Origins of the Interpretation and Criticism of Philosophical Foundations of Leninism in Western Marxism

The aim of the article is to discover the nature of the widespread criticism of Leninism in Western countries in the "left communism" or "communism of the Soviets" (Raetekommunismus), which arose in Germany, Holland, and Denmark in the 1920s and 1930s. To understand the general lines of the criticism of the philosophy of Leninism the author analyzes the ideas presented in the work Lenin as Philosopher by Anton Pannekoek, one of the greatest thinkers and politicians of the "communism of the Soviets". In its philosophical part, the work is devoted to the criticism of Lenin's main philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The author also takes into account the articles devoted to this criticism by Karl Korsch and Paul Mattik, other founders of "communism of the Soviets". The significance of these works is determined by the fact that they constitute the philosophical foundation of contemporary Western "Marxist anti-Leninism". The author reveals the political presuppositions and the political background of the polemic about the philosophical foundations of Leninism. The background is a polemic about the significance of the Russian revolution and the principles of building the Bolshevik party for the rest of the world and especially for Western countries and their Communist parties. The philosophical polemic with Leninism grows out of a doubt about the universal significance of the experience of the Russian revolution. In particular, Pannekoek and Korsch put forward the thesis of the bourgeois-democratic, not socialist character of the Russian revolution. From this thesis, they conclude that the theoretical basis of the Russian revolution is also of a bourgeois character, i.e. the Russian revolution is based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. The philosophical foundation of the Enlightenment is natural-scientific materialism, not historical materialism, i.e. not Marxism. The article demonstrates the genesis of the concept of Leninism as (1) an anti-democratic tendency in the contemporary liberation movement, (2) an instrument for legitimizing the repressive practices of the bureaucracy in the workers' parties and in the "catching-up" states of organized capitalism, (3) a naturalistic mishmash of natural-scientific and historical materialism, ultimately suppressing and emasculating the historicity of Marxist thought. The author reveals how this concept was transmitted to tmodern Western left-wing thought through the Frankfurt school, and especially through Marcuse's work Soviet Marxism (1958), which for many years became the most popular theoretical source for the Marxist criticism of Soviet dialectical materialism in the Western left. Nowadays, this interpretation functions in it in a sedimented form as self-evidence (Selbstverstaendlichkeit) and automatism.

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