p During the First World War, aware of the increasingly acute profound contradictions of capitalism and the critical nature of the historical moment, Lenin elaborated and further developed every facet of revolutionary Marxism-the theory of socialist revolution, Marxist economics and Marxist philosophy-in their indissoluble unity.

p The task was not only to safeguard the purity of Marxist dialectics and expose revisionist attempts to replace it by vulgar evolutionism, sophistry and eclectics. It was also necessary to advance the science of materialist dialectics, in the light of the new conditions of history and the new experience of the liberation movement, with new data of natural science, as an effective instrument of understanding the world and remaking it by revolution.

p The years 1914 and 1915 were devoted to re-reading Aristotle, Hegel, Feuerbach and other philosophers, works on natural science and the writings of the founders of scientific communism. Lenin’s copious notes and comments, unfinished essays and other materials were subsequently published under the title Philosophical Notebooks.

p Lenin evidently intended to use them for a book on materialist dialectics, but, unfortunately, was unable to carry the work to completion. But even uncompleted, the Philosophical Notebooks are an organic continuation of his chief philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and constitute a new step in the creative development of Marxist philosophy. The two works form the basis of the Lenin stage in philosophy. For in the Notebooks Lenin dealt with a wide range of philosophical problems, with special accent on Marxist dialectics.

p A central place in the Philosophical Notebooks is held by Lenin’s 208 conspectuses of Hegel’s Science oj Logic, Lectures on the History oj Philosophy and Lectures on the Philosophy of History. A careful study of Hegel’s dialectical method and its comparison with the dialectics of Marx and Engels in the light of mankind’s new historical and scientific experience and the practical needs of the working-class struggle enabled Lenin to develop further the proposition of Hegel and Marx that in the final analysis dialectics, logic and the theory of knowledge coincide. This idea is a fundamental plank in Lenin’s concept of materialist dialectics as a science.

p He comprehensively showed the diversity of features, aspects, elements and categories of dialectics as the most profound theory of development. Schematism and dogmatism, Lenin said, is alien to dialectics. And while dialectics expresses the most general laws of every process of development, it requires a Concrete analysis of reality and the multitude of forms in which reality is revealed to us.

p For the first time in the history of Marxism, Lenin formulated and substantiated, in the Philosophical Notebooks, the key proposition that the very essence, the kernel, of dialectics is the study of the unity of opposites. Lenin enriched and concretised Marxist dialectics by his analysis and generalisation of the new types and kinds of contradictions in the imperialist era, of the new ways in which opposites are transformed into one another, of the transition, the growing over, of one phenomenon into another.

p The struggle of opposites, the rise and settlement of contradictions, Lenin pointed out, are the source of development in the material world, the condition necessary for social progress. He denounced the attempts of the opportunist Second International leaders to “purge” reality of contradictions and struggle. The central axis of dialectics is the doctrine of constant development through struggle of antithetical forces and tendencies, through struggle between the old and the new. Hence, Lenin emphasised, the basic conclusion to be drawn from dialectics is that the new, the progressive, is invincible, that its victory over the old, obsolescent and reactionary is inevitable. The old is negated by the new, but this should be understood from the standpoint of materialist dialectics, which precludes bare negation as leading to an interruption in development, to a break in the connection between the old and the new. Marxist dialectics regards “negation as a moment of connection, as a moment of development, retaining the positive”.  [208•*  Without this there can be no progress either in nature, society or knowledge.

p The Philosophical Notebooks contain an analysis of the epistemological roots of idealism, which is of fundamental importance for the struggle against reactionary bourgeois philosophy and philosophical revisionism. The Notebooks formulate important propositions on problems of historical materialism.

p Lenin’s philosophical conspectuses, fragments and notes point the way to the further development of dialectical and historical materialism, the scientific history of philosophy. “Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx,” Lenin wrote, “must consist in the dialectical elaboration of the history of human thought, science and technique.”   [209•* 

p All Lenin’s most important works written during the First World War—Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Socialism and War, On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, The Junius Pamphlet,^^47^^ The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, The State and Revolution and others, are inseparably linked with the Philosophical Notebooks.

Lenin’s analysis of all the laws and categories of materialist dialectics as a philosophical science is remarkable for its profundity, militant materialist spirit, close link with reality and organic connection with the policy of the proletarian party. His masterly application of the Marxist dialectical method in analysing the new era in history became the basis of his new discoveries, which gave the proletariat the Marxist theory of imperialism, a correct and clear theory of socialist revolution, the teaching on the state, and the sound and scientifically-based strategy and tactics in revolutionary transformations of society.