Why I have such a high regard for Marx, Engels and Lenin
What is Matter? What is Experience? (continued)
One expression of the genius of Marx and Engels was that they despised pedantic playing with new words, erudite terms, and subtle “isms”, and said simply and plainly: there is a materialist line and an idealist line in philosophy, and between them there are various shades of agnosticism. The vain attempts to find a “new” point of view in philosophy betray the same poverty of mind that is revealed in similar efforts to create a “new” theory of value, a “new” theory of rent, and so forth.
V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 130-131
Part fourteen/to be continued…
A short piece that will send you thinking all day.
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Thank you for your response Ngobesing Suh Romanus. The Marxist position on this (which I think is correct – although I am not a Marxist I think that developments on Marxism are the way forward) is that one has to make a choice – which precedes the other – matter/objective reality (the materialist position – consistent with science) or consciousness and its products (the view of philosophical idealism – consistent with religions)? Fundamentally, the vast philosophical complexity to which Lenin referred in the above quotation can and must be reduced to (recognised as embodying) a choice as ‘simple’ as that. Is the human brain the result of billions of years of development, the great bulk of it, as science tells us, without a shred of consciousness, or was it all started by ‘the mind of God’ or some equivalent? Since this is the question which underlies all others, one’s answer to this fundamentally shapes one’s thoughts about the world. Best regards, Phil
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