Vladimir Lenin/Materialism and empirio-criticism - The recent revolution in natural science and philosophical idealism

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A year ago, in Die Neue Zeit (1906–07, No. 52), there appeared an article by Joseph Diner-Dénes entitled “Marxism and the Recent Revolution in the Natural Sciences.” The defect of this article is that it ignores the epistemological conclusions which are being drawn from the “new” physics and in which we are especially interested at present. But it is precisely this defect which renders the point of view and the conclusions of the author particularly interesting for us. Joseph Diner-Dénes, like the present writer, holds the view of the “rank-and-file Marxist,” of whom our Machians speak with such haughty contempt. For instance, Mr. Yushkevich writes that “ordinarily, the average rank-and-file Marxist calls himself a dialectical materialist” (p. 1 of his book). And now this rank-and-file Marxist, in the person of J. Diner-Dénes, has directly compared the recent discoveries in science, and especially in physics (X-rays, Becquerel rays, radium, etc.^[1]), with Engels’ Anti-Dühring. To what conclusion has this comparison led him? “In the most varied fields of natural science,” writes Diner-Dénes, “new knowledge has been acquired, all of which tends towards that single point which Engels desired to make clear, namely, that in nature ‘there are no irreconcilable contradictions, no forcibly fixed boundary lines and distinctions,’ and that if contradictions and distinctions are met with in nature, it is because we alone have introduced their rigidity and absoluteness into nature.” It was discovered, for instance, that light and electricity are only manifestations of one and the same force of nature.[2] Each day it becomes more probable that chemical affinity may be reduced to electrical processes. The indestructible and non-disintegrable elements of chemistry, whose number continues to grow as though in derision of the unity of the world, now prove to be destructible and disintegrable. The element radium has been converted into the element helium.^[3] “Just as all the forces of nature have been reduced to one force, so all substances in nature have been reduced to one substance” (Diner-Dénes’ italics). Quoting the opinion of one of the writers who regard the atom as only a condensation of the ether,^[4] the author exclaims: “How brilliantly does this confirm the statement made by Engels thirty years ago that motion is the mode of existence of matter.” “All phenomena of nature are motion, and the differences between them lie only in the fact that we human beings perceive this motion in different forms. . . . It is as Engels said. Nature, like history, is subject to the dialectical law of motion.”

On the other hand, you cannot take up any of the writings of the Machians or about Machism without encountering pretentious references to the new physics, which is said to have refuted materialism, and so on and so forth. Whether these assertions are well-founded is another question, but the connection between the new physics, or rather a definite school of the new physics, and Machism and other varieties of modern idealist philosophy is beyond doubt. To analyse Machism and at the same time to ignore this connection—as Plekhanov does^[5]—is to scoff at the spirit of dialectical materialism, i.e., to sacrifice the method of Engels to the letter of Engels. Engels says explicitly that “with each epoch making discovery even in the sphere of natural science [“not to speak of the history of mankind”], materialism has to change its form” (Ludwig Feuerbach, Germ. ed., p. 19).^[6] Hence, a revision of the “form” of Engels’ materialism, a revision of his natural-philosophical propositions is not only not “revisionism,” in the accepted meaning of the term, but, on the contrary, is demanded by Marxism. We criticise the Machians not for making such a revision, but for their purely revisionist trick of betraying the essence of materialism under the guise of criticising its form and of adopting the fundamental precepts of reactionary bourgeois philosophy without making the slightest attempt to deal directly, frankly and definitely with assertions of Engels’ which are unquestionably extremely important to the given question, as, for example, his assertion that “. . . motion without matter is unthinkable” (Anti-Dühring, p. 50).[7]

It goes without saying that in examining the connection between one of the schools of modern physicists and the rebirth of philosophical idealism, it is far from being our intention to deal with specific physical theories. What interests us exclusively is the epistemological conclusions that follow from certain definite propositions and generally known discoveries. These epistemological conclusions are of themselves so insistent that many physicists are already reaching for them. What is more, there are already various trends among the physicists, and definite schools are beginning to be formed on this basis. Our object, therefore, will be confined to explaining clearly the essence of the difference between these various trends and the relation in which they stand to the fundamental lines of philosophy.