Almost everything in this catalogue was written by a committee. The great primers of Soviet philosophy — Konstantinov's Fundamentals, the ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Afanasyev's Marxist Philosophy — carry an institute on the title page and a general editorial board behind it, and they are written in the impersonal voice of an apparatus that cannot be wrong. The Principles of Philosophy is different at the first sentence. "I shall begin my exposition of the principles of Marxist-Leninist philosophy," Anatoly Rakitov writes, opening Chapter I, and he keeps that "I" the whole way through: he stages Socratic dialogues, he says where he will return to a question later, he grants that a serious materialist "cannot simply reject idealists' arguments out of hand." This is one man teaching, and the man is worth knowing. Rakitov (born 1928) was a serious philosopher of science and logic, not a doctrinal functionary; and within a few years of finishing this book he had broken with Marxism-Leninism altogether. The biographical record is clear on where he went: into the service of Boris Yeltsin, as head of the analytical and information centre of the Russian presidency in the early 1990s. So this small textbook occupies a singular place. It is very probably the last systematic primer of Soviet philosophy written by a man who was already, perhaps, half out the door — and reading it with that in view, from its own tone rather than from anything we might project onto its author, turns out to be the most interesting thing that can be done with it.
Begin with the date, because for once the date on the spine is the date of the text. Many Progress translations lag their Russian originals by years, and several volumes in this series wear a glasnost jacket over an Andropov-era book. Not this one. The Principles of Philosophy is a glasnost book to its bones, and it announces the fact in its own vocabulary. The Introduction speaks of "the revolutionary reorganisation and restructuring taking place in the USSR, aimed at overcoming the stagnant tendencies noted during the two preceding decades"; of a "period of stagnation" in which "conservatism, and a certain subjectivism in decision-making were often raised to the rank of ideological principles"; of the need "to carry out a radical economic reform and to democratise society." It names perestroika and glasnost directly, dates "the ideology of renewal and the new thinking that the CPSU has been developing since the mid-1980s," and reports that "Soviet reorganisation (perestroika) is meeting certain resistance from the bureaucracy, and among certain conservative figures." It even floats, in the chapter on the state, a thought that would have been unprintable a decade earlier: "the model of socialism with a one-party system is not the only one possible." A book that speaks of "socialist pluralism" and "intellectual pluralism," and that sets itself against the "ideological barracks" of the past, is unmistakably a document of 1988–89 and no earlier.
The erosion of the old orthodoxy is real, then, and it is not cosmetic. It reaches the one subject Soviet textbooks had guarded most fiercely: their own history. The Introduction states, as a task the new ideology must perform, that it must give "a clear evaluation of the causes of the stagnation, and of all the breaches of social justice and deviations from socialist democracy and unjustified repressions carried out by Stalin and his immediate entourage." Set that beside its sibling volumes. The ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1978) contains the name Stalin zero times and the Terror not at all; Konstantinov (1979) admits only "the cult of personality," a defect of one man's "character," sealed off from the system. Rakitov, eleven years and a change of political weather later, will use the word "repressions" and put Stalin's name beside it. He will also say something no earlier primer would: that "the administrative, bureaucratic methods of leadership of the Soviet economy and state, built up in the 1930s and 1940s, have come into acute contradiction in recent decades with the needs of social development." The stagnation is dated, the bureaucracy is named, and the machinery of the 1930s is put in the dock. This is a textbook whose factual claims about the settled perfection of Soviet society are visibly crumbling in the author's own hands.
One small omission is worth marking before we credit the candour too fully. For all the naming, the reforms in this book have no author. Perestroika is the work of "the CPSU," of "the political leaders of Soviet society," of "the Communist Party which called on all the working people"; Mikhail Gorbachev, the living man who had proclaimed every one of these slogans, is not named once in the book. That is the old depersonalising reflex — Soviet policy as a process without a hand on it — surviving intact inside the new candour, and it is a first hint of where the loosening stops.
What does the book actually teach? It is a complete and orthodox exposition of dialectical and historical materialism, and it is worth stating its doctrine precisely, because the criticism that follows depends on taking it seriously. Philosophy, Rakitov holds after Marx, is "the intellectual quintessence of its time," a system of knowledge of the world as a whole; and it has one "basic question," the relation of consciousness to being, with two aspects. On the first — which comes first, matter or thought — "materialists affirm that matter is primary and determinant, and consciousness secondary and determined," and the whole history of philosophy divides into the two camps, materialist and idealist, that answer it. On the second — whether the world is knowable — materialism affirms that it is, and that the proof is not contemplation but "practice, i. e., of people's social and production activity." Consciousness is not a mirror-image struck off passively: it is a "reflection" of matter, a doctrine, Rakitov notes, that "subsequently came to be called the theory of reflection and was developed on a fundamentally new basis by Lenin." To all of this the book attaches the principle of partiinost — partisanship, or party-spirit — the insistence that "recognition of the irreconcilability of idealism and materialism is a prime important feature of the Marxian principle of partisanship in philosophy," and that every philosophy, whatever it pretends, serves the interests of a definite class.
Extended to society, materialism becomes historical materialism, and the load-bearing formula is stated flatly: dialectical materialism "extends materialism to society, considers that material social being determines social consciousness, and treats history as a developing, dialectical process." The relations of production "form the economic system of society, the basis of society"; the state, parties, law, morality, art and "the various forms of social consciousness" are the superstructure "built as it were on top of the relations of production, just as the storeys of a building are erected on top of its foundations." "'Social consciousness reflects social being — that is Marx's teaching', Lenin remarked," and Rakitov makes the line the hinge of his historical materialism. Over this frame he lays the three laws of dialectics, of which the law of the unity and struggle of opposites is "the essence and kernel of dialectics," in Lenin's phrase, "since it answers a most important and complex question, that of the source of development." Development everywhere comes from within, from the growth and resolution of internal contradictions — and social contradictions are sorted into "antagonistic" (irreconcilable, resolved only by the elimination of one side) and "non-antagonistic" (soluble by peaceful adjustment). That distinction will matter enormously in a moment, because it is the pressure-point on which the whole book turns.
First, though, the credit, which is due and which is substantial. Rakitov is a real philosopher, and it shows on the page in a way it does not show in most of this catalogue. His chief pedagogical device is the staged dialogue, and the dialogues are genuinely well made. A Materialist argues an Objective Idealist to a standstill over whether the world needs a designer; then a Subjective Idealist arrives to claim that an apple is only "the name for a certain combination of visual, tactile, and other sensations," and the Materialist walks him, courteously and inexorably, into the trap of solipsism — "you are arguing with yourself and trying to convince yourself that you are right… only you exist and there are no other people in the world" — until the idealist concedes, "perhaps you are right, and there is something wrong in my argument." On the knowability of the world, a Subjective Idealist produces the oldest sceptical exhibit of all, the pencil that looks bent in a glass of water, and the Materialist answers not with an assertion but with an experiment, and then with a genuinely fine image: knowledge "is not some isolated 'slice', but a spiral consisting of endless turns," each stage correcting and deepening the last. This is Socratic teaching that respects the reader's intelligence, and it is the opposite of a catechism's question-and-certified-answer.
The same quality runs through the history of philosophy, which is unusually generous for a Soviet primer. Rakitov gives real weight to Indian and Chinese thought — the Indian "technique of meditation and self-training," he writes, "is of undoubted interest for the contemporary science of man" — and to the Arab philosophers who "preserved the philosophical heritage of antiquity and made it available to the scholars of the European Middle Ages." He credits Hegel and Kant with raising "several important propositions of the dialectical method" that "much" surpassed "the naive dialectic of antiquity," and he honours Gramsci at length. His feel for science is a working philosopher's, not a propagandist's: quarks and gluons, annihilation of electron and positron into a field, the periodic law, science "outpacing technology" — these are used as illustrations because Rakitov actually understands them. Where this series has often had to report a rote inventory dressed as thought, here it can report the reverse. As elementary exposition of what dialectical and historical materialism claims, and of the classical arguments for and against materialism, The Principles of Philosophy is lucid, fair to its opponents in the set-piece dialogues, and better written than almost anything beside it on the shelf.
And yet the book fails at the exact point every book in this series fails, and it fails in the most instructive way of any of them, precisely because it comes so close to not failing. The doctrine it teaches contains a universal solvent: the theory of ideology. Ideology, Rakitov explains, is "false consciousness" — Marx and Engels's phrase — because exploiting classes have "striven to present their interests as eternal and immutable," and its thought is bent by "social being" to that end. This is a powerful acid, and Rakitov pours it freely over bourgeois thought. Multi-party democracy is unmasked: "the existence of a number of political parties, known as political pluralism, provides an appearance of choice for the working people," while in fact all of them defend the same basis. Agnosticism is "a weapon employed in the ideological struggle by opponents of the progressive classes." Bourgeois political economy, philosophy, law — each is traced back to the class interest it secretly serves. The solvent works on everything. Except one thing. "Socialism ensures the predominance of a scientific world outlook," and Marxism-Leninism alone is exempt from the acid because it is not ideology at all but science. Asked directly whether "a true ideology" is possible, one "that correctly reflects reality," the book answers: "Of course, it is possible. Initially it takes shape as the ideology of the working class… Its ideology does not aspire to justify any social set-up whatever as eternal and immutable." The category that explains all thought as the distorted echo of class interest is never once turned on the doctrine doing the explaining. That doctrine is "science," the "scientific world outlook," and stands outside the theory it applies to everyone else.
Now, the interesting part. In the earlier primers of this series that exemption sat undisturbed on a set of triumphant factual claims — the Terror airbrushed, the 1936 Constitution called "the Constitution of triumphant socialism," Soviet society described as harmonious and contradiction-free. Rakitov, in 1989, has given all of that up. His book admits contradiction under socialism as a permanent condition: "contradictions cannot be eliminated from it once and for all," and "its inherent non-antagonistic contradictions are the source of its development and perfection." He admits the bureaucracy. His dialogue on the sources of development — a Metaphysician who thinks change comes from outside, a Dialectician who insists it comes from within — takes as its climactic worked example the degeneration of the Soviet state itself. "In certain conditions, and in socialist society as well," the Dialectician says, "situations may arise when the state machinery begins to develop interests and goals of its own that do not correspond to those of society as a whole." The machine "becomes bureaucratic and clumsy," "begins to hold it back and slow it down," and produces "stagnation in public affairs and the economy." This is the method turned, at last, partway on the USSR — a thing no volume before it in this catalogue would do.
So has Rakitov passed the test the earlier books failed? He has not, and seeing exactly why is the whole point. The discriminator this series has learned to use is narrow and it holds here perfectly: error is admissible; the category is not. A Bolshevik may be granted a mistake — Stalin his "repressions," the reforms their "resistance," the 1930s their "administrative, bureaucratic methods" — without the classification ever turning inward. And under all Rakitov's new candour the classification does not turn. The bureaucracy is a "phenomenon," a set of "methods," a "non-antagonistic contradiction" to be dissolved by "political and educational measures"; it is never a stratum with a material interest of its own, never a class-in-formation, never something the theory of ideology could be applied to. Crucially, the Party that reforms it is never the thing reformed: the contradictions "were realised and laid bare by the Communist Party which called on all the working people to set about renewing society." The Party remains the physician and never becomes the disease. And the epistemic exemption — the claim that Marxism-Leninism is science and not ideology — survives every concession. Rakitov will surrender the perfection of Soviet society, the innocence of the 1930s, even the necessity of one-party rule; the one thing glasnost cannot revise from inside the doctrine is the doctrine's claim to stand outside ideology as science. That is the load-bearing wall, and it is the only wall left standing.
There is a smaller tell that confirms the pattern. The candour has a sharp edge where it meets the countryside. Collectivisation appears once, and it is presented, with no trace of the new frankness, as a triumph of dialectical method: a "contradiction" between industry and peasant agriculture "was resolved through collectivisation," and "socialist relations of production arose in agriculture based on co-operative ownership." No kulak (a well-to-do peasant), no requisitioning, no famine of 1932–33 — the abstract word "repressions" is admissible, but the concrete catastrophe that would have to be laid at the door of the system rather than one man's "entourage" stays outside the frame. The reflexivity fails in the particular exactly where it failed in the general.
The revolutionary-socialist tradition answered this book's move before the book was written, and from inside its own categories. In "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics" — a short polemic of December 1939, part of his defence of dialectics in In Defense of Marxism — Trotsky drew the distinction Rakitov's book is built to blur. The real dialectician, he wrote, is the one who has "learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself," and who determines "that critical limit beyond which 'A' ceases to be 'A', a workers' state ceases to be a workers' state." Whoever recognises development "in only certain spheres" and treats the rest as fixed is not a dialectician but a "vulgar evolutionist." That is the precise measure of The Principles of Philosophy. Rakitov recognises development in one more sphere than his predecessors dared — the bureaucracy, the stagnation, the fallibility of the Party's own methods — and then stops, at the caste and at the category, exactly where continuing would cost something. A method that finds contradiction, negation and supersession in every order of nature and history, and exempts a single order, its own, has not made a small local exception; it has suspended itself at the one point where it would have had to ask what class the ruling stratum of the USSR had become.
The tradition had carried the method through to that answer half a century earlier. The Revolution Betrayed (1936) — the standard against which every Soviet account of Soviet society in this catalogue must be read — begins from the very premise Rakitov reaches in 1989, that a transitional society "does not proceed harmoniously, but in contradictions," and then does the thing Rakitov will not. It names the bureaucracy as a caste: "exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism." It reads the growth of the state, which Rakitov's own doctrine says should be withering, as the symptom it is: "the state does not die away, but grows more and more despotic… the bureaucracy rises above the new society." And it states, in one line, the law Rakitov's book is written to deny: "Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other." Fifty-three years before Rakitov let his Dialectician concede that the state machinery can "develop interests and goals of its own," Trotsky had given those interests a name and a class content. One may accept or reject his diagnosis; what cannot be denied is that it is the dialectical method carried to its own society, which is the one operation the primer forbids itself.
Behind the particular failure lies the general one this series keeps meeting: diamat — the codified state philosophy of dialectical materialism — is not the living method of Marx but a doctrine frozen into a syllabus, and a frozen dialectic is a contradiction in terms. The fair counterweight is not a treatise but another popular primer, and one exists: George Novack's An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (5th ed., New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971, from the lectures of 1942), delivered to worker-activists while the leaders of his party stood trial. Novack teaches the same three laws and the same categories, and opens by refusing Rakitov's central move: "We shall approach dialectics not as a closed system. On the contrary it is an open system." And the sentence the whole exemption is built to avoid: "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." This must also apply to the science of dialectics — that is the clause a state philosophy cannot afford, because a method that must be turned on its own formulations will, sooner or later, be turned on the state that certifies them.
Which returns us to Rakitov himself, and to the reason his book is the most poignant object in this catalogue rather than merely the most candid. Measured against Konstantinov, Afanasyev, Boguslavsky and Oizerman, The Principles of Philosophy marks the far end of a visible curve: across the decade the exemption holds, but the factual claims it protects fall away one by one, until in 1989 almost nothing is left of them but the bare epistemic claim to be science. Rakitov could write the dialogues so well, and could admit so much, precisely because he was the kind of philosopher who would eventually find the last exemption untenable too — and, the record shows, he did, laying down the doctrine entirely within a few years and taking his analytical skills into the service of the state that replaced the one this book was written to legitimate. Read from its own tone, the book does not read like a catechism confidently recited. It reads like a doctrine hedging in the first person, on the edge of a country and a career about to end. That authors of such books saw the danger, named more of it than anyone before them, and still could not cross the last line, is the truest record they leave of the year in which they were written.