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Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science - Introduction to the ebook edition of Rea

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

This introduction to the ebook edition of Reason in Revolt argues that dialectical materialism — far from being rendered obsolete by scientific progress — has been vindicated and deepened by the very advances that were supposed to supersede it. Alan Woods claims that the latest discoveries in cosmology, genetics, palaeontology, and complexity theory confirm Engels' central insight: that nature works dialectically, through contradiction, leaps, and the transformation of quantity into quality. The article's central thesis is that the crisis of bourgeois ideology — expressed in the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, genetic determinism, and mystical cosmologies — is itself a reflection of the terminal crisis of capitalism, and that dialectical materialism provides the only adequate philosophical weapon to combat both the scientific errors and the political reaction that flow from that crisis.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws directly on Engels' dialectics of nature, particularly the unfinished project of applying the laws of dialectics — the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation — to the natural sciences. Woods situates himself within the tradition that insists on the unity of Marxist philosophy, rejecting the separation of dialectical materialism from historical materialism that characterised both Second International positivism and later Stalinist dogmatism. The article explicitly invokes Hegel's Logic as the source of the dialectical method, but insists that Marx and Engels transformed it from an idealist into a materialist framework.

The theoretical lineage here is that of the revolutionary Marxist tradition as opposed to both reformist and Stalinist distortions. Woods draws on Stephen Jay Gould's theory of punctuated equilibria as an independent scientific confirmation of dialectical leaps in evolution, and on Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a description of the dialectical process of scientific development itself. The rejection of the Big Bang theory is grounded in the materialist principle that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed — a position that places the article in a specific and contested position within Marxist philosophy, closer to Engels' own cosmological speculations than to the more cautious agnosticism of some later Marxists.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was published in June 2015, exactly twenty years after the original edition of Reason in Revolt. This places it in a specific conjuncture: the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the deepening of the European debt crisis, the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, and the early stirrings of what would become the mass movements of 2015-16 — the Greek referendum, the Sanders campaign, Corbyn's election as Labour leader, and the refugee crisis. Woods explicitly connects the resurgence of religious fundamentalism — Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu — to the barbarism of US imperialism and the terminal decline of capitalism.

The article names specific forces: George W. Bush and Tony Blair as examples of Christian fundamentalism in power; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, and Greece as evidence of a new wave of class struggle. It identifies the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent triumphalism of free-market ideology as the immediate historical backdrop against which Reason in Revolt was originally written, and argues that the illusions of that period have now been shattered. The reference to "years and decades of austerity, unemployment and falling living standards" in Europe is a direct commentary on the post-2008 trajectory of the European Union.

Where the Argument Continues

This introduction is precisely that — an opening to a much larger work. The argument about dialectics and modern science is developed at length in the full text of Reason in Revolt, which covers cosmology, evolution, genetics, chaos theory, and the history of philosophy. The article points to several areas where the argument continues in other IDOM materials:

  • The critique of genetic determinism and creationism is developed in multiple articles on the human genome project and intelligent design theory.
  • The rejection of the Big Bang theory is taken up in later IDOM articles on cosmology, particularly those engaging with the work of Neil Turok, Paul Steinhardt, and Roger Penrose.
  • The analysis of the crisis of bourgeois philosophy connects to a broader series of articles on the history of philosophy, including Woods' own The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective.
  • The political conclusions — the inevitability of a revival of class struggle and the need for revolutionary organisation — are developed in the daily political analysis of the RCI, particularly in Against the Stream episodes and in the theoretical articles of In Defence of Marxism.

The article also leaves open the question of how dialectical materialism can be systematically developed as a methodology for contemporary science — a task Woods acknowledges was never completed in the Soviet Union and remains to be undertaken.

Connections

This article should be read alongside:

  • Engels, Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring — the foundational texts for the Marxist philosophy of science.
  • Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and The Panda's Thumb — for the dialectical interpretation of evolution.
  • Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — for the dialectical model of scientific development.
  • Alan Woods and Ted Grant, Reason in Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science — the full text of which this is the introduction.
  • Alan Woods, The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective — for the broader philosophical context.
  • IDOM articles on cosmology, particularly those engaging with the work of Neil Turok and the cyclical universe hypothesis.
  • The RCI's political analyses of the Greek crisis, the rise of Syriza, and the European austerity regime — for the conjunctural political argument that frames the philosophical discussion.

Key Quotes

  1. "The latest discoveries of science have fundamentally modified the old view of evolution as a slow, gradual process, uninterrupted by sudden catastrophes and leaps."

  2. "The Big Bang theory was an attempt to explain the history of the Universe on the basis of certain observed phenomena... It is the modern equivalent of the old religious dogma of the creation of the world from nothing."

  3. "We have argued consistently that the material universe has neither a beginning nor an end – it is infinite in both time and space. Matter (and energy, which is the same thing) can neither be created nor destroyed."

  4. "The 'evolutionary adaptations' that originally enabled capitalism to displace feudalism and emerge as the dominant socio-economic system have long since turned into their opposite. It is displaying all the symptoms we associate with a socio-economic system in a state of terminal decline."

  5. "Dialectics teaches us that sooner or later, things change into their opposite. The most striking manifestation of dialectics is the crisis of capitalism itself."

  6. "Marxism is much more than a political doctrine, or a theory of economics. It is the philosophy of the future. Dialectical materialism allows us to study reality, not as a series of dry, unconnected, senseless events or 'facts', but as a dynamic process, driven by its internal contradictions, ever changing and with an infinitely rich content."