Lenin's philosophical positions

Abstract

In 1894, Lenin maintained that dialectics considers social evolution as "a process of natural history of the development of social economic formations". Against "the idealist and subjectivist methods in sociology," he emphasized the natural chain of historical phenomena, subject to laws independent of man's will and consciousness. Nevertheless, in What is to be done? (1902), criticizing the cult of spontaneity of the masses, he took up the thesis that socialism enters the consciousness of the workers from the outside in. Philosophical questions mobilized him intellectually when they interfered in the theoretical struggle of revolutionary Marxism. In 1908, he wrote Materialism and Empiriocriticism, confronting the renowned physicist Ernst Mach, who considered nature a complex of sensations, thus resuming subjective idealism (reduction of objectivity to the conditions of human knowledge). Finally, we discuss whether and to what extent the study of Hegel from 1914 to 1916, noted in the Philosophical Notebooks, affected Lenin's thought.