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This text was originally written as a section of the book Reason in Revolt: Marxist philosophy and modern science, but eventually the book became too long and this section had to be left out. Therefore this history of philosophy is published here for the first time, starting with the question: “Do we need philosophy?”
Over a hundred years after Darwin, the idea that everything changes is generally accepted among educated people. It was not always so. In this part of his series on the History of Philosophy, Alan Woods examines the first “dialecticians”, who tried to understand the processes of motion and change in nature.
Trotsky’s ‘ABC of Materialist Dialectics’ is a brilliant short explanation of Marxist philosophy. It was written as part of a defence of Marxism against a middle-class revisionist tendency in the American Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s, which attempted to challenge its basic principles. As opposed to pragmatism and empiricism, Trotsky defended dialectical materialism as a richer, fuller, more comprehensive view of society and life in general.
We republish this article on the referundum on the EEC Common Market, written by Ted Grant in 1979. The article explains that the struggle against a capitalist common market needs to be linked to the struggle of changing society on socialist lines, as the struggle against the European Constitution today must also be.
We publish this article written by Ted Grant just before the general
election in Britian in 1979. The article demonstrates that the Tory
policies were doomed to failure because of the sickness of British
capitalism and that the reforms offered in the Labour Party programme
were unattainable on a capitalist basis. The only way to carry out
these reforms and take society forward was the nationalisation of the
means of production, and the creation of a planned economy under the
democratic control of the working class.
Someone has said that one of the criteria for winning the Turner Prize is not to be understood. The philosophy behind this is: the less I am understood, the better the art. Yet the kind of art that wins the Turner competition also has merit. They have the merit of holding up a mirror to the society that produced them, and saying: “This is what you are, and this is all you are capable of producing.” These works point out to us that beneath the sleek, comfortable bourgeois surface of modern society, horrors are lurking: dead vermin, murder, death and decay.
We are publishing our second study guide on historical materialism, which forms part of the book “What is Marxism?”. Historical Materialism is the application of Marxist science to historical development. The fundamental proposition of historical materialism can be summed up in a sentence: “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)
Dialectical materialism is the revolutionary philosophy of Marxism. In this article, Rob Sewell explains this fundamental aspect of the Marxist method.
Dialectical materialism is the fundamental method of Marxism: a philosophy that seeks to analyse and explain the world due to the processes and material conditions in nature; a philosophy that seeks to explain change and motion. John Pickard provides an introduction to this revolutionary philosophy at the heart of Marxism.
Phil Mitchinson explores the ideas of “direct action” associated with the groups that are often at the centre of organising recent anti-capitalist protests.
It is nearly seven years since George Bush, the then president of the US, made his famous “New World Order” speech. This was in 1991. In the build-up to the Gulf War the main imperialist power on earth promised a world without wars, without dictatorships and, of course, a world firmly under the control of a single all-powerful world policeman–the US. After the fall of Stalinism, US imperialism really thought that the world would be firmly under their command and they would be able to dictate the destiny of each and every country. All conflicts in the world were to be solved through dialogue in a kind of “Pax Americana.” Now all these dreams have been reduced to rubble.