Three components of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin V.I.

"Manifesto communist party"was not a purely political document, reflecting only the current situation. It was based on the ideas of a large number of predecessors, although in a significantly rethought form. In the article “Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism,” Lenin pointed to three main directions of predecessors:

German classical philosophy (Georg Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach).

In Hegel's dialectic, Marx saw the pinnacle of philosophical thought.

But Marx abandoned idealism in favor of philosophical materialism (see dialectical materialism).

Deepening and developing philosophical materialism, Marx extended it to the knowledge of human society - historical materialism.

Engels noted that when writing both the Manifesto of the Communist Party and especially Capital, the dialectical method was used.

English political economy (Adam Smith and David Ricardo) laid the foundation for the labor theory of value.

In his early works, Marx, on the one hand, condemns philosophy for its speculative consciousness, but on the other hand, he persistently emphasizes the need to translate philosophy into reality. Thus, Marx’s 11th thesis about L. Feuerbach is widely known: “Philosophers have only explained the world in different ways, but the point is to change it.”

Later, this position degenerates into a sharp criticism of metaphysical philosophy in The German Ideology.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), as one of the finalists of classical political economy, left a noticeable mark on the history of economic thought.

The creative legacy of K. Marx has much in common with the achievements of his predecessors in the “classical school” of economic thought, especially A. Smith and D. Ricardo. However, their theoretical and methodological positions, as the author of Capital believed, became the pinnacle of the foundations of “bourgeois” economic theory, and after their works, “classical political economy” supposedly exhausted itself20. Nevertheless, in general, it can be stated with confidence that this scientist, like all the classics, considered the subject of political economy to be a priority study of problems in the sphere of production. In particular, in his own words, classical political economy “... starting with W. Petty... explores the internal dependencies of bourgeois relations of production”21. Method of study 1) General characteristics of the methodology According to K. Marx himself, as a scientist, methodologically he proceeded simultaneously from three scientific sources: the English classical political economy of Smith-Ricardo, the German classical philosophy of Hegel-Feuerbach and French utopian socialism. From the representatives of the former they borrowed, among many others, the concept of economic liberalism22, the labor theory of value, the provisions of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, productive labor, etc., from the latter - the ideas of dialectics23 etc. materialism, for others - the concept of class struggle, elements of the social structure of society, etc. Therefore, the author of “Capital” is not the only one among the researchers of the early and mid-19th century who considered politics and the state as secondary phenomena in relation to socio-economic ones, who preferred following the causal approach, classify economic categories into primary and secondary, which considered economic laws, capitalism and, accordingly, the market mechanism of economic management to be transitory, etc.24 2) The concept of base and superstructure The central place in the research methodology of K. Marx is occupied by his concept of base and superstructure. superstructure, which he declared back in 1859 in the Critique of Political Economy. The main idea in the work was formulated as follows: “In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary, relations independent of their will - relations of production that correspond to a certain stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these production relations is economic structure society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The method of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual processes of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness (my italics - Ya.Ya.)”25. Turning to the essence of K. Marx's concept under consideration, it should be noted that the idea of ​​analyzing social development as an alternation of base and superstructure is not easy to apply. For example, “productive forces depend simultaneously on technical equipment and on the organization of joint labor, which in turn depends on the laws of property. The latter belong to the legal field. But... law is a part of the state, and the latter refers to the superstructure. We are again faced with the difficulty of separating the base and the superstructure.”26 But despite this since then, and even now, “for a Marxist, the economic approach means that the organization of production plays a decisive role in determining the social and political structure, and its main emphasis is on material goods, goals and processes, conflict between workers and capitalists and the general subordination of one class to another"27. 3) Model of an ideal society Meanwhile, by and large, in the concept of base and superstructure, an attempt is made to give an economic interpretation of history, taking into account the dialectics of productive relations with production relations, which suggests, according to K. Marx, the process of transition from capitalism to socialism, because “bourgeois social “formation,” he writes, “ends the prehistory of human society.”28 According to Marx, the non-dialectical approach29 and the unfounded recognition of the laws of capitalist economics as universal did not allow representatives of classical political economy, who, in fact, discovered these laws, to understand that they have a specific and transitory nature. Let us also note that, according to K. Marx, capitalism, the era of which “begins in the 16th century,” excludes the humanization of society and democracy due to private ownership of the means of production and the anarchy of the market. In this system, people work for profit, exploitation of one class by another takes place, and a person (both entrepreneur and worker) becomes alien to himself, since he cannot self-realize in work, which has degraded only into a means of subsistence in an unpredictable market and fierce competition. As for true freedom outside of work, i.e. free time, then, according to Marx, it will become the “measure of wealth” not under capitalism, but under communism30. It should be emphasized that in K. Marx’s arguments about the inevitable collapse of capitalism, the main thing is not the violation of market principles of income distribution between classes of society, but the fact that this system does not provide full employment and tends towards colonial exploitation and wars. Therefore, he considers socialism and communism to be the social ideal, calling them phases of a non-antagonistic communist society, in which the means of production will no longer be the object of individual appropriation and each person will gain freedom31.

Philosophy In the development of philosophy of the 19th century. Three defining directions can be distinguished: classical German philosophy, dialectical-materialist philosophy, philosophy of positivism. German classical philosophy represents the most important achievement of bourgeois philosophical thought. Being the ideology of the German bourgeoisie, historically progressive for its time, it reflected both the unique conditions for the development of capitalism in Germany at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, as well as the major socio-economic changes that took place in the more developed countries of Europe. Formation of the German classical philosophy occurred under the influence of revolutionary changes in France, the industrial revolution in England, and the peculiarities of the socio-political situation in Germany, which was in economic stagnation. The philosophical thought of Germany reflected the peculiarities of the worldview of its time and did not represent a single whole. I. Kant was a dualist, I. Fichte was a subjective idealist, F. Schelling and G. Hegel were objective idealists, L. Feuerbach was a materialist and an atheist. But they were united by a line of succession. The core line of development of German classical philosophy was the study of forms of universality, which in Kant and Fichte were considered as forms of thinking, in Schelling and Hegel - as forms of being, reality, spiritual reality. Classical German philosophy is united by the idea of ​​development, dialectics. Classical German philosophy is completed by the greatest materialist L. Feuerbach, whose philosophical system was formed on the basis of the Hegelian school. This philosophy determined the thinking of the century and became the methodological basis for the development of spiritual culture in the 19th century. Its problems are, first of all, human problems, solved through the creation of a systematic picture of the world. The systems of “world-man” relations proposed by German philosophers, almost all (except for the ideas of L. Feuerbach) are idealistic in their attempt to once and for all explain the place and purpose of man. A huge achievement of German classical philosophy is the doctrine of development, dialectics, which took the form of scientific knowledge and became a research method. A significant contribution to the development of culture is made by Marxist philosophy and Marxist theory, which left their mark on the philosophical and artistic thinking of the 19th century. The program document - the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” - presented a new worldview that extended to the area of ​​social life. Creatively reworking the ideas of classical German philosophy, English political economy, French and English utopian socialism, Marx and Engels discovered the laws of social development and showed the proletariat a scientifically based path to improve the conditions of its existence. In addition, the philosophy of Marxism has historical and cultural significance for the development of any scientific research, including research in the field of culture. The method of dialectical materialism, a universal method of studying the developing natural, conceivable or social object. Based on this method, realistic art turned to reflecting contradictions inner world man and his contradictory connections with the processes of social life. The fate of Marxism is dramatic, but its role in culture is undeniable. Positivism Positivist consciousness developed under the influence of positivist philosophy. The conflict between humanistic ideals and prosaic everyday life resulted in the recognition of a scientific fact. Positivism relied on the philosophy of the New Age, on the program of practical dominance of science as a rational system of experimental reliable knowledge, discarding metaphysical ideas and becoming the forerunner of scientism. In the development of critical trends in the culture of the 19th century. there were two stages. The first was associated with the revolutionary movement, the second - with the emergence and spread of socialist ideas and the spiritual crisis of bourgeois society, that is, with disbelief in the possibility of spiritual progress, in the feasibility of humanistic ideals. All this led to the emergence of pessimism, apathy, and indifference, which was reflected in such forms of artistic culture as impressionism, naturalism, symbolism, aestheticism and decadence. Impressionism developed under the influence of positivism. Focusing on the precise fixation of a “fact” (a moment in the depiction of reality) and refusing broad generalizations, the worldview of impressionism was unable to acquire stable patterns. This trend was based on the latest scientific discoveries in the field of biology, physiology, physics and chemistry, in the field of studying sound and visual sensations. Naturalism The influence of positivism was most clearly manifested in it. His credo is “nature as it is.” Naturalists rejected the arbitrariness of the imagination and compared the work of writers and artists with the work of nature researchers - naturalists. The result of such activity is observation through temperament. A literal reflection of the biological aspect of human life was expressed in the profanation of art, which predetermined its scandalous success among the bourgeoisie, in the emergence of the aesthetics of “physiological art.” But the most significant shift in the spiritual culture of the 19th century. and the life of society was the formation of romanticism, which claimed a holistic worldview and style of thinking along with others - classicism and realism. Romanticism- a phenomenon generated by the bourgeois system. As a worldview and style of artistic creativity, it reflects its contradictions: the gap between what should be and what is, ideal and reality. The awareness of the unrealizability of humanistic ideals and values ​​of the Enlightenment gave rise to two alternative ideological positions. The essence of the first is to despise base reality and withdraw into the shell of pure ideals. The essence of the second is to recognize empirical reality and discard all speculation about the ideal. The starting point of the romantic worldview is open rejection of reality, recognition of the insurmountable gap between ideals and real existence, the unreasonableness of the world of things. It is characterized by a negative attitude towards reality, pessimism, interpretation of historical forces as being outside the real everyday reality, mystification and mythologization. All this prompted the search for a resolution of contradictions not in real world, but in a fantasy world. The romantic worldview covered all spheres of spiritual life - science, philosophy, art, religion. It was expressed in two versions: First, in it the world appeared as an endless, faceless, cosmic subjectivity. The creative energy of the spirit acts here as the beginning that creates world harmony. This version of the romantic worldview is characterized by a pantheistic image of the world, optimism, and sublime feelings. The second is that human subjectivity is considered individually and personally, understood as the inner, self-absorbed world of a person in conflict with the outside world. This attitude is characterized by pessimism, a lyrically sad attitude towards the world. The original principle of romanticism was “two worlds”: comparison and contrast of the real and imaginary worlds. The way to express this dual world was symbolism. Romantic symbolism represented an organic combination of the illusory and real worlds, which manifested itself in the appearance of metaphor, hyperbole, and poetic comparisons. Romanticism, despite its close connection with religion, was characterized by humor, irony, and dreaminess. Romanticism declared music to be the model and norm for all areas of art, in which, according to the romantics, the very element of life, the element of freedom and the triumph of feelings, sounded. The emergence of romanticism was due to a number of factors. Firstly, socio-political: the French Revolution of 1769-1793, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of Independence of Latin America. Secondly, economic: the industrial revolution, the development of capitalism. Thirdly, it was formed under the influence of classical German philosophy. Fourthly, it developed on the basis and within the framework of existing literary styles: enlightenment, sentimentalism. Romanticism flourished between 1795 and 1830. - the period of European revolutions and national liberation movements, and romanticism manifested itself especially clearly in the culture of Germany, England, Russia, Italy, France, and Spain. The romantic tendency had a great influence in the humanities, and the positivist tendency in the natural sciences, technology and practice. Realism The term “realism” should be understood in two ways: as a historically defined direction, a type of artistic thinking and as a truthful, objective reflection of reality (in the language of a particular art). Realism evolved from primitive forms of culture. As an artistic method, realism arose in the depths of romanticism in the first third of the 19th century, when the principle of truthful depiction was established in Europe as an opponent to romanticism. Therefore, in realism, the subject of the image is not the world of fantasy and dreams, but modern reality. The importance of realism in culture is difficult to overestimate. Critical realism. In the second half of the 19th century. becomes the dominant artistic thinking and method. Critical realism does not at all mean a negative attitude towards reality. This is a form of opposition to the existing (dominant) ideology. The leading role in critical realism belongs to literature. A realistic reflection of reality is determined not by one or another technique, but by a general attitude to reality, that is, artistic truth, which includes two sides: a truthful reflection of existing aspects of life and truth, compliance with the aesthetic ideal. In the first half of the 19th century. realism functioned in close connection with romanticism. For the culture of the 19th century. characterized by multi-style, struggle various directions, the beginning of crisis phenomena. The nature of a person’s interaction with the surrounding reality changes fundamentally: a contemplative attitude appears, a desire for sensory contact with the world, and this is realized in different ways in different movements. In naturalism - through the fixation of the fleeting, through an individual impression. In impressionism - through the transmission of dynamically filled life. In symbolism - thanks to the animation of the external world, and in modernism - thanks to the creation of images of the spirit. It is necessary to note two important features of the culture of the 19th century: 1. The establishment of the values ​​of the bourgeois way of life, which manifested itself in an orientation towards consumption and comfort, and in art led to the emergence of new artistic styles (Empire style, academicism, pseudo-romanticism, etc.) 2. Improving institutional forms of culture, i.e., unifying previously disparate academic cultural institutions: museums, libraries, theaters, art exhibitions. An art industry emerged. Art has become a commodity and a structure of bourgeois economic relations. The most important cultural achievement of the 19th century. is the emergence of the art of photography and design. The development of photography led to a revision of the artistic principles of graphics, painting, sculpture, and combined artistry and documentary, which is not achievable in other forms of art. The basis for the design was laid by the International Industrial Exhibition in London in 1850. Its design marked the rapprochement of art and technology and marked the beginning of a new type of creativity. A very important fact in the culture of the 19th century. There was a differentiation of artistic culture into aesthetics, art criticism, and art history as separate areas of humanitarian knowledge. XIX century was a century of ups and downs, a century of diversity and contradictions, but it prepared that turning point in the consciousness and culture of mankind, which divided the traditions of the classical and modern eras.

Three sources and three components of Marxism- the title of an article by Vladimir Lenin, giving a concise analysis of the historical roots, essence and structure of Marxism. Written on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx. First published in the form of an article in the legal journal of the RSDLP (b) “Prosveshchenie” (1913, No. 3).

One of the favorite quotes used in Soviet propaganda materials (slogans, posters, inscriptions on monuments, etc.) was Lenin’s phrase from this article, “The teaching of Marx is omnipotent because it is true.”

Abstract of the article

In the introduction, Lenin, polemicizing with opponents who present Marxism as a kind of “sect” standing “...aside from the high road of the development of world civilization,” shows that Marx’s teaching “ arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy", as "the legitimate successor to the best that humanity created in the 19th century in the person of German philosophy, English political economy, French socialism" According to this definition three sources of Marxism include:

• German classical philosophy;
• English (bourgeois) political economy;
• French utopian socialism.

These three sources are considered by Vladimir Lenin in his article, along with others components Marxism.

First section The articles are devoted to philosophy. Outlining the foundations of Marxist philosophy, Lenin focuses on her materialistic character, noting that she synthesized the best achievements French 18th century materialism and the philosophy of the German thinker Ludwig Feuerbach. Having defined " dialectic", as “the doctrine of development in its most complete, deep and free from one-sidedness, doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge, giving us a reflection of eternally developing matter,” Lenin notes it as the main acquisition of German classical philosophy, creatively assimilated and developed by Marxism, in the system of which dialectics becomes a methodology scientific knowledge and revolutionary change in the world. In the system of Marxism it acquires a completed character and materialism, which extends Marxism into the public sphere. Lenin considers Marx's discovery of the materialist foundations of social life to be one of the greatest achievements of scientific thought..

Second section articles are dedicated to Marx's economic teachings. Following him, Lenin also evaluates the teachings of the English political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Having started the labor theory of value, Smith and Ricardo considered the laws of the capitalist economy as eternal, they did not see the relationship between people behind the relationships of things, and therefore could not reveal the essence of surplus value. Lenin contrasts this with Marx's doctrine of surplus value, which served as the basis for a comprehensive scientific analysis of the capitalist formation, the cornerstone of Marx’s entire economic theory.

Third section articles are devoted to the teachings of Marx about socialism. Noting that before Marx, the most serious criticism of capitalism was given by utopian socialists, Lenin criticizes the weakness of utopian socialism, which could not understand “... the essence of wage slavery under capitalism, nor discover the laws of its development,” and did not indicate the forces capable of creating a new society. Lenin contrasts this with the economic theory of Marx and his doctrine of class struggle, which substantiated the inevitability of the death of capitalism, and found the force that should become its “gravedigger” - the class of proletarians. According to the author, this “class of proletarians,” due to its social position, is capable of “sweeping away the old and creating the new.”

Influence

Due to its brevity and didacticism, Lenin’s article “Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism” was one of the fundamental ones in the system of secondary and higher education of the USSR. Its content was studied in the course “Social Studies” (grades 9-10 of secondary school), and in university programs - as part of the courses “Political Economy” and “Scientific Communism”. Since acquaintance with this material began in school years, in colloquial speech, and sometimes in journalism, the work is usually called by the first two words - “ Three sources"(cf. Adam Smith, "An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations..." → "The Wealth of Nations").

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Literature

• //Lenin V.I.- PSS, t.23
• “Three sources and three components of Marxism” // Soviet Philosophical Dictionary. M.: 1974

Notes

An excerpt characterizing the Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism

The next day, Prince Andrei remembered yesterday's ball, but did not dwell on it for long. “Yes, it was a very brilliant ball. And also... yes, Rostova is very nice. There is something fresh, special, not St. Petersburg, that distinguishes her.” That's all he thought about yesterday's ball, and after drinking tea, he sat down to work.
But from fatigue or insomnia (the day was not a good one for studying, and Prince Andrei could not do anything), he kept criticizing his own work, as often happened to him, and was glad when he heard that someone had arrived.
The visitor was Bitsky, who served on various commissions, visited all the societies of St. Petersburg, a passionate admirer of new ideas and Speransky and a concerned messenger of St. Petersburg, one of those people who choose a direction like a dress - according to fashion, but who for this reason seem to be the most ardent partisans of directions . He worriedly, barely having time to take off his hat, ran to Prince Andrei and immediately began to speak. He just found out the details of the meeting state council this morning, opened by the sovereign, and spoke with delight about it. The sovereign's speech was extraordinary. It was one of those speeches that are made only by constitutional monarchs. “The Emperor directly said that the council and the senate are state estates; he said that government should not be based on arbitrariness, but on solid principles. The Emperor said that finances should be transformed and reports should be made public,” said Bitsky, emphasizing well-known words and significantly opening his eyes.
“Yes, the current event is an era, the greatest era in our history,” he concluded.
Prince Andrei listened to the story about the opening of the State Council, which he expected with such impatience and to which he attributed such importance, and was surprised that this event, now that it had happened, not only did not touch him, but seemed to him more than insignificant. He listened to Bitsky's enthusiastic story with quiet mockery. The simplest thought came to his mind: “What does it matter to me and Bitsky, what do we care about what the sovereign was pleased to say in council! Can all this make me happier and better?”
And this simple reasoning suddenly destroyed for Prince Andrei all the previous interest in the transformations being carried out. On the same day, Prince Andrei was supposed to dine at Speransky’s “en petit comite,” [in a small meeting], as the owner told him, inviting him. This dinner in the family and friendly circle of a man whom he admired so much had previously greatly interested Prince Andrei, especially since until now he had not seen Speransky in his home life; but now he didn’t want to go.
At the appointed hour of lunch, however, Prince Andrei was already entering Speransky’s own small house near the Tauride Garden. In the parquet dining room of a small house, distinguished by its extraordinary cleanliness (reminiscent of monastic purity), Prince Andrei, who was somewhat late, already found at five o’clock the entire company of this petit comite, Speransky’s intimate acquaintances, gathered. There were no ladies except Speransky's little daughter (with a long face similar to her father) and her governess. The guests were Gervais, Magnitsky and Stolypin. From the hallway, Prince Andrei heard loud voices and clear, clear laughter - laughter similar to the one they laugh on stage. Someone, in a voice similar to Speransky’s voice, clearly repeated: ha... ha... ha... Prince Andrei had never heard Speransky’s laughter, and this ringing, thin laugh statesman struck him strangely.
Prince Andrei entered the dining room. The whole company stood between two windows at a small table with snacks. Speransky, in a gray tailcoat with a star, obviously still wearing the white vest and high white tie he wore at the famous meeting of the State Council, stood at the table with a cheerful face. Guests surrounded him. Magnitsky, addressing Mikhail Mikhailovich, told an anecdote. Speransky listened, laughing ahead at what Magnitsky would say. As Prince Andrei entered the room, Magnitsky’s words were again drowned out by laughter. Stolypin boomed loudly, chewing a piece of bread with cheese; Gervais hissed with a quiet laugh, and Speransky laughed subtly, distinctly.
Speransky, still laughing, gave Prince Andrei his white, tender hand.
“I’m very glad to see you, prince,” he said. - Just a minute... he turned to Magnitsky, interrupting his story. “We have an agreement today: dinner of pleasure, and not a word about business.” - And he turned to the narrator again, and laughed again.

“THREE SOURCES AND THREE COMPONENTS OF MARXISM”

work by V. I. Lenin, containing a condensed analysis of historical. roots, essence and structure of Marxism. Written on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Marx's death. Publ. in the legal Bolshevik journal. "Enlightenment" (1913, No. 3). As the experience of the 1905 revolution showed, the Marxist education of the proletariat is acquiring a principle. significance during the period of rise of the labor movement. The article was intended for desks. activists, propagandists of Marxism among workers.
In will join. parts of Lenin's work, refuting the attempts of the bourgeoisie. scientists to present Marxism as a kind of “sect” standing “...aside from the main road of development of world civilization” (Works, vol. 19, p. 3), shows that Marx “... arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives philosophy, political economy and socialism... It is the legitimate successor to the best that humanity created in the 19th century in the person of German philosophy, English political economy, French socialism” (ibid., pp. 3–4). German classic philosophy, English political economy and French utopian socialism constitutes the three sources of Marxism, which Lenin considers together with its component parts.
The 1st section of the article is devoted to philosophy. Outlining the foundations of Marxist philosophy, Lenin focuses on its materialism. character, noting that she synthesized the best achievements of the French. 18th century materialism and philosophy of L. Feuerbach. Ch. acquisition of German classic philosophy - “...d i a l e c t i c a , i.e. about development in its most complete, deep and free from one-sided form, about the relativity of human knowledge, which gives us a reflection of eternally developing matter" (ibid., p. 4) - was also creatively adopted by Marxism, in whose system it became the methodology of scientific . knowledge and rev. world changes. Materialism acquired a complete character, being extended by Marxism to society. sphere. Marx's discovery of materialism. foundations of societies. Lenin considers the greatest achievement of scientific life. thoughts.
The 2nd section is devoted to economics. the teachings of Marx. Lenin evaluates the teachings of English. bourgeois economists A. Smith and D. Ricardo, who laid the foundation for the labor theory of value. However, considering the laws of capitalism. economies as eternal, Smith and Ricardo were unable to reveal the essence of surplus value; they did not see the relationships between people behind the relationships of things. Lenin characterized the doctrine of surplus value as a cornerstone. economical stone Marx's theories, on the basis of which he gave a comprehensive scientific. capitalist analysis formations. In the article, Lenin formulates the basic contradiction of capitalism: “Production itself is becoming more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers are linked into a planned economic organism—and the product of common labor is appropriated by a handful of capitalists” (ibid., p. 6).
In section 3, Lenin examines socialist. Marx's teachings. Speaking about the fact that in the pre-Marxist period the most. Serious criticism of capitalism was given by utopian socialists; Lenin notes the weakness of utopianism. socialism, which was unable to understand “... the essence of wage slavery under capitalism..., to discover the laws of its development...”, to find those forces that are capable of creating a new society (ibid., p. 7). Lenin draws attention to the fact that only economic. Marx’s theory and his teaching on the class struggle scientifically substantiated the inevitability of the death of capitalism, indicated the force that should become its gravedigger - the class of proletarians, “...by its social status...” constituting a force “... capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.” (ibid., p. 8).

Philosophical Encyclopedia. In 5 volumes - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia.
Edited by F.V. Konstantinov.
1960-1970.

Philosophy- a special form of knowledge of the world, produces a system of knowledge about the fundamental principles of human existence, about the general essential characteristics of human relations to nature, society and spiritual life in all its main manifestations. Philosophy also understands the form of human thinking, the theoretical form of a worldview.

Theosophy(ancient Greek Θεοσοφία) - religious-mystical teaching, divine wisdom, religious wisdom, the source of which is mystical intuition.

It just so happens that it is difficult for a person to live without faith. Sooner or later, everyone begins to feel the need for this vital support. Support for your thoughts, actions, hopes.

But what should those who cannot accept religion in its generally accepted form do?

What to do if you understand the basics, but categorically disagree with the methods of presentation and the tinsel of rituals? What to do if you are a materialist and an idealist rolled into one?

Many times a journalist of noble origin asked herself similar questions. This woman lived a bright and unusual life, leaving behind a whole teaching and followers all over the globe. There is probably no place on earth where she has not left her traces. In 1875, she founded the company with her friend Henry Steele Olcott.

Firsov A.

Marx's teaching is omnipotent because it is true.
V.I.Lenin

Who can now remember offhand what the three sources, the three components of Marxism are? Do you remember? But before, they knew it by heart.

Now that Marx's 190th birthday is approaching, it makes sense to remember the basic tenets of Marxism and how Marxism was put into practice.

Let's start with the sources and components Marxism. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself called these:

German philosophy,
- English political economy,
- French socialism.

The logic of Marxism in relation to the development of humanity (in the reasoning of Marx and Engels) can be reduced to three postulates:

1) The material existence of any person ultimately determines his consciousness.

2) The growth of human capabilities (labor productivity) occurs in geometric progression, and the growth of human needs in arithmetic progression.

3) Under capitalism, an increasingly large part of the surplus value produced is appropriated by capital, which inevitably leads to increasing stratification of society and the growth of class struggle.

The first postulate seemed to stem from Hegel's dialectic.
The second postulate seemed to stem from Marx’s historical materialism.
The third postulate seemed to stem from the theory of surplus value.

Marx's conclusion was quite simple:

From the third postulate (the inevitability and growth of class struggle), it was concluded that sooner or later an economic crisis and revolution would occur.
From it the conclusion was drawn that ultimately the means of production would sooner or later pass to the workers and peasants.

After which, in accordance with the second postulate, the growth of labor productivity will sooner or later lead to the fact that human capabilities will outstrip human needs (social wealth will flow in an endless stream, communism will come).

Under these conditions, the first postulate will begin to work. Everyone will receive material benefits according to their needs. And all people will automatically become happy. An era of universal happiness will come.

This is what the Communist Manifesto says about the intensification of the class struggle:

“For several decades now, the history of industry and trade has been nothing but the history of the indignation of modern productive forces against modern production relations, against those property relations that are the condition for the existence of the bourgeoisie and its rule. It is enough to point out trade crises, which, returning periodically, more and more menacingly call into question the existence of the entire bourgeois society... The growing competition of the bourgeoisie among themselves and the trade crises it causes lead to the fact that workers’ wages are becoming more and more unstable.”

From three postulates it was concluded that:

The inevitability of revolution
- the inevitability of communism, and
- the inevitability of universal happiness.

Leninism took from Marxism the fragmentary reasoning and the main conclusions. Lenin and his entourage, relying not so much on the postulates and logic of Marxism, but on its conclusions (communism is the inevitable future of all humanity, achievable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat), built the tactical steps necessary to gain power by a party that could position itself as the best way expressing the interests of the proletariat.

The faithful Leninists-Stalinists built the dictatorship of the proletariat as they imagined it. Then everything stopped because the theory refused to work. Labor productivity increased, but communism did not come and was not even visible. A deadlock situation arose.

To get out of the deadlock, we need to return to the original postulates.

The above postulates of the theory of Marx and Engels are not correct. Everything is exactly the opposite:

1) Class struggle in modern society may not get worse. The existing inter-class contradictions are not 100% antagonistic.

2) Labor productivity never advances human needs, but, on the contrary, moves behind human needs.

3) A person who has all his material needs satisfied does not necessarily become 100% happy.

Accordingly, the conclusions that Marx made in his time turned out to be incorrect.

Life has shown that everything is exactly the opposite of Marx’s conclusions:

A revolution is not necessary for the further development of society,

Human eternal and universal happiness is a utopia,

Communism, as a society of fully satisfied needs, is impossible, since human needs develop at the same pace as human capabilities. Or, as often happens, human desires outstrip human capabilities.

The practice of introducing communism has shown that being does not completely determine consciousness. That it is human nature not to want to work and to want as much as possible. Accordingly, there are at least two points that no existence can change:

- You can’t make sure that all people always want to work.

It is impossible to make sure that all people are always satisfied with less than they can get.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels may have made mistakes, but they made huge contribution in the development of social sciences.

Karl Marx believed that a revolution was best carried out in one of the backward capitalist countries, for example, in Russia. Attempts to apply Marxism in some of the most backward countries in the world (Russia, Kampuchea, etc.) led to a sharp decline in the population of these countries. But this is not the fault of the author of Capital, but of his student, who had his own mistakes - both problems with logic and the prioritization of tactical rather than strategic tasks.

Three sources and three components of Marxism

Marx's teaching arouses throughout the civilized world the greatest hostility and hatred of all bourgeois (both official and liberal) science, which sees in Marxism something like a “harmful sect.” A different attitude cannot be expected, because “impartial” social science cannot exist in a society built on class struggle. One way or another, but all official and liberal science protects wage slavery, and Marxism declared a merciless war on this slavery. To expect impartial science in a society of wage slavery is the same stupid naivety as to expect the impartiality of manufacturers in the question of whether the wages of workers should be increased by reducing the profits of capital.

But this is not enough. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with complete clarity that in Marxism there is nothing like “sectarianism” in the sense of some closed, ossified doctrine that arose aside from the high road of development of world civilization. On the contrary, the whole genius of Marx lies precisely in the fact that he gave answers to questions that the progressive thought of mankind had already raised. His teaching arose as direct and immediate continuation the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

Marx's teaching is omnipotent because it is true. It is complete and harmonious, giving people a complete worldview, irreconcilable with any superstition, with any reaction, with any defense of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that humanity created in the 19th century. represented by German philosophy, English political economy, French socialism.

We will briefly dwell on these three sources and at the same time components of Marxism.

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially in late XVIII V. in France, where a decisive battle took place against all sorts of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and in ideas, materialism turned out to be the only consistent philosophy, faithful to all the teachings of the natural sciences, hostile to superstition, bigotry, etc. The enemies of democracy therefore tried with all their might to “refute” , undermine, slander materialism and defended various forms of philosophical idealism, which always comes down, one way or another, to the defense or support of religion.

Marx and Engels most resolutely defended philosophical materialism and repeatedly explained the deep fallacy of any deviations from this basis. Their views are set out most clearly and in detail in the works of Engels: “Ludwig Feuerbach” and “Refutation of Dühring”, which - like the "Communist Manifesto" - are a reference book for every class-conscious worker.

But Marx did not stop at the materialism of the 18th century, but moved philosophy forward. He enriched it with the acquisitions of German classical philosophy, especially the Hegelian system, which in turn led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The most important of these acquisitions is dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its most complete, deep and free from one-sidedness, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge, which gives us a reflection of ever-developing matter. The newest discoveries of natural science - radium, electrons, the transformation of elements - have remarkably confirmed Marx's dialectical materialism, contrary to the teachings of bourgeois philosophers with their “new” returns to the old and rotten idealism.

Deepening and developing philosophical materialism, Marx brought it to the end, extended his knowledge of nature to knowledge human society. The greatest achievement of scientific thought was historical materialism Marx. The chaos and arbitrariness that had hitherto reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, showing how from one way of social life, due to the growth of productive forces, another, higher one develops - from serfdom, for example, capitalism is growing.

Just as human cognition reflects existing nature independently of him, that is, developing matter, so social cognition person (i.e. different views and teachings, philosophical, religious, political, etc.) reflects economic system society. Political institutions are a superstructure over the economic foundation. We see, for example, how the different political forms of modern European states serve to strengthen the dominance of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx's philosophy is complete philosophical materialism, which gave humanity great tools of knowledge, and the working class in particular.

Having recognized that the economic system is the basis on which the political superstructure rises, Marx paid most attention to the study of this economic system. Marx's main work, “Capital,” is devoted to the study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.

Classical political economy before Marx developed in England, the most developed capitalist country. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, exploring the economic system, laid the foundation labor theory of value. Marx continued their work. He strictly substantiated and consistently developed this theory. He showed that the value of any commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time spent on the production of the commodity.

Where bourgeois economists saw the relationship of things (the exchange of goods for goods), there Marx revealed relationship between people. The exchange of goods expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money means that this connection is becoming ever closer, inextricably connecting the entire economic life of individual producers into one whole. Capital means the further development of this connection: human labor becomes a commodity. The hired worker sells his labor power to the owner of the land, factories, and tools. The worker uses one part of the working day to cover the costs of maintaining himself and his family (wages), and the other part of the day the worker works for nothing, creating surplus value for the capitalist, the source of profit, the source of wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus value is the cornerstone of Marx's economic theory.

Capital created by the labor of the worker crushes the worker, ruining small owners and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately visible, but in agriculture we see the same phenomenon: the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture increases, the use of machinery increases, peasant farming falls into the loop of money capital, falls and is ruined under the yoke of backward technology. In agriculture there are other forms of decline in small-scale production, but its decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By beating small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in labor productivity and to the creation of a monopoly position for the unions of the largest capitalists. Production itself is becoming more and more social - hundreds of thousands and millions of workers are connected into a planned economic organism - and the product of common labor is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. The anarchy of production, crises, a frenzied pursuit of the market, and the insecurity of existence for the mass of the population are growing.

By increasing the dependence of workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labor.

From the first beginnings of a commodity economy, from simple exchange, Marx traced the development of capitalism to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, both old and new, clearly shows every year to more and more workers the correctness of this teaching of Marx.

Capitalism has won throughout the world, but this victory is only the threshold of the victory of labor over capital.

When serfdom was overthrown and “ free“capitalist society,” it was immediately discovered that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist teachings immediately began to arise as a reflection of this oppression and a protest against it. But the original socialism was utopian socialism. He criticized capitalist society, condemned it, cursed it, dreamed of its destruction, fantasized about a better system, and convinced the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

But utopian socialism could not indicate a real way out. He could neither explain the essence of wage slavery under capitalism, nor discover the laws of its development, nor find that social force, which is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions that accompanied the fall of feudalism and serfdom, everywhere in Europe and especially in France, revealed more and more clearly the basis of all development and its driving force. class struggle.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the serf-owning class was won without desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country has developed on a more or less free, democratic basis without a life-and-death struggle between different classes capitalist society.

The genius of Marx lies in the fact that he was able to draw from here before anyone else and consistently carry out the conclusion that world history teaches. This conclusion is the doctrine of class struggle.

People have always been and will always be stupid victims of deception and self-deception in politics, until they learn to look for any moral, religious, political, social phrases, statements, promises interests one class or another. Supporters of reform and improvement will always be fooled by the defenders of the old until they understand that every old institution, no matter how wild and rotten it may seem, is maintained by the forces of one or another ruling class. And to break the resistance of these classes, there is only one means: to find in the society around us, to enlighten and organize for the struggle such forces that can - and by their social position must- constitute a force capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.

Only Marx’s philosophical materialism showed the proletariat a way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have vegetated until now. Only Marx's economic theory explained the actual position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

All over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa, independent organizations of the proletariat are multiplying. He is enlightened and educated, waging his class struggle, gets rid of the prejudices of bourgeois society, unites more and more closely and learns to measure the measure of his successes, temper his strength and grows uncontrollably. ( Lenin, Three Sources and Three Components (1913), Works, vol.XVI, pp. 349 - 353, ed. 3rd.)

The place and significance of the various components of Marxism

Marx's teachings

Marxism- system of views and teachings of Marx. Marx was the successor and brilliant finalizer of the three main ideological movements of the 19th century, belonging to the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy and French socialism in connection with French revolutionary teachings in general. The remarkable consistency and integrity of his views, recognized even by Marx’s opponents, which together give modern materialism and modern scientific socialism, as the theory and program of the working-class movement of all civilized countries of the world, forces us to preface the presentation of the main content of Marxism, namely the economic teachings of Marx, with a brief outline of his worldview at all.

Philosophical materialism

Starting from 1844 - 1845, when Marx’s views took shape, he was a materialist, in particular a supporter of L. Feuerbach, and subsequently saw his weaknesses solely in the insufficient consistency and comprehensiveness of his materialism. Marx saw the world-historical, “epoch-making” significance of Feuerbach precisely in the decisive break with Hegel’s idealism and in the proclamation of materialism, which even “in the 18th century. especially in France was a struggle not only against existing political institutions, and at the same time against religion and theology, but also ... against all metaphysics" (in the sense of "drunken speculation" as opposed to "sober philosophy") ("Holy Family" in "Literary Heritage").

“For Hegel,” wrote Marx, “the process of thinking, which he transforms even under the name of idea into an independent subject, is the demiurge (creator, creator) of the real... For me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing more than the material, transplanted into the human head and transformed in it” (“Capital”, I, preface to the 2nd ed.).

In full accordance with this materialist philosophy of Marx and expounding it, Fr. Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring ( cm.): - Marx familiarized himself with this work in manuscript - ... “The unity of the world lies not in its existence, but in its materiality, which is proven ... by the long and difficult development of philosophy and natural science ... Movement is a form of existence of matter. Nowhere and never has there been and cannot be matter without movement, movement without matter... If we ask the question ... what is thinking and cognition, where do they come from, then we will see that they are products of the human brain and that man himself - a product of nature that developed in a certain natural environment and with it. Because of this, it goes without saying that the products of the human brain, which in the final analysis are also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of the connection of nature, but correspond to it.” “Hegel was an idealist, that is, for him the thoughts of our head were not reflections (Abbilder, reflections, sometimes Engels speaks of “imprints”), more or less abstract, of real things and processes, but, on the contrary, things and their development were for Hegel, reflections of some idea that existed somewhere before the world came into being.”

In his essay “Ludwig Feuerbach”, in which Fr. Engels sets out his and Marx's views on the philosophy of Feuerbach and which Engels sent to print, having previously re-read his and Marx's old manuscript from 1844 - 1845. On the question of Hegel, Feuerbach and the materialist understanding of history, Engels writes:

“The great fundamental question of all, and especially of modern philosophy, is the question of the relationship of thinking to being, spirit to nature... what precedes what: spirit to nature or nature to spirit... Philosophers were divided into two large camps, according to how they answered this question. Those who argued that spirit existed before nature, and who, therefore, one way or another recognized the creation of the world, ... formed the idealist camp. Those who considered nature to be the main principle joined various schools of materialism.”

Any other use of the concepts of (philosophical) idealism and materialism leads only to confusion. Marx resolutely rejected not only idealism, which is always associated in one way or another with religion, but also the point of view of Hume and Kant, widespread especially in our days, agnosticism, criticism, positivism in various forms, considering such philosophy a “reactionary” concession to idealism and, at best, “ a shameful letting through the back door of materialism, expelled in the public eye...”

In particular, we should note Marx’s view on the relationship of freedom to necessity: “Necessity is blind until it is conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity" (Engels in Anti-Dühring) = recognition of the objective law of nature and the dialectical transformation of necessity into freedom (along with the transformation of an unknown but knowable "thing in itself" into a "thing for us", "the essence of things" into "phenomena"). Marx and Engels considered the main drawback of the “old” materialism, including Feuerbach’s (and even more so the “vulgar”, Buchner-Vocht-Moleschott) materialism: 1) that this materialism was “predominantly mechanical”, not taking into account the latest developments of chemistry and biology... 2) the fact that the old materialism was ahistorical, undialectical (metaphysical in the sense of anti-dialectic), and did not consistently and comprehensively pursue the point of view of development; 3) the fact that they understood the “essence of man” abstractly, and not as a “totality” (defined specifically historically) of “all social relations” and therefore only “explained” the world, then when it comes to “changing” it, i.e. e. did not understand the meaning of “revolutionary practical activities».

Dialectics

Hegelian dialectics, as the most comprehensive, rich in content and deep doctrine of development, was considered by Marx and Engels to be the greatest acquisition of classical German philosophy. They considered any other formulation of the principle of development, evolution, to be one-sided, poor in content, disfiguring and crippling the actual course of development (often with leaps, catastrophes, revolutions) in nature and in society.

“Marx and I were almost the only people who set themselves the task of saving” (from the defeat of idealism and Hegelianism as well) “conscious dialectics and translating it into a materialist understanding of nature.” “Nature is a confirmation of dialectics, and precisely the latest natural science shows that this confirmation is unusually rich” (written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transformation of elements, etc.!), “accumulating daily a mass of material and proving that things are the way they are in nature ultimately dialectical and not metaphysical.”

“The great fundamental idea,” writes Engels, “that the world does not consist of ready-made, complete objects, but is a set of processes in which objects that seem unchangeable, as well as mental pictures of them, concepts taken by the head, are in continuous change, then arise, then are destroyed - this great fundamental idea, since the time of Hegel, has entered into the general consciousness to such an extent that hardly anyone will challenge it in its general view. But it is one thing to acknowledge it in words, another thing to apply it in each individual case and in each given field of study. “For dialectical philosophy there is nothing established once and for all, unconditional, sacred. On everything and in everything she sees the mark of an inevitable fall, and nothing can withstand it except the continuous process of emergence and destruction, the endless ascent from the lower to the higher. She herself is only a simple reflection of this process in the thinking brain.”

Thus, dialectics, according to Marx, is “the science of the general laws of motion of both the external world and human thinking.”

This revolutionary side of Hegel’s philosophy was adopted and developed by Marx. Dialectical materialism “does not need any philosophy standing above other sciences.” What remains from the previous philosophy is “the doctrine of thinking and its laws - formal logic and dialectics.” And dialectics, in the understanding of Marx, also according to Hegel, includes what is now called the theory of knowledge, epistemology, which must consider its subject equally historically, studying and generalizing the origin and development of knowledge, the transition from Not knowledge to knowledge.

Materialistic understanding of history

Awareness of the inconsistency, incompleteness, and one-sidedness of the old materialism led Marx to the conviction of the need to “harmonize the science of society with a materialist foundation and rebuild it according to this foundation.” If materialism generally explains consciousness from being, and not vice versa, then when applied to the social life of mankind, materialism required an explanation public consciousness from public being. “Technology,” says Marx, “...reveals man’s active relationship to nature, the direct process of production of his life, and at the same time his social conditions of life and the spiritual ideas arising from them.” Marx gave a complete formulation of the basic principles of materialism, extended to human society and its history, in the preface to the essay “On the Critique of Political Economy” in the following words:

“In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary, relations independent of their will - production relations that correspond to a certain stage of development of their material productive forces.

The totality of these production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms correspond public consciousness. The method of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual processes of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with existing production relations, or - which is only legal expression this - with the property relations within which they have so far developed. From forms of development of productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. With a change in the economic basis, a revolution occurs more or less quickly in the entire enormous superstructure. When considering such revolutions, it is always necessary to distinguish the material revolution, stated with natural scientific precision, in the economic conditions of production from the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical, in short: from the ideological forms in which people are aware of this conflict and fight against it.

Just as one cannot judge an individual person on the basis of what he thinks about himself, in the same way one cannot judge such an era of revolution by its consciousness. On the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between social productive forces and production relations...” “In general terms, Asian, ancient, feudal and modern, bourgeois, modes of production can be designated as the progressive era of economic social formation" (Compare Marx’s brief formulation in a letter to Engels dated July 7, 1866: “Our theory of determining the organization of labor by the means of production.”)

The discovery of a materialist understanding of history, or, rather, the consistent continuation and spread of materialism to the area of ​​social phenomena, eliminated the two main shortcomings of previous historical theories. Firstly, at best, they considered only the ideological motives of the historical activity of people, without examining what causes these motives, without grasping the objective pattern in the development of the system of social relations, without seeing the roots of these relations in the degree of development of material production; secondly, previous theories did not cover just the actions masses population, while historical materialism for the first time made it possible to study with natural-historical accuracy the social conditions of life of the masses and changes in these conditions. Pre-Marxian “sociology” and historiography in the best case provided an accumulation of raw facts, fragmentarily typed, and a depiction of individual sides historical process. Marxism pointed the way to a comprehensive, comprehensive study of the process of emergence, development and decline of socio-economic formations, considering totality all contradictory trends, reducing them to precisely defined conditions of life and production of various classes society, eliminating subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of individual “dominant” ideas or in their interpretation, revealing roots without excluding all ideas and all different tendencies in the state of the material productive forces. People themselves create their own history, but what determines the motives of people, and specifically the masses of people, what causes clashes of contradictory ideas and aspirations, what is the totality of all these clashes of the entire mass of human societies, what are the objective conditions for the production of material life that create the basis for all historical activity of people, what is the law of development of these conditions - Marx drew attention to all this and pointed the way to the scientific study of history as a single, natural process in all its enormous versatility and inconsistency.

Class struggle

That the aspirations of some members of a given society run counter to the aspirations of others, that social life is full of contradictions, that history shows us the struggle between peoples and societies, as well as within them, and also the alternation of periods of revolution and reaction, peace and war, stagnation and rapid progress or decline - these facts are well known. Marxism provided a guiding thread that made it possible to discover a pattern in this apparent labyrinth and chaos, namely: the theory of class struggle. Only the study of the totality of aspirations of all members of a given society or group of societies can lead to a scientific determination of the result of these aspirations. And the source of conflicting aspirations is the difference in the position and living conditions of those classes into which every society breaks up.

“The history of all hitherto existing societies,” says Marx in the Communist Manifesto (with the exception of the history of the primitive community, adds Engels), “has been the history of class struggle. Free and slave, patrician and plebeian, landowner and serf, master and apprentice, in short, oppressor and oppressed were in eternal antagonism to each other, waged a continuous, sometimes hidden, sometimes open struggle, always ending in a revolutionary reorganization of the entire social edifice or the common death of the combatants classes... Modern bourgeois society, which emerged from the depths of the lost feudal society, did not destroy class contradictions. It only put new classes, new conditions of oppression and new forms of struggle in the place of the old ones. Our era, the era of the bourgeoisie, is distinguished, however, in that it has simplified class contradictions: society is increasingly split into two large hostile camps, into two large classes facing each other - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Since the Great French Revolution, European history has revealed with particular clarity in a number of countries this real background to events, the struggle of classes. And already the era of restoration in France put forward a number of historians (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, Thiers), who, summarizing what was happening, could not help but recognize the struggle of classes as the key to understanding the entire French history. And the newest era, the era of the complete victory of the bourgeoisie, representative institutions, broad (if not universal) suffrage, cheap daily press reaching the masses, etc., the era of powerful and ever-wider unions of workers and unions of entrepreneurs, etc. ., showed even more clearly (albeit in a very sometimes one-sided, “peaceful”, “constitutional” form) the struggle of classes as the engine of events. The following passage from Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” will show us what demands Marx made on social science for an objective analysis of the position of each class in modern society, in connection with the analysis of the conditions for the development of each class:

“Of all the classes that now oppose the bourgeoisie, only the proletariat represents a truly revolutionary class. All other classes decline and are destroyed with the development of large-scale industry; the proletariat is its own product. The middle classes: the small industrialist, the small trader, the artisan and the peasant - they all fight the bourgeoisie in order to save their existence from destruction like the middle classes. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Even more, they are reactionary: they seek to turn back the wheel of history. If they are revolutionary, it is insofar as they are facing a transition into the ranks of the proletariat, insofar as they defend not their present, but their future interests: insofar as they abandon their own point of view in order to take the point of view of the proletariat.”

In a number historical works (see literature) Marx gave brilliant and profound examples of materialist historiography, analysis of the situation everyone a separate class and sometimes different groups or strata within a class, showing first-hand why and how “every class struggle is a political struggle.” The passage we have cited illustrates what a complex network of social relations and transitional The stages from one class to another, from the past to the future are analyzed by Marx to take into account the entire resultant of historical development.

The most profound, comprehensive and detailed confirmation and application of Marx's theory is his economic teaching.

Marx's economic teachings

“The ultimate goal of my work,” says Marx in the preface to Capital, “is the discovery of the economic law of movement of modern society,” that is, capitalist bourgeois society. The study of the production relations of a given, historically defined society in their emergence, development and decline - this is the content of Marx’s economic teachings. In a capitalist society production dominates goods, and Marx’s analysis therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

Price

A product is, firstly, a thing that satisfies some human need; secondly, a thing exchanged for another thing. The usefulness of a thing makes it use value. Exchange value (or simply value) is primarily a ratio, a proportion in the exchange of a certain number of use values ​​of one type for a certain number of use values ​​of another type. Daily experience shows us that millions and billions of such exchanges constantly equate each and every use value, the most diverse and incomparable with each other, to one another. What is common between these different things, constantly equated with each other in a certain system of social relations? What they have in common is that they - products of labor. By exchanging products, people equate the most different types of labor. The production of goods is a system of social relations in which individual producers create a variety of products (social division of labor), and all these products are equated to each other in exchange. Consequently, what is common to all goods is not the specific labor of a particular branch of production, not the labor of one type, but abstract human labor, human labor in general. The entire labor force of a given society, represented in the sum of the values ​​of all commodities, is one and the same human labor force: billions of facts of exchange prove this.

And, consequently, each individual commodity is represented only by a certain share socially necessary working hours. The amount of value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor or labor time socially necessary for the production of a given commodity, a given use value.

“By equating their various products with one another in exchange, men equate their various types of labor with one another. They don't realize it, but they do it."

Value is a relation between two persons - as an old economist said; he should only have added: a relation covered by a material shell. Only from the point of view of the system of social production relations of one specific historical formation of society, moreover, relations manifested in the massive phenomenon of exchange, repeated billions of times, can one understand what value is.

“As values, commodities are only certain quantities of frozen labor time.”

Having analyzed in detail the dual nature of labor embodied in commodities, Marx proceeds to analyze forms of value And money. Marx's main task is to study origin monetary form of value, study historical process the development of exchange, starting from individual, random acts of it (“simple, separate or random form of value”: a given quantity of one commodity is exchanged for a given quantity of another commodity) up to the general form of value, when a number of different goods are exchanged for the same specific commodity , and to the monetary form of value, when this specific commodity, the universal equivalent, is gold. Being the highest product of the development of exchange and commodity production, money obscures and covers up the social character of private work, the social connection between individual producers united by the market.

Marx exposes extremely detailed analysis various functions of money, and here (as in general in the first chapters of Capital) it is especially important to note that the abstract and sometimes seemingly purely deductive form of presentation actually reproduces a huge amount of factual material on the history of the development of exchange and commodity production.

“Money presupposes a certain level of commodity exchange. Various forms of money - a simple commodity equivalent or a medium of exchange or a means of payment, treasure and universal money - indicate, depending on the different extent of application of one or another function, according to the comparative predominance of one of them, at very different stages of the social process of production. ("Capital", I.)

Surplus value

At a certain stage of development of commodity production, money is transformed into capital. The formula for commodity circulation was - T (commodity) - D (money) - T (commodity), i.e., the sale of one product to buy another. The general formula for capital is, on the contrary, M - C - M, i.e. purchase for sale (with a profit). Marx calls surplus value this increase in the initial value of money put into circulation. The fact of this “growth” of money in capitalist circulation is well known. It is this “growth” that turns money into capital, as a special, historically determined, social relation of production. Surplus value cannot arise from commodity circulation, because it knows only the exchange of equivalents, cannot arise from a premium to the price, because the mutual losses and gains of buyers and sellers would be balanced, and we are talking specifically about a mass, average, social phenomenon, and not about individual. In order to obtain surplus value, “the owner of money must find on the market a commodity whose very use value would have the original property of being a source of value”, such a commodity, the process of consumption of which would at the same time be a process of creating value. And such a product exists. This is human labor power. Its consumption is labor, and labor creates value. The owner of money buys labor power at its value, determined, like the value of any other commodity, by the socially necessary labor time necessary for its production (i.e., the cost of maintaining the worker and his family). Having purchased labor power, the owner of money has the right to consume it, that is, to force it to work all day, say, 12 hours. Meanwhile, the worker, within 6 hours (“necessary” labor time), creates a product that pays for its maintenance, and over the next 6 hours (“surplus” labor time) creates a “surplus” product or surplus value that is not paid for by the capitalist. Consequently, in capital from the point of view of the production process, it is necessary to distinguish two parts: constant capital spent on means of production (machines, tools, raw materials, etc.) - its value (immediately or in parts) is transferred without change to the finished product product - and variable capital spent on labor. The value of this capital does not remain unchanged, but increases during the labor process, creating surplus value. Therefore, to express the degree of exploitation work force capital, one must compare surplus value not with all capital, but only with variable capital. The rate of surplus value, as Marx calls this ratio, will be, for example, in our example 6/6, i.e. 100%.

The historical prerequisite for the emergence of capital is, firstly, the accumulation of a certain amount of money in the hands of individuals at a relatively high level of development of commodity production in general and, secondly, the availability of a “free” worker in the double sense, free from any restrictions or restrictions on the sale of labor power and free from the land and generally from the means of production, an ownerless worker, a “proletarian” who has nothing to exist except by selling labor power.

An increase in surplus value is possible through two main methods: by lengthening the working day (“absolute surplus value”) and by shortening the necessary working day (“relative surplus value”). Analyzing the first technique, Marx develops a grandiose picture of the struggle of the working class to shorten the working day and the intervention of state power to lengthen the working day (XIV - XVII centuries) and to shorten it (factory legislation of the 19th century). After Capital appeared, the history of the labor movement of all civilized countries of the world gave thousands and thousands of new facts illustrating this picture.

Analyzing the production of relative surplus value, Marx examines three main historical stages in the increase in labor productivity by capitalism: 1) simple cooperation; 2) division of labor and manufacture; 3) machines and large industry. How deeply Marx revealed here the basic, typical features of the development of capitalism is evident, among other things, from the fact that studies of the Russian so-called “handicraft” industry provide a wealth of material for illustrating the first two of the three stages mentioned above. And the revolutionary effect of large-scale machine industry, described by Marx in 1867, was revealed during the half-century that has elapsed since then in a number of “new” countries (Russia, Japan, etc.).

Further. Marx's analysis is extremely important and new. capital accumulation, i.e., converting part of the surplus value into capital, using it not for personal needs or the whims of the capitalist, but for new production. Marx showed the error of all previous classical political economy (starting with Adam Smith), which believed that all surplus value converted into capital goes to variable capital. In fact, it breaks down into means of production plus variable capital. Of enormous importance in the process of development of capitalism and its transformation into socialism is a more rapid increase in the share of constant capital (in total amount capital) compared to the share of variable capital.

The accumulation of capital, accelerating the displacement of workers by machine, creating wealth at one pole and poverty at the other, gives rise to the so-called “reserve labor army,” a “relative surplus” of workers or “capitalist overpopulation,” which takes extremely diverse forms and makes it possible for capital to expand extremely quickly. production. This possibility, in connection with credit and the accumulation of capital in the means of production, provides, among other things, the key to understanding crises overproduction, which periodically occurred in capitalist countries, first on average every 10 years, then at longer and less defined periods of time. The so-called primitive accumulation should be distinguished from the accumulation of capital on the basis of capitalism: the forced separation of the worker from the means of production, the expulsion of peasants from the land, the theft of common lands, the system of colonies and public debts, protective duties, etc. “Primitive accumulation” creates at one pole “free” proletarian, on the other the owner of money, the capitalist.

« The historical trend of capitalist accumulation"Marx characterizes it in the following famous words:

“The expropriation of direct producers is carried out with the most merciless vandalism and under the pressure of the meanest, dirtiest, most petty and most frenzied passions. Private property, obtained by the labor of the owner” (peasant and artisan), “based, so to speak, on the fusion of the individual independent worker with his tools and means of labor, is being supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of someone else’s, but formally free labor force... Now it is no longer the worker who runs an independent economy who is subject to expropriation, but the capitalist who exploits many workers. This expropriation is accomplished by the play of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capital. One capitalist beats many capitalists. Hand in hand with this centralization or expropriation of many capitalists by a few, the cooperative form of the labor process develops on an ever wider, larger scale, the conscious technical application of science develops, the systematic exploitation of the land, the transformation of the means of labor into such means of labor that can only be used collectively, the economization of all means of production by using them as means of production of combined social labor, the weaving of all peoples into the network of the world market, and at the same time the international character of the capitalist regime. Together with the ever-decreasing number of magnates of capital who usurp and monopolize all the benefits of this process of transformation, the mass of poverty, oppression, slavery, degeneration, exploitation increases, but at the same time the indignation of the working class, which is trained, united and organized by the mechanism of the very process of capitalist production . The monopoly of capital becomes the shackles of the mode of production that grew up under and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist shell. She explodes. The hour of capitalist private property is striking. The expropriators are expropriated.” ("Capital", I.)

Extremely important and new is, further, Marx’s analysis of the reproduction of social capital, taken as a whole, given in Volume II of Capital. And here Marx takes not an individual, but a mass phenomenon, not a fractional part of the economy of society, but all this economy in its entirety. Correcting the above error of the classics, Marx divides all social production into two large departments: I) the production of means of production and II) the production of consumer goods, and examines in detail the areas taken by him numerical examples, the circulation of all social capital as a whole, both during production in the same quantities and during accumulation. In Volume III of Capital the question of the formation of the average rate of profit on the basis of the law of value is resolved. The great step forward of economic science, in the person of Marx, is that the analysis is carried out from the point of view of mass economic phenomena, the entirety of the social economy, and not from the point of view of individual incidents or the external surface of competition, which is often limited to vulgar political economy or modern “theory marginal utility." First, Marx analyzes the origin of surplus value and then moves on to its breakdown into profit, interest and land rent. Profit is the ratio of surplus value to all capital invested in an enterprise. Capital of a “high organic structure” (that is, with a predominance of constant capital over variable capital in amounts above the social average) gives a rate of profit below the average. Capital of “low organic structure” is above average. Competition between capitals and their free transfer from one industry to another will reduce the rate of profit in both cases to the average. The sum of the values ​​of all goods of a given society coincides with the sum of the prices of goods, but in individual enterprises and in certain branches of production, goods, under the influence of competition, are sold not at their value, but at production prices(or production prices), which equal capital employed plus average profit.

Thus, the well-known and indisputable fact of the deviation of prices from values ​​and the equality of profits is fully explained by Marx on the basis of the law of value, for the sum of the values ​​of all goods coincides with the sum of prices. But the reduction of value (social) to prices (individual) occurs not in a simple, not direct, but in a very complex way: it is quite natural that in a society of isolated commodity producers connected only by the market, a pattern cannot manifest itself other than in an average, social, mass pattern, when individual deviations in one direction or another cancel out.

An increase in labor productivity means a faster growth of constant capital compared to variable capital. And since surplus value is a function of variable capital alone, it is clear that the rate of profit (the ratio of surplus value to all capital, and not to only its variable part) tends to fall. Marx analyzes in detail this tendency and a number of circumstances that cover it or counteract it. Without stopping at the transfer of the extremely interesting sections of Volume III, devoted to usurious, commercial and monetary capital, we will move on to the most important thing: the theory ground rent. The price of production of agricultural products, due to the limited area of ​​land, which is all occupied by individual owners in capitalist countries, is determined by the costs of production not on average, but on worse soil, not under average, but under worse conditions for delivering the product to the market. The difference between this price and the price of production on better soils (or better conditions) gives the difference or differential rent. Analyzing it in detail, showing its origin in the difference in the fertility of individual plots of land, in the difference in the size of the investment of capital in land, Marx completely revealed (see also “Theories of Surplus Value”, where criticism of Rodbertus deserves special attention) Ricardo’s mistake that differential rent is obtained only through a consistent transition from the best lands to the worst. On the contrary, there are also reverse transitions, there is the transformation of one category of land into another (due to the progress of agricultural technology, the growth of cities, etc.), and the notorious “law of diminishing soil fertility” is a deep mistake, blaming nature for the shortcomings, limitations and contradictions of capitalism. Then, equality of profits in all sectors of industry and the national economy in general presupposes complete freedom of competition, freedom of capital flow from one industry to another. Meanwhile, private ownership of land creates a monopoly, an obstacle to this free flow. Due to this monopoly, the products of agriculture, characterized by a lower composition of capital and, therefore, an individually higher rate of profit, do not go into a completely free process of equalization of the rate of profit; the owner of the land, as a monopolist, gets the opportunity to keep the price above the average, and this monopoly price gives rise to absolute rent. Differential rent cannot be abolished under the existence of capitalism, but absolute Maybe- for example, during the nationalization of land, when it becomes the property of the state. Such a transition would mean undermining the monopoly of private owners and would mean a more consistent, more complete implementation of freedom of competition in agriculture. And therefore, the radical bourgeoisie, Marx notes, have repeatedly come out in history with this progressive bourgeois demand for the nationalization of the land, which, however, scares off the majority of the bourgeoisie, because it too closely “touches” yet another, in our days especially important and “sensitive” monopoly: the monopoly of the means of production in general . (Marx himself outlined his theory of average profit on capital and absolute land rent in a remarkably popular, concise and clear way in a letter to Engels dated August 2, 1862. See Correspondence, vol. III, pp. 77 - 81. Compare also the letter from August 9, 1862, ibid., pp. 86 - 87.) - Regarding the history of land rent, it is also important to point out Marx’s analysis, showing the transformation of labor rent (when a peasant creates a surplus product with his labor on the landowner’s land) into rent in products or in kind ( the peasant produces a surplus product on his land, giving it to the landowner due to “non-economic coercion”), then into cash rent (the same rent in kind, converted into money, the “rent” of old Rus', due to the development of commodity production) and finally into capitalist rent , when the place of the peasant is taken by an entrepreneur in agriculture, carrying out cultivation with the help of hired labor. In connection with this analysis of the “genesis of capitalist land rent”, it should be noted a number of subtle (and especially important for backward countries like Russia) thoughts of Marx about evolution of capitalism in agriculture.

“The transformation of rent in kind into money rent is not only inevitably accompanied, but even preceded by the formation of a class of poor day laborers hired for money. During the period of the emergence of this class, when it only appeared sporadically, the more prosperous peasants obliged to pay dues naturally developed the custom of exploiting rural wage workers at their own expense - just as in feudal times, wealthy serfs themselves in turn kept serfs. These peasants thus gradually develop the ability to accumulate a certain amount of property and transform themselves into future capitalists. Among the old owners of land, leading independent farming, there arises, therefore, a breeding ground for capitalist tenants, the development of which is determined by the general development of capitalist production outside agriculture” (“Capital”, vol. III 2, p. 332)... “Expropriation and expulsion from village parts rural population not only “frees” the workers, their means of living, their tools of labor for industrial capital, but also creates an internal market” (“Capital”, vol. I 2, p. 778).

The impoverishment and ruin of the rural population plays, in turn, the role of creating a reserve labor army for capital. In every capitalist country, “part of the rural population is therefore constantly in a state of transition towards becoming an urban or manufacturing (i.e., non-agricultural) population. This source of relative surplus population flows constantly... The rural worker is reduced to the lowest level wages, and he always has one foot in the swamp of pauperism” (“Capital”, vol. I 2, p. 668).

The peasant's private ownership of the land he cultivates is the basis of small-scale production and the condition for its prosperity and its acquisition of a classical form. But this small-scale production is compatible only with the narrow primitive framework of production and society. Under capitalism, “the exploitation of the peasants differs from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat only in form. The exploiter is the same - capital. Individual capitalists exploit individual peasants through mortgages and usury; the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through state taxes" (Class Struggle in France). “The peasant’s parcel (small plot of land) represents only a pretext allowing the capitalist to extract profit, interest and rent from the land, leaving the landowner himself to earn his wages as he pleases.”

Usually the peasant even gives part of his wages to capitalist society, i.e., the capitalist class, sinking “to the level of an Irish tenant under the guise of a private owner” (“Class Struggle in France”).

What is “one of the reasons that in countries with predominant small peasant landownership the price of grain is lower than in countries with a capitalist mode of production?” (“Capital”, vol. III 2, p. 340).

The fact is that the peasant gives to society (i.e., the capitalist class) part of the surplus product for free.

“Consequently, such a low price (of bread and other agricultural products) is a consequence of the poverty of producers, and in no case the result of the productivity of their labor” (“Capital”, vol. III 2, p. 340).

Small landed property, the normal form of small production, is degraded, destroyed, and perishes under capitalism.

“Small landed property, in its essence, excludes: the development of social productive forces of labor, social forms of labor, social concentration of capital, large-scale cattle breeding, and the increasing and increasing application of science. Usury and the tax system inevitably lead everywhere to its impoverishment. The use of capital to purchase land takes away this capital from being used to cultivate the land. The endless fragmentation of the means of production and the disunity of the producers themselves.” (Cooperatives, i.e., partnerships of small peasants, playing an extremely progressive bourgeois role, only weaken this tendency, but do not destroy it; we must also not forget that these cooperatives give a lot to the wealthy peasants and very little, almost nothing, to the masses of the poor, and then the partnerships themselves become exploiters of wage labor.) “A gigantic theft of human power. The ever-increasing deterioration in the conditions of production and the rise in price of the means of production is the law of parcel (small) ownership.”

Capitalism, in agriculture as well as in industry, transforms the production process only at the cost of the “martyrology of producers.”

“The dispersion of rural workers over large areas breaks down their power of resistance, while the concentration of urban workers increases this power. In modern, capitalist agriculture, as in modern industry, an increase in the productive power of labor and its greater mobility are purchased at the price of destruction and exhaustion of the labor force itself. Moreover, every progress of capitalist agriculture is not only a progress in the art of robbing the worker, but also in the art of robbing the soil... Capitalist production, therefore, develops the technique and combination of the social process of production only in such a way that it undermines at the same time the sources of all wealth: land and worker” (“Capital”, vol. I, end of chapter 13).

Socialism

From the previous it is clear that Marx derives the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society entirely and exclusively from the economic law of movement of modern society. The socialization of labor, in thousands of forms, moving forward more and more rapidly and manifested itself in the half century that has passed since the death of Marx, is especially clearly visible in the growth of large-scale production, cartels, syndicates and trusts of capitalists, as well as in the gigantic increase in the size and power of finance capital, - this is the main material basis for the inevitable onset of socialism. The intellectual and moral engine, the physical executor of this transformation is the proletariat, educated by capitalism itself. His struggle with the bourgeoisie, manifesting itself in various and increasingly rich in content forms, inevitably becomes a political struggle aimed at conquering political power proletariat (“dictatorship of the proletariat”). The socialization of production cannot but lead to the transfer of the means of production into the ownership of society, to the “expropriation of the expropriators.” An enormous increase in labor productivity, a reduction in the working day, and the replacement of the remnants and ruins of small, primitive, fragmented production with collective, improved labor - these are the direct consequences of such a transition. Capitalism finally breaks the connection between agriculture and industry, but at the same time, with its highest development, it prepares new elements of this connection, the connection of industry with agriculture on the basis of the conscious application of science and a combination of collective labor, a new settlement of humanity (with the destruction of both rural abandonment and isolation from the world , savagery, and unnatural accumulation of gigantic masses in big cities). New form families, new conditions in the position of women and in the upbringing of younger generations are prepared by the highest forms of modern capitalism: female and child labor, the disintegration of the patriarchal family by capitalism inevitably takes on the most terrible, disastrous and disgusting forms in modern society. But nevertheless, “large industry, assigning a decisive role in the socially organized production process, outside the home sphere, to women, adolescents and children of both sexes, creates an economic basis for highest form families and relations between the sexes. Of course, it is equally absurd to consider the Christian-Germanic form of the family as absolute as the ancient Roman or ancient Greek or Eastern form, which, by the way, in connection with one another, form a single historical series of development. It is obvious that the composition of a combined work force from persons of both sexes and different ages, being in its spontaneous, crude, capitalist form, when the worker exists for the production process, and not the production process for the worker, is a plague-ridden source of death and slavery - under appropriate conditions is inevitable should turn, on the contrary, into a source of humane development” (“Capital”, vol. I, end of chapter 13).

The factory system shows us “the embryos of education for the era of the future, when for all children above a certain age productive labor will be combined with teaching and gymnastics, not only as one of the means for increasing social production, but also as the only means for producing fully developed people” (ibid. ).

On the same historical basis, not only in the sense of an explanation of the past, but also in the sense of a fearless foresight of the future and bold practical activity aimed at its implementation, Marx’s socialism places questions about nationality and the state. Nations are an inevitable product and an inevitable form of the bourgeois era of social development. And the working class could not grow stronger, mature, or take shape without “settled within the nation,” without being “national” (“although not at all in the sense that the bourgeoisie understands it”). But the development of capitalism is increasingly breaking down national barriers, destroying national isolation, and replacing national antagonisms with class antagonisms. In developed capitalist countries, therefore, the complete truth is that “workers have no fatherland” and that the “joining of efforts” of workers, at least of civilized countries, “is one of the first conditions for the liberation of the proletariat”...

The state, this organized violence, inevitably arose at a certain stage in the development of society, when society was split into irreconcilable classes, when it could not exist without “power”, supposedly standing above society and to a certain extent isolated from it. Emerging within class contradictions, the state becomes “the state of the strongest, economically dominant class, which with its help becomes the politically dominant class and in this way acquires new means for the subjugation and exploitation of the oppressed class. Thus, the ancient state was primarily a state of slave owners for the subjugation of slaves, the feudal state was an organ of the nobility for the subjugation of serfs, and the modern representative state is an instrument for the exploitation of wage workers by capitalists.” (Engels in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” where he sets out his and Marx’s views.)

Even the freest and most progressive form of a bourgeois state, a democratic republic, does not eliminate this fact at all, but only changes its form (the connection between the government and the stock exchange, corruption - direct and indirect - of officials and the press, etc.). Socialism, leading to the destruction of classes, thereby leads to the destruction of the state.

“The first act,” writes Engels in Anti-Dühring, “with which the state truly acts as the representative of the whole society - the expropriation of the means of production for the benefit of the whole society - will at the same time be its last independent act as a state. Government intervention in public relations will become redundant in one area after another and will cease of its own accord. Managing people will be replaced by managing things and regulating the production process. The state will not be “abolished,” it will “wither away.” “A society that organizes production on the basis of free and equal associations of producers will place the state machine where it then belongs: in the museum of antiquities, next to the spindle and the bronze axe.” (Engels in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.”)

Finally, on the question of the relationship of Marx’s socialism to the small peasantry, which will remain in the era of expropriation of the expropriators, it is necessary to point out the statement of Engels, expressing Marx’s thought:

"When we master state power, we will not even think about forcibly expropriating small peasants (whether with compensation or not), as we will be forced to do with large landowners. Our task in relation to the small peasants will be, first of all, to transfer their private production and private property into partnership, but not by force, but through example and the offer of public assistance for this purpose. And then, of course, we will have enough means to prove to the peasant all the advantages of such a transition, advantages that should now be explained to him.” (Engels, On the Agrarian Question in the West, ed. Alekseeva, p. 17, Russian translation with errors. Original in Neue Zeit).

Tactics of the class struggle of the proletariat

Having found out back in 1844 - 1845. [Lenin here refers to the works of K. Marx and F. Engels “The Holy Family”, “German Ideology” and “Theses on Feuerbach” by Marx. - Red.] one of the main shortcomings of old materialism, consisting in the fact that it did not know how to understand the conditions and evaluate the significance of revolutionary practical activity, Marx throughout his life along with theoretical works, paid unrelenting attention to questions of tactics of the class struggle of the proletariat. Enormous material is provided in this regard All the works of Marx and... his correspondence with Engels in particular. This material has not yet been collected, brought together, studied or developed. Therefore, we must limit ourselves here to only the most general and brief remarks, emphasizing that without this aspects of materialism, Marx rightly considered it half-hearted, one-sided, and dead. Marx defined the main task of the tactics of the proletariat in strict accordance with all the premises of his materialist-dialectical worldview. Only an objective account of the totality of the relationships of all classes of a given society, without exception, and, consequently, an account of the objective stage of development of this society and an account of the relationships between it and other societies can serve as the basis for the correct tactics of the advanced class. Moreover, all classes and all countries are considered not in a static, but in a dynamic form, that is, not in a stationary state, but in movement (the laws of which arise from the economic conditions of the existence of each class). The movement, in turn, is considered not only from the point of view of the past, but also from the point of view of the future, and not in the vulgar understanding of “evolutionists” who see only slow changes, but dialectically: “20 years are equal to one day in great historical developments,” Marx wrote Engels, - although later days may come in which 20 years are concentrated” (vol. III, p. 127 “Correspondence”).

At every stage of development, at every moment, the tactics of the proletariat must take into account this objectively inevitable dialectic human history, on the one hand, using the era of political stagnation or snail-like, so-called “peaceful” development to develop the consciousness, strength and fighting ability of the advanced class, and on the other hand, leading all the work of this use towards the “ultimate goal” of the movement of this class and creating in him the ability to practically solve great problems in great days, “concentrating in himself 20 years.” Two of Marx's arguments are particularly important in this matter: one from The Poverty of Philosophy regarding the economic struggle and economic organizations of the proletariat, another from the “Communist Manifesto” regarding its political tasks. The first one reads:

“Large industry accumulates in one place a mass of people unknown to each other. Competition splits their interests. But the protection of wages, this common interest in relation to their employer, unites them with one common idea of ​​​​resistance, of coalition... Coalitions, at first isolated, form into groups, and the protection of the workers of their unions against the constantly united capital becomes more necessary for them, than wage protection... In this struggle - the real one civil war- all elements for the coming battle are united and developed. Having reached this point, the coalition assumes a political character.”

Here we have before us the program and tactics of the economic struggle and the trade union movement for several decades, for the entire long era of preparing the forces of the proletariat “for the coming battle.” With this we must compare the numerous indications of Marx and Engels on the example of the English labor movement, how industrial “prosperity” causes attempts to “buy the workers” (I, p. 136, “Correspondence with Engels”), to distract them from the struggle, how this prosperity in general “ demoralizes the workers" (II, p. 218), just as the English proletariat is being "bourgeoisized" - "the most bourgeois of all nations" (English) "apparently wants to lead matters in the end to having, next to the bourgeoisie, a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat" (II, p. 290); how his “revolutionary energy” disappears (III, p. 124); how you have to wait more or less for a long time“the deliverance of the English workers from their apparent bourgeois corruption” (III, p. 127); how the English labor movement lacks the “fervor of the Chartists” (1866; III , p. 305); how the English workers' leaders are created according to the type of middle ground “between the radical bourgeois and the worker” (on Holyoke, IV, p. 209); how, due to the monopoly of England and until this monopoly bursts, “nothing can be done about the British workers” (IV, p. 433). Tactics of economic struggle in connection with the general course ( and outcome) of the labor movement is viewed here from a remarkably broad, comprehensive, dialectical, truly revolutionary point of view.

The “Communist Manifesto” on the tactics of political struggle put forward the main position of Marxism: “Communists fight in the name of the immediate goals and interests of the working class, but at the same time they defend the future of the movement.”

In the name of this, Marx in 1848 supported the party of the “agrarian revolution” in Poland, “the same party that caused the Krakow uprising of 1846.” In Germany 1848 - 1849 Marx supported extreme revolutionary democracy and never subsequently took back what he said then about tactics. He viewed the German bourgeoisie as an element that “from the very beginning was inclined to betray the people” (only an alliance with the peasantry could give the bourgeoisie the integral implementation of its tasks) “and to compromise with the crowned representatives of the old society.” Here is Marx’s final analysis of the class position of the German bourgeoisie in the era of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, an analysis that is, among other things, an example of materialism, which considers society in motion and, moreover, not only from the side of the movement that faces back... “without faith in yourself, without faith in the people; grumbling before the top, trembling before the bottom; ... frightened by the world storm; nowhere with energy, everywhere with plagiarism; ... without initiative; ... a cursed old man, condemned to guide, in his senile interests, the first impulses of youth of a young and healthy people...” (“New Rhine Gazette”, 1818, see “Literary Heritage”, vol. III, p. .212). About 20 years later, in a letter to Engels (vol. III, p. 224), Marx declared the reason for the failure of the revolution of 1848 was that the bourgeoisie preferred peace with slavery to the prospect of fighting for freedom alone. When the era of revolutions of 1848 - 1849 ended, Marx rebelled against any game of revolution (Schapper - Willich and the fight against them), demanding the ability to work in the era of a new period, allegedly preparing new revolutions “peacefully”. The spirit in which Marx demanded that this work be carried out can be seen from his following assessment of the situation in Germany during the darkest reactionary times in 1856:

“The whole matter in Germany will depend on the possibility of supporting the proletarian revolution with some second edition of the peasant war” (“Correspondence with Engels”, vol. II, p. 108).

While the democratic (bourgeois) revolution in Germany was not completed, Marx directed all his attention in the tactics of the socialist proletariat to the development of the democratic energy of the peasantry. He considered Lassalle to be committing “objectively treason against the labor movement for the benefit of Prussia” (vol. III, p. 210), among other things, precisely because Lassalle was in favor of the landowners and Prussian nationalism.

“It is despicable,” Engels wrote in 1865, exchanging thoughts with Marx regarding their upcoming joint appearance in the press, “in an agricultural country to attack only the bourgeoisie in the name of industrial workers, forgetting about the patriarchal “exploitation with sticks” of rural workers by the feudal nobility” ( III, p. 217).

In the period 1864 - 1870, when the era of the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany was coming to an end, the era of the struggle of the exploiting classes of Prussia and Austria for one way or another to complete this revolution above, Marx not only condemned Lassalle, who flirted with Bismarck, but also corrected Liebknecht, who fell into “Austrophilism” and in defense of particularism; Marx demanded revolutionary tactics that would equally mercilessly fight both Bismarck and the Austrophilians, tactics that would not accommodate the “winner” - the Prussian Junker, but would immediately resume the revolutionary struggle against him and on the basis, created by Prussian military victories (“Correspondence with Engels”, vol. III, pp. 134, 136, 147, 179, 204, 210, 215, 418, 437, 440 - 441). In the famous address of the International of September 9, 1870, Marx warned the French proletariat against an untimely uprising, but when it did come (1871), Marx enthusiastically welcomed the revolutionary initiative of the masses who were “storming the sky” (Marx’s Letter to Kugelman). The defeat of the revolutionary action in this situation, as in many others, was, from the point of view of Marx’s dialectical materialism, a lesser evil in the general course and outcome proletarian struggle than abandoning a position taken and surrendering without a fight: such a surrender would demoralize the proletariat and cut off its ability to fight. Fully appreciating the use of legal means of struggle in eras of political stagnation and the dominance of bourgeois legality, Marx in 1877 - 1878, after an exceptional law was issued against the socialists, sharply condemned the “revolutionary phrase” of Most, but no less, if not more sharply, attacked to opportunism, which then temporarily took possession of the official Social Democratic Party, which did not immediately show steadfastness, firmness, revolutionary spirit, or readiness to move on to an illegal struggle in response to the exceptional law (“Letters of Marx to Engels,” vol. IV, pp. 397, 404, 418, 422, 424. Compare also letters to Sorge). ( Lenin, K. Marx (1914), Works, vol.XVIII, pp. 8 - 31, ed. 3rd.)

The main thing in Marxism-Leninism

The main thing in Marx's teaching is the class struggle. This is what they say and write very often. But this is not true. And from this infidelity quite often results in an opportunistic distortion of Marxism, its falsification in the spirit of acceptability for the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of class struggle Not Marx, but the bourgeoisie before Marx was created for the bourgeoisie, generally speaking, acceptable. Who recognizes only class struggle, he is not yet a Marxist, he may not yet be outside the framework of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To limit Marxism to the doctrine of class struggle means to curtail Marxism, to distort it, to reduce it to what is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. A Marxist is only one who distributes recognition of class struggle before recognition dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the deepest difference between a Marxist and an ordinary petty (and even big) bourgeois. On this whetstone you need to test real understanding and recognition of Marxism. ( Lenin, State and Revolution (1917), Works, vol.XXI, pp. 392, ed. 3rd.)

The main thing in Marx's teaching is the clarification of the world-historical role of the proletariat as the creator of a socialist society. ( Lenin, Historical destinies of the teachings of Karl Marx (1913), Works, vol.XVI, pp. 331, ed. 3rd.)

Taking a materialistic look at the world and humanity, they (Marx and Engels. - Ed.) saw that, just as all natural phenomena are based on material causes, so the development of human society is determined by the development of material productive forces. Relations depend on the development of productive forces , in which people become related to each other in the production of objects necessary to satisfy human needs. And in these relationships there is an explanation of all phenomena of social life, human aspirations, ideas and laws. The development of the productive forces creates social relations based on private property, but now we see how the same development of the productive forces takes property away from the majority and concentrates it in the hands of an insignificant minority. It destroys property, the basis of the modern social order, it itself strives for the same goal that the socialists set for themselves. Socialists only need to understand what social force, due to its position in modern society, is interested in the implementation of socialism, and communicate to this force an awareness of its interests and historical task. Such a force is the proletariat. ( Lenin, Friedrich Engels (1895), Works, vol.I, pp. 435, ed. 3rd, 1926)

The brochure “On the Foundations of Leninism” says:

“Some people think that the main thing in Leninism is the peasant question, that the starting point of Leninism is the question of the peasantry, its role, its relative weight. This is completely false. The main question in Leninism, its starting point is not the peasant question, but the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the conditions for its conquest, the conditions for its strengthening. The peasant question, as a question about the ally of the proletariat in its struggle for power, is a derivative question.”

Is this position correct?

I think that's right. This position follows entirely from the definition of Leninism. In fact, if Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution, and the main content of the proletarian revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, then it is clear that the main thing in Leninism lies in the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the development of this question, in the justification and concretization of this question.

Nevertheless, Comrade Zinoviev apparently does not agree with this position. In his article “In Memory of Lenin” he says:

“The question of the role of the peasantry, as I have already said, is main issue[Italics mine. - I. St.] Bolshevism, Leninism" (see Pravda No. 35 of February 13, 1924).

This position of Comrade Zinoviev, as you see, follows entirely from the incorrect definition of Leninism given by Comrade Zinoviev. Therefore it is as wrong as his definition of Leninism is wrong.

Is Lenin’s thesis correct that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the “root content of the revolution” (see Vol. XXIII, p. 337)? Certainly correct. Is the thesis that Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution correct? I think that's correct. But what follows from this? And from this it follows that the main question of Leninism, its starting point, its foundation is the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Isn’t it true that the question of imperialism, the question of the spasmodic nature of the development of imperialism, the question of the victory of socialism in one country, the question of the state of the proletariat, the question of the Soviet form of this state, the question of the role of the party in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the question of ways of construction socialism - that all these issues were developed by Lenin? Isn’t it true that these very questions form the basis, the foundation of the idea of ​​the dictatorship of the proletariat? Is it not true that without the development of these fundamental questions, the development of the peasant question from the point of view of the dictatorship of the proletariat would be unthinkable?

There are no words that Lenin was an expert on the peasant question. There are no words that the peasant question, as a question about the ally of the proletariat, is of the utmost importance for the proletariat and is integral part the fundamental question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But isn’t it clear that if Leninism had not faced the basic question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, then there would not have been a derivative question of the ally of the proletariat, the question of the peasantry? Isn’t it clear that if Leninism had not faced the practical question of the conquest of power by the proletariat, then there would have been no question of an alliance with the peasantry?

Lenin would not have been the greatest proletarian ideologist, which he undoubtedly is, he would have been a simple “peasant philosopher,” as he is often portrayed by foreign literary inhabitants, if he had developed the peasant question not on the basis of the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but in addition to this basis , outside this base.

One out of two:

or the peasant question is the main one in Leninism, and then Leninism is not suitable, not obligatory for capitalistically developed countries, for countries that are not peasant countries;

or The main thing in Leninism is the dictatorship of the proletariat, and then Leninism is an international teaching of the proletarians of all countries, suitable and obligatory for all countries without exception, including capitalistically developed ones.

Here you have to choose. ( Stalin, Questions of Leninism, pp. 192 - 194, Partizdat, 1932, ed. 9th.)