Lenin, V. I.
Lenin, V. I.
(Ulianov, Vladimir Ilyich) Lenin is generally regarded as the chief exponent of dialectical materialism (q.v.) after Marx and Engels. He was born April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, Russia, and received the professional training of a lawyer. A Marxist from his student days onward, he lived many years outside of Russia as a political refugee, and read widely in the social sciences and philosophy. In the latter field his “Philosophical Note Books” (as yet untranslated into English) containing detailed critical comments on the works of many leading philosophers, ancient and modern, and in particular on Hegel, indicate his close study of texts. In 1909, Lenin published his best known philosophic work “Materialism and Empirio-Cnticism” which was directed against “a number of writers, would-be Marxists” including Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Berman, Helfond, Yushkevich, Suvorov and Valentinov, and especially against a symposium of this group published under the title, “Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism” which in general adopted the “positivistic” position of Mach and Avenanus.
In his economic and political writings, Lenin extended and developed the doctrines of Marx and Engels especially in their application to a phase of capitalism which emerged fully only after their death — imperialism. In the same fashion Lenin built upon and further extended the Marxist doctrine of the state in his “State and Revolution”, written just before the revolution of 1917. In this work Lenin develops a concept like the dictatorship of the proletariat which Marx treated only briefly and generally, elaborates a distinction like that between socialism and communism, only implicit in Marx’s work, and asserts a thesis like the possibility of socialism in one country, towards which Marx was negative in the light of conditions as he knew them. After the Bolsheviks came to power, Lenin headed the government until his death on January 21, 1924. In Russian, Lenin’s “Collected Works” comprise thirty volumes, with about thirty additional volumes of miscellaneous writings (“Leninskie Sborniki”). The principal English translations are the “Collected Works”, to comprise thirty volumes (of which five in eight books have been published to date), the “Selected Works” comprising twelve volumes (for philosophical materials, see especially Volume XI, “Theoretical Principles of Marxism”), and the Little Lenin Library, made up mostly of shorter works, comprising 27 volumes to date. — J.M.S.