The copyright page settles the most important question about this book before you reach the first page of text. It reads: "First printing 1985 Second printing 1987", above the line "© Progress Publishers 1985". The 1987 on the spine is a reprint date. What you are holding is a 1985 book.
That distinction decides everything. 1987 was the second full year of perestroika and glasnost, a year in which Soviet historians were publicly quarrelling about the Moscow Trials and Soviet philosophers were beginning, cautiously, to say things in Voprosy Filosofii that would have ended a career five years earlier. A popular introduction to dialectical materialism published in Moscow in 1987 would be a document of that opening. This one is not. It was written and set before the opening began, and Progress ran the plates again without changing a word.
The internal evidence is unambiguous, and it is worth reporting as counts rather than impressions. Searching the full text with word boundaries: perestroika, zero. Glasnost, zero. Gorbachev, zero. Restructuring, zero. Acceleration, zero. Chernobyl, zero. Afghanistan, zero. The Twenty-Seventh Congress of February 1986, which rewrote the Party programme and is the obvious landmark for any 1987 ideological text, appears in no form — the word Congress does not occur in the book at all. Every dated citation in the apparatus is to a Progress volume of Lenin's Collected Works, printed in 1977 or 1980. The single passage that reaches for contemporary reference does so in the vaguest available terms: "In the 1980s, capitalism has intensified its abuse of scientific and technical achievements for anti-humane purposes by developing the most sophisticated and obnoxious mass destruction weapons". That is a sentence about Reagan's second term, written before anyone in the building knew that the general secretary would shortly be saying something else.
So the nil return is the finding, and it should be stated plainly: this is a pre-Gorbachev manual circulating under a Gorbachev-era imprint. Readers who come to it looking for the moment official Soviet philosophy noticed that its world was changing will not find it here.
The second thing the apparatus tells you is who was meant to read it. The back matter lists the series: ABC of Social and Political Knowledge, nineteen numbered titles, of which this is No. 6. The order is instructive. No. 5 is What Is Scientific Communism?, No. 6 What Is Dialectical Materialism?, No. 7 What Is Historical Materialism? — which is, precisely, Plekhanov's tripartite division of Marxist theory, turned into a syllabus. George Novack sets out that division in his essay "Sociology and Historical Materialism": Plekhanov divided Marxist thought into dialectical materialism as the general approach to reality, historical materialism as its application to society, and scientific socialism as its application to capitalism's supersession. The ABC series is that scheme with catalogue numbers on it.
The book's own structure follows the same logic. It is divided not into chapters but into ten "Topics", the standard unit of the Soviet party-school curriculum, each subdivided into numbered sections, with a glossary of "Philosophical Terms in Common Use" at the back. Whole passages are addressed to a student working through a course: there is a discussion of how to use analysis and synthesis "in the study of dialectical and historical materialism", and another on "pedagogical induction and deduction". This is not a treatise and does not pretend to be. It is a teaching manual, and it should be judged as one.
For whose school? The Foreword answers directly, and this is the most valuable single sentence in the book. Krapivin thanks "the personnel of the Inner-Party Education Department under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, the Ideological and Political Education Department of the MPEA Party of Labour, the Ideological Department of the FRELIMO Party, the management and teaching staff of the Dr. Agostinho Neto National Party School and the Central Party School of the FRELIMO Party". So the commission is explicit. This is a cadre textbook for the ruling parties of Cuba, Angola and Mozambique — for what Soviet doctrine called the states of socialist orientation.
Once you know that, the book's illustrations stop looking like neutral pedagogy. Explaining how the interaction of opposites drives change, Krapivin's example is the reorientation of production after independence, concluding that the new economy will be "primarily oriented towards contacts with the socialist countries, the natural allies of the newly independent states". Explaining the categories of necessity and chance, his example is that "elimination of underdevelopment is a necessity, which stems from the law-governed development of newly independent societies, especially those which have chosen the socialist orientation". Soviet foreign policy is not argued for anywhere in this book. It is smuggled in as worked examples in the chapter on dialectical categories, where a student learning the material is least equipped to notice that a political claim has been slipped in among the physics.
The same audience explains a genuine oddity of the text. In sixty-four thousand words of Soviet philosophy, the phrase "Soviet Union" occurs twice, "USSR" three times, and "CPSU" exactly once. The book has been carefully de-nationalised, so that the doctrine arrives in Luanda and Maputo as universal science rather than as a Russian export. That is a deliberate piece of craft, and it is worth noticing precisely because it is invisible.
It would be easy, and dishonest, to stop there. A popularisation is a hard thing to do well, and over long stretches Krapivin does it well.
The exposition of quality, quantity and measure is the best part of the book. He does not simply assert that quantitative change produces qualitative change; he builds the concept of measure carefully, distinguishes basic from non-basic qualities, and picks examples that actually teach. Colour is inessential to petrol; combustibility is essential, and petrol that has lost it is no longer fuel. Water is liquid between zero and one hundred degrees at normal pressure, and that range is its measure. Then he does something a lesser writer would not: he connects the technical concept to something the reader already knows. "The philosophical concept of measure in a sense corresponds to the popular notion that through immoderation (i. e., a disruption of measure) positive turns into negative, and useful becomes harmful." Food in excess damages health. That is real teaching — it earns the abstraction by cashing it out.
The treatment of matter is also good. Krapivin gives an honest and clear account of the crisis in physics around 1900: the atom turns out to be divisible, the electron's mass turns out to vary with velocity, particles annihilate into light, and philosophers who had identified matter with a particular physical picture find their materialism collapsing along with the picture. "As a result, every new discovery in the natural sciences caused fresh confusion and contradictions in the understanding of matter." The resolution he offers — Lenin's, that matter is a philosophical category and not a commitment to any particular inventory of ultimate constituents — is stated fairly and is, on its own terms, right.
Most surprising of all is Topic 10, on the methods of cognition, where Krapivin discusses induction, deduction, analogy and modelling. What distinguishes it is that he insists on the limits of each. Induction "cannot take into account the development of the object being studied". Deduction's possibilities "are limited by the totality of its basic general premises and by its inability to validate these premises". Analogy yields only probability and "cannot serve as an instrument of logical proof". He quotes Engels on induction and deduction belonging together as necessarily as synthesis and analysis. He even warns his students against "mechanical cramming", which "can only enrich a person's memory, but will then encumber it". A reader who worked through this section attentively would come out of it better equipped to think than most undergraduates. There is no reason to pretend otherwise.
The collapse is not gradual and it is not everywhere. It happens at one point, and it happens for a reason.
Krapivin's account of contradiction is thoroughly orthodox and, up to a point, uncompromising. Contradiction is universal; it is internal; it is the source of all development; nothing anywhere is exempt. He is emphatic that every phenomenon is shot through with it. Then he reaches the socialist countries, and the machinery stops.
"Socialist development is marked by non-antagonistic contradictions. All classes, social groups and individuals in the socialist society have the same fundamental economic interests and politico-moral principles." The universal solvent has met the one substance it cannot dissolve. And Krapivin then explains how such contradictions as remain are handled: not through class struggle, but "through organised efforts of the whole people" and "the society's new motive forces, like socio-political and ideological unity, strengthening legality, socialist patriotism, criticism and self-criticism".
That list, and above all the phrase it ends on, is not Krapivin's. It is Andrei Zhdanov's, from his intervention at the philosophers' conference of June 1947 — the occasion on which the Central Committee's cultural enforcer instructed Soviet philosophers to discover a form of development peculiar to socialism. Zhdanov's words were these: in Soviet society, where antagonistic classes have been liquidated, development "takes place, not in the form of a struggle of antagonistic classes and cataclysms, as it does under capitalism, but in the form of criticism and self-criticism, which is the genuine motive force of our development, the powerful instrument in the hands of the party. This is without doubt a new form of movement, a new type of development, a new dialectical law."
We can quote Zhdanov because Raya Dunayevskaya quoted him, in "Stalinists Falsify Marxism Anew" in Fourth International, vol. 9 no. 7 (whole no. 89), printed as September 1948 though that issue date is unreliable — the year after the speech, and thirty-seven years before Krapivin's first printing. She gave the primary trail as well: Voprosy Filosofii no. 1, 1947; Bolshevik no. 16, 30 August 1947; English in Political Affairs, April 1948. Her verdict was that a demand for a dialectical law free of contradictions makes not the masses but the bureaucracy the driving force of history. The doctrine Krapivin reproduces in a Moscow primer for African and Cuban party schools in 1985 had been named, sourced and answered before he was old enough to study it.
What makes the doctrine false is not a philosophical error but a factual one, and the factual answer was in print before Zhdanov spoke. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky described exactly the antagonisms whose existence Krapivin denies: "As a result of these flagrant differences in wages, doubled by arbitrary privileges, the bureaucracy has managed to introduce sharp antagonisms in the proletariat" (ch. 6, "The Growth of Inequality"). His summary judgement, in ch. 9, is the sentence a dialectician ought to have had to answer: "The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism". Krapivin's book runs to sixty-four thousand words on contradiction and contains not one occurrence of the word privilege, and one of bureaucratic — in a passage about the vices of dogmatists.
The second collapse is a silence, and it is enormous. The Marxist philosophy, Krapivin says, was created by Marx and Engels and "creatively developed by Lenin, by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union". And after Lenin? One sentence: "The Leninist stage in the development of the Marxist philosophy also includes works by Lenin's associates, by leaders of the CPSU and the Marxist-Leninist parties of other countries, and research done by Marxist-Leninist philosophers throughout the world."
That is the entire institutional history of Soviet philosophy from 1924 to 1985, and there is not a proper noun in it. Word-boundary searches of the full text return zero for Deborin, zero for Mitin, zero for Zhdanov, zero for Lysenko, zero for Bukharin, zero for Trotsky, zero for Stalin, zero for "Menshevising idealism", zero for 1931 and zero for 1947. Nothing here indicates that in 1931 a Central Committee resolution destroyed the Deborin school and installed Mitin's people over it; that Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism was, for two decades, what dialectical materialism was for hundreds of millions of readers; that Zhdanov's 1947 intervention set the terms Krapivin is still using; or that the genetics Krapivin's own quantity-into-quality section illustrates with hybridised apples was outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1948, the philosophy faculties concurring. And "Lenin's associates" is the cruellest phrase in the book, because a great many of them were shot.
There is a third failure, and it is the neatest, because the book supplies its own indictment. Krapivin defines dogmatism accurately: it "results from the absolutisation of some propositions, conclusions, or formulas, which are considered outside the context of concrete conditions, place and time", and it "manifests itself in a rehearsal of mechanically memorised propositions, formal attitudes, bureaucratic practices". He is describing the ABC of Social and Political Knowledge.
The natural counterweight is not a treatise, which would be an unfair match, but another popularisation written for another party's cadre. In 1942, in New York, George Novack delivered nine lectures on dialectics to members and sympathisers of the Socialist Workers Party while its leaders were being prosecuted under the Smith Act. He opens by naming the circumstance: "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." The lectures are quoted here from An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism, 5th ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971); the text carries references as late as 1963, so the wording is Novack's own but not necessarily his wording of 1942. Like Krapivin's book, they are elementary, oral in register, and addressed to activists rather than academics. They are the fair comparison.
The difference shows in the first minutes. Novack tells his audience that he will not proceed as he did with formal logic, by stating fundamental laws and deriving from them: "We shall approach dialectics not as a closed system. On the contrary it is an open system and therefore our approach is elastic, concrete, more informal." He goes further: "Dialecticians recognise that all formulas must be provisional, limited, approximate, because all forms of existence are transient and limited. This must also apply to the science of dialectics and to the formulations of its laws and ideas." And the conclusion, which reads as though written with the ABC series in front of him: "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. To address such a demand to dialectics, to seek to impose perfect formulas upon its processes, betrays a captivity to the method of formal thinking."
He is not being evasive, and it matters that he says so at once: "But this does not at all mean that dialectics is subject to no laws or that these laws cannot be stated in lucid terms." Three laws and six paired categories can be taught. The question is whether they are taught as an open method or handed over as a closed inventory to be examined on.
The sharpest contrast is in the use each man makes of the same law. Krapivin illustrates the transformation of quantity into quality with water, petrol and hybridised fruit — chosen, one suspects, because they carry no risk. In Lecture VI, Novack applies it to the organisation his listeners belonged to. The Third International degenerated for years; after the German catastrophe of 1933 passed without revolt in its ranks, "the process of degeneration had reached the point of death. Quantitative changes had brought about a new quality. The Third International was beyond cure — it was dead. It had become, like the Second International, a 'stinking corpse.' It was buried by Stalin in 1943." Whereupon the policy of reforming it became, in his flat list, "unnecessary, incorrect, outworn, unrealistic". That is the law of measure applied where it costs something. It is the same law. One man uses it to explain a kettle; the other uses it to explain why he had to leave his own International.
Novack also diagnosed the genre directly. In "Is Nature Dialectical?" he writes: "In the Soviet Union, where the socialist revolution abolished capitalism decades ago, dialectical materialism is the state philosophy. Under Stalin, in fact, it became scholasticised and ossified". He had said the same thing earlier, reviewing Engels's Dialectics of Nature in Fourth International, vol. 1 no. 7, December 1940: cut off from politics, "Marxism shrivelled from a vigorously growing ideological movement into a sterile scholasticism", and "under Stalinist auspices there cannot be any consistent or fruitful development of the science of dialectical materialism".
Two honest limits on the reply. First, the tradition tracked the doctrine but barely tracked its institutions: searches across the Trotsky corpus, the Fourth International run of 1940–56, the Biulleten' Oppozitsii English texts, the Novack archive, Intercontinental Press and International Viewpoint return nothing on the Deborin purge, nothing on "Menshevising idealism", and nothing on the Institute of Philosophy beyond a passing mention. Dunayevskaya on Zhdanov is very nearly the whole of it. Second, on perestroika itself the archive has a structural gap in exactly the wrong place: Intercontinental Press, the Trotskyist weekly of record, ceased publication with its issue of 11 August 1986, so the paper best placed to cover the opening died as it began; International Viewpoint takes the subject up only from late 1987, in nos. 128 to 130.
What does exist, and stands directly against this reprint, is Ernest Mandel's "The significance of Gorbachov", the lead article of International Marxist Review vol. 2 no. 4, Winter 1987 — contemporaneous with the second printing. Mandel argues that the damage runs deeper than any particular falsehood: what has discredited the tradition is "the thorough discrediting of communism, socialism, and Marxism by its transformation into a state doctrine (or even a state religion), the overall balance sheet of the Stalin and Brezhnev eras, and the gap between reality and the official ideology, which seems completely lying". Later in the same article, weighing an ordinary piece of Soviet reporting against the official literature, he remarks that it says more about social reality in the USSR and Eastern Europe "than one hundred books of 'Marxism-Leninism' made incomprehensible through adaptation to the needs and interests of the bureaucracy". (The IMR scan breaks that word across a line; I have closed it up.) Krapivin's is one of the hundred, and it was on the presses in Moscow the year Mandel wrote the sentence.
Read it, first, as evidence about its own moment — not 1987 but 1985, and not Moscow's intelligentsia but the party schools of Havana, Luanda and Maputo. It is the clearest surviving statement of what the Soviet Union thought it was exporting, to whom, and in what form.
Read it, second, for the parts that are simply good. The sections on measure, on matter, and on the methods of cognition are competent teaching by someone who took the job seriously, and a reader will learn from them.
Read it, third, for the exact location of the fracture. Krapivin argues, correctly and at length, that contradiction is universal and that nothing develops except through it — and then exempts from that law the one society in which he lived. Everything wrong with the book follows from that single exemption: the missing sixty years, the missing names, the missing word privilege, and the definition of dogmatism that fits the book better than anything the book was aimed at.
Novack, reviewing the first publication of Dialectics of Nature in 1940, gave the reason to keep such volumes in print, and named the awkwardness of doing so: "In science as in society remnants of the heritage of the October Revolution are here and there embedded within Stalinism; some good can still emanate from this abomination: a contradiction which will doubtless horrify the anti-dialecticians." That is the spirit in which this edition is offered. Some good can still emanate from it. Not, however, the good it was printed to do.