Lénine — Les incursions des empiriocriticistes allemands dans le domaine de...

The reader is probably fuming at us for quoting at such length this incredibly trivial rigmarole, this quasi-scientific tomfoolery decked out in the terminology of Avenarius. But wer den Feind will verstehen, muss im Feindes Lande gehen —who would know the enemy must go into the enemy’s territory. [4] And R. Avenarius’ philosophical journal is indeed enemy territory for Marxists. And we invite the reader to restrain for a minute his legitimate aversion for the buffoons of bourgeois science and to analyse the argument of Avenarius’ disciple and collaborator. Argument number one: Marx is a “metaphysician” who did not grasp the epistemological “critique of concepts,” who did not work out a general theory of knowledge and who simply inserted materialism into his “special theory of knowledge.” This argument contains nothing original to Blei personally. We have already seen scores and hundreds of times that all the founders of empirio-criticism and all the Russian Machians accuse materialism of “metaphysics,” or, more accurately, they repeat the hackneyed arguments of the Kantians, Humeans and idealists against materialist “metaphysics.” Argument number two: Marxism is as “metaphysical” as natural science (physiology). And here again it is not Blei who is “responsible” for this argument, but Mach and Avenarius; for it was they who declared war on “natural-historical metaphysics,” applying that name to the instinctively materialist theory of knowledge to which (on their own admission and according to the judgment of all who are in any way versed in the subject) the vast majority of scientists adhere. Argument number three: Marxism declares that “personality” is a quantité négligeable, a cypher, that man is an “incidental factor,” subject to certain “immanent laws of economics,” that an analysis des Gefundenen, i.e., of what is found, of what is given, etc., is lacking.…