V. Adoratsky: There is yet another danger, namely, of falling, in company with the idealists (Hegel), under the influence of abstractions, of losing contact with concrete reality, of confining oneself to dialectic conceptions without connecting those conceptions with the development of the objective world, of not distinguishing categories from the material relationships of the objective world—in a word, the danger of straying onto the path of idealism and of forgetting the requirements of materialism. This danger is threatened by the Menshevistic idealism of the Deborin group, who conceal idealistic and anti-Marxian views under the guise of Marxian phraseology and the pretence of fighting for dialectic materialism. While the mechanist theory has no profound social roots in our midst, Menshevistic idealism is nevertheless a real and serious danger. Clothed in the garb of orthodox Marxism, it acts as a channel of bourgeois influences to the proletariat. Some of the distinguishing features characteristic of certain representatives of this tendency, and which in fact are common to the whole school of Menshevistic idealism are: the severance of theory from practice; the denial of the party nature of philosophy; professorial, contemplative “objectivism”; failure to appreciate Lenin as a materialist and dialectician; failure to appreciate Lenin’s contribution to the development of dialectic materialism; the disguise of non-Marxian and idealistic views by Marxian phraseology; priggish “scholarliness” which is totally unjustified because this ostensible “scholarliness” is not backed by any practical work or by a positive study of the subject. The idealistic revision of Marxism effected by the Menshevistic idealists is clearly illustrated by the fact that this tendency makes the materialist dialectics of Marx identical with the dialectics of Hegel. Hence, their revisionism is essentially of a Hegelian character. The founders of scientific socialism always emphasised the importance of studying the method of dialectic materialism. They even pointed out how this should be done, namely, by studying the history of philosophy, and in particular, Hegel. wordsmith.social/protestation/…