Great Throughts Treasury

"Accident is something relative. It appears only at the point of intersection of inevitable processes."

"A utopian is one thing; mankind, or, more precisely, a social class representative of mankind’s highest interests in a given period, is something else. As Marx has very well said: ‘With the thoroughness of the historical action, the size of the mass whose action it is will therefore increase.’ This is conclusive condemnation of a utopian attitude towards great historical problems. If Marx nevertheless thought that mankind never sets itself unachievable tasks, then his words are, from the viewpoint of theory, only a new way of expressing the idea of the unity of subject and object in its application to the process of historical development; from the viewpoint of practice they express that calm and courageous faith in the achievement of the ‘ultimate aim’ which once prompted our unforgettable NG Chernyshevsky to exclaim fervently: ‘Come what may, we shall win.’"

"And what healthy optimism breathes in the words that mankind always sets itself only such tasks that it can solve. They do not, of course, mean that any solution of mankind’s great problems, as suggested by the first utopian one meets, is a good one."

"Kantianism is not a philosophy of struggle, or a philosophy of men of action. It is a philosophy of half-hearted people, a philosophy of compromise."

"If we wanted to express in a nutshell the view held by Marx and Engels with regard to the relation between the now celebrated ‘basis’ and the no less celebrated ‘superstructure’, we would get something like the following: 1. The state of the productive forces. 2. The economic relations these forces condition. 3. The socio-political system that has developed on the given economic ‘basis’. 4. The mentality of social man, which is determined in part directly by the economic conditions obtaining, and in part by the entire socio-political system that has arisen on that foundation. 5. The various ideologies that reflect the properties of that mentality. This formula is comprehensive enough to provide proper room for all ‘forms’ of historical development, and at the same time it contains absolutely nothing of the eclecticism that is incapable of going beyond the interaction between the various social forces, and does not even suspect that the fact that these forces do interact has provided no solution of the problem of their origin. This formula is a monist one, and this monist formula is thoroughly imbued with materialism. In his Philosophy of the Spirit, Hegel said that the Spirit is history’s only motive principle. It is impossible to think otherwise, if one accepts the viewpoint of the idealism which claims that being is determined by thinking. Marx’s materialism shows in what way the history of thinking is determined by the history of being. Hegel’s idealism, however, did not prevent him from recognising economic factors as a cause ‘conditioned by the development of the Spirit’. In exactly the same way, materialism did not prevent Marx from recognising the action, in history, of the ‘Spirit’ as a force whose direction is determined at any given time and in the final analysis by the course of economic development. That all ideologies have one common root – the psychology of the epoch in question – is not hard to understand; anyone who makes even the slightest study of the facts will realise that."

"The ‘conventional lie’ of a society divided into classes becomes ever more enhanced, the more the existing order of things is shaken by the impact of the economic development and the class struggle caused thereby. Marx very truly said that the greater the development of the contradiction between the growing productive forces and the existing social order, the more does the ideology of the master class become imbued with hypocrisy. The more the falseness of this ideology is revealed by life, the more elevated and virtuous does the language of that class become the truth of this remark is being brought home with particular force today, when, for instance, the spread of loose morals in Germany, as revealed by the Harden-Moltke trial, goes hand in hand with a ‘renascence of idealism’ in social science. In our country, even among ‘theorists of the proletariat’, people are to be found who do not understand the social cause of this ‘renascence’, and have themselves succumbed to its influence, such as the Bogdanovs, the Bazarovs, and their like."

"When a social revolution is brought about by a class striving for its liberation, that class acts in a way that is more or less expedient in achieving the aim desired; in any case its activities are the cause of that revolution. However, together with all the aspirations that have brought them about, these activities are themselves a consequence of a definite course of the economic development, and are therefore themselves determined by necessity."

"Sociology becomes a science only in the measure in which it succeeds in understanding the appearance of aims in social man (social ‘teleology’), as a necessary consequence of a social process ultimately determined by the course of economic development. Highly characteristic is the circumstance that consistent antagonists of the materialist explanation of history see themselves forced to prove the impossibility of sociology as a science. This means that the ‘critical approach’ is now becoming an obstacle to the further scientific development of our times. In this connection, an interesting problem arises for those who are trying to find a scientific explanation of the history of philosophical theories. That problem is: to determine in what way this role of the ‘critical approach’ is linked up with the struggle of the classes in present-day society."

"The obstacles met by present-day materialism as an harmonious and consistent theory are incomparably greater than those that Newton’s theory came up against, on its appearance. Against it are directly and decisively ranged the interests of the class now in power, to whose influence most scholars subordinate themselves of necessity. Materialist dialectic which ‘regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and... lets nothing impose upon it’, cannot have the sympathy of the conservative class that the Western bourgeoisie today is. It stands in such contradiction to that class’ frame of mind that ideologists of that class naturally tend to look upon it as something impermissible, improper and unworthy of the attention both of ‘respectable’ people in general, and of ‘esteemed’ men of learning in particular. It is not surprising that each of these pundits considers himself morally obliged to avert from himself any suspicion of sympathy with materialism. Often enough such pundits denounce materialism the more emphatically, the more insistently they adhere to a materialist viewpoint in their special research. The result is a kind of semi-subconscious ‘conventional lie’, which, of course, can have only a most injurious effect on theoretical thinking."

"But economic life develops under the influence of a growth in the productive forces. Therefore the mutual relations of people engaged in the process of production undergo changes, and, together with them, changes take place in human mentality."

"Marxism is an integral world-outlook. Expressed in a nutshell, it is contemporary materialism, at present the highest stage in the development of that view upon the world whose foundations were laid down in ancient Greece by Democritus,and in part by the Ionian thinkers who preceded that philosopher. What was known as hylozoism was nothing but a naive materialism. It is to Karl Marx and his friend Frederick Engels that the main credit for the development of present-day materialism must no doubt go. The historical and economic aspects of this world-outlook, that is, what is known as historical materialism and the closely related sum of views on the tasks, method and categories of political economy, and on the economic development of society, especially capitalist society, are in their fundamentals almost entirely the work of Marx and Engels. That which was introduced into these fields by their precursors should be regarded merely as the preparatory work of amassing material, often copious and valuable, but not as yet systematised or illuminated by a single fundamental idea, and therefore not appraised or utilised in its real significance. What Marx and Engels’ followers in Europe and America have done in these fields is merely a more or less successful elaboration of specific problems, sometimes, it is true, of the utmost importance. That is why the term ‘Marxism’ is often used to signify only these two aspects of the present-day materialist world-outlook not only among the ‘general public’, who have not yet achieved a deep understanding of philosophical theories, but even among people, both in Russia and the entire civilised world, who consider themselves faithful followers of Marx and Engels. In such cases these two aspects are looked upon as something independent of ‘philosophical materialism’, and at times as something almost opposed to it. And since these two aspects cannot but hang in mid-air when they are torn out of the general context of cognate views constituting their theoretical foundation, those who perform that tearing-out operation naturally feel an urge to ‘substantiate Marxism’ anew by joining it – again quite arbitrarily and most frequently under the influence of philosophical moods prevalent at the time among ideologists of the bourgeoisie – with some philosopher or another: with Kant, Mach, Avenarius or Ostwald, and of late with Joseph Dietzgen. True, the philosophical views of J Dietzgen have arisen quite independently of bourgeois influences and are in considerable measure related to the philosophical views of Marx and Engels. The latter views, however, possess an incomparably more consistent and rich content, and for that reason alone cannot be supplemented by Dietzgen’s teachings but can only be popularised by them. No attempts have yet been made to ‘supplement Marx’ with Thomas Aquinas. It is however quite feasible that, despite the Pope’s recent encyclical against the Modernists, the Catholic world will at some time produce from its midst a thinker capable of performing this feat in the sphere of theory."