Reflections on Lenin’s Dialectics

Conclusion¶

Summing up our research, we can say that Lenin’s understanding of dialectics is oriented (among other things) to a whole and concrete vision of the historical situation, and it is this ensemble that determines Lenin’s enduring relevance. The most important thing in Lenin’s dialectic is to see a constantly changing and developing totality—the universal connection of phenomena, the dialectic of essence and phenomenon, the inclusion of a specific, concrete object/process in the whole, and the historicity of this whole.

Any scientist, organizer, factory director, workshop head, foreperson, educator, and politician should learn from Lenin this organic, plastic consideration of any phenomenon through the prism of its inclusion in an integral structure. The simplest example of this consideration, as we have seen, is Lenin’s analysis of a glass of water, an analysis that is often ridiculed today, without understanding its inner depth. Therefore, based on Lenin’s version of Marxist dialectics, we can create not only scientific methods and concepts, but also develop management practices at various levels.

However, the most important thing in Lenin’s social and practical dialectics is not only the “point of view of totality” or concrete historical analysis of the situation, but, above all, the return of the revolutionary subject to social and historical practice. In fact, in contrast to the leaders of the Second International, who considered the coming socialist revolution to be a purely objective social process, Lenin, in his socio-political dialectics, returned to Marxism the subject and the subjective dimension of social existence.

Consequently, it is most significant that, in abandoning the “automatism” and fatalism of the leaders of the Second International, Lenin gave the labor movement what today is not quite rightly called utopia or utopian consciousness: an image of a just human future society that does not come about “by itself” by virtue of the abstract “historical necessity,” but one that must be created by the people themselves, for they are the creators of their own history.