Customer Reviews

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

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This book was written when Lenin wanted to show his prowess in the communist community because his position was threatened by Bogdanov and the other high ranking communists that had opinions that were contrary to his; Robert Service wrote that when one of the communists read the first page of this book he threw it across the room! I liked this book but it could have been a lot better, I liked the first half but the other half was Lenin ranting about how other philosophers ideas are wrong. It is also said that after Lenin read Aristotle's Metaphysics he had changed his ideas; Lenin had a good education that highlighted the Greek's classic ideas but he would eventually abandone them because of the newer ideas that were voming from the Agrarian terrorists and people of the like. Overall, I think this book is okay but there are many others that should be read first.

This stands as a testament to the mediocrity and imbecility of Lenin as a philosopher. It is a overtly lengthy, dull and plodding work. Lenin demonstrates that he has little of the flair of a born philosopher but the heavyhandedness and arbitrariness of a politician. This book, which is so antiquated that it now seems unworthy of even academic interest, is nothing but a compilation of quatations from previous Marxists, glossed and re-worked to back up official party policy. Also includes a typically stupid and blustering polemic against the majority of positivists and idealists who are all deemed as "blockheads"; only the revelations of Marx and Engels, as Lenin seems to think, contain the monopoly of infallible truth. A laughable example of the dogmatism and intolerance of an ideology upon which was founded a totalitarian darkness that could not maintain itself without resorting to terror, persecution, assassination, sabotage and institutionalised ignorance.