tradiction, Marx contented himself with epistemologically uncritical positivism and positivist historism, and this is why his formula of historical materialism remains so nebulous.
Engels, in his criticism of Dühring’s philosophy, attempted to systematise the philosophy of Marxism, but the work Engels was attacking, Dühring's The Revolution of Science, is, epistemologically considered, nothing more than a naive exposition of naive realism. Seeing, therefore, that the Russian orthodox Marxists, Plehanov in especial, but also Lenin, took their theory of cognition from Engels (as Plehanov is careful to explain), we cannot expect much valuable fruit from the philosophical discussions of the Marxists.
"The father of Russian Marxism" is, in fact, satisfied with Engel's naive realism.[1] Nevertheless he believes himself to be an orthodox Marxist in proclaiming materialism as monism, in approximating it as closely as possible to Spinozism, and even in positively identifying it with Spinozism, for he maintains that the materialism of Marx and Engels, and also the materialism of Feuerbach and Diderot, are no more than a variety of Spinozism. At the same time he defends the materialistic foundation of dialectic, wherein he discovers the true essence of historical materialism, of the Marx-Engels philosophy.
It need hardly be said that there is no justification for the identification of Marxism with Spinozism, as the Marxists have admitted (Stein, for example, in his book on Spinoza). Spinoza assumes a parallelism between being and thought, whereas in the Marx-Engels philosophy the relationship is regarded as causal, for existence is assumed to determine thought. As a parallelist, Spinoza is a rationalist, and indeed an ultra-rationalist. Marx, on the other hand, is an ultra-empiricist. Moreover, Plehanov may learn from Engels how
- ↑ In Plehanov's latest polemic writing, From Defence to Attack, Kant's thing-by-itself and subjectivism are disposed of with the assertion that modern science does not merely study things by its analysis, but actually produces things, and that what we can ourselves produce cannot be said to be uncognisable. Here is Plehanov's epistemological basic formula: "We give the name of material objects (bodies) to such objects as exist independently of our consciousness, act upon our senses, and thus awaken in us definite sensations, these sensations, in their turn, being a fundamental element of our ideas of the outer world, that is to say, our ideas of the aforesaid material objects and of their mutual relationships." Mihailovskii was likewise a materialist, but Mihailovskii at least did not fail to recognise the subjective element of apperception.
