Helpful terms and concepts
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." (Karl Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach)
Society today is in turmoil and transition. More is at stake than ever before — not only in whose interests society will be reorganized, but also how and when humanity will be able to take the next step toward realizing its full potential. We are in an epoch of human history made possible by an explosion of science and knowledge and defined by the beginning of production without labor. As society today enters this qualitatively new epoch, revolutionaries face new challenges. The mastery of the scientific method associated with Marxism is urgent. Using that Marxism, revolutionaries must focus intellectual attention on developing the guidelines for revolutionary practice in this epoch.
Marx and Engels couldn't describe the changes going on before our eyes today, but their understanding of the laws of motion and change allowed them to anticipate a leap to a new quality of social and human development. The science of society they developed equips us to participate productively in the profound changes swirling around us.
The following excerpt from Anti-Duhring, by Frederick Engels, shows Engels’ dialectical conception of development and suggests the potential offered by this epoch.
"The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in civilization was a step towards freedom.... For the generation of fire by friction for the first time gave man command over one of the forces of nature, and thus separated him forever from the animal kingdom. The steam-engine will never bring about such a mighty leap forward in human development, however important it may seem in our eyes as representing all those immense productive forces dependent on it, forces which alone make possible a state of society in which there are no longer class distinctions or anxiety over the means of subsistence for the individual, and in which for the first time there can be talk of real human freedom, of an existence in harmony with the known laws of nature. But the simple fact that all past history can be characterized as the history of the epoch from the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion into heat up to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion shows how young the whole of human history still is, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views."
In this sense, Engels suggests leaps in science and technology far greater than those of his day, and he anticipates the scientific and material possibility for human beings to escape the dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest laws that govern the rest of the animal kingdom and to embrace and realize the full potential of their humanity.
This "Introduction" presents the contents of this Study Guide, discusses the importance of both philosophy and ideology to revolutionaries, offers some thoughts on the importance of Marxists developing doctrine for our time, and shares with you how this
Study Guide came to be. Some of the terms in this introduction will be more fully explored in the classes that follow.
Marxist philosophy and revolutionaries
Marxist philosophy helps us set up and solve real questions. It explains the material nature of the world and the dialectical nature of its motion and change. Historical materialism is the extension of that methodology to the study of society and how it develops and changes. When revolutionaries extend the science of change to the study of society, we can understand how society evolves and leaps ahead, which aspects of social change are automatic and beyond our will and which aspects require conscious and planned action by people.
The complexities of history point to the importance of Marxist philosophy for revolutionaries. History is the multi-layered story of the relation between what objective conditions make possible and what conscious people make happen. It's the story of intrigue and deception for selfish gain, of personal sacrifice for high ideals, of wars for liberation of oppressed peoples, of revolutions to overthrow one class and secure political power for another. In a broader sense, it is the story of people fighting for their moral values and historically evolved aspirations in the context of economic and other material changes. It is the story of the relation between the practical (activity, organization, social struggle) and the conscious (philosophy, theory, politics, ideology). It is the story of political revolution within social revolution. Within history, revolutionaries take up the challenge to develop the subjective or conscious understanding that equips people to fight for and determine the results of the objective changes.
The more revolutionaries know about how the world works and how history unfolds, the better we are able to play our particular role.
So why this particular Study Guide?
We want to make every possible contribution to the continuity of the study of Marx and Engels on philosophy. Philosophy isn't the property of the elite few; it belongs to every revolutionary. This Study Guide, for example, is the product of the summation of decades of collective experience and study by active revolutionaries. The search for the correct approach to advancing the revolutionary process in the US propelled the study and discussion of philosophy. The deeper understanding of philosophy generated the framework for developing doctrine for the questions of revolution posed by this epoch. By employing dialectical materialism to study the qualitative changes in how things are produced today, we were able to further our understanding of the process of change and to draw conclusions about what this means for society. We could then clearly see that to ensure the continuity of Marxism today, Marxists have to use the science to further develop the conclusions of how society is changing and why. Marxists must use those conclusions to more sharply focus their activity as revolutionaries.
Therefore, this Study Guide is aimed at the study of philosophy as the science of change. In assembling and distributing it, we hope to contribute a mechanism both for continuing to study the philosophy developed by Marx and Engels and for further exploring that philosophy in the context of a new epoch in social development. We hope that active revolutionaries will find this Study Guide useful and that it will provide
a framework for the continuing development of the science, doctrine and practice of revolutionaries.
This Study Guide is a tool for active revolutionaries who strive to master the science of revolution. It provides a framework for discussion among those who are willing to study, think, and collectively develop the principles that will effectively guide the work of revolutionaries.
We revolutionaries today have new territory to chart, new challenges to figure out, new opportunities for actually achieving the kind of society that previous generations could only dream of. We hope the use of this Study Guide will, on the one hand, stimulate discussions that cultivate a scientific framework for revolutionary passion and, on the other hand, help aim the study of Marxism toward revolutionary practice.
Ideology
In this spirit, something must be said about ideology and its role in ensuring that the study of philosophy truly becomes a tool for change.
Consciousness compels, motivates and directs action; action completes or consummates consciousness. What you do is an expression of what you think or believe on one level or another. Ideology is the intangible glue between what you think and what you do.
What do we mean by "ideology"? There are many different definitions and uses of the word. Many people refer to ideology in the sense of the contending sets of abstract ideas that separate one group of people from another. But here we are using the term "ideology" in the sense of a system of ideas that expresses and defines relationships among people and between individuals and society. For the revolutionary, ideology expresses an understanding of his or her relation to the rest of the world and a sense of responsibility to society. Ideology is not just a question of what you think, but rather how you approach what you think: what you do and how you see your place in the world and your role in changing it.
So what does ideology have to do with studying philosophy and the science of society? Science is not the same as ideology, but it is one of the fibers that strengthen ideology. Sterile study of philosophy or Marxism in general does not make one a revolutionary; nor does outrage at injustice equip the revolutionaries to accomplish their tasks. Ideology grows out of the interrelation between the passionate struggle for a better world and a scientific approach to accomplishing that change. For Marxists, the purpose and value of philosophy is not simply to interpret the world, but to change it. Marxist philosophy provides the scientific approach that reinforces our conviction that what we are fighting for is possible. It identifies the role of revolutionaries in the revolutionary process, provides the tools we need to figure out how to carry out our commitment to humanity, and gives us confidence that our energies are going to make a difference.
Scope of this Study Guide -- themes in philosophy
The classes and readings in this Study Guide explore two main themes in the study of change. Both themes point to the responsibility of revolutionaries to develop the conscious side of the revolutionary process.
The first theme addresses the relationship of the objective and subjective aspects of the process of change. The central organizing concept is that changes in the productive forces are the basis for the revolutionary reorganization of society. These objective changes, however, don't automatically determine how society is organized. People fight out and decide the outcome of epoch-defining material changes in society, and they can only do so under definite material conditions.
For example, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a whole new stage of development of society. However, it was the class struggle and the different outcomes of the various political revolutions of that era that determined whether society would industrialize in the interests of the masses of people or in the interests of the capitalists.
Some distorted Marx's and Engels' thesis about how society changes, implying that Marx and Engels underestimated the role of the subjective. On the contrary, Marx and Engels relied on history and philosophy to show how people fight out and determine the changes made possible by objective changes. Once again, Marxists have to assess the objective, economic changes and rally to the responsibility of revolutionaries to develop the subjective side of the revolutionary process, to ensure the intellectual development of the combatants.
The second theme explores the nature of motion and change. Change is not just a shift in the balance of forces, and it doesn't come about simply through the same old thing getting bigger or more intense. What then accounts for change? Qualitative change can only begin when something new enters into an ongoing process from outside of that process or when something is extracted from the process.
As we grappled with the nature of the profound changes in the world today, we found that the current new objective conditions allowed us to understand the dialectics of change further than had been possible in previous times. The technology associated with electronics represents the beginning of production without labor — an antagonism to capitalism’s essential relation of buying and selling labor power. By looking at the changes going on around us, we were able to grasp more deeply the importance of certain principles of Marxist philosophy, such as, the difference between contradiction and antagonism, how the introduction of something qualitatively new into a process begins the quantitative stages of the leap. Our understanding of philosophy then helped us grasp the importance of the materials changes going on throughout the world today.
An understanding of the motion of change also sharpened our grasp of the role of revolutionaries. Although capitalism could grow alongside of other forms of private property, communism won't automatically grow out of the destruction of capitalism. Communism is "a system or theory of the ownership of all means of production (and distribution) by the community or society…as a whole." Because communism means the abolition of private property, it cannot coexist with or spontaneously grow out of capitalism. Achieving it will depend on the consciousness and conscious activity of millions of people.
There exist certain values (such as the moral conviction that no one should be hungry in a world of plenty) and practices (such as the development and sharing of information and information products on the Internet) which are consistent with communism. Although these values and practices are consistent with communism, they can coexist with capitalism. Material conditions are setting the objective basis for people to fight for communism. What's missing is their consciousness to do so.
The challenge of developing doctrine
The interweaving of these two themes in philosophy, along with our collective efforts to be effective revolutionaries, kept challenging us and pushing us forward. We found that we had to make a distinction between the science of society, referred to as Marxism, and doctrine, which is often also referred to as Marxism. Simply put, science helps us understand the world; doctrine is a guide to changing it. Once we understood that distinction, we saw the importance of developing doctrine. So the classes in this Study Guide lead to and culminate in a discussion of doctrine for this epoch. Here we will look briefly at several related questions that are more fully explored in the various classes, and developed in the class on doctrine.
What is doctrine and why is it so important to revolutionaries? Doctrine is a general policy or set of principles that guides political activity toward a definite political goal. These guidelines aim the political activity and collective efforts of revolutionaries toward pushing the process ahead through its various stages and toward its resolution.
As revolutionaries, we don't have the luxury of simply declaring what we're for and what we're against. Serious revolutionaries proceed from the standpoint of the line of march of the revolution – the stages it has to go through to consciously and politically resolve the questions society is objectively fighting out. Accomplishing each stage doesn’t happen automatically; nor is it a smooth and even process. It depends on the consciousness of great numbers of people. Doctrine guides revolutionaries to identify the opportunities presented by the objective developments. It guides us as we set out to develop the thinking of the people and prepare for future stages of the revolutionary process as it matures.
Why is it so important to develop doctrine for our time? A new epoch means revolutionaries operate under different conditions and therefore need the guidance of new doctrine.
Marx and Engels made their intellectual and practical contribution in the context of the social revolution brought on by the shift from an agrarian-based to an industrial-based society. Likewise, we are also in an epoch of transition from one material basis of society to another, that is, an epoch of social revolution. And today, as in Marx's time, new tools are beginning to disrupt and destroy the society built on the old basis. Such moments of transition and instability in society are precisely when the work of revolutionaries is most decisive in determining how society reorganizes around those new tools.
But there is a crucial difference between the transition that society was going through in Marx's and Engels' time and that which our society is going through today. Marx and Engels described how the beginning of industrial production began to disrupt a society built around manual labor and how it destabilized those who held political power.
Today, the beginning of the application of electronics to production is disrupting a society based on electro-mechanical production and organized around large-scale industry. On the one hand, capitalism depends on, and is defined by, wage labor; on the other hand, new methods of production are beginning to eliminate labor. This particular clash of law systems shapes the social revolution of our epoch.
This makes all the difference in the world and calls for the development of doctrine to guide the work of revolutionaries today. Marx and Engels faced a situation in which
the interests of the working class were opposed to those of the capitalist class, but the working class was locked into the system defined by the interdependence of the two hostile classes. The objective connections between those classes were growing and strengthening. By contrast, today new methods of production are undermining and destroying those connections. Today we face the social consequences of the capitalist system in the process of its destruction, not the growing pains and expansion of capitalism.
As a set of principles that guide revolutionaries’ work, doctrine has to align to this qualitatively new situation. Its role is to guide revolutionaries' work within this particular leap in society in order to advance the reconstruction of society in the interests of all of humanity.
Besides aligning to the particular quality of the social revolution we are dealing with, doctrine also has to speak specifically to the current stage of the revolutionary process. Today doctrine has to guide us through the relatively early stages of the revolutionary process, when society and the thinking of the people are being disrupted. It should guide us as we focus our energies to develop the conscious understanding of the millions of people whose lives have been disrupted by underlying material changes and to cultivate their ability to fight in their interests and the interests of all humanity. Future stages of the revolutionary process will bring new challenges and will call for the further development of doctrine.
What does this have to do with philosophy, and what difference does all this make to the practical work or revolutionaries? Philosophy is about change — what causes it and the nature of its motion. Revolutionaries are most effective when they proceed from an understanding of the nature of change and aim their work accordingly. Qualitative change doesn't come about through a mechanical increase or decrease of the amount or intensity of the old; it depends on the introduction of something new into an ongoing process. Objective conditions set the basis for social change; people determine the direction and outcome of that change. Doctrine proceeds from a scientific description of the objective conditions and the laws of how change takes place in order to determine general guidelines for the work of revolutionaries.
Many principles commonly accepted and followed by revolutionaries don't proceed either from an understanding of how change actually takes place or from an understanding of the specifics of this epoch. These principles are not always explicitly stated. However, as the by-products of imposing doctrine for one situation onto another, they are persistent. Certainly conceptions like "build an anti-monopoly coalition," "unite to fight the right," or "fight back" as routes to the transformation of society (or even to advancing the interests of the exploited and oppressed) reflect an incorrect application of doctrine that was appropriate elsewhere a century and a half ago.
Developing doctrine for this epoch and bringing it into play poses many more questions than we can cover in this Introduction. As you go through the classes in this Study Guide, you will explore the complexities of these and other questions.
How to use the Study Guide
This guide offers a mechanism for the continued study and discussions that equip revolutionaries to critically analyze events as they unfold. We tried to aim the classes not so much at getting across a set of ideas as at providing a process through which the
methodology of Marxism becomes an integral part of the participants’ intellectual and political lives. The value of this methodology is as a way of understanding the world and how it works, approaching questions revolutionaries have to figure out, and identifying the role of each individual in revolutionary social change. Therefore, we share this Study Guide not so much for one set of people to teach ideas or propagate beliefs to another set of people, but to nurture and enhance the ability of all of us to think and master the methodology for solving the problems posed by the class struggle of this epoch.
Naturally, there is a relation between how we think and what we think. So, some of the classes do point to some conclusions. But it is essential that we don’t allow those conclusions (and tentative conclusions) to limit or define our study and development of the science. The tragic history of confusing science and doctrine has seen lives lost and revolutions betrayed. At times, this sort of confusion has also constrained science and reduced it to the justification for a doctrine or politically necessary policy at a given time and place. Revolutionaries need to continue to develop scientifically and to learn to employ the methodology that flows from Marxist philosophy so as to continually develop doctrine as times change.
We hope you will use the methodology explored in the Study Guide to tackle the actual questions revolutionaries face today. Go beyond imposing doctrine of past moments onto today's reality. Develop and share your classes, studies and conclusions. Above all, make this study and discussion a continual and integral part of your life as a revolutionary. The study of Marxism is not a one-time event. We learned a lot working on this Study Guide. We hope others will learn a lot using it and will contribute to the intellectual treasury of the revolutionary movement.
