I. I

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where the decisive battle was fought against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and in ideas, materialism proved to be the only consistent philosophy, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so on. The enemies of democracy therefore tried with all their might to “refute”, undermine and slander materialism, and defended various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most resolute manner and repeatedly explained the profound error of every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully set out in Engels’s works Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker. But Marx did not stop at the materialism of the eighteenth century: he moved philosophy forward. He enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of the system of Hegel, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The chief of these achievements is dialectics, that is, the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and least one-sided form, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge, which gives us a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science, radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, have strikingly confirmed Marx’s dialectical materialism, in spite of the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” returns to old and rotten idealism.

Deepening and developing philosophical materialism, Marx carried it through to the end and extended its knowledge of nature to the knowledge of human society. Marx’s historical materialism was the greatest achievement of scientific thought. The chaos and arbitrariness that had until then reigned in views on history and politics gave way to a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, as a result of the growth of the productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher one develops: how capitalism, for instance, grows out of serfdom.

Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature, which exists independently of him, that is, developing matter, so man’s social knowledge (that is, his various views and doctrines, philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, how the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism, which has given mankind, and the working class above all, powerful instruments of knowledge.