Of all Lenin's books, this is the one that travelled furthest from what it was to what it was made to mean. He wrote it in 1908, in the grey years after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, and he wrote it in anger at his own comrades. A group of talented Bolsheviks — Alexander Bogdanov above all, with Anatoly Lunacharsky and Vladimir Bazarov — had grown enchanted with the most fashionable philosophy of the day, the "empirio-criticism" of the physicist Ernst Mach and the philosopher Richard Avenarius (a positivism that dissolved the material world into bundles of sensation). Lenin thought this a betrayal of the materialist foundations of Marxism, and he set out to demolish it. What he produced was a factional weapon aimed at particular men in a particular quarrel. What the Soviet state made of it, a generation later, was the official philosophy of a sixth of the earth.
Take the book first on its own terms, because it has real force. Lenin's target is the idea that the world is only what we perceive of it — that, as the slogan of the day had it, physics had shown "matter has disappeared." Against this he insists on a world that exists independently of any mind that observes it, and he gives the definition that would be recited by Soviet students for eighty years: "Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them." Knowledge, on this view, is a reflection — a copy — of a reality that does not depend on us. And when he turns to the crisis in the physics of his own moment, the disappearance of the solid Newtonian atom into fields and electrons, he is at his best: the crisis, he argues, is not the death of matter but the death of one picture of it, and science will keep going deeper without end. "The electron," he writes, "is as inexhaustible as the atom." That single phrase — knowledge as bottomless, never closed — is the most valuable sentence in the book, and, as we shall see, the one its later custodians most thoroughly betrayed.
But the book has a second argument running beneath the first, and it is the one that mattered for what came after. Lenin does not treat the quarrel with Mach as a disagreement that reasonable people might have. He treats every philosophy as the servant of a class. "Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism," he writes, "one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society." There are, in the end, only two camps — materialism and idealism — and idealism, however it dresses itself, leads back to religion, to what he calls, borrowing Dietzgen's phrase, the "graduated flunkeys of clericalism or fideism" (fideism being the doctrine that truth rests on faith rather than reason). This is the principle later canonised as partiinost' — party-mindedness in philosophy: the claim that there is no neutral ground, that every position is objectively partisan, and that the task of the Marxist is to identify which class a philosophy serves. As an insight it has a point: ideas are not innocent of the interests they carry. As a rule of judgement it is a loaded gun, because it lets a doctrine be condemned for the camp it allegedly belongs to rather than refuted for what it says.
This is the tension an honest reader must hold. Lenin's anti-relativism — his insistence that there is a real world and a real truth about it, not reducible to whatever we find convenient to believe — is a genuine and durable contribution, and the century that followed, with its fashions for treating all knowledge as mere construction, has not made it less needed. Yet the epistemology he defends is cruder than the cause deserves. The "copy, photograph, reflect" theory of knowledge is a flat, almost pre-dialectical realism: the mind as a mirror, ideas as snapshots of things. It was on exactly this ground that the book drew its sharpest criticism from within the revolutionary left — the Dutch council-communist Anton Pannekoek, in his Lenin as Philosopher (1938), argued that Lenin's materialism was the mechanical, middle-class materialism of the natural sciences rather than the historical materialism of Marx, and that its very crudeness fitted it to become a state creed. Whatever one makes of that verdict, the polemical method of the book — sorting thinkers into the friends and the agents of reaction, and reading a man's epistemology off his politics — is a habit that would prove terribly convenient to people with the power to enforce it.
Which brings us to the edition in your hands, and to what was done with the text. This translation, by Abraham Fineberg, is taken from Volume 14 of Lenin's Collected Works, published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1972. By 1972 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was no longer a polemic; it was Scripture. It had become the foundation stone of diamat — dialectical materialism, the compulsory philosophy of the Soviet state, taught in every institute, examined in every discipline. The reflection theory was presented not as Lenin's contested position in a 1908 argument but as the settled Marxist theory of knowledge; partiinost' was presented not as a polemicist's weapon but as a principle of method. The Soviet editorial apparatus around this volume — the introductions, the notes of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism — frames the book exactly so: as the definitive refutation of a "reactionary philosophy," its occasion safely historical, its doctrine permanently binding. What the framing cannot say is what the doctrine was used to do.
For partiinost' in philosophy became, in the hands of the state, precisely the licence its logic invited. A weapon forged in 1908 to win a faction fight against Bogdanov was, by the 1930s, the instrument for enforcing a single official philosophy and for condemning any deviation from it as service to the class enemy. The philosopher Abram Deborin's school was denounced and broken; Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism of 1938 fixed the catechism; and the principle that a doctrine could be judged by the camp it served was turned loose on science itself — on genetics, where Lysenko's fraud was protected as the "materialist" biology and Mendelian inheritance damned as idealist reaction; on relativity, on quantum mechanics, on cybernetics, each in its turn arraigned before the tribunal of party philosophy. Here is the bitterest irony the book contains. Lenin had written that the electron is as inexhaustible as the atom — that knowledge has no final floor, that inquiry never closes. The state that made his book holy used it to close inquiry: to draw a line around what a materialist was permitted to think and to treat the crossing of that line as a crime. The text that celebrated the bottomlessness of knowledge became the charter of an official orthodoxy that forbade the very openness it praised.
Read as what it was — a brilliant, overbearing, deeply occasional polemic by a revolutionary who believed the reality of the world was worth fighting for — the book rewards the reader still, above all in its refusal to let the truth about nature be dissolved into fashion. Read as what it was made into — the closed philosophy of a closed state — it is a warning about what happens when the claim that every idea serves a class is handed to those with the power to decide which class, and to act on the answer. Both readings are in these pages. The first is Lenin's. The second is the apparatus's, and it is the reason the book needs an introduction at all.