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Materialism and the Pivot to Spinoza Materialism and the Pivot to Spinoza
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Plekhanov beyond Dialectics? Plekhanov beyond Dialectics?
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Conclusion Conclusion
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6 What Is “Nature”? Georgi Plekhanov and the Dilemmas of Consistent Materialism
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Published:January 2023
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Abstract
Historians have amply discussed the so-called “revisionism controversy” in German Social Democracy and the Second International, in which party members fought over the core elements of Marxism. Little known, however, is the role that Spinoza and Spinozism played in that controversy. This chapter follows the battles that Georgi Plekhanov, the so-called “father of Russian Marxism,” waged in that chronologically and geographically expansive controversy, with attention to the Spinozism that guided him in the 1890s-1900s. Plekhanov maintained that Spinoza had properly conceived a fully immanent world; likewise, according to Plekhanov, he fought superstition on every front, allowing for no transcendence – not in the form of gods, ideas, humans, or anything else. Following suit, Plekhanov wielded Spinozism as a weapon against all possible slips on the part of Marxist theorists – against all appeals to ideals, to supplements to the world, even appeals to human freedom. Insistent that humans are absolutely determined by nature like any other creature in the world, Plekhanov ultimately qualified even Marx’s own call to change the world as a brief burst of exuberance that wasn’t in keeping with the truly Spinozist elements of dialectical materialism that refused fantasies of willful human agency.
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