If only “sensations” are real, argues Lenin, then external reality is assumed not to exist: we live in a solipsistic world where there is only myself and my sensations. I take myself, the subject, as the only reality. This idealism, for Lenin, is the ideological manifestation of the enemy: it is pure bourgeois-ism. Against idealism, Lenin poses a materialism that sees the human being—human consciousness, human spirit—as an aspect of a concrete world that is objective, knowable, and comprising solely matter in motion in space.
