In its content, Marxism is the result of a generalization of the observations of various thinkers of the antagonism that has prevailed for thousands of years between the classes of haves and have-nots. However, this generalization was not made by mechanical summation, but meaningfully, based on an economic analysis of the anarchy of production in the capitalist industrial era. Unlike the philosophy of the 18th century, the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels has its roots deep in economic facts.

Despite the fact that enlightenment philosophers have mercilessly criticized all the prevailing views on nature and society, contemptuously rejecting them in the face of omnipotent reason; in fact, all the supposed great achievements of this philosophy: reasonableness, justice, equality, and the social contract, after passing the millstones of historical practice, have turned into private property, bourgeois justice, «equality» before the law, and democratic republics. This is a set of such sour and state-owned ideologies, which today is called the «rule of law,» that only the blind, deaf, and mute teachers of the humanities, and only in words, believe in their virtue. The theory and practice of the rule of law is collapsing every day, and the real aspirations — eternal peace, despite all the organizations of the «United» Nations, have not been achieved. Endless wars of conquest have been replaced by endless wars for resources, influence, capital, and neocolonial subordination. Chistogan [cash (about the amount received in full, without deductions)] has finally replaced all the motives of humanity and subordinated his «omnipotent» mind, which was passionately praised by the enlightenment thinkers.

It is precisely the «indestructibility» of bourgeois ideals, with their obvious inconsistency, which shows that without turning to a firmer ground than abstract pure reason, it is impossible to turn our views into a truly transformative force. Real life responds to every stupid idealistic theory with the painful truth of poverty, hunger, ignorance, war, and man-made catastrophe.

Today, after the destruction of the USSR, the discussion about social development has been replaced by talk about the apocalypse. If the earlier society was concerned with the question of how to arrange life for the happiness of mankind, now earthlings are only interested in what gives them a chance to somehow survive in a thermonuclear war, an environmental catastrophe, or the mutual destruction of each other by increasingly sophisticated means of mass terror. The rotting vices of society have imperceptibly turned into our inevitable future.

Having discarded the only doctrine of communism that is scientifically motivated by optimism, humanity humbly bowed its head before the absurdity of the social organization of the imperialist stage of capitalism. A hundred degenerate oligarchs now own a fortune that is sufficient to feed a billion hungry people. However, at the same time, he is engaged in hypocritical charity, and he buys yachts, football clubs, plots on the Moon, racing highways, jewelry eggs, houses, airplanes, and cars in incredible quantities. Abramovich spent $1.6 billion on football — this is the 2015 budget for basic science in the Russian Federation. Isn’t this alone enough to draw a conclusion about the unreasonableness of the social structure?

And if the utopian ideas of socialism left the historical arena in the 19th century, along with the development of large-scale industry and the emergence of scientific socialism, today we can say that the public consciousness has generally rejected all hopes for a radical, revolutionary transformation of life. Only reformism, laced with cheap populism, has remained. However, life and the obvious shortcomings of the social system are hitting the ignorant masses of working people all over the world with increasing force to the amusement of the oligarchs — the new aristocrats of a decaying civilization.

Marxism was the result not only and not so much of a brilliant discovery, but an inevitable consequence of the class struggle of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In other words, his task was not to invent an ideal society and a better morality but to investigate the economic and historical process, the consequence of which was the emergence of the dialectical identity of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in order to find a means in the economic mechanisms to resolve their irreconcilable struggle. Marxism, being a brilliant generalization of the experience of the class struggle, primarily of the proletariat, has become a real science of society. Naturally and solely because the class struggle is the main content of the history of all peoples at the stage of the post-primitive development of «civilization.»

Marx and Engels showed that the proletariat, with its demands and struggles, is a necessary product of the economic order of capitalism, which is based on private property and a disorderly large-scale social production. In the 19th century, there were many talented and honest people, who were carried away by the struggle for political freedom against the autocracy of individual tsars, the police, and the clergy; they did not see the opposition of the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and did not allow the idea that the workers can act as an independent social force; these were dreamers, albeit brilliant at times, thinking that it was only necessary to convince the rulers and the ruling classes of the injustices of the modern social order, of a socialism without a struggle, of how to stop the development of industry and the proletariat, and to stop the course of history. Today there are no fewer of them: the same fighters, who are now propagandizing anarcho-syndicalism, nationalism, and the rejection of Marxism in different ways in the name of «struggle» within the framework of bourgeois opposition or marginal revolutionism. True, the degree of their harm to the cause of the revolution is much greater, and the degree of their talent is much more modest than that of their predecessors of the 19th century.

In our time, the Marxist truth is especially obvious to the rulers who have been crushed: that humanity can be saved from its oppressive disasters not by the will of benevolent heroes, but only by an organized working class armed with scientific knowledge. However, despite the fact that communism is the ultimate goal and the necessary result of the development of the productive forces of society, the class struggle must be consciously directed against the foundations of a class society — private property and the anarchy of social production. This direction of the struggle of the proletariat cannot develop by itself; on the contrary, it is the result of scientific research turned into politics. The sum of such scientific research is the communist theory of revolution, which naturally follows from the application of diamatic thinking to the field of social reconstruction. However, it should not be assumed that communism is the science of all sciences. Despite the fact that the modern education system and the accumulated body of theoretical knowledge of bourgeois sciences are organized in such a way that they force, first of all, young people to assimilate a lot of dead knowledge that clog their heads and turn a generation into consumers, this does not at all imply a requirement of discarding the entire culture of humanity in favor of communist slogans. It is precisely the slogans, the conclusions, and the dogmas which will remain from communism if an entire building of Marxist-Leninist science is not erected in a person’s head, and if the entire sum of knowledge, the consequence of which is communism, is not assimilated.

Marx relied on a solid foundation of human knowledge, drawing from a detailed analysis of the capitalist formation a conclusion about the inevitability of its revolutionary transformation into a classless society. But what has changed since Marxism came into its own? At first glance, humanity has made a huge step forward compared to the 19th century. However, is it true? What changes did this «huge step» bring about? As you know, society is changing based on the changes in the way of production, which makes up the technological processes, the labor organization, and the system of people’s relations in the production process. Since production is a public matter, and labor is a determining factor in the quality of the personality of each individual member of society, insofar as the quality of relations between people regarding the means of production and other labor factors are the decisive and main content of the mode of production. Therefore, in the 20th century, despite the fact that there have been serious changes in technological processes and some changes in the organization of labor, the social relations of private property have changed only slightly, at least within the framework of capitalism; it should be assumed that the development of human society in its content has been exclusively quantitative.

So, since the end of the 19th century, capitalist relations have spread to the entire territory of the Earth, and pre-capitalist relations have remained only as disappearing remnants. The quantitative and qualitative ratio of classes has naturally changed towards further polarization — an insignificant bunch of oligarchs has become even more «insignificant,» but also much richer. The mass of proletarians has increased, and the gap between the consumption of the classes has grown. The layers of the petty bourgeoisie — the artisans and the peasantry — have been reduced to a minimum or have completely disappeared, thus replenishing mainly the proletariat. The forms of capitalist domination have changed qualitatively, in particular, monopolization and imperialism have intensified. The merger of the state with capital has reached unprecedented heights — public funds collected regardless of the class nature of the taxpayer are now directly pumped into the banking sector in favor of the financial oligarchy. To regulate the imperialist economy and as a result of monopolization, international firms and institutions — TNCs, the IMF, etc. have emerged. In other words, everything that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin predicted has happened.

In the situation of the 21st century, when classes are increasingly polarized, when the intermediate layers and the petty-bourgeois classes disappear, the proletariat will be able to apply Marxist theory in political practice virtually without restrictions and concessions. There is no need to reckon with the petty-bourgeois classes. They are being washed out of the social structure as an economic factor; nonetheless, they are being reproduced in the form of psychology and worldview more and more in the ideological field, and therefore the role of superstructure mechanisms in maintaining the rule of the bourgeoisie is increasing. Conversely, the subjective factor of the revolution acquires special significance — the working class, as before, is not opposed by the petty-bourgeois mass of the peasantry, but by the mass of the same counter-revolutionary proletariat, which enters the camp of imperialism only out of its own ignorance and zeal.

In this regard, it is important to remember that the proletariat is a revolutionary class in comparison with the bourgeoisie and not by itself. Its revolutionary character lies «exclusively» in the fact that its world-historical role consists in the destruction of the conditions of reproduction of classes, and hence in self-destruction. Simply put, the proletariat is a sufficiently culturally developed human slave to be freed from slavery once and for all. And, consequently, to liberate the entire society, which will make a leap from the realm of the elements and oppression into the scientific «realm» of conscious necessity and freedom.

In this regard, communism is a science that, although it reflects the fundamental interests of the proletariat, that is, all the direct producers of products and services, and therefore, in fact, the whole society, it requires an appropriate attitude. In other words, if you are a proletarian of physical labor, then the general political provisions of communism are «closer» to you. If you are a proletarian of intellectual labor, then some general theoretical provisions of communism are «closer» to you, but only when you conscientiously approach yourself and the cognition of reality. But this does not mean at all that the proletarian will become a communist by himself. The proletariat demands organization into the working class by its vanguard, the Communist Party, and education on the basic issues of worldview and political practice. Marxism does not grow out of the proletariat and does not grow into the proletariat by itself. Marxism is both a science of society and thinking and a revolutionary theory. Accordingly, one is inseparable from the other.

Relatively speaking, the first thing a person who wants to master Marxism faces is materialism. Nowadays, both in the bourgeois sciences, journalism, education, and in the public consciousness, no attention is paid to the partisanship of philosophy, the partisanship of worldview. Despite the fact that no individual is against having a strong thinking apparatus which would allow one to avoid making mistakes at every step, at least in his own life, at the same time he absolutely does not want to subject his methodology of thinking and his set of ideas about the world to a critical look. Every single man on the street firmly believes in the right to have his own opinion, and therefore in the right to have a wrong, but personal, opinion. This leads to a natural rejection of the cognizability of the world and, as a consequence, the rejection of materialism. The absolute majority of ordinary people actually live in a world concocted from opinions.

In fact, the world around us objectively exists and does not depend on our false ideas about it. This self-evident truth can be fully recognized, but not applied in the course of forming a worldview or its critical analysis. If a person wants his views to be adequate and his thinking apparatus to be able to penetrate into the essence of surrounding phenomena, he will have to admit that the world is infinitely moving in space and infinitely existing in time as indestructible matter. Consequently, consciousness, in turn, is a property of highly organized matter, the essence of which is to «transfer» approximate images of reality to the field of thinking for the transformation of the latter. Moreover, the degree of approximation corresponds to the degree of scientific knowledge.

For example, take such a natural phenomenon as lightning. Why is the knowledge of lightning infinite? At the first approach, lightning appears to us as a bright flash in the sky, which carries a force capable of kindling fire. In other words, all our conclusions about lightning are made based on direct observation of the phenomenon, from its perception by our senses. When we penetrate a little deeper into the phenomenon, further knowledge will show that lightning is a giant electric charge in the form of a bundle of rapidly disappearing or alternating filamentous branched spark channels. Improving our tools of cognition, we will already operate with such concepts as electric field strength, current strength, shock wave, atmospheric electricity. Even deeper — shock ionization, breakdown of escaping electrons, etc. to infinity into the depths of matter.

Thus, Marxism solved the basic question of philosophy regarding the relationship of matter and consciousness — matter is primary, and the world is knowable. This answer is an axiom that has allowed us to overcome the salon limitations of philosophy forever, turning it from treatises on reality into a transformative force of society.

The essence of materialism is to consider phenomena based on themselves, without humanization, without mixing in the supernatural. The fact is that, unlike inanimate matter, in which motion, as a form of existence of matter; and reflection, as its universal property in the form of interaction, are absolutely inseparable, a person first reflects objective laws of motion in his head, and then he performs an action. And it depends on the quality of his reflection as to how effective his activities will be. In other words, if a comet hits a planet, then their interpenetration and mutual reflection, in accordance with Newton’s laws, will occur at the moment of collision. No «reflection» will follow. If a person notices a comet, then the effectiveness of his actions will depend on the accuracy of his calculation of the distance, speed and trajectory of the celestial body. It turns out that the comet, first as a model, is transferred by a person into consciousness and then transformed there. The conclusions obtained are then applied in practice.

It is this «magical» opportunity to mold models of reality in consciousness that leads to a certain independence of thinking and to the need for fantasy. And since not only natural, but also social forces have blindly dominated man for millennia, and his social consciousness has not yet passed to a universal scientific form, the tendency is for social being to be reflected in his thinking constantly. In other words, the thinking subject constantly and often imperceptibly endows the material world with the properties of consciousness. For example, he believes in an omnipotent being, believes in an omnipotent idea, believes in fate, uses fictitious properties of phenomena, falsifies facts, denies the cognizability of phenomena or the whole reality and other mystical, near-mystical, anti-scientific and unscrupulous theories, approaches, and methodologies. The main «engine» of idealism is ignorance, which is promoted with economic encouragement from the ruling classes. A teacher of a higher educational institution will significantly complicate his life if he consistently conducts a theory of the cognizability of society and the laws by which it exists. But if, instead of achieving and propagating the only truth, the teacher declares an indefinite set of opinions that are equal to each other in value, his career will at least develop well. The situation is similar with journalism, writers, and all professions of intellectual work.

The fact that the philosophy of Marxism is materialism, by the way, also presupposes the knowledge of almost everything, since the category of «matter» encompasses the entire universe. Matter is infinite and indestructible: it has never arisen and will never disappear, and all the diversity of the universe is a natural product of the development of forms of moving matter.

However, materialism in its vulgar form existed long before Marx; it appeared together with philosophy in general. But only Marx managed to put materialism on a scientific track, that is, to complete the development of materialism in depth after establishing the facts of the successful applicability of the laws of dialectics to the development of society. Marx successfully reinterpreted and reworked idealistic dialectics, discovered mainly by Hegel, freeing materialism from methodological dependence on mechanicism. Before Marx, philosophers, as long as they remained materialists, were in thrall to the idea of the world as a set of mechanically moving elements of nature. The new phenomena that marked a breakthrough in physics and chemistry into the microcosm can be scientifically explained only with the help of dialectics. Marxism has given a brilliant result in generalizing the methodology of all sciences on the basis of materialistic dialectics. The origins of today’s crisis in the natural sciences, mainly in physics, lie precisely in the methodological rejection of diamatics in favor of professional cretinism in the form of various types of positivism, including the relativism of theoretical physics of the 20th — 21st centuries.

Having read exclusively encyclopedic articles, some superficially believe that dialectics is a universal way of cognition, which consists in juggling Hegelian triads and creatively filling the famous three laws with factology. Such a vulgar understanding of dialectics will inevitably lead to the rejection of materialism in favor of objectivism. An objectivist, examining a number of facts, will necessarily go astray by adopting the point of view of the apologist of these facts. He will invent a «law», a «process», a «trend» based on a certain number of facts torn out of life and will adjust the rest of the facts to the chosen line. Also with the laws of dialectics, the objectivist will necessarily either begin to «tighten the bolts» with the help of the law of the transition of quantitative changes into qualitative ones, or he will bring anything under the phrase about the laws of dialectics.

The Hegelian example of the germinating grain turned out to be too corrosive to the immature philosophical minds. Engels brilliantly deciphered this example of dialectics, but this, as practice has shown, was extremely insufficient to clear the ideas of dialectics from the school boy’s literal understanding.

The cornerstone of dialectics, as we know, is the consideration of objects in the unity of opposites, that is, as contradictions. In itself, the idea of contradiction is a mental abstraction necessary for modeling the unity of the opposite in consciousness. In reality, the world is consistent, and every identity of the opposite is logical and natural. But since consciousness is able to model only a specific moment of a continuously changing reality, and always only within certain boundaries that are actually conditional, the only way to mentally express the unity or identity of the opposite sides that make up the essence of the phenomenon can only be the idea of its inconsistency. In other words, the universe is constantly changing, every «thing» in the universe is actually a process mediated by all other processes. Therefore, modeling phenomena in consciousness is always not only a simplification of causes and effects, in form and content, but also a simplification of the cause of the self-movement of matter. So, for example, the social and biological side of a person is the unity of the sides of a human being locked in a struggle. It is inconceivable for them to exist without each other. Thus, for example, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie constitute the unity of the sides of the capitalist formation locked in a struggle. For example, the reactionary and revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat constitute the unity of the parties of the proletarian class locked in the struggle. For example, the progressive side of competition, the movements of technological development and enlargement, and the reactionary side of inconsistency, anarchy, conservatism constitute the unity of the parties of the bourgeois class locked in the struggle. Etc.

To master dialectics, it is not necessary to mentally divide each «thing» into two sides. This is a road towards the schematism of objectivism. The point is to examine thoroughly all possible sides of the «thing» with maximum conscientiousness to investigate the actual unity of the opposite, which underlies the self-movement and existence of the «thing.» The dialectical opposite cannot be found «from above», knowing that it must be somewhere. Only by disassembling the object of research into «cogs» only by approaching these «cogs» on the basis of maximum scientific and philosophical generalizations, which are called methodology, is it possible to penetrate into the essence of any phenomenon, explaining its unknown mechanism through the previously known.

Hegel, unlike the authors of all encyclopedias, wrote that it is categorically not enough to talk about the emergence of knowledge about something by explaining the concrete unknown through the multitude of the known. He quite rightly pointed out that, firstly, every known «thing» is known by us exclusively as an image of it-for-itself, that is, within conditional boundaries that distinguish it from everything else, and secondly, that this image is mediated by a certain set of connections of the «thing» process with all other processes. The more poorly a person is aware of the quantitative content of this set of connections, the lower the efficiency of cognition. And the definition of an unknown «thing» through known «things» is a completely external side of the matter.

In this case, the «cogs» are just the points of the interpenetration of processes. To illustrate: in the example of the proletariat, revolutionism is the result of the application of oppression (exploitation) to science, and venality is the result of the application of oppression to private property. In this way, it is possible to investigate the mechanisms of the formation of the proletariat into the working class. However, revolutionism and prostitution must be understood in a strictly scientific sense.

Diamatics requires a person to be extremely self-critical and conscientious, otherwise, it is easy to turn the conclusions of dialectics into speculative philosophy. Especially if you invent a tool of cognition from the laws of dialectics. The laws of dialectics are abstractions that reflect extremely general stable universal interrelations in the self—movement (existence) of matter. They have enormous methodological significance in the sense of generalizing into a single model of the truth, all that is known about the process.

Formal-logical laws are a reflection of the dialectics of the movement of the material world in the human consciousness, the peculiarity of which is the limitation, formatting of dialectics within the process of modeling infinite reality into finite consciousness. Therefore, a moderate level of theoretical thinking is needed to formulate the laws of formal logic, and it requires less than that to understand them. Because human thinking takes place according to the laws of formal logic, which themselves are methodologically frozen casts of the «contradictory» laws of dialectics. The real movement of matter cannot directly enter consciousness, it is reflected there, roughly speaking, frame by frame. Therefore, for diamatic thinking, both a high theoretical level and a high degree of conscientiousness are required, because one has to consciously overcome the limitation of the laws of formal logic in order to study the real dialectic of movement.

For example, we have established that the proletariat is unthinkable without the bourgeoisie and vice versa. But when considering the specific properties and manifestations of the proletariat, it seems quite independent. When we see a proletarian, it seems to us that he is just a «man,» when in reality this is only one of the features of a person, albeit a weighty one, and it is one of the forms of public relations of private property. However, in the course of the development of the proletariat, its independence really manifests itself, but only in the struggle against the bourgeoisie. Only as an aggravation of the opposite, a more complete expression of it. That is, a more complete manifestation of the essence of the proletariat is possible only through strikes against the bourgeoisie. And vice versa. Every single thought seems to have its opposite, every conclusion «has two opposite sides to each other.» These are formal logical casts of normal thinking, which theoretically need to be generalized diamatically.

The application of diamatic thinking to the study of society has yielded the greatest fruits of communism, which is formulated in historical materialism. This scientific theory is the sum of the laws of the development of society, the development of the labor movement, the development of the proletarian revolution and communist construction. In the USSR, especially after Stalin, the unified Marxist-Leninist science was functionally split into dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific communism. By the way, Stalin tried to eliminate this mistake by publishing a «Short Course,» but after the ignorance and arrogance of the Trotskyist Khrushchev, this direction was naturally abandoned, and the Marxist-Leninist theory was left to professional academic cretins who turned it into a set of their useless qualifications.

In fact, historical materialism is a logical conclusion from diamatics, its application to the study of society as a form of matter. One of the most practical, and, as the practice of the destruction of the USSR has shown, difficult to understand teachings of historical materialism is certainly the doctrine of class struggle. It is the diamatic understanding of the doctrine of class struggle that is the key to the revolution and the successful construction of communism. And, of course, the doctrine of the class struggle cannot be understood without mastering diamatics.

A. Redin
2016