ABSTRACT
Lenin compensated for his practical betrayals of the Marxist philosophy by asserting it theoretically with extreme and violent dogmatism. Lenin defended in philosophy a position inconsistent with his fundamental attitude in politics. And although his attention was called to it, he never attempted to resolve this inconsistency. Lenin defended the assertion that ideas are the mere automatic reflection of things, not because he had thought about ideas, and examined them, and decided that that is what they are. He would have been the last man to be deluded by so unreal an account of anything he had examined. He defended that assertion because he saw no alternative except to say that ideas are the reality and that material things are secondary and a delusion. Lenin, educated as a dialectic materialist, remained unaware of the existence of a natural science which would have supported his assertion of the dynamic function of ideas.
