Skip to content

On the significance of militant materialism

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

Lenin's central thesis is that the defence of materialism in the revolutionary period cannot be left to Communists alone, nor can it be reduced to a purely theoretical exercise. The article argues for a militant materialism — one that actively intervenes in ideological struggle, forms alliances with non-Communist materialists and progressive natural scientists, and wages an unrelenting fight against all forms of religious obscurantism and idealist philosophy, however scientifically dressed they may be. The key claim is that the revolution's survival depends not only on political and economic transformation but on a conscious, organised struggle for a materialist worldview among the masses.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is grounded in the classical Marxist understanding, inherited from Engels, that the proletariat must wage a threefold struggle — economic, political, and theoretical. Lenin draws directly on Joseph Dietzgen's characterisation of bourgeois philosophy professors as "graduated flunkeys of clericalism," extending this to show how the class interests of the bourgeoisie are expressed through apparently neutral scientific and philosophical trends.

The article sits firmly within the Leninist tradition of philosophical partisanship. It insists that materialism without dialectics is helpless against the sophisticated idealist currents that emerge from revolutions in natural science. Lenin's call for a "Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics" is a practical programme for equipping natural scientists with the philosophical tools necessary to resist bourgeois idealist interpretations of their own discoveries. This places the article in direct continuity with Engels's Dialectics of Nature and Lenin's own Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, while also anticipating later Marxist engagements with the philosophy of science.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article's contemporary relevance is striking. The IDOM introduction explicitly connects Lenin's warnings to the current crisis of the university system — funding crises, the erosion of scientific reproducibility, witch-hunts against pro-Palestine staff, and the dominance of postmodernist and idealist philosophies in the social sciences. The specific mechanism Lenin identifies — that the ruling class promotes mystical and idealist ideas to cut across class lines — is argued to operate today through identity politics, postcolonial theory, and queer theory, which divide the working class along lines of 'identity' rather than class.

The parallel between the idealist misinterpretation of Einstein's relativity in Lenin's time and the contemporary misuse of quantum mechanics to deny the existence of a material world independent of the observer is drawn explicitly. The article's warning about "pseudo-scientific sophistry" that serves as a screen for "pedantry or a complete misunderstanding of Marxism" is directed at contemporary tendencies within the left that dismiss militant atheist propaganda as unsophisticated.

Where the Argument Continues

The IDOM introduction points readers to the broader corpus of dialectical materialism published by the Revolutionary Communist International, including books and articles on modern science. The reference to Trotsky's letter to Pod Znamenem Marksizma, newly translated and republished alongside Lenin's article, opens a line of inquiry into Trotsky's own contributions to materialist philosophy. The introduction also signals that Lenin's criticism of the bureaucratic deformations of the workers' state will be taken up in the next instalment of the Lenin in a Year series, connecting this philosophical article to the political struggle against Stalinist bureaucracy.

Connections

This article should be read alongside:

  • Engels's Dialectics of Nature and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
  • Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism for the earlier philosophical polemic against idealist interpretations of the new physics
  • Trotsky's letter to Pod Znamenem Marksizma, newly translated by IDOM
  • The broader IDOM literature on dialectical materialism and the critique of postmodernism
  • Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts for the foundational materialist conception of practice

Key Quotes

  1. "In effect, the professors of philosophy in modern society are in the majority of cases nothing but 'graduated flunkeys of clericalism'."

  2. "One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone."

  3. "It would be the biggest and most grievous mistake a Marxist could make to think that the millions of the people (especially the peasants and artisans), who have been condemned by all modern society to darkness, ignorance and superstitions — can extricate themselves from this darkness only along the straight line of a purely Marxist education."

  4. "No natural science and no materialism can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground."

  5. "In order to hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist."

  6. "The keen, vivacious and talented writings of the old eighteenth-century atheists wittily and openly attacked the prevailing clericalism and will very often prove a thousand times more suitable for arousing people from their religious torpor than the dull and dry paraphrases of Marxism."