Materialism and Empiriocriticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy

Wellred

Core Argument

This chapter launches a devastating critique of empiriocriticism, exposing it as a mere refurbishment of Berkeley's subjective idealism dressed in modern scientific terminology. Lenin traces the lineage of Mach and Avenarius's ideas back to Bishop Berkeley's 1710 Treatise, which argued that objects are merely "collections of ideas" existing only in perception (esse est percipi). Berkeley explicitly denied matter as a "nonentity" and attacked materialists for "duplicating" the world by positing objects existing independently of mind. The Machians' "new" discoveries—their rejection of things-in-themselves and matter—are, Lenin demonstrates, nothing but a rehash of this same idealist sophistry.

The chapter establishes the fundamental philosophical opposition drawn by Engels: materialists proceed from nature to thought, idealists from thought to nature. Between them stand Humean and Kantian agnostics, who deny the possibility of fully knowing the world. Mach's doctrine that things are "complexes of sensations" is exposed as subjective idealism leading inevitably to solipsism. When Mach and Avenarius claim to have "discovered the world-elements" as neutral between physical and psychical, Lenin reveals this as an incoherent jumble—a sophistry that smuggles materialism in through the word "element" while maintaining idealist premises.

Avenarius's "principal coordination"—the indissoluble connection of self and environment—is shown to be a paraphrase of Fichte, collapsing into subjective idealism when tested against concrete problems such as the existence of the earth prior to human consciousness. The chapter mercilessly dissects the absurd contortions required to maintain this position: the theory of the "potential" central term, the resort to Kantian a priori postulates, and the desperate suggestion of worms as primitive fellow-men to preserve coordination.

Lenin demonstrates that empiriocriticism is an eclectic "pauper's broth" combining idealist premises with materialist deductions. Its denial of objective causality, law, and necessity in nature—reducing these to subjective expectations or conventional symbols—serves fideism in its struggle against materialism. The Russian Machians, despite claiming Marxism, are shown to have uncritically absorbed reactionary philosophical errors. The chapter concludes that dialectical materialism, recognising objective truth and the relativity of knowledge without reducing to relativism, alone provides a consistent philosophical foundation for science and revolutionary practice.