Introduction by Alan Woods¶
Core Argument¶
In the introduction to his work, Alan Woods argues that official philosophy has been systematically enlisted as a tool of reaction against Marxism, particularly during the Cold War. Powerful material interests control academic careers, enforcing a conspiracy of silence around Hegel and fostering hostility towards dialectical materialism. Woods traces the philosophical crisis that followed the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, when a mood of pessimism among the petty bourgeoisie led intellectuals to abandon class struggle for subjective idealism, specifically the Machism of Avenarius and Mach. Figures such as Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Bazarov claimed to update Marxism with these ideas, but Lenin recognised this as a complete negation of Marxist philosophy. His Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909) defended dialectical materialism by exposing Machism as a form of idealism.
The fundamental philosophical divide, Woods explains, is between materialism, which holds nature as primary and spirit as secondary, and idealism, which reverses this relation. Idealism is a façade for religion and superstition, historically used to block scientific inquiry, as exemplified by Bishop Berkeley’s denial of matter to combat atheism. Berkeley used empiricist arguments to claim that since we know the world only through our senses, we cannot prove the existence of the physical world independent of perception, asserting esse est percipi — to be is to be perceived. This subjective idealism leads logically to solipsism, which Berkeley tried to avoid by positing a cosmic mind, God, that perceives everything.
Dialectical materialism, by contrast, holds that the objective world exists independently of the subject, but the two form a dialectical unity; consciousness is a bridge, not a wall. Knowledge derives from collective human experience and sensuous activity, not merely individual sense perception. Engels posed philosophy’s fundamental question as the relation of thinking to being, identifying three trends: consistent materialism, consistent idealism, and the inconsistent tendency of Hume and Kant, who separated appearance from the unknowable “thing-in-itself”. For Marxists, ideas reflect the material world, tested through practice. Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach states that objective truth is a practical, not theoretical, question—practice, through experimentation and industry, refutes the Kantian thing-in-itself.
Woods contends that subjective idealism persists in bourgeois philosophy, from logical positivism to postmodernism, which he dismisses as a bad copy of earlier subjective idealism. This degeneration reflects capitalism’s dead-end. The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism, he concludes, remains a revolutionary weapon.