In his philosophical opus magnum, The Monistic View of History, Plehanov discusses the ethical problem, although the work is properly concerned solely with the question of freedom and necessity. How, asks Plehanov, can the consciousness, how can voluntary decisions, how can motivation, be explained in a purely objectivist manner? How can voluntary decisions, above all, be even partially conceived as a mere "reflex" of the object? With this question, the objectivism of Marx and Engels is shivered to fragments, and despite all his Marxist orthodoxy, Plehanov takes refuge in Spinoza.[1]
§ 165.
WHEN we talk of "from Marxism to idealism," we have to understand by idealism, religion as the definite opposite of materialism. In Russia, materialism signifies, irreligion or antireligion, and in the narrower sense, atheism.
The return to religion effected by the revisionists was partly determined by the example of the German revisionists. For the most part, however, the Russian revisionists followed the current represented by Solov'ev and Dostoevskii. To-day, as I have said, it is no longer possible to speak of Struve, Bulgakov, and similar writers, as revisionists. But there do exist
- ↑ Be it noted that Plehanov does not in truth, as does Engels, completely eliminate the subject. In his translation of Engels' Feuerbach (1892) Plehanov declares, just like Descartes, that his own existence at least stands for him above the possibility of doubt, for this existence is guaranteed by "an absolutely insuperable" inner conviction. In his polemic against Kant he contends that, objectively regarded, Engels' position is that in the historical process of transition from one form to another, reality comprises Engels as one of the necessary instruments of the imminent revolution; whilst subjectively regarded, we perceive that Engels found this participation in the historical movement as agreeable, and that he looked upon it as his duty. The objective historical process is agreeable to the individual, who considers participatition in it to be his duty—thus Plehanov, in this matter likewise, is not an amoralist of orthodox rigiditz, for Spinozist parallelism has him in its toils. This is why I say that Plehanov, too, was a revisionist. Is it not to him that we owe the term "the red phantom"? Did not Lenin ridicule Plehanov's revolutionism by saying that its motto was, "Kill with kindness"?
Bu the subjective ego was soon forced to recognize that the "object," i.e. tha absolutist knout, was the stronger party. Rosa Luxemburg, therefore, following the teaching of Marx and Engels, declared that the mass-ego of the working class was the true determinant of history. I leave undiscussed the problem whether and how the mass-ego can exist without the individual ego, for I have merely referred to the passage in order to show how the orthodox Russian Marxist condemn subjectivism in all its forms and for every conceivable reason.
