The Actuality of Evald Ilyenkov

Can Marxist-Leninist philosophy exist without dialectical materialism, without the analysis of material and social contradictions, and without the need to overcome and resolve them in the interests of revolutionary transformation? Does the speaker acknowledge that the philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism, as Lenin asked Bogdanov one day in May 1908? What had ‘official Soviet Marxism’ really become, capable of combining ideological dictatorship with militant philosophical ignorance, itself justified by the achievements of modern science, skilfully utilised as an instrument of domination and the preservation of the established order? How can one conceptually master reality and its contradictions, knowing full well that knowledge is never neutral but is class-based? These questions are answered by Evald Ilyenkov, one of the greatest Marxist philosophers of the 20th century, who, in the late 1970s, re-examined Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in a text entitled Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism—still unpublished in Italy—and identified the revolutionary leader as an exceptional theoretical ally. Just as Lenin had had to combat the attacks launched by Bogdanov’s theories—which drew on the empirio-criticism of Mach, Avenarius and Berman—as a form of dogmatic and reactionary materialism directed against the natural sciences, so too did Ilyenkov combat the infiltration of positivism into Soviet politics and philosophy, criticising the rejection of dialectics as serving only the technocratic project of building ‘socialism’ in the Brezhnev era—a disguised heir to the very empirio-criticism denounced by Lenin as the natural metaphysical conclusion of the logic of positivism.