Is the Soviet notion of practice Marxian?

Abstract

The somewhat esoteric title of my paper1 would seem to call for a few explanatory remarks. The question whether this or that component of contemporary Communist ideology can legitimately be traced back to Marx is certainly not new. Unfortunately, however, questions of this kind are usually asked in too general a way to be amenable to a truly satis factory answer. For example, the question whether the contemporary Soviet concept of man or history is genuinely Marxian or not, is so enor mously complex that it would seem virtually impossible to answer it without breaking it down into a whole series of more specific questions. The same applies to recent discussions as to whether the humanistic insights of the young Marx have been preserved in contemporary Marx ism-Leninism or not. However, once one has succeeded in pinning down a fairly definite doctrine and then asks oneself whether and to what extent it can be traced back to Marx, one is entering a discussion which is as exciting as it is timely. The recent reaction of Soviet philosophers, for example, to I. Fetscher's suggestion that both Soviet ideology and Soviet reality might be criticized in terms of ideas advanced by Marx himself2, indicates that Communist thinkers simply cannot afford to ignore this kind of argument which dissociates them from one of their main authorities. It would be nasty, and perhaps somewhat too easy, to say that by dissociating the Communists from Marx one succeeds in undermining the peculiar self confidence characteristic of contemporary Marxist-Leninist ideology. Therefore, I prefer to put it in a somewhat more obliging, if also more pretentious way: to ask whether this or that element of Marxist-Leninist ideology is compatible with or even can be traced back to ideas of Karl Marx is a forceful means of bringing us into conversation with Communist ideologists and philosophers into a conversation which today seems as necessary as it is difficult and which, as unfruitful or even impossible as it might have appeared a few years ago, has been gathering momentum in the last two or three years.