Georgi Plekhanov - Mediator Between Two Generations (1856-1918)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Between the Stankevich Circle of the 1830s and Lenin stands a key figure who connects both traditions: Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), the “father of Russian Marxism.”
Biography: From Narodnik to Marxist
Plekhanov came from the middle landed gentry—the same milieu from which Stankevich and Belinsky had also come. His early political socialization, however, took place not in philosophical circles but in the revolutionary movement of the Narodniks (populists), who believed in the immediate revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry.
Disappointment over the failure of this movement led Plekhanov into Swiss exile in 1880, where—no differently from the young Hegelians half a century earlier—he came to intensive study of German philosophy. In 1883 he founded the “Emancipation of Labor” group in Geneva—the first Russian Marxist organization. In the same year appeared his programmatic work Socialism and Political Struggle, which represented a “completely new conception in the history of the Russian socialist movement”: not the peasantry but the industrial proletariat must be the leading force of revolution.[1]
Plekhanov’s Interpretation of Hegel: Between Spinoza and Marx
Plekhanov’s major philosophical work was On the Question of the Development of the Monistic View of History (1895), which Lenin called “the best in the whole international Marxist literature” on this topic. In this and other works, Plekhanov developed a peculiar interpretation of Hegel, one that connected three traditions: Hegel, Spinoza, and Marx.[2]
From Hegel, Plekhanov took the dialectic as a method that makes qualitative leaps and historical development comprehensible. Unlike the “vulgar materialists” of his time, he insisted that dialectic could not be reduced to mechanical causality. The famous formula “omnis determinatio est negatio” (all determination is negation)—which Hegel had taken from Spinoza—became the key to his understanding.
From Spinoza, Plekhanov took the idea of the unity of substance: Marxism, he said, was “a more or less self-conscious Spinozism”—a formula Plekhanov made famous. This connection of Hegel and Spinoza was original, but problematic: it threatened to transform the dynamic self-movement of Hegelian dialectic into a static monistic system.[3]
Systematic Assessment: Strengths and Limits
What Plekhanov achieved:
Plekhanov rescued Hegel for Russian Marxism. At a time when “vulgar materialism” in the vein of Büchner and Vogt threatened to displace the dialectical tradition, Plekhanov insisted on the indispensability of Hegel for understanding Marx. His critique of neo-Kantianism and positivism within social democracy—for instance against Eduard Bernstein’s “revisionism”—repeatedly invoked Hegelian dialectic as the methodological foundation of Marxism.
What Plekhanov missed:
From the perspective of our Hegel interpretation, Plekhanov shows the same limit as the entire Marxist tradition: the materialist predetermination. He adopted the formula of the “inversion” of Hegel without asking whether this inversion leaves the logical structure of the Hegelian system intact at all. The Science of Logic—the work that explicates the categorial presuppositions of any worldview, whether materialist or idealist—remained underexamined in Plekhanov’s work as well.
The tragedy of Plekhanov lies in his political development: the founder of Russian Marxism ended up in 1914 as an advocate of “national defense” in the First World War, and in 1917 as an opponent of the October Revolution. He died in 1918, a few months after the revolution he had not wanted. But his philosophical writings—especially on the relation between Hegel and Marx—remained influential and were recommended by Lenin as exemplary into the 1920s. A direct path leads from Plekhanov to Deborin, who was his student and whose “Deborin school” developed the most differentiated Soviet interpretation of Hegel in the 1920s, before it was liquidated in 1931.
On the biography: Richard Lorenz: “Georgi Walentinowitsch Plechanow,” in: Walter Euchner (ed.): Klassiker des Sozialismus, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991, pp. 251-263. ↩︎
Lenin praised Plekhanov’s philosophical writings even after the political break. Cf. V.I. Lenin: “Once Again on the Trade Unions,” in: Works, Vol. 32, p. 70. ↩︎
On the Spinoza-Hegel connection in Plekhanov, see the article “Dialectics and Marxism: Plekhanov, between Hegel and Spinoza,” klassegegenklasse.org. ↩︎