Preface to the First Edition¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s preface to the first edition of Materialism and Empirio-criticism opens with a polemical salvo against a cluster of recent publications that, under the banner of Marxism, had launched a concerted assault on its philosophical foundations. Within the space of half a year, four books had appeared—chief among them the symposium Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism—whose authors, including Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Berman, and Yushkevich, were united in their hostility to dialectical materialism. Lenin’s core argument is that these writers, despite sharp political differences among themselves, represent a coherent philosophical revisionism: they claim to be Marxists while in practice renouncing the fundamental materialist outlook repeatedly affirmed by Marx and Engels. The evidence Lenin marshals is drawn from their own texts: Berman calls Engels’ dialectics “mysticism”; Bazarov dismisses Engels’ views as “antiquated” with casual finality. They appeal to the authority of “recent philosophy,” “modern positivism,” and the “philosophy of natural science of the twentieth century” to justify their retreat from materialism. Yet when pressed to define their relation to Marx and Engels explicitly, they resort to subterfuge, evasion, and a refusal to confront the mass of materialist declarations left by the founders of Marxism. Lenin characterises this as “mutiny on one’s knees”—a phrase borrowed from another Marxist—and identifies it as the hallmark of revisionism: a departure from fundamental views combined with fear of an open, resolute break.
The historical context is the period of reaction following the defeat of the 1905 revolution, when sections of the Russian intelligentsia, including party intellectuals, abandoned orthodox Marxism for religious and idealist currents. Lunacharsky’s “god-building” is singled out as the most flagrant case of a slide into fideism—the doctrine that substitutes faith for knowledge—but Lenin insists the tendency is not confined to him. The preface thus establishes the book’s task: to demonstrate that the “seeking” of these would-be Marxists has led them into something “incredibly muddled, confused and reactionary,” and to identify the philosophical stumbling block that has caused their deviation. Lenin’s polemic is directed not only against the specific authors named but against the broader current of empirio-criticism and positivist revisionism that sought to reconcile Marxism with idealist epistemology. The tone is combative, the method forensic: he will expose the gap between their verbal allegiance to Marxism and their actual philosophical practice.