The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (Excerpt)¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s 1913 essay, written on the thirtieth anniversary of Marx’s death, establishes Marxism not as a sectarian novelty but as the conscious synthesis of the most advanced thought of the nineteenth century. The core argument is that Marxism is “omnipotent because it is true”—true because it does not reject previous intellectual achievements but absorbs and transcends them. Lenin identifies three sources: German classical philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism. The excerpt focuses on the first of these, Marxist philosophy.
Lenin insists that the foundation of Marxism is materialism, the only philosophy consistent with natural science and hostile to superstition. He notes that throughout modern European history, particularly in eighteenth-century France, materialism was the weapon of democracy against medieval rubbish, serfdom, and clerical obscurantism. Its enemies—defenders of religion and bourgeois oppression—have therefore always tried to refute it by advocating philosophical idealism. Marx and Engels, Lenin argues, did not merely repeat eighteenth-century materialism. They enriched it with the dialectics of Hegel, which in turn had produced Feuerbach’s materialism. Dialectics is presented as the doctrine of development in its fullest form, the recognition that human knowledge reflects eternally developing matter. Lenin cites the latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—as confirmations of dialectical materialism, in direct polemic against bourgeois philosophers who used such discoveries to revive idealism.
The decisive advance, however, is the extension of materialism to the cognition of human society: historical materialism. Lenin claims this replaced the previous chaos and arbitrariness in views on history with a harmonious scientific theory. The growth of productive forces drives the development from one system of social life to another—capitalism from feudalism, for example. Social knowledge—philosophical, religious, political—reflects the economic system of society, and political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. Lenin illustrates this with the observation that the various political forms of modern European states all serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
The polemical thrust is twofold. First, against philosophical idealism in all its forms, which Lenin treats as a disguised defence of religion and bourgeois rule. Second, against those who would treat Marxism as a dogma rather than a development, or who would use new scientific discoveries to abandon materialism. Lenin’s conclusion is that Marx’s consummate philosophical materialism provides the working class with powerful instruments of knowledge.