Historical and philosophical grotesque/nonsense: Scientific Communism

Abstract

The article demonstrates how Scientific Communism, an ideological construct of the last three decades of the Soviet period of national history, can be interpreted from philosophical positions. The historical and philosophical concept of G. W. F. Hegel is taken as the starting point of the study, on the basis of which a scientific and academic version of the historical evolution of philosophical thought was formed, which has a paradigmatic status in the historical and philosophical discourse. However, later on, the tendency to expand the horizons of philosophical competence began to manifest itself clearly by including systems that, according to formal and substantive characteristics, do not meet Hegelian disciplinary criteria, and therefore can be qualified as marginal. This will allow us to assert that the historical evolution of philosophical thought is diverse in essence and cannot be theoretically monological, because it includes various forms of philosophizing, as well as discursivethematic contents. Scientific Communism is precisely such a marginal zone, whose philosophical potential can be fully manifested only when the perspective of research interpretation is shifted. The dominant attitude among researchers of humanities to ideology, a characteristic example of which is Scientific Communism, is based on the opinion of K. Marx, who considered it, ideology, an illusory and perverse form of reflection of the world, distorting reality. However, if we follow the installation of D. de Tracy, thanks to which ideology was articulated as an autonomous and socially significant cognitive practice, then the real task of ideology is precisely to form a worldview adequate to reality. Of course, ideology, according to D. de Tracy, will gain a positive effect, as well as philosophical and conceptual persuasiveness, only when mastering the entire complex of paideutical disciplines, such as Grammar, Logic and Ethics. In the case of Scientific Communism, such complexes accompanying and legitimizing each other were dialectical and historical materialism, political economy and the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The article is written in memory of Akat Kalistratovich Belykh, Doctor of Philosophy, the first and only head of the Department of Scientific Communism (1962–1992) of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Leningrad Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor of the A. A. Zhdanov State University.