Evald Ilyenkov and the end of classical Marxist philosophy

Abstract

This article examines the history of Marxist philosophy in light of the long-standing confrontation between materialist dialectics and the Diamat’s scholasticism. Classical Marxist philosophy emerged from a materialist rethinking of Hegel’s logic (with the reservation that the mature Marx himself used the term “philosophy” to refer to ideology rather than science). Ilyenkov developed it along these lines. He understood dialectics solely and exclusively as a method of thinking, sharply condemning attempts to turn dialectics into a kind of “ontology” or “picture of the world as a whole”. The author of the article explores the origins of this kind of Marxist metaphysics (Diamat) in the works of Georgi Plekhanov and Joseph Dietzgen. The line of classical Marxist philosophy was resumed in the 20th century in Lenin’s “Philosophical Notebooks” and the early works of Georg Lukács. Based on a critical rethinking of Hegel’s philosophy, they restored the method of materialist dialectics. Ilyenkov continued this work. The article highlights the main points of his polemic with the neo-Marxist Lucio Colletti, who wrote the preface to the Italian edition of Ilyenkov’s first book. Ilyenkov’s intellectual links with his predecessors in the field of dialectical logic, led by Abram Deborin, are outlined briefly. In their works, the classical Marxist tradition coexisted strangely with Diamat scholasticism. The final section discusses the “Achilles’ heel” of classical Marxist philosophy: the absence of comprehensive applications of the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete in modern science since Marx. Despite his efforts, Ilyenkov himself never succeeded in constructing a dialectical logic “from the abstract”.