One place where Lenin stands out as a singular figure — whether compared to the “classical” revolutionary Marxists Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, or even Friedrich Engels, let alone less revolutionary ones like Karl Kautsky — is his deep engagement with Hegel and dialectics. As I argued thirty years ago in Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism,[1] those Hegel Notebooks of 1914-15, and the related essays and fragments on dialectics, constituted the philosophical foundation for his post-1914 theoretical work, helping to shape that work into a body of creative, revolutionary theory and practice.

What Drove Lenin to Hegel in 1914? … and Palestine Today

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 marked the end of an era in a double sense. First, an unprecedented inter-imperialist war with modern weaponry, shattering decades of supposed peace and progress, was the trigger for new theoretical and practical perspectives on Lenin’s part, including delving directly into Hegel. Second and equally important in sparking Lenin’s turn to the philosopher whom Marx termed in Capital “the source of all dialectics”[2] was the betrayal on the part of nominally antiwar and anti-imperialist social democratic parties in France, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere, who supported their respective pro-war governments with stunning alacrity. This double shock drove the far left and some young people toward revolution and break with reformist gradualism. In some respects, we are in a similar though so far less dramatic situation today. The first shock of 2022-23 took the form of the genocidal wars still unfolding in Ukraine and Gaza. These constitute a marker signaling the end of the post-1989 neoliberal order, already shaken by the 2008 economic crisis. And with Palestine, young people are being driven to the left not only by the genocide, but also by the failure of so many voices and institutions that claimed the progressive mantle to acknowledge the genocide, let alone side with the Palestinians, thus discrediting liberalism and the reformist left once again.  Whether like Lenin in 1914, this will lead the youthful left and progressive movements to re-examine their basic assumptions is an open question. These current issues form the background to this article.

The Dialectic Proper

The most compelling statement in Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks of 1914-15 is, “Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.“[3] This has been widely quoted and was even used as a blurb on the back cover of the first paperback English edition of the Science of Logic, published in 1989. It has sent generations of Marxists to Hegel’s book, despite the efforts of more orthodox materialists and anti-Hegelians to steer them away from such an endeavor. This was not an isolated statement on Lenin’s part, nor was it restricted to his private notebooks. For he wrote in a similar vein in a 1922 programmatic article, one of his very last publications, calling upon Marxists to carry out “a systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint” and to form a “kind of ‘Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics’.”[4]  The following year, Georg Lukács quoted this passage in his preface to the first edition of History and Class Consciousness, published at time when Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks had not yet appeared in any language.[5] Karl Korsch, like Lukacs attacked for idealism by the Comintern in 1924, uses the same quote as the epigraph to his Marxism and Philosophy, also published in 1923. Unfortunately, by the time the French existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty made his famous distinction between “Western Marxism” and “ultra-Bolshevism” in 1955, this link between Lenin and the very kind of Marxism Merleau-Ponty was extolling as an alternative to official Leninism had been almost forgotten. Merleau-Ponty certainly shows no awareness of it despite the fact that Henri Lefebvre has published a French translation of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks two decades earlier. In fact, the conspiracy of silence was on both sides, that of “scientific” Marxists in the USSR and their offshoots, and that of more independent Marxists in Western Europe, Japan, and North America. Those who tried to center Lenin’s notes on Hegel were utterly marginalized!

Where Lukács got into trouble with the Comintern apparatus in 1924 was not so much for extolling Hegel in general, terrible as that was to crude materialists, but for directly attacking Engels himself for mechanical materialism and quasi-positivism. But here too, there is a link to Lenin. For Lenin also attacks those he terms vulgar materialists, not in his 1922 published article but in several places in his private 1914-15 Hegel Notebooks.  He even criticizes Engels on the dialectic, though less extensively than Lukács. Let us now quote Lenin’s statement about the need to study the Logic in fuller form:

Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past 1/2 century have understood Marx!![6]

This is preceded by another, more targeted statement against vulgar or crude materialism, aimed at the best-known Russian Marxist philosopher, Georgi Plekhanov: “Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism… more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialistic one.”[7]  Moreover, a bit later in Lenin’s notes, he complains that Plekhanov wrote “nil” “about the large Logic, in connection with it, its thought (i.e., dialectics proper, as philosophical science).”[8] Lenin was a philosophical – though not a political or organizational — follower of Plekhanov for many years, as can be seen especially in his 1908 work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Therefore, we need to consider very carefully the meaning of Lenin’s declaration that, not having made the thorough study of Hegel’s Science of Logic that he was now recommending, “Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past 1/2 century have understood Marx!!”[9]  Following here in the trajectory of my mentor Raya Dunayevskaya, who began to work this out during her comradeship with CLR James and Grace Lee Boggs in the 1940s, I conclude that Lenin surely meant to include himself among those Marxists who had not “understood Marx” because he had not made the requisite study of Hegel’s Science of Logic.  Having said that, it follows that the 1914-15 Hegel Notebooks constitute a philosophical break in Lenin’s thought, not only with the reigning Marxist orthodoxies but also with his own crude materialist past.

Second, Lenin rehabilitates idealism in new ways in the Hegel Notebooks, suggesting that the ideal and the real stand in relationship to each other in dialectical thinking. He holds that human consciousness can go beyond the given reality in a positive, revolutionary manner, most strikingly in his exclamatory statement, “Man’s consciousness not only reflects the world, but creates it.” At this point, Lenin also made an explicit connection to the social world of change and revolution, adding, “i.e., the world does not satisfy man and man decides to change it by his activity.”[10] This comment did not come out of thin air; nor was it merely a Marxist gloss on Hegel at a general level.

Rather, Lenin seemed to be responding specifically here to Hegel’s treatment of the practical idea, where the human subject quests to change the world and where, as the German philosopher wrote, “the subject possesses… a certainty of its own actuality and the non-actuality of the world.”[11] It is important to note that these remarks by Lenin, interesting in themselves, concerned an equally interesting section of the Science of Logic where to the surprise of many, including Lenin, Hegel seemed to rate the practical idea higher than the theoretical idea, writing that as the concept moves between the theoretical and the practical idea, their conflict did not begin to be resolved until “cognition is restored and united with the practical Idea.”[12] This part of the Science of Logic, and Lenin’s response to it, preoccupied both Lukács and Dunayevskaya, albeit in very different ways. To be sure, this is because it can be connected to the Marxian notion of the unity of theory and practice, a point amplified by the fact that Hegel began the next and final chapter of the Science of Logic by calling the absolute idea not god, but the “identity of theoretical and the practical idea.”[13]

Third, Lenin found further social and material content in Hegel’s work, especially where he least expected to do so, in this absolute idea chapter, where he exclaimed that Hegel “Stretches a hand to materialism.”[14] It is significant that Lenin did so in reading the Science of Logic, a Hegel text that lacks much social or historical content, in contrast to the one most intellectuals focus on nowadays, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Lenin’s reading of the absolute idea chapter as partly materialist also constitutes an implicit point of difference with Engels, who had stressed the revolutionary character of Hegel’s dialectical method versus his philosophical system culminating in the absolute, with the latter pilloried as a “dogmatic” flight into a pure idealism of no use to Marxists.[15]

Let us look at some additional issues Lenin develops in his 1914-15 Hegel Notebooks. First, he takes down the following passage from Hegel’s Science of Logic, from the middle of the chapter on Being-for-Self:  “The ideality of Being-for-Self as a totality thus passes over, in the first place, to reality.”[16]  Lenin responds:

The idea of the transformation of the ideal into the real is profound! Very important for history. But also in the personal life of man it is evident that there is much truth in this. Against vulgar materialism. NB. The difference of the ideal from the material is also not unconditional, not boundless.[17]

While the above remark is hardly a thorough exposition of Hegel’s category of being-for-self, it is a key example of Lenin’s attack on crude materialism.

At another point, in Hegel’s section on contradiction, Lenin makes Hegel’s “law of contradiction” and his concept of “self-movement” or, more generally, his “dialectic,” the key to an understanding of both Hegel and Marxism. First, he takes down five full paragraphs from He­gel’s brief section on the “Law of Contradiction.” The key has become “self-movement” and not merely “movement.” And this self-movement arises from within the subject matter. Thus, it is not a steady “flow” or the product of external force, but the inner contra­dictions of the subject matter that constitute the heart of dialectical development and change. Putting it in terms of social theory, the “internal contradictions” of a given society are the key to grasping changes within that society, changes that develop as a process of self-development and self-movement by self-conscious human subjects. Obviously, for a Marxist like Lenin, these are usually less individual than collective subjects like the working class, the peasantry, or oppressed nationalities or ethno-racial groups.

Lenin becomes very enthusiastic over having discov­ered this, not in Marx, but directly in Hegel:

Movement and “self-movement” (this NB! arbitrary (independent) spontaneous, internally-necessary movement,) “change,” “movement and life,” “the principle of every self-movement,” “drive” to “movement” and “activity”– opposite of “dead being.” — Who would believe that this is the core of “Hegelianism,” of abstract and abstruse (difficult, absurd?) Hegelianism?[18]

Thus, movement and self-movement have their basis in the internal contradictions of social phenomena. In viewing this movement as at the same time spontaneous and internally necessary, Lenin is rejecting the deterministic models of the Marxism of the Second International, while at the same time identifying with Hegel’s notion of an historically and socially grounded concept of subjectivity. This concept of self-movement through contradiction, not Identity or “dead Being,” is for Lenin the core of Hegel’s Science of Logic, something he is evidently surprised to discover.

It is in the last book of the Science of Logic on the Notion or Concept, Lenin makes his most decisive break with crude materialism and determinism. As mentioned above, but worth repeating given its importance, in his notes on “The Idea of Cognition,” Lenin continues a procedure developed in earlier sections of his Notebooks, that of placing long extracts from Hegel on the left side of the page, and his own “translation” on the right hand side. His own statement at this point is one of his most far­-reaching: “Man’s cognition not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.”[19]

With this, Lenin has traveled pretty far from the crude reflection theory of his 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, now that cognition or consciousness sometimes “creates” rather than merely “reflects” the world. By cognition here he most surely means not only philosophical or scientific cognition as developed so far by Hegel, but also the type of cognition embodied in revolutionary theory, since that is after all his aim in reading Hegel. To be sure, this cognition reflects and describes the world, which to Lenin would mean the material, social, and historical world. In addition, however, as Lenin now holds, cognition “creates” the world. In many respects, this aphorism is the high point of the entire Hegel Notebooks in terms of Lenin’s rethinking and reorganization of his pre-1914 philosophical categories.

The Dialectics of Imperialism and National Liberation

Besides his writings on Hegel and the dialectic proper, a second and related aspect of Lenin’s thought that has particular resonance today is his new dialectical theory of imperialism and of the whole era of monopoly capitalism, a stage of capitalism that persisted until it crashed in 1929, to be replaced by state-capitalism, the stage we still inhabit. At one level, imperialism and monopoly constituted a new and more hegemonic form of capitalism with global reach, but this second stage of capitalism (after its first competitive phase) also evidenced new contradictions that pointed toward instability, inter-imperialist war, and anti-colonial revolution. These theoretical notions, it can be demonstrated, owed something to the Hegel Notebooks, as seen in his 1916 article on the Easter Uprising in Ireland as a national liberation movement. These new contradictions inside monopoly capitalism — and the imperialism that flowed out of this stage of capitalism –manifested themselves especially in the flowering of national liberation movements. In addition to Ireland, these soon assumed massive proportions in other colonial and semi-colonial societies of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.  Lenin argued that Marxists had to support these movements unreservedly and forcefully, so long as they had a liberatory content, even if not an explicitly socialist one. Moreover, he held that national liberation movements could under certain circumstances step off ahead of the working classes in the fight for a global revolution against capital. Still, the working class movement in Western Europe and North America remained decisive.

In a related context, Lenin also theorized the relationship of the working class to oppressed racial and national minorities within large multi-ethnic nations, arguing for their cultural and linguistic autonomy, or if ultimately desired, the right to secede and form a separate nation. To be sure, Lenin’s formulations on ethnicity and nation had serious limitations in practice, since in the USSR these policies were too often cancelled out by an overweening and centralized one-party state. However, enough remained of this legacy, at least as a cultural and intellectual heritage, for Vladimir Putin to have declared, as late as 2016, that Lenin had left a “time bomb” sitting under the Russian state due to a nationalities policy “based on total equality along with the right of each to secede.”[20] In this way, Putin blamed Lenin for helping to engender the collapse of the USSR and for Ukraine’s efforts to break away from the Russian sphere of influence, also anticipating the actual imperialist invasion carried out in 2022.

Be that as it may in terms of events inside Russia, the impact of Lenin’s concept of national liberation was even greater at a global level, both in his own time and in the decades that followed. Thus, in the years after 1917, Lenin’s theory of imperialism and national liberation — and the practices of the early USSR at junctures like the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East — helped make Marxism into a truly international movement of both ideas and action, allowing it to deeply penetrate the Global South for the first time.

In this regard, let us quote again, but more fully from Lenin’s programmatic 1922 article on dialectics, the one quoted by Lukács, on the need for Marxists to become “materialist friends of the Hegelian dialectic.” A longer excerpt will show the complex framework in which Lenin’s call for the study of Hegel and dialectics was embedded, a framework in which anti-colonial national liberation movements were intertwined with Hegel and dialectics:

The contributors to Under the Banner of Marxism must arrange for the systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint, i.e., the dialectics which Marx applied practically in his Capital and in his historical and political works, and applied so successfully that now every day of the awakening to life and struggle of new classes in the East (Japan, India, and China) — i.e., the hundreds of millions of human beings who form the greater part of the world population… — every day of the awakening to life of new peoples and new classes serves as a fresh confirmation of Marxism. Of course, this study, this interpretation, this propaganda of Hegelian dialectics is extremely difficult, and the first experiments in this direction will undoubtedly be accompanied by errors. But only he who never does anything never makes mistakes. Taking as our basis Marx’s method of applying materialistically conceived Hegelian dialectics, we can and should elaborate this dialectics from all aspects, print in the journal excerpts from Hegel’s principal works, interpret them materialistically and comment on them with the help of examples of the way Marx applied dialectics, as well as of examples of dialectics in the sphere of economic and political relations, which recent history, especially modern imperialist war and revolution, provides in unusual abundance. In my opinion, the editors and contributors of Pod Znamenem Marksizma should be a kind of “Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics.”[21]

When Lenin’s 1922 passage is read in full, we can contrast his perspective not only to the crude materialists who rejected Hegel, but also to those Eurocentric Marxists who failed to see that revolutions outside Europe would be the motor of twentieth and twenty-first century revolution. Here, Lukács and Korsch do not look so good either, as they isolated what Lenin joined together, dialectics in philosophy and dialectics of revolution in a very concrete form, imperialism and national liberation. Notably, they neglected to mention Lenin’s discussion of revolution in Asia and how analyzing it properly was intertwined with the study of Hegel and dialectics.

Lenin drives home the point about dialectics and non-European societies in his last theoretical essay, his notes on Sukhanov, written in January 1923 and published a few months after his death in 1924:

They all call themselves Marxists, but their conception of Marxism is impossibly pedantic. They have completely failed to understand what is decisive in Marxism, namely, its revolutionary dialectics. They have even absolutely failed to understand Marx’s plain statements that in times of revolution the utmost flexibility is demanded …. up to now they have seen capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Western Europe follow a definite path of development, and cannot conceive that this path can be taken as a model only mutatis mutandis, only with certain amendments (quite insignificant from the standpoint of the general development of world history) …. For instance, it has not even occurred to them that because Russia stands on the borderline… she could and was, indeed, bound to reveal certain distinguishing features; although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish her revolution from those which took place in the West European countries and introduce certain partial innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East …. Our Sukhanovs, not to mention Social-Democrats still farther to the right, never even dream that revolutions cannot be made any other way. Our European philistines never even dream that the subsequent revolutions in Oriental countries, which possess much vaster populations in a much vaster diversity of social conditions, will undoubtedly display even greater distinctions than the Russian Revolution.[22]

Again, the relationship of dialectics to really grasping imperialism, national liberation, and revolution could not have been put in stronger terms. What a tragedy that the strain of Marxism interested the most in dialectics – Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Lefebvre, etc. – gave little attention to race, imperialism and revolutions outside Europe.  There were of course exceptions, like the Marxist-oriented anti0-colonial writer Frantz Fanon or the Marxist tradition in which I was educated, that of Raya Dunayevskaya and her erstwhile comrade CLR James.

Concluding Remarks: On the Early Discussion of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks in the U.S.

With your indulgence I’d like to conclude with something about my own intellectual influences, those that launched me as a writer on Lenin and Hegel. I would like to do so by outlining briefly the little-known origins of the discussion of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks in the U.S. in the 1940s, by the first Marxist group that placed those Notebooks at the very center of their theory and practice. I refer to the creative development of Marxism in the U.S. during and after the Second World War by the Johnson-Forest Tendency (1941-55). This small but intellectually active faction within Trotskyism was led by C.L.R. James [Johnson], Raya Dunayevskaya [Forest], and Grace Lee Boggs. Eager to extend their state-capitalist analysis of Stalin’s Russia and to theorize the relationship of race and class in the U.S. versus the reigning class reductionism, they also began to separate themselves from the elitist aspects of the Leninist concept of the vanguard party, all the while also exploring the young Marx and particularly Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks, which Dunayevskaya had translated without being able to find a publisher. This was the first time that a group of Marxist thinkers had made Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks their main philosophical point of departure. In 1948, James issued in mimeographed form for their small his Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin, which stressed issues in Lenin and Hegel like breaks and leaps rather than evolutionary gradualness, spontaneity versus top-down revolutionary movements, and self-movement by conscious human subjects.

It was not entirely surprising that – in approaching Hegel and dialectics — James (an Afro-Caribbean), Dunayevskaya (a Russian-American), and Lee (a Chinese-American) drew their dialectical inspiration more from Lenin, a thinker originating in the borderland between Europe and Asia, rather than Central European Hegelians like Herbert Marcuse, whom they did study a bit, or Lukács, whom they did not take up very much at that time. Of course, they were also Trotskyists and thus Leninists in politics, but none of the other leading Trotskyists of the time — or Trotsky himself — had much interest in dialectics, let alone Hegel. More orthodox Trotskyists tended toward mechanical materialism. For their part, most of the more independent-minded intellectuals drawn to Trotskyism in the U.S. laced their Marxism with a dose of John Dewey’s anti-Hegelian philosophy of pragmatism, as seen in the writings of the virulently anti-Hegelian academic Marxist philosopher Sidney Hook, now almost forgotten. In those days, Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941) offered a rare dialectical, Hegelian alternative to such anti-Hegel perspectives.

In dozens of unpublished letters in 1949-51, the three philosophers of the Johnson-Forest Tendency – CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs — took up subjectivity, the idealist element in dialectics, and dialectical versus mechanical materialism, with Nikolai Bukharin seen as the prime exemplar of the latter among revolutionary thinkers. Their discussion saw philosophy as linked to Marxist politics and economics. Thus, a point they took up while theorizing about Lenin, one not found in Lukács or Marcuse, was the notion that his post-1914 books Imperialism and State and Revolution were grounded in the Hegel Notebooks.

The first public discussion in English of Lenin and Hegel came after the breakup of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, with Dunayevskaya’s book Marxism and Freedom (1958). It included an analysis of the 1914-15 Notebooks as a nodal point in dialectical thought as well as the first translation into English of the Notebooks in the appendix.  In a chapter on Lenin and Hegel in relation to the betrayal of revolutionary Marxism by the Second International at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Dunayevskaya took up how his first theoretical response was to re-examine his philosophical foundations with a deep study of Hegel’s Science of Logic.  She extolled his new dialectical insights into issues like self-movement, the revolutionary character of dialectical idealism, and the cul-de-sac of vulgar materialism, with the latter including Lenin’s own earlier writings on philosophy like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.  In interpreting anew Lenin’s theory of imperialism, she saw his concepts of the aristocracy of labor and of national liberation as outgrowths of his Hegel studies, with particular focus on his writings on the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland. She also viewed State and Revolution as the product of “Hegelian-Marxian” insights.[23] I could go on, but I will end here, having given at least a taste of the intellectual origins of my perspectives on Lenin.

Summing up: One, in response to the crisis of Marxism of 1914, Lenin explored the foundations of a socialism gone wrong, which had become unmoored from its dialectical foundations in Marx and Hegel. This took him to Hegel’s Science of Logic. Two, this helped lead Lenin toward a new dialectical theory of national liberation, rooted in both social reality itself (the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916) and a new dialectical vision that helped him to grasp that reality better than others (even revolutionaries who also did not betray like Trotsky, Bukharin, or Luxemburg). All this is terribly important not just for history but for today. Lenin offers an intransigent stance in the face of reformist equivocation and betrayal. He also anticipates an intersectional Marxism that includes the working class, but also national minorities, women, LGBTQ issues, and the fight vs. imperialism and environmental destruction.[24] He not only anticipates, but also helps us to clarify our theory and our practice today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Adamson, Alex, 2024, “Lenin, Dialectics, and Trans Liberation,” pp. 26-28 in Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, ed. by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson, Quebec: Daraja Press.

Anderson, Kevin B. [1995] 2022, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, Second Edition, Leiden: Brill Publishers.

Dunayevskaya, Raya 1958, Marxism and Freedom, New York: Bookman Associates.

Engels, Friedrich, 1990, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” pp. 353-398, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, New York: International Publishers.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1969, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, New York: Humanities Press.

Lenin, V.I. 1961a, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book, The Science of Logic,” pp. 85-238 in Collected Works, Vol. 38, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

_______. 1961b, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” Pp. 227-36 in Collected Works, Vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

_______. 1961c, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, pp. 245-314 in Collected Works, Vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

_______. 1961d, “Our Revolution (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes,” pp. 476-480 in Collected Works, Vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lukács, Georg [1923] 2023, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, with a new preface by Michaël Löwy, London: Verso

Mandraud, Isabelle 2016, “Une ‘bombe à retardement’ nommé Lénine,” Le Monde, February 4.

Marx, Karl, 1976, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: NLB.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, [1955] 1973, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

[1] Anderson [1995] 2021.

[2] Marx 1976, p. 744.

[3] Lenin 1961a, p. 180. Although I will be referencing with page numbers the widely available translation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks from the Soviet edition of 1961, I am often substituting the clearer and sometimes more accurate language in the first English translation. It appeared as an appendix to Dunayevskaya 1958, translated by the author but dropped from later editions.

[4] Lenin 1961b, p. 234.

[5] Lukács [1923] 2023, p. xlv.

[6] Lenin 1961a, p. 180.

[7] Lenin 1961a, p. 178.

[8] Lenin 1961c, p. 277.

[9] Lenin, 1961a, p. 180.

[10] Lenin, 1961a, pp. 212-13.

[11] Hegel 1969, p, 818.

[12] Hegel 1969, p. 823.

[13] Hegel 1969, p. 824.

[14] Lenin, 1961a, p. 234.

[15] Engels 1990, p. 361.

[16] Hegel 1969, p. 164, trans. altered slightly.

[17] Lenin 1961a, p. 114.

[18] Lenin 1961a, p. 141.

[19] Lenin 1971a, p. 212.

[20] Mandraud 2016.

[21] Lenin 1961b, pp 233-34.

[22] Lenin 1961d, pp. 476, 477, 480.

[23] Dunayevskaya 1958, p. 191.

[24] For an interesting essay linking Lenin’s Hegel notebooks to transgender issues, see Adamson 2024.