In order to transform our lives, the whole society, and the whole world, we must understand how and why everything is the way it is. This means we must study philosophy, which is the “generalization and summation of the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of society,” like Chairman Mao, leader of the Communist Party of China had said. All philosophy has a class nature, and the foundation of revolutionary and working class philosophy is materialism.
What is materialism? In short, it is the philosophical school of thought that is fundamentally opposed to idealism, and which views matter rather than ideas as the basis of the world.
In the course of human society, there have been many schools of philosophy, but ultimately there are only two camps, materialism and idealism, who struggled to answer the fundamental question of philosophy, the question of the relationship between thinking and being and between consciousness and matter.
This fundamental question of philosophy has two aspects: one, on whether the origin of the world comes from either concrete matter or consciousness, and two, on whether thought, or consciousness, can recognize and correctly reflect existence. Idealism asserts that consciousness is the source of the world and is the “first principle,” giving a false answer to this fundamental question and therefore is unable to provide us with a correct understanding of how to change the world. Throughout history, idealism was used as a weapon of the oppressor and exploiting classes, who used it to tell the people various lies, saying “it is enough to change the way you think”; “nothing in the world will ever change”; “everything in the earthly world is fake and doesn’t matter”—in this way, justifying their own rule and justifying a lack of resistance to their rule.
Materialism holds that matter is first and consciousness second, that matter is the origin of the world and is the world itself, and that our understanding is the product of and reflection of the objective material world. The foundation of materialism is the recognition that matter is an objective reality that exists independently of consciousness. Materialism arose as humanity gained more practice in understanding and transforming the world, as we gradually recognized the essence of the our world and society, and got rid of superstitions and delusions. The new experience of struggling for production, developing the natural sciences, and the class struggles between the bourgeoisie and proletariat has also enriched people’s understanding of materialism, as we discovered more and more on how the world works from our experience in living and changing it.
Materialism has always been a tool of progressive classes and strata throughout human history, in every social revolution, scientific and technological breakthrough, one can find materialism. However, the old capitalist and pre-capitalist materialism was not a thoroughgoing materialism. While it acknowledged that matters comes first and consciousness comes second, it turned its back on this principle in the field of social history. It doesn’t acknowledge that social phenomena are based on the foundations of economy and production. Worse, at times it is transformed into a tool of the class enemy and completely denies the separate existence of consciousness, equating it with matter—meaning that the workers can never go beyond what is the “status quo” and change the world by revolutionary means. Today, this view is pushed by people who talk about things like “technological singularity” and AI rule of the world.
It was not until the emergence of Marxist philosophy, dialectical materialism, that this issue was resolved. Dialectical materialism holds that social existence primarily determines consciousness, while at the same time recognizes that people’s thought or consciousness, being something on its own, can also react to social existence and change it. This lays out the relationship between ideas and matter, between theory and practice: as revolutionary theory comes from social practice, from production, scientific experiment, and class struggle, this theory can go on to guide our struggle and develop it further. Armed with such a theory and applying it into practice, the proletariat is able to shape the world according to its own will, destroying the society of exploitation of man by man and establishing a new one with equality and freedom for all.
As our thoughts, and thus our understandings, don’t exist outside of material reality, and as our existence in society primarily determines how we think, any revolutionary theory can only come from concrete practice. Any theory will also be useless if not put into practice, and it is practice which is the best way for us to better understand it and develop it further.
How can we understand revolutionary theory? Idealism teaches that consciousness is separate and superior to material reality, and therefore it is enough to just study, to debate, and from this process we can perfect our grasp of anything. Dialectical materialism, on the other hand, stresses the importance of practice. When we first get to know a new concept we might only be able to superficially “know” it, only grasping the form and not the true meaning. But when we link it to our previous knowledge gained from practice, and especially when we apply it into practice—whether making mistakes along the way or not—we will get a much better picture of it, all while we continuing our studies. This is true for solving a math problem, for learning a life skill, as well as for mastering Marxism. As theory comes from practice and goes on to guide practice, practice also advances the theory. In this way, the two form an upward spiral as we change and understand more of the world concurrently.
For example, a concept like “surplus value” might sound like something out of a college economics class at first. But when we connect it to our own lives as workers, it becomes much clearer: for every 8-hour day we work, we only get paid for what we produced in less than an hour and sometimes even less than 10 minutes, the rest is surplus value. And when we apply this in practice, in calculating our rate of exploitation with our coworkers, mobilizing, politicizing and organizing them to fight for wage increases, we are gaining a more profound knowledge of our own power, the inner workings of the capitalist system, and how to overthrow it.
Today, among the left in the United States, there is an overemphasis on study, divorcing it from revolutionary practice. It is often said that the great revolutionaries of the past have already laid down all theory, and it is our task to first study them so we can use them well. This approach is very common across all camps, from those who call themselves Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, revolutionary nationalists, and even Maoists. Fundamentally, this serves to justify a lack of social practice by escaping into studies, therefore separating the dialectical process of theory and practice, falling into idealism. While these groups have studied and debated among themselves for years and decades, the working class and oppressed nations continue to face deeper and heavier oppression and exploitation day by day. As all philosophy has a class nature, these people follow the philosophy of the capitalist class, they are predominantly from a petty-bourgeois and bourgeois background, isolated from the life and struggle of the workers.
There is also an error by some to overemphasize practice over theory and say that practice alone is enough. This also negates materialism, as it does not allow for our practice to be collected and systematized into what we call revolutionary theory, which is then again applied and developed further. In fact, the most important part in the process of knowledge and practice is the application of knowledge into practice—it is only through this application that we can consciously transform the the world.
As revolutionaries-in-formation, we must understand the importance of going to the working class and taking part in their struggle, both learning from them and leading them. At the same time, we must continue to study Marxism, the experience of the revolutionary and working class movement before us, in order to better intervene in the daily struggles of our class and gain new victories. In philosophical language, this is the only materialist approach.
For further study we suggest:
- Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Part 2: Materialism.
- Mao Zedong, On Practice.
- Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Part 3: Historical Materialism.
- Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
