This is a first textbook. It says so on its first line — "This book is intended for those who are beginning to study Marxist-Leninist philosophy" — and it behaves like one throughout: eighteen chapters, each broken into numbered sections, each section broken into headed sub-sections, with worked examples about gold and about atoms, and a summary at the close of every argument. It runs to about 131,000 words in David Fidlon's clean and readable translation. Nothing in it is difficult. That is the point of it, and it is also the beginning of the problem.
The spine says 1980 and the printer's key at the back reads 30–80. But this book has layers, and they are not the same age.
Its doctrinal spine is older than 1980. The CPSU Programme it quotes on the withering away of the state is the Programme of 1961; the political framework throughout — the Peace Programme, "developed socialism", the comprehensive programme for raising the level of management — is that of the Twenty-Fifth Congress of February 1976, which is cited nine times and is the most recent Congress in the book. The Twenty-Sixth Congress, of February 1981, is absent, as one would expect. The 1977 Constitution is present, quoted from the Moscow 1977 English edition, so a revision pass was made after October 1977.
The topmost layer is later still and easy to date. A closing section of the chapter on national liberation, "India. Thirty Years Along the Road of National Liberation and Social Progress", opens on "On January 26, 1980 India marked the 30th anniversary of its Constitution", discusses the parliamentary elections "which took place at the beginning of 1980 and brought the Indian National Congress headed by Indira Gandhi to power", notes that in February 1980 the Bhilai agreement was twenty-five years old, and reports that the two Indian Communist parties "condemned Peking's aggression in Vietnam" — the Sino-Vietnamese war of February 1979. So the last hand laid on this text was laid in the spring of 1980.
Hold that date against what the book says about the world. Détente appears seven times and always as something advancing: "there is a growing trend towards international detente and peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems." Afghanistan appears four times — as a country of socialist orientation, as a place where "the workers and employees of the Kabul housebuilding factory voluntarily turned up for wcrk on their day off", and as one of the peoples whose "just struggle" against "imperialist provocations" the Indian communists support. In a book revised in the spring of 1980, the Soviet Army does not enter Afghanistan. Détente does not die. This is not concealment so much as inertia: the political furniture is that of 1976, and the 1980 additions were laid on top of it without disturbing it. Read it, therefore, as a mid-1970s book with a 1980 face — the summation of the Brezhnev settlement at the exact moment that settlement ran out.
The volume itself will not tell you. There is no author's note, no biographical paragraph, no institutional affiliation on the title page; the front matter offers a translator, a designer, a request for readers' opinions, and a name rendered in Cyrillic — В. Г. Афанасьев.
The anti-Stalinist press can tell you, and it did so contemporaneously, which is worth pausing over, because for most of the philosophers in this series it cannot. In Intercontinental Press of 28 November 1977, Gerry Foley reported on the sixtieth-anniversary celebrations in Moscow and the Kremlin's decision not to let Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, speak at the 3 November commemoration. When the international press made an issue of it, the explanation was fronted by the editor of Pravda: Afanasyev "claimed that Carrillo had not been allowed to speak because he arrived late and that there was, of course, no intention to rebuff him or censor his views". The Spanish party's Secretariat rejected this on 7 November, pointing out that the arrival dates had been fixed in Madrid in October in discussions "with the Pravda editor himself", and that Carrillo's text had been in all the translators' booths on the morning of the third. (IP prints the initial as "M."; it was V. G. Afanasyev, who held the editorship of Pravda from 1976 to 1989.)
Eleven years later, International Viewpoint no. 146 of July 1988, reporting the Nineteenth Party Conference, names him in full and without ambiguity: "One of the leading 'reconstructers,' V. G. Afanasyev, the chief editor of Pravda, even argued that since in principle there could be no socialist opposition, the press would have to play the necessary role of critic." Gorbachev interrupted him from the chair. In International Viewpoint no. 128 of October 1987, in a survey of the rehabilitations then under way, the same man appears again: "Afanasiev, the editor of Pravda, questioned the opportuneness of rehabilitating Trotsky. He argued that the revolutionary leader's 'negative' features predominated over his 'positive' ones, although he did not deny the latter."
A warning, since the same article contains the trap: Yuri Afanasiev, the historian who became rector of the Historical-Archival Institute in January 1987, called publicly for the rewriting of the Party history manuals, and ended up on the social-democratic wing of the Democratic Platform, was a different man entirely. Both Afanasievs appear in that single October 1987 article, on opposite sides of the argument about Trotsky. Do not confuse them; the sources here are careful, and so should we be.
So: this elementary textbook of philosophy was written by the man who edited the central organ of the Soviet Communist Party. That is not an incidental biographical fact. It is the key to the book. What we have is not a scholar's introduction to a discipline but the discipline as the apparatus wished it to be transmitted — written by someone whose day job was deciding what four hundred million people would read the next morning.
Much of the exposition is good, and the series' credibility on everything that follows depends on saying so.
The account of quality and quantity is genuinely well taught. Afanasyev takes gold, lists its colour, ductility, malleability, density, heat capacity, melting and boiling points and chemical inertness, and then draws the distinction a student actually needs: "Quality is manifested in properties. A property characterises a thing from one side only, whereas quality gives the general idea of an object as a whole." A page later he transposes the same point to society without strain. Whatever one thinks of the doctrine, this is a person who has taught a class.
The treatment of freedom and necessity is more than a slogan. He states the objection fairly — "bourgeois sociologists accuse Marxists of fatalism, of worshipping historical necessity and claiming that man is impotent in the face of social laws" — and answers it in the classical way: "Freedom does not abolish objective necessity, it signifies that man understands necessity and exploits it for his own ends. Man's activity is only free when it corresponds to objective necessity and his freedom consists not in imaginary independence from the laws of nature and society, but in knowledge of these laws and the ability to make them serve human needs." That is Spinoza through Hegel through Engels, correctly transmitted.
The section on consciousness and cybernetics is better than its reputation would suggest. Written when the Soviet discipline's earlier hostility to cybernetics was still in living memory, it welcomes the machines — "Some of them guide trains, aircraft or intricate production processes, others translate texts from one language into another" — and then makes an argument rather than a denunciation: that the machine is "the product of the astute mind and skilled hands of man who programmes its functions", that it relieves mental labour as ordinary machinery relieves physical labour, and that "however high the level which cybernetics may attain in its development, an automatic machine will never become a vehicle of human consciousness and will never replace man as a social being." One may think the conclusion overconfident. It is reasoned, it is not obscurantist, and it is a long way from 1950.
And the theory of truth is, for four pages, a competent piece of philosophical instruction. He distinguishes objective, absolute and relative truth; he grasps that they are aspects of one process rather than three kinds of proposition; he illustrates with classical and quantum mechanics; he insists that "There is no abstract truth, truth is always concrete." The summary sentence is one any teacher might use: "Man's knowledge is both absolute and relative: relative because it is not exhaustive and can be endlessly developed and deepened, revealing new sides of reality; absolute, because it contains elements of eternal, absolutely exact knowledge."
Two paragraphs after that summary, the same section reads: "The fundamental theses of Marxist-Leninist theory, whose correctness has been confirmed by practice, are absolute truth. Although Marxist-Leninist theory is constantly developing, its basic principles cannot be refuted."
Everything the preceding pages established is withdrawn in a line. If human knowledge at each stage is relative, and absolute truth is approached only through an endless process, then a body of doctrine that "cannot be refuted" is not a scientific theory at all in the sense the chapter has just defined; it is a boundary drawn around a region of thought and marked no entry. The book has begun by promising the opposite: "Marxist philosophy is a creative, developing science and not a parcel of immutable, petrified principles taken on trust." It ends by declaring itself "the sole scientific theory and method of cognising and explaining reality."
George Novack put the difficulty exactly, and — as far as this editor can establish — without ever having read Afanasyev, since he was writing thirty-eight years earlier. In the winter of 1942 Novack delivered nine lectures on dialectics to members of the Socialist Workers Party, who were at that moment being prosecuted under the Smith Act. He opened by remarking on the oddness of the occasion: "Here are members and sympathisers of a revolutionary political party under government persecution in the midst of World War II, the biggest war in world history." In the seventh lecture he diagnosed the flaw in Hegel: "Hegel's thought was smitten by this inherent and incurable opposition between its claim to be a system of absolute truth and its dialectical method, which asserted that all truths were relative." That is Afanasyev's position precisely, and it is worse in Afanasyev's case, because Hegel at least built the system himself.
Novack's fifth lecture goes further and hits the form of this book, not merely its content. "Dialectical thinking, therefore, cannot be completely comprised in any fixed set of formulas, nor can dialectics be codified in the same way and to the same extent as formal logic." He does not conclude that dialectics has no laws — "Every logic must be capable of categorical determination and expression. If this were not so, these lectures of mine would be a senseless enterprise" — but he insists that a written constitution of dialectical logic "reflect the state of the dialectic at a given moment and from a specific and limited point of view". The demand for something more, he says, comes from people "still enslaved to the formalism of academic life and thought": "They have a thirst for formalism, for fixed and final absolute expressions, which dialectics cannot quench."
Afanasyev's book is that thirst institutionalised. Its three laws and seven categories are laid out, in Novack's phrase for what the formalists demand, each "with fixed rank and proper title, like officers in the army hierarchy" — and the thing they are protected from is revision. And Novack had already named what happens to a logic when its laws are made unquestionable: in his third lecture, describing the laws of formal logic presented as absolute, he wrote that they "rule the world of thought in totalitarian fashion, exacting unquestionable obedience from all things", and that "In reality, formal logic goes hand in hand with religion and dogmatism." He meant it against Aristotle's heirs. It applies without modification to the book in your hands.
The counts are worth setting down, because a textbook's silences are its curriculum.
In 130,932 words on Marxist philosophy, published in Moscow in 1980, the name Stalin does not appear once. Not as a philosopher, not as a politician, not as a victim of anyone or a perpetrator of anything. Yet the "personality cult" is discussed at length — seven occurrences in a single passage of the chapter on the role of the individual in history — and is condemned in strong terms: it "belittles both the people's role as makers of history and the role of the Communist Party", it "fetters the development of the Party's ideological life", and "The personality cult and the consequent violations of the Leninist norms of Party and state life, of socialist law and democracy are deeply alien to the democratic nature of socialism." The passage closes: "That was why the CPSU condemned the personality cult and resolutely liquidated its consequences."
Whose cult? Which violations? Committed by whom, against whom, and with what result? The sentences are grammatically complete and historically empty. A cult with no object, violations with no agent and no victims, and a liquidation of consequences performed by an institution rather than by people. Twenty-four years after the Twentieth Congress, an official philosophy textbook could still discuss the crime without naming the criminal — and this in a chapter whose ostensible subject is precisely the role of the individual in history.
Trotsky appears once. Bukharin appears once. It is the same once: a footnote citing Lenin's "Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin", Collected Works, vol. 32. Neither man is mentioned in the body of the text, on any subject. They survive only inside the title of a work by someone else.
Plekhanov appears zero times. This is the most eloquent absence in the book. Belinsky, Herzen and Chernyshevsky are all named and credited — "A big contribution to the theory of social development was made by Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky and other Russian revolutionary democrats of the 19th century" — but the first Russian Marxist philosopher, the man Lenin said one could not become a Marxist without reading, is not in the index of a Soviet Marxist philosophy textbook. Progress Publishers had issued his Selected Philosophical Works in the same decade and it sits elsewhere on this list.
Of the Soviet philosophical establishment: Deborin — 0. Mitin — 0. Yudin — 0. Zhdanov — 0. Lysenko — 0. The phrase "Menshevising idealism" — 0. The journal Pod znamenem marksizma — 0. The Institute of Philosophy — 0. No Soviet philosopher of any period is named anywhere in the book.
And the dates. "1931" occurs once, as the publication year of Lenin Miscellany XI. "1947" occurs once, as the year of Indian independence. "1936" occurs once, as the year of Pavlov's death. "1937" occurs once — as a base year for a statistical comparison of industrial output. That is what 1937 is in this book: a denominator.
The chapter "The Rise and Development of Marxist Philosophy" contains the book's only attempt at the history of its own discipline, and it consists of two sentences:
After Lenin, the philosophy of Marxism has been developed by his associates and pupils, prominent leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the fraternal communist and workers' parties. Marxist-Leninist philosophy has been further developed in the decisions of Congresses, Conferences and Central Committee Plenary Meetings of the CPSU and other Marxist parties and in the resolutions of international meetings of Communists.
That is the whole of it: 1924 to 1980, fifty-six years, with no philosopher named and no event described. Earlier the same chapter has declared that "The Leninist stage in the development of philosophy covers a period from the end of the 19th century to the present day" — one undivided block, eighty years long, with no internal history at all. The subject of the sentences is not a person and not even a school but a set of committees; philosophy is developed in decisions.
Readers of this series will recognise a familiar manoeuvre from other volumes — the purge rendered as weather, a thing that came about with no one doing it. Compare F. V. Konstantinov's Development of Revolutionary Theory by the CPSU, published by Progress in 1971 and also on this list. Konstantinov at least approaches the subject: "But towards the beginning of the 1930s (in some cases even earlier) serious errors and distortions came to light in the work of the journal and in the school of A. M. Deborin, who headed the journal." Errors that came to light, of their own accord — that is the weather. But he goes on, and further than one expects: "The personality cult damaged the development of Marxist theory and philosophy. It fettered theoretical thinking, pushing it into dogmatism and reducing it to commentary."
Afanasyev does not manage the weather. He does not reach it. On the history of Soviet philosophy his 1980 textbook says strictly less than a Progress volume of nine years earlier, and what it substitutes is a list of Party bodies. When a book has nothing to say about the past of its own field, one should ask who would have been embarrassed by the saying. In 1980 the answer includes the author.
The chapter on the state gives the Brezhnev-era doctrine in its finished form: "With the completion of socialist construction the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat turns into a state of the whole people—the political organisation of the whole people in which the leading role is played by the working class and its vanguard, the Communist Party." Dictatorship and all-people's state, he explains, "are not qualitatively different types of state. In point of fact they are stages in the development of a socialist-type state."
The reply was written before the doctrine was. In 1936, examining the constitution that first made this move, Trotsky called it what it was: "This is a matter, to put it briefly, of juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Where there are no capitalists, there is also no proletariat – say the creators of the new constitution – and consequently the state itself from being proletarian becomes national." And he drew out the consequence the doctrine will not draw: "when the bearer of dictatorship becomes the people, freed from class contradictions, that can only mean the dissolution of the dictatorship in a socialist society – and, above all, the liquidation of the bureaucracy." (The Revolution Betrayed, ch. 10, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution".) Afanasyev's book, forty-four years later, keeps the first half of the argument and quietly drops the second: the state of the whole people has arrived, and the apparatus is stronger than ever. His own chapter concedes as much in its opening line on the withering away: "The fact that it is necessary to strengthen and develop the socialist state does not mean that it will exist for ever."
Trotsky's chapter 3 answers that too, and answers a resolution of 1935 which had proclaimed the "final and irrevocable" triumph of socialism together with an "all-sided reinforcement" of the dictatorship: "the very necessity of 'reinforcing' the dictatorship – that is, governmental repression – testifies not to the triumph of a classless harmony, but to the growth of new social antagonisms." It is worth noting that Afanasyev, writing in 1980, reaches for the identical adverbs. Real freedom, he says — mankind's age-old dream — "has struck root here finally and irrevocably."
The same instinct runs through his treatment of contradiction under socialism, which is otherwise one of the more honest passages in the book: he affirms, against a long tradition of denial, that contradictions do exist under socialism, quotes Lenin's "Antagonism and contradiction ... are not one and the same thing", and gives a real example about the enlargement of agricultural co-operatives. Then the resolution: "The method of disclosing the contradictions of socialist society lies in criticism and self-criticism", which cannot itself resolve anything; resolution belongs to "the competent organisational and educational work both of the Party and the Government". And as for those whose interests "run counter to the interests of society" — "These individuals are re-educated by the efforts of the people and the Communist Party, while penalties are imposed on the more incorrigible ones."
That clause sits in a chapter on the laws of dialectics. It is the whole book in miniature: an argument about the structure of reality that terminates, without any change of tone, in a note about what is done to people who disagree. The man who wrote it had, three years earlier, explained to the world's press why Santiago Carrillo's microphone had been switched off.
One more measure of the book's age. Its chapter on "The Unscientific Nature of Contemporary Bourgeois Sociology" promises an "endless number of trends and schools" and names two men: Arnold Toynbee, credited with reviving the "historical cycle" theory and with holding that history's aim "is to set up the kingdom of God", and Oswald Spengler. Toynbee died in 1975; Spengler in 1936. Talcott Parsons, Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Popper, Max Weber — none of them is in the book. The living opponent is not engaged, is not quoted, and is not named.
Set beside it T. I. Oizerman's The Main Trends in Philosophy, also in this series, which reads Popper in the Hutchinson edition and quotes him accurately, reconstructs Husserl's epoché, and gives Sartre his due in a footnote. Oizerman was a scholar and argued like one, and he was working in the same country under the same constraints. The difference between the two books is not the political line, which is identical. It is that one author had read his adversaries and the other had been told about them.
As an artefact this book is close to ideal for its purpose: it is exactly what the Soviet state, at the end of the Brezhnev years, wanted an ordinary reader in Delhi or Lagos or Manchester to understand Marxist philosophy to be. Clear, orderly, patient, thoroughly taught, and sealed. Read the chapters on dialectics for the teaching, which is often skilful; read the theory of truth up to the sentence where it stops; read the whole of it for the shape of the silence, which is the most informative thing about it.
And then read the nine lectures Novack gave in 1942 to a party under indictment, which cover much of the same ground and reach the opposite conclusion about what a philosophy is for. There is no better demonstration of the difference between studying dialectics because your life may depend on thinking clearly, and administering it because it is your ministry.