2.Philosophy and science

Wellred

Core Argument

Chapter 2: Philosophy and Science

The crisis of capitalism finds its reflection in the degeneration of bourgeois philosophy, which has collapsed into trivial semantics and word-play, reducing itself to the study of words and culminating in subjective idealism and solipsism. This mystification has its roots in the division between mental and manual labour that arose with class society. Against this decay, dialectics remains indispensable as the methodology of science, studying things in motion, interconnection, and contradiction through its three laws: the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. Marx inverted Hegel’s idealist dialectic, placing it on a materialist foundation.

The chapter launches a sustained polemic against Heinz Dieterich’s so-called ‘philosophy of praxis’, borrowed from Gramsci’s fascist-era censorship, dismissing it as shallow eclecticism drawn from postmodernism despite its criticisms of that tradition. Dieterich inverts Marx’s materialism, making consciousness rather than the development of productive forces the basis of history, contradicting Marx’s unambiguous position that social existence determines consciousness. His claim that the USSR fell due to mediocrity in social sciences is rejected: bureaucratic degeneration caused that mediocrity, as bureaucratic regimes stifle the free thought essential to science. Soviet achievements occurred despite the bureaucracy, not because of it.

Dieterich’s dismissal of debates over idealism versus materialism as ‘academic extravagances’ constitutes a break with Marxism, which is founded on dialectical materialism. Lenin argued natural science cannot hold its own without it. Dieterich uncritically accepts the Big Bang theory, misstating its age and ignoring that it depends on unobserved hypothetical entities—inflation field, dark matter, dark energy—to resolve contradictions. Evidence contradicts the theory, and the history of science shows even established theories are eventually overthrown. Marx and Engels critically engaged with science, rejecting Newtonian mechanism and Darwinian gradualism, anticipating later developments such as punctuated equilibria.

Dieterich’s claim that understanding society requires prior mastery of physics is absurd: complex systems have emergent properties irreducible to atomic forces. His argument that the USSR collapsed partly because the human genome was undiscovered is crude idealism. The Human Genome Project confirms Marxism, exploding racist myths; genes are raw material, while society plays the main role in human development. Morality is socially determined, not super-historical; selfishness is a product of class society, not evolution. Dieterich offers only an ideal, not a real programme for socialism.