In the period of its historical ascent, the bourgeoisie played a most progressive role, not only in developing the productive forces, and thereby mightily expanding humanity’s power over nature, but also in pushing back the frontiers of science, knowledge, and culture.
Luther, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dührer, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, and a host of other pathfinders of civilisation shine like a galaxy, illuminating the broad highway of human cultural and scientific advance opened by the Reformation and Renaissance.
In its youth the bourgeoisie was capable of producing great thinkers: Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Adam Smith, and Ricardo. In the period of its decline, it is only capable of producing flea-crackers.
The latest major wave of such ideas came in the 70s, 80s, and 90s as a reaction to the defeats of a series of revolutions worldwide – defeats which were compounded by the collapse of the Soviet Union. This led to the growth of the school of postmodernism which covered postmodernist philosophy, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory, and a whole host of so-called theories based on identity politics.
But whereas Mach and Avenarius, as Lenin brilliantly showed, were bad copies of Berkeley, Kant, and Hume, today’s postmodernist geniuses are bad copies of bad copies. Desperate to appear original and trying hard to hide their incompetence they stuff their works with incomprehensible, convoluted, and intentionally ambiguous language.
They say there is nothing new under the sun. That statement is proven to be true by the entire history of bourgeois philosophy in our times. Every single school of philosophy for the last 150 years at least is merely a regurgitation, in one way or another, of the irrational ideas of subjective idealism – the crudest, most absurd, and pointless varieties of idealism.
The latest postmodernist craze is just another one of these variants. It has served to confuse and disorient a whole generation of philosophy students in the universities, who imagine that they have discovered something entirely new and novel, when in reality they merely repeat the absurdities of earlier philosophies, which were already comprehensively demolished by Lenin as early as 1908. Here we have the most striking proof of the correctness of Marx’s celebrated dictum: “social being determines consciousness”.
The degeneration of bourgeois philosophy is a reflection of the dead-end of the capitalist system itself. A system which has become irrational must lean on irrational ideas. In attempting to maintain itself, the bourgeoisie has turned against its own revolutionary past. Turning against the best traditions of the enlightenment, capitalism is clinging ever harder to the modern-day descendants of feudal mysticism and scholasticism.
A man on the edge of a precipice is not capable of rational thought. In a vague way, the ideologues of the bourgeoisie sense that the system they defend is reaching its end. The spread of irrational tendencies, mysticism, and religious fanaticism reflects the same thing.
Nowadays, the subjective idealists are reduced to fighting a desperate rear-guard action, which amounts to the total dissolution of philosophy, reducing it entirely to semantics (the study of the meaning of words).
The endless arguments about meaning and semantics and the minutiae of meanings resembles nothing so much as the interminable debates of the medieval Schoolmen on such fascinating subjects as whether angels had sex and how many of them could dance on the head of a pin. The problem is that in their obsession with form, they forgot the content altogether. As long as the formal rules were obeyed, the content could be as absurd as one liked.
Marx once observed: “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.” (K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 236.) Modern bourgeois philosophy prefers the former to the latter. In its obsession with combatting Marxism (and materialism in general), it has dragged philosophy back to the worst period of its old, outworn, and sterile past.
The fact that all this fussing and fiddling and playing with words could be given the name of philosophy at all is a proof of how far modern bourgeois thought has declined. Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Mind: “By the little with which the human spirit is satisfied, we can judge the extent of its loss.” That would be a fitting epitaph for all of bourgeois philosophy after Hegel and Marx.
In the present period, the honour of fighting against the stream, of combatting mystical and irrational thought, falls to the revolutionary vanguard of the working class, the Marxists. To cite once more the words of Joseph Dietzgen: “Philosophy is not a science, but a safeguard against social democracy.” (In those days, the Marxists called themselves social democrats.)
And he added: “Then it is no wonder that social democrats have their own philosophy.” That philosophy – the philosophy of Marxism – is called dialectical materialism. It remains one of the most important weapons in our revolutionary arsenal.
And anyone who wishes to understand how to use that weapon correctly should consider it a duty not just to read, but to make a careful study of one of the most fundamental texts in all the rich arsenal of Marxist thought, Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
(A brief excerpt from “Lenin in a Year: In Defence of Materialism by Alan Woods.”
