1. Marxism became an all-inclusive system in which
its social philosophy was presented as an application
and expression of the ontological laws of a universal
and objective dialectic. During the heyday of Social-
Democratic Marxism, the larger philosophical impli-
cations and presuppositions of its social philosophy
were left undeveloped. So long as the specific party
program of social action was not attacked, the widest
tolerance was extended to philosophical and theolog-
ical views. There was no objection even to the belief
that God was a Social Democrat. Social Democrats,
without losing their good standing within their move-
ment, could be positivists, Kantians, Hegelians,
mechanistic materialists, even, as in the case of Karl
Liebknecht, subjectivists of a sort in their epistemology.
All this changed with the development and spread
of Marxist-Leninism. The works of Engels, particularly
his Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, of Lenin's
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and Notebooks, and
subsequently, those of Stalin, became the sacred texts
of a comprehensive system of dialectical materialism,
devoted to explaining “the laws of motion in nature,
society and mind.” The details of the system and its
inadequacies need not detain us here (Hook, 1941;
1959), but what it professed to prove was that the laws
of dialectic guaranteed the victory of communist soci-
ety, that no one could consistently subscribe to the
ontology of dialectical materialism without being a
communist and, more fateful, that no one could be a
communist or a believer in communist society without
being a dialectical materialist.
The comprehensiveness of this state philosophy re-
sulted in a far flung net of new orthodox dogma being
thrown over all fields from astronomy to zoology, the
development of what was in effect a two-truth theory,
ordinary scientific truth and the higher dialectical truth
which corrected the one-sidedness of the former, and
political control of art and science. All communist
parties affiliated with the Third Communist Interna-
tional were required to follow the lead of the Russian
Communist Party. The literalness of the new orthodoxy
is evidenced in the fact that the antiquated anthropo-
logical view of Engels and its primitive social evolu-
tionism, based upon the findings of Lewis Morgan's
pioneer work, Ancient Society (1877; 1959), were re-
vived and aggressively defended against the criticisms
of Franz Boas, Alexander Goldenweiser, Robert Lowie,
and other investigators who, without any discredit to
Morgan's pioneer effort, had cited mountains of evi-
dence to show that social evolution was neither uni-
versal, unilinear, automatic, or progressive. Oddly
enough the acceptance of the Engels-Morgan theory
of social evolution, according to which no country can
skip any important phase in its industrial development,
would be hard to reconcile with the voluntarism of
Bolshevik-Leninism, which transformed Russia from a
backward capitalist country with strong feudal vestiges
into a highly complex and modern industrial socialist
state.
Reasoning from the dubious view that all things were
dialectically interrelated, and the still more dubious
view that a mistaken view in any field ultimately led
to a mistaken view in every other field, including
politics, and assuming that the party of Bolshevik-
Leninism was in possession of the truth in politics, and
that this therefore gave it the authority to judge the
truth of any position in the arts and sciences in the
light of its alleged political consequences, a continuous
purge of ideas and persons, in accordance with the
shifting political lines, marks the intellectual history
of the Soviet Union. Here, as often elsewhere in the
world, theoretical absurdities prepared the way for the
moral atrocities whose pervasiveness and horror were
officially partly revealed in N. Khrushchev's speech
before the XXth Congress of the Russian Communist
Party in 1956. Most of what Khrushchev revealed was
already known in the West through the publications
of escapees and defectors from the Soviet Union, and
the publications of Commissions of Inquiry into the
Truth of the Moscow Trials, headed by John Dewey.
