On the Question of Dialectics
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A fragment Lenin wrote in Bern in 1915, at the end of his notebooks on Hegel’s Logic and Aristotle’s Metaphysics: the essence of dialectics is the splitting of a whole and the knowledge of its contradictory parts; the unity of opposites is relative, their struggle absolute; dialectics is present in the simplest proposition, as all of capitalism’s contradictions are in the commodity; and knowledge is a spiral, of which idealism straightens one segment into a line. Mao Zedong built On Contradiction (1937) on it.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the Russian text of the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 29 (Moscow, 1969), printed from the manuscript; first published in Bolshevik nos. 5–6 (1925). The editors’ notes are omitted.
- Source
- Internet Archive (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 29)
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Contents
- On the Question of Dialectics 12 min 16
Lenin’s notebook fragment of 1915, written at the end of his reading of Hegel and Aristotle. He defines the essence of dialectics as the splitting of a whole into contradictory parts and the knowledge of them; criticises Plekhanov and Engels for treating it as a sum of examples; contrasts development as mere repetition with development as the struggle of opposites; finds dialectics already in the simplest proposition, as Marx found all of capitalism’s contradictions in the commodity; and describes knowledge as a spiral, from which idealism straightens one segment into a line.