Marxist philosophy: A primer

Clockwise from top left: Aristotle, Galileo, Hegel, Feuerbach, Lenin, Engels, Marx.

Why study philosophy?

• What is philosophy? The study of reality on the most general level.

• ‘Default’ philosophy: justifies capitalist system, rules out alternatives & change.

• We need a scientific philosophy suited to turbulent times in which we live.

Some useful sources1. Frederick Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and

the End of Classical German Philosophy’, Selected Works, Vol. 3 (available online).

2. George Novack, Introduction to the Logic of Marxism.

3. Alan Woods, The History of Philosophy (with very useful philosophical glossary).

4. Alan Woods & Ted Grant, Reason in Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science (available online).

The great division in philosophy

• What is the relation of thinking to being? Which is primary: spirit or nature?

• Idealism: thought comes first => God, ‘creationism’.

• Materialism: nature primary, exists independently of us.

Ancient Greece:the birth of philosophy

The 400 years from mid-7th century BC saw some amazing advances in thought.• Materialism: Milesians (Thales, Anaximander)

• Dialectics: Heraclitus (535-475 BC)

• Atomists: Democritus (460-370 BC) & Epicurus (341-270 BC)

• Logic: Aristotle (384-322 BC)

• Atomistic view of matter, heliocentric cosmology, earth round (and circumference fairly accurately measured), humans descended from fish, geometry, etc.

Long struggle for materialism & science against Church

• The ‘Dark Ages’: rigid, obscurantist view violently imposed by Catholic Church.

• Martyrs (1600 — Giordano Bruno burnt at stake for ‘heresy’).

• Long struggle for objective, scientific view of world, especially in cosmology: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo.

Mechanical materialism• French materialist philosophers of 1700s

helped prepare ground for Great Revolution (Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, etc.).

• Mechanics most developed of sciences.• Limitations: rigid, no room for change or

development.• Newton’s solar system — once started no

variation; Laplace’s atomistic system future set forever.

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)• Great German idealist philosopher.

• ‘Hegel set about to devise a logic “adequate to the lofty development of the sciences” and necessary “for securing scientific progress”. This new method of thought was dialectics. As the systematiser of the dialectical method, Hegel must be regarded as the founder of modern logic …’ (Novack, An Introduction to the logic of Marxism)

Young Hegelians• Following Hegel’s death his school

split into two wings.• Young (or left) Hegelians: David

Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner, Ludwig Feuerbach.

• Marx and Engels belonged to this group in their youth.

• But they later broke away and criticised it ruthlessly in mid-1840s in The Holy Family and The German Ideology.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72)• Broke from Hegelians with materialist

critique of their idealism.

• Essence of Christianity (1841): Marx and Engels very enthusiastic.

• Feuerbach was bridge for Marx and Engels from Hegel to dialectical materialism.

• In his 1886 essay Engels explains Feuerbach’s significance to a new audience of radicals.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach• Feuerbach’s materialism had severe

limitations.• For Feuerbach humanity made religion

but abstract, isolated men and women —not social beings interacting with others in real historically evolved societies.

• The heavenly family is a reflection of contradictions of the earthly family.

• Famous 11th thesis: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it.’

Formal logic• ‘Logic is the science of the thought

process … which goes on in human heads …’ (Novack)

• Three laws of formal logic (Aristotle):1. Law of identity: ‘A’ equals ‘A’.

2. Law of contradiction: ‘A’ not equal to ‘not-A’.

3. Law of exclusion: Nothing can be neither ‘A’ nor ‘not-A’.

Limitations of formal logic• Formal logic adequate only if we abstract

from motion. It cannot deal with change, with motion.

• ‘… the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from protista to man, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change.’ (Engels, Dialectics of Nature)

• System of logic must reflect this reality.

Basic laws of dialectics

1. The law of transformation of quantity into quality (e.g., Egyptian Spring).

2. The law of unity and interpenetration of opposites (e.g., workers and bosses under capitalism).

3. The law of negation of the negation (e.g., socialist revolution will ‘negate’ the capitalists who ‘negated’ the original primary producers).

Dialectical materialism1. The world is material and forms an interconnected whole.2. The basic forms of all being are space and time, and there is no

being out of space and time. 3. Motion is the mode of existence of matter. There is no matter

without motion and no motion without matter. Both are uncreatable and indestructible.

4. The motion present in the world is explained by internal factors, and therefore no external mover is needed.

5. The world is constantly changing, and, indeed, there are no truly static entities in the world.

6. The changes in matter occur in accordance with certain overall regularities or laws.

7. The human mind is the highest product of organic matter.8. Matter is infinite in its properties, and therefore our knowledge

will never be complete.9. Our knowledge grows with time, as is illustrated by our

increasing success in applying it to practice, but this growth occurs through the accumulation of relative, not absolute truths.

10. The material unity of the world means that the motion of matter results in a natural hierarchy of relatively autonomous forms of movement of matter, each with its own laws of motion.

‘Big Bang’ & crisis in science• Despite enormous advances in science,

serious problems on the macro cosmological level (and on micro subatomic level also: hunt for the ‘God particle’).

• ‘Big Bang’ theory: universe originated from a single point 14 billion years ago! Before that there was no space or time!

• ‘Big Bang’ is a religious, not a scientific notion. Marxism rejects any theory or interpretation which posits a beginning or an end to motion, time and space.

• Scientific contradictions of the theory are mounting.

Open letter hits ‘Big Bang’The May 22, 2004 issue of the British magazine New Scientist carried ‘An open letter to the scientific community’ signed by 34 scientists.

‘The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed — inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

‘But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors …

‘What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.’

The letter went on to point out that were were alternative theories but that these were not being taken seriously:

‘Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

‘Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang … This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.

‘Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies …

‘Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method — the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible …

‘Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang's validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe.’

Materialist alternative• For those interested I recommend the 1991

book The Big Bang Never Happened by Eric Lerner.

• Lerner champions idea of a plasma universe, first put forward by Swedish Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén (1908-95).

• This universe is infinite in time and space. Electromagnetic phenomena, not gravity, play the key role.

• Obviously, further research will settle the matter.

Historical materialsm• Historical materialism is dialectics

applied to the study of history and society.

• The labour theory of human origins.• Humanity now evolves not only in

nature but also in human society.• The conflict between the capitalist

class and the working class is the driving force of modern history and politics.

‘Dialectics is a method, an instrument of knowledge. Historically one can define materialist dialectics as the proletariat’s theory of knowledge …

‘In the last analysis, knowledge itself is not a phenomenon which is detached from the life and interests of humanity. It is a weapon in the conservation of the species, an instrument which enables humanity the better to dominate the forces of nature, to understand the origins of the “social question” and the ways to solve it. Knowledge is, therefore, born of the social practice of humanity; its function is to perfect this practice. In the last analysis, its effectiveness is measured by its practical results …’ (Ernest Mandel, Introduction to Marxism)