Editor’s Foreword¶
Core Argument¶
Editor’s Foreword
This foreword situates the volume as a direct intervention in the theoretical preparation of a new generation of revolutionaries, arguing that dialectical materialism is not an academic curiosity but the indispensable compass for the working class in an era of renewed capitalist crisis. The core claim is that Marxist theory—and specifically its philosophical method—is the synthesis of working-class historical experience and the only reliable guide to action. Without it, the movement is condemned to oscillate between opportunist reformism and ultraleft sectarianism, or to sink altogether.
The editor draws on the post-2008 conjuncture as evidence: the crisis produced the rise of Sanders and Trump, and millions now call themselves socialists, but this creates a political battleground between liberals who confine socialism to capitalist limits and Marxists who understand it as the transitional phase after the working class seizes state power. The foreword insists that the task is not to find ready-made answers in the classics but to absorb their method and apply it to living struggles.
A lengthy anecdote about Trotsky’s 1937 meeting with George Novack in Mexico serves as the chapter’s central polemic. Trotsky, despite facing the Moscow Trials and fighting for his life, spent over an hour insisting that the Socialist Workers Party must combat Max Eastman’s repudiation of dialectics, calling pragmatism and empiricism “the greatest curse of American thought.” The editor uses this to argue that the SWP’s subsequent political failures—and the Fourth International’s inability to become a mass force—stem directly from neglecting this theoretical grounding. Mistakes in theory lead to mistakes in practice, and humanity has paid for those decades of lost revolutionary opportunity.
The foreword also polemicises against postmodernist ideology, which it characterises as a bourgeois and petty-bourgeois attempt to derail the movement into class collaboration and confusion. It contrasts this with dialectical materialism’s embrace of contradiction, polarisation, and change as approximations of objective reality. The editor notes that dialectical thinking does not come naturally, especially in the United States where pragmatic empiricism and religious superstition are deeply embedded, and must be consciously combatted.
The volume’s structure is outlined: sections on the origins of dialectical materialism from Hegel through Feuerbach, on dialectics itself, on materialism, and on the dialectics of class struggle, party building, and the transition to communism. The editor acknowledges necessary omissions—Marx’s Capital, Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?—but insists the volume provides the methodological tools to approach them properly. The foreword closes by framing the book as a labour of love for a new generation, with the confidence that quality can be transformed into quantity, as nature and history repeatedly demonstrate.