СОВЕТСКАЯ МАРКСИСТСКАЯ ФИЛОСОФИЯ

Soviet Marxist Philosophy

Appeared after the October Socialist Revolution in Russia. In its first years, it developed in struggle against the remnants of the old, bourgeois philosophy and the philosophical theories of Menshevism, Russian Machism (Bogdanov, and others). In 1922, the first Marxist philosophical journal Pod znamenem marxisma (Under the Banner of Marxism) was founded. Its third issue carried Lenin's article "On the Significance of Militant Materialism", devoted to the tasks of the journal and the development of Soviet Marxist Philosophy. This article, as well as Lenin's other creative works, has had a decisive influence on all the subsequent work of Soviet philosophers. In the initial years, the basic task was to form a new body of philosophers closely associated with the Communist Party and its entire struggle for the country's socialist reconstruction. The class struggle in the first period of the Soviet state's existence was reflected in all fields of ideology, including philosophy.

In the late twenties and early thirties, there developed a criticism of relapses into mechanistic materialism (N. I. Bukharin, A. I. Varyash, V. N. Sarabyanov, and others) and of manifestations of Menshevistic idealism (A. M. Deborin's group), which tried to identify Marxist dialectics with Hegel's, divorced theory from practice, and underestimated the Leninist stage in the development of philosophy. The first Soviet manuals appeared, explaining the essence of dialectical and historical materialism. The journal Under the Banner of Marxism, which ceased publication in 1944, and other periodicals were bent on elaborating philosophical problems of building socialism and cultural revolution, reviewing the past history of philosophy in the light of Marxist philosophy, working for an alliance with the naturalists and for their transition to the positions of dialectical materialism. The first publications of Dialectics of Nature by Engels (1925) and Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks (1929) gave an impulse to research into new questions.

But the development of Soviet philosophy, as of other social sciences, was seriously retarded in the period of the cult of Stalin's personality. His work On Dialectical and Historical Materialism was unwarrantedly declared the peak of Marxist philosophy. The Party's criticism of the personality cult and the decisions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU laid the foundation for a new stage in the development of Soviet philosophy. A feature of this stage is a considerably wider range of subjects for philosophical research and a deeper approach to urgent questions in modern philosophical science. A large place has been given to the study of Lenin's philosophical legacy. New textbooks and manuals have been written, in which the dogmatic features associated with the cult of Stalin have been overcome.

The chief trend in the development of contemporary Soviet philosophy is determined by the tasks of communist construction outlined in the decisions of the 20th, 22nd and 23rd Congresses of the CPSU and its new Programme. The Party decisions summing up the experience of communist construction in the USSR and the entire world development have a profound philosophical content and reveal the laws governing social development in contemporary conditions. A number of Soviet philosophers, mainly sociologists, are working on questions concerning the laws of communist construction, the dialectics of the transition from socialism to communism, the development of the Soviet state, the merger of the two forms of socialist ownership into communist ownership, the elimination of the essential distinctions between town and country, between physical and mental labour, the development of socialist culture, and others (G. M. Gak, G. I. Gleserman, F. V. Konstantinov, T. A. Stepanyan, V. P. Tugarinov, P. N. Fedoseyev, V. A. Fomina, G. P. Frantsev, D. I. Chesnokov, and others).

Although concrete social problems are still not sufficiently studied in philosophical literature, many sociological works have been published in recent years. Some of them are devoted to the raising of the cultural and technical level of the working class, the obliteration of the distinctions between town and country, the elimination of religious survivals, etc. A large place in the studies of Soviet philosophers is taken up by problems of dialectical materialism. Moreover, they generalise the achievements of contemporary natural science, further elaborate materialist dialectics, study the new forms in which its laws are manifested under socialism, questions of dialectical logic and the theory of knowledge, the categories of dialectical materialism, the problem of a materialist system of categories and philosophical questions of the natural sciences (E. V. Ilyenkov, B. M. Kedrov, P. V. Kopnin, I. V. Kuznetsov, M. E. Omelyanovsky, M. N. Rutkevich, V. I. Svidersky, Y. P. Sitkovsky, A. G. Spirkin, B. S. Ukraintsev, V. P. Chertkov, and others).

Soviet philosophers are working extensively in the field of Marxist studies of the world history of philosophy; in recent years much has been achieved in the study of Russian materialist philosophy; a group of philosophers are studying contemporary philosophy in the capitalist countries, critically analysing idealistic philosophical conceptions (V. F. Asmus, M. P. Baskin, B. E. Bykhovsky, A. M. Deborin, M. A. Dynnik, M. T. Iovchuk, I. S. Kon, G. A. Kursanov, A. O. Makovelsky, Y. K. Melvil, M. B. Mitin, K. N. Momjyan, I. S. Narsky, T. I. Oiserman, O. V. Trakhtenberg, B. A. Chagin, I. Y. Shchipanov, and others).

Communist construction has posed as one of the most important tasks in the field of philosophy the elaboration of problems in communist morality, Marxist ethics, the struggle against the survivals of capitalism in people's consciousness and behaviour, against the influence of religious views, and so on. A number of philosophers: Y. A. Levada, A. F. Shishkin, and others, devoted their works to these problems. In the last few years Soviet philosophers have been devoting their investigations to problems of aesthetics: the history of aesthetics, the aesthetic categories, the theory of socialist realism, criticism of bourgeois aesthetic theories, and so on (Y. B. Borev, A. G. Yegorov, M. A. Lifshitz, M. F. Ovsyannikov, Z. V. Smirnova, G. M. Fridlender, and others).

Whereas formerly philosophers specialising in the field of formal logic devoted their efforts mainly to the study of traditional logic, in recent times they have begun to concern themselves with urgent problems of logic which require dialectical-materialistic generalisation of the achievements in mathematical logic, semantics, and so on (K. S. Bakradze, Y. K. Voishvillo, D. P. Gorsky, A. A. Zinoviev, P. S. Popov, P. V. Tavanets, S. A. Yanovskaya, and others). Works have been published dealing with the philosophical analysis of cybernetics, its essence and connections with other sciences, questions of psychology in general and social psychology in particular (B. G. Ananyev, A. N. Leontyev, S. L. Rubinstein, B. M. Teplov, and others).

Soviet philosophers are faced with great tasks, the principal of which are: a more profound generalisation of the real processes of communist construction, development of the new culture, the formation of the man of communist society, elaboration of the human morality of communism.