LENIN THE PHILOSOPHER 59 on, he wanted to check his theories on all these questions by re-reading, assimilating and using the revolutionary tenets of materialisti-cally applied dialectics. Lenin's perception of the capitalist world in its last legs—the world out of which the Socialist world was emerging—was in short the background against which his philosophical works (both Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and Philosophical Notebooks) made their appearance. Remove this world outlook and Lenin's philosophy loses its scientific character. This is what happened to Mao Zedong whose dabbling into the theory of contradictions and his anti-Leninist perception of world reality are inseparable from each other. India's Marxist-Leninists—among whom there are sections who look upon "Mao's theory of contradictions" as a development of Marxism— should learn as much from this negative example of distortion of Leninism as from Lenin's outstanding work. E M S NAMBOODIRIPAD* 1 V I Lenin, MeteriaUsm and Empiric-Criticism ^ Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1967, pp 318-319. 2 Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism", in Collected Works, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1966, Vol 33,pp 233-234. ^General Secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist).