Library:Fundamental principles of philosophy

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Introduction

Study of the marxist dialectical method

Traits of dialectics

Everything is connected (law of reciprocal action and universal connection)

Conclusion

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Everything is changing (law of universal change and of the continuous development)

Conclusion

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Qualitative change

Remarks

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The struggle of opposites (i)

Features of the contradiction

Unity of opposites

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The struggle of opposites (ii)

The struggle of opposites, the driving force of thought

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The struggle of opposites (iii)

General conclusion on contradiction – marxism versus proudhonism

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Study of marxist philosophical materialism

What is the materialist conception of the world?

Marxist philosophical materialism is distinguished by three fundamental features

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Traits of marxist materialism

The materiality of the world

Conclusion

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Matter is prior to consciousness

Conclusion

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The world is knowable

The union of theory and practice

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Dialectical materialism and the spiritual life of society

The spiritual life of the society is a reflection of its material life

The dialectical materialist thesis

If it is true that nature, being, the material world is the first datum, while consciousness, thought, is the second, derived datum; if it is true that the material world is an objective reality existing independently of the consciousness of men, while consciousness is a reflection of this objective reality, it follows from there that the material life of society, its being is also the first datum, while its spiritual life is a second, derived datum; which the material life of the society is an objective reality existing independently of the will of man, while the spiritual life of the society is a reflection of this objective reality, a reflection of the being.

— Stalin, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism

The thesis according to which the spiritual life of society reflects its material life is thus a direct consequence of the philosophical materialism exposed in The spiritual life of the society is a reflection of its material life

The material life of the society is an objective reality existing independently of the conscience and the will not only of individuals, but of man in general

It is precisely this objective reality, independent of conscience, that some thinkers, because they do not understand its laws, call fatality. Existentialists have renewed the vocabulary while keeping the same thing: they speak of "man thrown into the world", of man "in situation". We will see in the fourth part of this work, devoted to historical materialism, that this situation is not a mystery and that it can be studied scientifically.

A few examples will help us understand what is happening to this objective reality, independent of consciousness.

When, under feudalism, the young bourgeoisie of Europe began the construction of the great manufactures, it was unaware of the social consequences of this "innovation" which was to lead to a revolution against the royal power whose benevolence it appreciated at the time (the monarchy encouraged the nascent manufactures) and against the nobility into which it dreamed of entering!

When the Russian capitalists implanted modern large-scale industry in Tsarist Russia, they were not aware that they were preparing the conditions for the future triumph of the socialist revolution.

When the shoemaker, whom Stalin refers to in Anarchism or Socialism?, joined Adelkhanov, he "did not know that the distant consequence of this decision, which he believed to be provisional, would be his adherence to socialist ideas.

Here is the very interesting passage that Stalin devotes to the shoemaker:

Imagine a shoemaker who had a very small workshop, but could not compete with the big bosses, so he had to close his workshop and, let's suppose, he was hired in a shoe factory in Tiflis, at Adelkhanov's house.  He was hired at Adelkhanov's, not to become a permanent salaried worker, but to raise money, build up a small capital and then be able to reopen his workshop. As we can see, the shoemaker's situation is already proletarian, but his conscience is not yet proletarian; it is entirely petty-bourgeois. In other words, the petty-bourgeois situation of this cobbler has already disappeared, it no longer exists, but his petty-bourgeois conscience has not yet disappeared, it is behind his de facto situation. It is obvious that here again, in social life, it is the external conditions, the situation of men, that change first, and then, as a consequence, their consciousness. Let us return, however, to our shoemaker. As we already know, he is thinking of raising money to reopen his workshop, so the proletarian shoemaker is working, and he realizes that it is very difficult to raise money, because his salary is barely enough to provide for his existence. He also notices that it is not very attractive to open a private workshop: the rent of the premises, the whims of the customers, the lack of money, the competition of the big bosses and so many other worries, such are the worries that haunt the spirit of the craftsman. However, the proletarian is relatively free of all these worries; he is not worried about the client or the rent to be paid; in the morning, he goes to the factory; in the evening, he leaves it "the most quietly in the world", and, on Saturdays, he also quietly puts his "pay" in his pocket. It is then that for the first time the petty-bourgeois dreams of our shoemaker have their wings clipped; it is then that, for the first time, proletarian tendencies are born in his soul. Time passes, and our shoemaker realizes that he lacks the money to get the bare necessities, that he is in great need of a wage increase. At the same time, he realizes that his comrades are talking about unions and strikes. From that moment on, our shoemaker becomes aware that in order to improve his situation, it is necessary to fight against the bosses, and not to open a workshop of his own. He joined the trade union, went on strike and soon embraced the socialist ideas... So the change in the shoemaker's material situation ultimately brought about a change in his consciousness: first his material situation changed, and then, some time later, his consciousness changed accordingly. The same has to be said of the classes and the society as a whole.

— Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?

When the U.S. imperialists, and subsequently the Western capitalists, in 1947, on the basis of the Marshall Plan, organized the economic blockade of the U.S.S.R. and the people's democracies, it was far from clear that they would contribute to the formation of a new world market, a socialist market, and to the disintegration of the old single capitalist market.

Such is the "fatality" on which many novelists have embroidered. The struggle for the satisfaction of immediate interests leads, in the more or less long term, to social consequences independent of the will of those who engaged in this struggle. These immediate interests are by no means arbitrary since they respond to the objective situation, at a given moment, of a society, of a given social class. This is a fundamental proposition of historical materialism, as formulated by Marx:

In the social production of their existence, men enter into determined, necessary relations, independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a determined degree of development of their material productive forces

— Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

For example, the capitalist relations of production have not been chosen by men. The development of the productive forces within feudal society necessarily led to the formation of capitalist relations of production and not to others, whether men wanted it or not. This is how each new generation is forced to start from the objective conditions that are made for it. "Fatality" then? No, because as we shall see, the scientific study of the objective relations of production makes it possible to understand their nature, to foresee their evolution, to accelerate it.

Alleging the 'independence' of the mind, in the manner of the idealists, is quite simply to ignore the objective conditions that impose themselves first and foremost on the mind, even though it knows nothing about them, for such is the unfortunate fate of the idealist thinker: as he starts from his consciousness, without questioning the objective conditions that make it exist and that make it exercise itself, he believes that it is sufficient for itself. Illusion fought by materialism.

Having said that, it is necessary to draw an important practical conclusion from the remarks we have just presented: we have shown that very great material changes have taken place in history without those who participated in the transformation, or who brought it about, being aware of its consequences, without their having wanted it. It is therefore false to claim that there will be no socialist revolution in a country where all the workers have previously acquired revolutionary theory! The millions of people who, in October 1917, made the revolution with their hands did not see as far as Lenin and the Bolsheviks the scientific vanguard of the revolution. But in carrying out this great historical task, they were working on the transformation of their own consciousness, on the victory of the new man, a victory scientifically foreseen by Marx.

The spiritual life of the society is a reflection of the objective reality of the society

It is not the will of men that arbitrarily determines social relations, as we have said, but rather the conscience of men, which is conditioned by the material reality of the society of which they are members.

Now this society-we will return to this at greater length in Part 4 of this manual-is not born of a miracle: it is the totality of relationships that have been formed to assure men a victorious struggle over nature; relationships necessarily conditioned by the level of productive forces available to men and which they had to accommodate (ten thousand years ago, relationships between men could not be those that great industry engendered!).

It is this very complex set of factors that must be taken into account when one wants to understand how social ideas are a reflection of society.

History shows that if, at different times, men have had different ideas and desires, it is because at different times men fought differently against nature to provide for their needs, and that, consequently, their economic relations took on a different character. There was a time when men fought against nature in common, on the basis of primitive communism; at that time their property was also communist, and therefore they hardly distinguished between "mine" and "yours"; their conscience was communist.  The time came when the distinction between "mine" and "yours" became part of production; from then on, property itself took on a private, individualistic character. This is why the feeling of private property entered into the consciousness of men. And this is finally the time - the time of today, when production again takes on a social character; consequently, property will not be long in taking on, in its turn, a social character - and this is why socialism gradually penetrated the consciousness of men.

— Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?

We see the error of vulgar materialism. Noting that there is no thought without a brain, he concluded that social ideas have a purely organic determination: modify the organism of an individual, and you will change his political ideas!

Philosophical materialism certainly states that the brain is the organ of thought. But the brain itself is inseparable from the objective conditions that make men exist: it is the brain of a social being. As Marx wrote, "...man in his reality is the totality of social relations." In the thinking brain is thus reflected "the totality of social relations" (that the individual is unaware of this fact, that such and such a university philosopher has never thought about it, is powerless to change the fact).

One of the most characteristic examples of ideology as a reflection is provided by religion. The idealists, like the theologians, profess that every man spontaneously finds in himself the idea of God, that this idea has existed since the origins of mankind, that it will last as long as it does. In reality, the idea of God is a product of the objective situation of men in ancient societies. According to Engels' formula, religion is born from the limited conceptions of mankind, but in what way? On the one hand, by the almost total impotence of primitive man before a hostile and incomprehensible nature; on the other hand, by their blind dependence on a society they did not understand and which seemed to them the expression of a superior will. Thus the gods, inexplicable and all-powerful beings, masters of nature and society, were the subjective reflection of man's objective impotence before nature and society.

The progress of the natural and social sciences was to reveal the illusory character of religious beliefs. However, as long as the exploitation of man by man persists, objective conditions remain for the belief in a superhuman being who dispenses happiness and misfortune. "Man proposes, God disposes": the peasant of ancient Russia, crushed by misery and with no prospects for the future, entrusts his fate to the divinity. The socialist revolution, by giving the community control over the productive forces, gives mankind the possibility of scientifically directing society, while at the same time increasing his power over nature at an ever-increasing rate. The objective conditions are created so that the religious mystifications which other objective conditions had generated and maintained are gradually erased from human consciousness.

In the same way, moral ideas are a reflection of objective social relations, a reflection of social practice. Idealists see in morals a set of eternal principles, absolutely independent of circumstances: they come to us from God, or they are dictated to us by the infallible "conscience. But we need only beware that, for example, the commandment "Thou shalt not steal" could only have existed and had meaning from the day private property appeared. In communist society, the notion of theft will lose all real basis because the abundance of goods will be such that there will be nothing to steal. How then can one speak of eternal morality? Morality is transformed with and by society. This is why, since society evolves through class struggle, there is a counter-current struggle between the morality of the dominant class and the morality of the exploited class; the first is conservative or reactionary in spirit; the other is more or less revolutionary. But since the ruling class has, for many years, powerful means to impose its ideas, millions of men accept without discussion the morality of the ruling class as the morality. Mystification of which the members of the dominant class are themselves victims.

Let us illustrate this with an example. The revolutionary French bourgeoisie of the 18th century led its leap against feudalism in the name of eternal Liberty, Reason and Justice. It identified its revolutionary class interests with those of mankind in general, and it was sincere. But the victory of the bourgeois revolution gave words their true meaning, their historical meaning. It showed that these universal moral ideas were the expression of class-specific interests. Freedom? yes, freedom for the bourgeoisie to produce and trade for its class profits; freedom to keep political power for itself, etc. But to the proletariat, this bourgeoisie which had made the Revolution under the flag of freedom, refused the freedom to form unions, to fight by strike, etc., and to the proletariat, this bourgeoisie which had made the Revolution under the banner of freedom, refused the freedom to form unions, to fight by strike, etc. It is the name of eternal morality that it guillotined Babeuf, because in fact it wanted to suppress bourgeois property.

Engels said:

We know today that this reign of reason was nothing other than the idealized reign of labour, that eternal justice as it was then proclaimed found its adequacy in bourgeois justice. (Engels. Anti-Dühring)

Does this mean that there will never be universal morality? Not at all. Morality will be the same for all men when the social conditions which will make such a morality effective will be objectively realized, that is, when the world triumph of communism will have abolished forever all opposition of interests among men, abolished all classes. It is therefore the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie (and against its supposed universal morality), and not the easy preaching of the idealists, which objectively opens the way to the triumph of a universal morality, that is to say, a fully human morality. Is this universal morality impenetrable to us today? No, its principles of fraternal solidarity find their first realization already in capitalist society in the morality of the revolutionary class, the proletariat. And even more so, of course, in the countries where socialist revolution has already triumphed. Indeed, while the bourgeoisie, liquidating feudalism, substitutes one exploitation for another, the proletariat, breaking capitalism, suppresses all exploitation of man by man.

The suppression of class antagonisms prepares the blossoming of the universal communist morality, of which the class morality of the revolutionary proletariat constitutes the first form.

We see that the opposition of moral ideas in the course of history, and in a general way, the opposition of ideologies, reflects the opposition of the interests of the social classes in presence. It is in this way that we can understand how social and political ideologies evolve. If, for example, the bourgeoisie in France, in one hundred and sixty years, has gone from moral universalism ("All men are brothers") to fascist racism (hatred of the Jews, hunting of North African workers, etc.), this can be explained by the material evolution of this class. Revolutionary, it believed that it could speak for all men. Threatened in its turn in its reign, it justified its domination by a claim of right of blood. This is how the feudal lords used to do it!

How new ideas and social theories emerge

For idealism, ideas arise in the minds of men without knowing why, regardless of their conditions of existence. But then a question arises which idealism is incapable of answering: why has such an idea appeared in our days and not in antiquity?

Dialectical materialism, which never separates ideas from their objective basis, does not believe that new ideas arise by a magical operation. New ideas arise as a solution to an objective contradiction that has developed in society. Indeed, we know that the driving force behind any change is contradiction (see lesson 5). The development of contradictions in a given society poses the task of resolving them when these contradictions become more acute.  New ideas then emerge as an attempt to resolve these contradictions.

It is the objective development of the contradictions peculiar to feudal society-divorce between old and new productive forces-that gave rise to revolutionary ideas in the rising class: hundreds of plans for social and political reform arose, and a similar process took place in capitalist society: socialist ideas were born to resolve the contradictions from which millions of men, women and children suffered.

What distinguishes the great innovators is their ability to solve problems that, as a reflection of the objective contradictions of society, are more or less confused in the consciousness of their contemporaries:

Humanity only ever poses problems that it can solve, because, on closer inspection, it will always be found that the problem itself only arises where the material conditions for solving it already exist or at least are in the process of formation.

— Karl Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Incomprehensible for those who are not initiated into dialectical materialism, this famous phrase can be explained in this way. Who says "problem" says "contradiction" to be solved. But what is contradiction if not a struggle between the old and the new? If therefore a contradiction appears, it is because the new is already there, even if only partially. For example: feudal society could only be called into question today when, within it, the antagonistic forces that were later to destroy it (industry, the bourgeoisie) began to exercise themselves.  The solution of the problem was the victory of this newcomer who sought Savoy.

The issue of survivorship

The concept we have outlined in this lesson sheds light on an important feature of the history of ideas: the question of survivorship.

Survival occurs when an idea survives in the mind when the objective conditions that founded its existence have disappeared.

An essential thesis of philosophical materialism is that consciousness is posterior to material reality (nature and society). It is posterior to the consciousness of the objective situation. This is how the former shoemaker Stalin talks about leads an objectively proletarian life, but keeps, for a certain time, a petty bourgeois consciousness.

In the same way, in a society whose material base is changing, men only become aware of these changes with a certain delay.  When these appear, then they look for solutions in the arsenal of old ideas they have kept from the past. Survivors (ideas born in old objective conditions) are an obstacle to new ideas, which correspond to the new objective conditions.  Example: at the very beginning of capitalism, the proletarians exploited by the industrial bourgeoisie, were looking for a solution to their misery in an unutopic return to craftsmanship: they therefore destroyed the machines.

But the survivors must inevitably retreat, as the contradictions of objectives develop: then the return to the past appears more and more impossible, while new ideas are reinforced, the only ones adapted to the objective forces that are rising. The past is prolonged in consciousness until the day when the present becomes intolerable to the point that a new one must be found; then the future prevails.

Conclusion

The title of this lesson was justified. It is from the material life of societies that one must start to understand their spiritual life.

From this we will draw some lessons of great practical significance.

1. The only problems that can be solved in a given period of time are those posed by the real needs of society.  Marxists, therefore, base their action on a thorough study of the objective conditions in a given period; that is why this action is fruitful. They thus oppose Blum's idealism which, denying the material character of social facts, especially economic facts, transformed socialism into mysticism; all action was therefore doomed to failure.
2. In his relations with the workers, the revolutionary militant must never stop at what the workers think. Ideas are one thing, material conditions are another. Such a proletarian can have conservative ideas without knowing it, under the ideological pressure of the bourgeoisie. Is that surprising? No, since the ruling class, at the same time as it exploits the workers, does everything possible to persuade them that it is perfect this way (the official morality taught in school does not preach class struggle, but serene acceptance of what is). We must not condemn this proletarian: his misconceptions express the objective reality of a society where the bourgeoisie reigns. Much more!  Beyond the diversity of opinions that share the workers, the revolutionary, proceeding with the materialist analysis of the objective conditions, will highlight the community of interests, thus founding the unity of action: unity of action is possible because in the last resort it is not the ideas that determine the conditions of the class struggle, but the conditions of the class struggle that determine the ideas. That is why in 1936, Maurice Thorez, addressing the Catholic workers or Cross of Fire, said to them: You are workers like us, who are communists. "Let us unite in the common struggle for the good of our people and our country"
3. The transformation of ideas, as we have shown in this lesson, has a material basis. This is of great consequence for the revolutionary education of the workers: the penetration of revolutionary ideas can only take place in and through struggle, in connection with the concrete tasks of life, on the construction site, in the workshop, in the office. It is the social struggle (objective condition) that makes possible the decisive changes in the consciousness of the workers (subjective reflection). It is thus through the united struggle to resolve the objective contradictions of capitalist society that the non-encrusted revolutionary workers make their experience, with the help of the marxist-leninist vanguard, discovering solutions to their ills. In turn, they become revolutionaries.

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The role and importance of ideas in social life

Conclusion

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The formation, importance and role of scientific socialism

Conclusion

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Historical materialism

Production: productive forces and production relationships

Conclusion

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The law of necessary correspondence between the relations of production and the character of the productive forces

The role of human action

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The class struggle before capitalism

The development of the bourgeoisie

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The contradictions of capitalist society

Conclusion

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The superstructure

Conclusion

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Socialism

Conclusion

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From socialism to communism

Conclusion

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The materialist theory of state and nation

The state

Class struggle and freedom

The proletariat and freedoms

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The nation (i)

The working class and the nation

Proletarian patriotism

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The nation (ii)

Notes on Alsace and the Moselle

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