Few people would ever compare Vladimir Lenin and Ayn Rand. One led the Bolshevik Revolution and became the chief theorist of Soviet communism. The other became the twentieth century’s foremost defender of laissez-faire capitalism. Politically, they stood at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Yet they shared one fundamental philosophical conviction: reality exists independently of human consciousness.
Lenin defended this view in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), where he attacked philosophers such as Ernst Mach for reducing reality to subjective sensations. For Lenin, matter exists independently of the observer, and science progressively discovers objective truth.
Rand began from a remarkably similar premise. Her philosophy opens with the axiom, “Existence exists.” Reality does not depend upon beliefs, language, or social convention. Human beings do not create reality but discover it through reason.
Neither thinker accepted epistemological relativism. Both maintained that objective reality exists independently of the human mind and that reason can discover truth about it.
This common starting point makes the later development of Marxist thought particularly interesting.
During the twentieth century, many currents associated with Western Marxism engaged with structuralism, critical theory, post-structuralism, and later postmodern philosophy. Although these traditions differed considerably, some questioned universal reason, objective truth, or stable meanings in ways that departed from the philosophical realism Lenin defended.
Would Lenin have regarded some later Marxist thinkers as philosophical idealists?
His writings suggest he might have. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin argued that any philosophy blurring the distinction between objective reality and subjective experience ultimately undermined both science and Marxism itself.
On this narrow epistemological question, Lenin arguably shared more common ground with Ayn Rand than with some later thinkers who identified as Marxists.
Whether one agrees with Lenin or with Rand, both would almost certainly have rejected the claim that reality itself is merely a social construct.
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