Socialist Appeal - Audio File: The Philosophy of Marxism

Audio File: The Philosophy of Marxism

By Socialist Appeal

Monday, 27 October 2008

Marxist philosophy provides one with all the basic tools needed to analyse and understand living reality, understood, not as a series of dry, senseless unconnected "facts", but as a dynamic process, impelled by its intenal contradictions, ever changing and with an infinitely rich content. It is both materialist and dialectical.

Philosophical materialism is the outlook that explains that there is only one material world. For materialists there is no consciosness apart from the living brain, which is part of a material body. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind is itself the highest product of matter. To use the words of Marx, "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

The Marxist view of the world is also dialectical.The dialectical method is an attempt to understand more clearly our real interdependent world. Dialectics "is nothing more than the scienece of the general laws of motionand development of nature, human society and thought" (Engels). Put simply, it is the logic of motion.

At the ULU Marxist Society meeting of October 16th, Fred Weston, editor of www.marxist.com, spoke to the society on the Philosophy of Marxism.

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