an embodiment of materialism that even the orthodox Marxists have begun to abandon their Marx. Avenarius, Mach, and empirio-criticism, have become the authorities of many of the orthodox, whilst Dietzgen begins to replace Engels. Plehanov disputes the validity of these new authorities championed by his comrades, and so does Lenin, but it cannot be said that either Plehanov or Lenin is wholly right, for Marxist positivism can readily be associated with the ideas of Mach or Hume. Still, we are concerned with ethics as well as with epistemology and metaphysics, and from the ethical outlook Marxist amoralism is incompatible with Humism. It would seem, however, that even Plehanov must have been attacked by the revisionist intellectual anaemia—for why else should he make out Marx to be a Spinozist?
For the Marxists the struggle between subjectivism and objectivism has no mere theoretical significance, but is, rather, practical and ethical. With good reason since the days of Hume and Kant subjectivism has been in essentials a moral philosophy. In the dispute between the orthodox Marxists and the revisionists, the ethical problem comes to the front, the question whether our estimate of socialism and the socialist program is to be ethical or amoralist and historical. The orthodox Marxists are especially concerned with founding and defending revolution and the revolutionary mood, and for them the revolutionary mood is the touchstone of philosophy. From this outlook Plehanov defends materialism as objectivism against subjectivism, contending that subjectivism leads to scepticism, and therefore weakens and destroys the evolutionary spirit.[1]
- ↑ To the epilogue to the Russian translation of Thun's work on the Russian revolutionary movement, Plehanov expressed his objections to the so-called objectivist method of Lavrov. The task of science, he said, and therefore the task of scientific socialism, was to explain the subject (in so far as explanation was requisite) by the object. Russian progressive thought had become more and more objectivistic in proportion as it was richer in the revolutionary spirit, whereas it had become increasingly subjectivistic in proportion as it was poor in revolutionary content. Černyševskii and Dobroljubov, he contended, had certainly not been subjectivists. This is perfectly true, but they were far from being extreme objectivists; they recognised the significance of ethics and gave their socialism an ethical foundation, whilst the narodovolcy and the terrorists agreed with them in representing the duty of revolution as an ethical imperative. Rosa Luxemburg, writing in "Iskra" an article criticising Lenin (1904) discerned subjectivism in the fondness of Lenin's adherents for centralism. The ego, crushed by absolutism, took its revenge by enthroning itself as a conspirators' committee, as an almighty "popular will."
