Book Reviews – How a Soviet philosopher who stoodup for dialectics continues to inspire, London: Real Democracy Movement

Corinna Lotz, Finding Evald Ilyenkov: How a Soviet philosopher who stood up for dialectics continues to inspire, London: Real Democracy Movement, 2019, 58 pages

Among the few good bookshops in New Delhi in the last century, PPH (People’s Publishing House) was a place where one could find not only the standard Soviet publications of the classics of Marxism-Leninism, but also books on philosophy which were not available in other book shops overflowing with Anglo-American publications. Here, in 1977, one could find an unusual publication of essays by the philosopher Evald Ilyenkov with the title Dialectical Logic. At that time, Ilyenkov was hardly known among Indian Marxists but the topics seemed to connect to reflections on the development of Marxism so vehemently debated in those years. Here now was a work by a sophisticated, creative Marxist thinker who brought immense theoretical insight into what Engels had called the major task of Marxist thinking, namely unravelling the relation between thought and being.