“With the outbreak of World War I, Lenin’s speculations and writings about war underwent a radical transformation. Ideologies, like the paradigms of a scientific discipline, begin to disintegrate when the exceptions or anomalies start to threaten the very core of the model. Normal ideological discourse, like what Thomas Kuhn has called “normal science”, becomes increasingly difficult. Lenin’s concerns were shared by socialists across Europe. In Marxist terms practice, i.e.,, objective circumstances, had called into question a central point of theory. In 1914 Lenin, along with other social democrats, confronted an anomaly of such scope and power that their ideological assumptions could not but undergo change (6). (…) In Lenin’s case, this crisis had a profound, but largely unacknowledged consequence, for Soviet military science. For Lenin, the committed revolutionary, the ramifications of a general European war were no abstract concern. On the contrary, because he was committed to changing the world, Lenin required of theory that it grant him “scientific foresight” . the ability to foresee the war’s course and outcome. On the one hand, this led Lenin to review the substantial body of socialist literature on finance capitalism and imperialist rivalries, culminating in 1916 with his synthetic work, ‘Imperialism the Highest State of Capitalism’ (10). On the other Hand, Lenin was concerned with the problem of theory reconstruction, a task made essential bay the apparent failure of accepted Marxism to predict or prevent the war. It is most typical of Lenin that in the face of such earth-shaking historical events, he should return to philosophy in order to find a theoretical framework upon which to analyze these events and to guide his actions” (pag 185); “His first citation of Clausewitz’ work is most instructive in what it reveals about his method and technique. The citation came in a work devoted to the collapse of the Second International, which was written in the first half of June 1915 (20). Here Lenin presents his paradigm shift in the form of intellectual synthesis of Clausewitz. Hegel, Marx, and Engels, transforming the dialectic from an external process of “copying” observed empirical phenomena into an internalized tool for the unification of theory and practice: “Applied to wars, the basic thesis of this dialectic, so shamelessly distorted by Plekhanov (the defending Russia’s prosecution of the war as part o a democratic struggle against German militarism) to the purposes of the bourgeoisie, is this, that “war is simply the continuation of politics by other (namely violent) means”. Such is the formulation of Clausewitz, one of the greatest writers on questions of military history, whose ideas were engendered by Hegel. And such ideas were always the point of view of Marx and Engels, ‘each’ war, they viewed as a continuation of the politics of a given interested power and of the different classes within them – at a given time (21). (…) The reality of war and the bitter intersocialist politics of 1915-1916 brought Lenin to a radical revision of Marxist thought on war. If the European working class could not deter war through solidarity and proletarian internationalism, then the question became one of how to benefit from anomaly. The answer was to transform the imperialist war into a civil war. Lenin embraced Clausewitz in a fashion never done by Marx or Engels” [Jacob W. Kipp, Lenin and Clausewitz: The Militarization of Marxism, 1914-1921, Washington, 1985] [(6) Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, Chicago, 1970, 2nd edition, 43-76; (10) V.I. Lenin, ‘Polnoe Sobranie sochinenii’, 27, Moscow, Progress, 1965-1970, 299-426; (20) Ibidem, 26, 224; (21) Ibid.] [Lenin-Bibliographical-Materials] [LBM*]
- Categoria dell'articolo:Nuove Accessioni
- Articolo pubblicato:9 Dicembre 2015