Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences, 1939

Marxism was largely ignored both in academic and political circles, whereas on the continent of Europe it was at least considered worthy of criticism. You will remember, however, one of the definitions of a crank, covering both the human and mechanical kinds, as "A little thing that makes revolutions"! It is now impossible to doubt the importance of Marxism, because Marxism was the philosophy of Lenin. It is very difficult to deny that Lenin was the greatest man of his time. Not that this admission need imply agreement with him. It is perfectly possible, without being a Mohammedan, to admit that Mohammed was the greatest man of his time. The philosophy of a man who has had so great and important an influence on world history as Lenin is undoubtedly worthy of investigation.

Plekhanov, a Russian Marxist and predecessor of Lenin, began his book, Fundamental Problems of Marxism, with the statement: "Marxism is a complete theoretical system." That is approximately true of the philosophy of Aristotle, St. Thomas, Spinoza, or Hegel. Clearly it is not true of the philosophy of Socrates. It is also untrue of Marxism. Marxism is not complete, not a system, and only in the second place theoretical. It is not complete because it is alive and growing, and above all because it lays no claim to finality. The most that a Marxist can say for Marxism is that it is the best and truest philosophy that could have been produced under the social conditions of the mid-nineteenth century. It is not primarily a system, but a method.

Marx said in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point is to change it."

Lenin's only important philosophical work is called Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Now a student of academic philosophy who takes up a study of Marxism will at first be disappointed. A great many questions are left unanswered, for two different reasons. Some were shown to be improperly put, and it was sufficient to demonstrate the historical reasons why they had been asked in the past. Others could not be answered on the existing data. Thus the relation between brain and mind is not in principle an insoluble problem; but it cannot be solved, except in the most summary manner, until we know a very great deal more, particularly about the brain. Marxism is not concerned mainly with being, but with becoming. It claims to enable us to understand change and development of all kinds, not only political and economic change and development, and by understanding to influence and to control them.

A pragmatic materialism

In the first place, we have the principle of the unity of theory and practice, with the primacy of practice.

So far we may say that Marxism anticipates pragmatism, although it differs from pragmatism in almost all other respects, notably in its consistent emphasis on the changing of the world, and above all in its belief that there is a real world, and that absolute truth, if never reached, can be continually approached.

Engels: 'Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?'

Engels: the economic structure of society always forms the real basis from which, in the last analysis, is to be explained the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions, as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other conceptions of each historical period. Now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic conception of history was propounded, and the way found to explain man's consciousness by his being, instead of, as heretofore, his being by his consciousness.

Idealism driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history -- explain history by economic forces

Dialectical materialism is founded on Hegelian dialectic. It had long been realized that matter on the whole behaves intelligibly, conforming to the laws of logic and arithmetic. The question arose whether our reason mirrors the behaviour of matter, or whether on the other hand, matter mirrors the behaviour of mind. Kant's view was somewhere intermediate, perhaps leaning to the idealist side.

Dialectical materialism is founded on Hegelian dialectic. It had long been realized that matter on the whole behaves intelligibly, conforming to the laws of logic and arithmetic. The question arose whether our reason mirrors the behaviour of matter, or whether on the other hand, matter mirrors the behaviour of mind. Kant's view was somewhere intermediate, perhaps leaning to the idealist side. Hegel laid down, especially in his Logic and Phenomenology of Mind, a number of principles of thought going beyond those laid down by Aristotle and taught as formal logic, principles which had been more or less recognized for centuries, but never so clearly formulated. These principles were called dialectical principles. He said that nature conformed to them. According to Hegel the logical categories exist eternally; the world is a mere exemplification of these logical categories in space and time. Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels believed that the principles were exemplified in nature before they governed thought. According to Marx, the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. Hegel is standing on his head. Our business is to put him on his feet. Engels treated the Hegelian dialectic as expressing primarily the properties of matter, and only secondarily the laws of thought. He held that the principles which Hegel had worked out in the realm of thought also applied to material events, not only in the social field, but in the fields of astronomy, physics, biology, and so on.

The negation of the negation was regarded by Marx as the main source of progress and of novelty.

what is the source of novelty? of paradigm shift?

Lenin wrote: "The sole 'property' of matter — with the recognition of which materialism is vitally connected — is the property of being objective reality, of existing outside our cognition."

Engels said: "The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind-images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidents and all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end — this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things." You will see that in the idea of process as fundamental, we have the anticipation of much of what is valuable in the philosophies of Bergson and Whitehead.

It may be claimed, in my opinion with a very large measure of truth, that man is to a considerable extent a slave of economic conditions, until he recognizes the fact; and the idealist, who denies the principle of historical materialism completely, is as much in the grip of economic conditions as anyone else. Marxists believe that the principle of economic determinism of other human activities is largely true, but they are out to make it untrue by founding a society in which economic classes have been abolished, and in which this particular kind of determinism no longer holds.

But how do we reconcile this determinism with the idea of self-determination? Is there a middle ground between determinism and bootstraps?

The fact that Marxism lays so much stress on this struggle of human beings against economic forces makes it clear that the doctrine of economic fatalism is no part of the Marxist philosophy. On the contrary, Marxism unifies the theory of the struggle against economic fatalism with its actual practice.

so its a pragmatism freedom lies in the necessity to fight determinism is ultimately a fatalism i like that but it necessitates an acknowledgment of forces which is great because market-heads love their forces so the question is not whether this determinism, or the influence of these forces, exists, it's what to do about them-- succumb to them (fatalism) or act.

The Marxist theory of truth is, I think, straightforward and simple, but by no means complete. The view taken is that an indefinite progress is made in the direction of truth, except, perhaps, on fairly trivial matters such as the date of a given man's birth or death. This doctrine is, of course, familiar to English students of philosophy in a slightly different form in the work of Bradley. A short quotation from Engels [A.D., p. 101] states the Marxist point of view clearly: "The sovereignty of thought is realized in a series of extremely unsovereignly-thinking human beings; the knowledge which has an unconditional claim to truth is realized in a series of relative errors; neither the one nor the other can be fully realized except through an endless eternity of human existence.

Very similar to the pragmatic view of experimentation, hypothesis-driven thinking? You can't progress unless you're making (good faith) errors and learning from them, acknowledging your limitation of your class, forces, situatedness. How does this connect to forecasting, prediction? Model error? Also connects nicely with user-centered design-- design as experimentation, as trial-and-error. If those errors are made in good faith.

unity of opposites quantity into quality negation of the negation