Objections to Some Thesis of V.I. Lenin’s Work “Materialism and Empirio-criticism”, Trans. from Chinese by Arkady A. Bo­risov, publicated and edited by Vladilen G. Burov

Abstract

In the history of the Russian Revolution and in the history of Marxism, Lenin’s work “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” played an important role. In the days of the Soviet Union, it was considered a classic Marxist work, any deviation from its provisions was not allowed. However, from a scientific point of view, many important provisions and specific conclusions in this book are erroneous and debatable even for their time. Therefore, we would like to present to our readers, Russian scholars, some of the results of the research we have obtained since the 1980s (especially Chapter 5, “The Latest Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism”). The author examines the views of scientists criti­cized by Lenin – Poincaré, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson – and comes to the conclu­sion that Lenin’s accusation of them in idealism, agnosticism and fideism is un­fair. He shows that these assessments were the result of a misunderstanding of the crisis in physics that revolutionized science. The crisis in physics led to the collapse of mechanistic materialism, and not to the “replacement of mate­rialism with idealism and agnosticism”. As a result of the change in the founda­tions of classical mechanics, a new understanding of space and time was achieved, new theories were created by Einstein, Planck and other scientists, and these theories were prepared by the ideas of those whom Lenin criticizes.