Foundations of Marxism [CFML: Chapter 4]

A. Marxist Epistemology

Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.
— Mao Zedong 1

• The Marxist understanding of knowledge, truth, and action.
• Cognition as a dialectical, psycho-material phenomenon.
• The Marxist theory of knowledge.
• Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth.

Epistemology & Technology

From the ancient Greek epistēmē,2 meaning “science” or “knowledge,” and the suffix -logía,3 meaning “study of” or “logic of,” epistemology may be understood, in simplest terms, as the study of knowledge. Epistemology is, as a branch of philosophy, concerned principally with understanding knowledge as a category; what it is, what it means, what it consists of, etc.

One cannot properly be said to know a subject without participation of some form in relation to it. It would be a mistake, therefore, to introduce the epistemic category without its natural counterpart: tékhnē,4 the technical category.

Although often used interchangeably by the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates, in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, written in light of Xenophon having been a student of Socrates himself, the teacher is described as referring to a number of practices as tékhnē: playing musical instruments, dancing, wrestling, skilled trades, household management,5 farming, and doing math.

It is, therefore, most simply, that knowledge, in the sense of epistemology, refers specifically to that category which exists in distinction from that of technology; theoretical knowledge and ideas as distinct from that of the technical or practical. The discrete categories of theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge—theory and practice—then form the dialectical unity of complete knowledge. This purely philosophical distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge corresponds generally to the cognitive distinction between implicit and explicit memory, wherein the declarative, or the theoretical, is traditionally the principal focus of epistemology.

For Marxists, however, only the unity of both, as a unity of opposites, may be understood to truly represent real knowledge, finding its highest expression in praxis—transformative action guided by knowledge and experience.

The Material Epistēmē

Where Audi’s Dictionary notes that ideas are the product of thought,6 the Marxist-Leninist tradition has maintained, from Marx to Mao, that thought itself is the result of material antecedents. Thought must, therefore, likewise be material in some way; neither ideas as products, nor thought as the process from which they are derived, may exist, as it were, beyond the material world.7 What then, we may ask, is the material basis of thought?

In 1861, Broca’s area, so named after its discoverer, Paul Broca (1824-1880), would be identified as the specific region of the human brain associated with the specific cognitive function of speech production.8 In 1874, Wernicke’s area, likewise named for Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), would be identified with that of language comprehension.9 Astute readers will note that these dates, as well as the underlying notion of thought as a product of cognitive processes housed within the human brain, also align with the lives and ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). This is, in the overarching Marxist view, unlikely to be a coincidence: while not physicians themselves, Marx and Engels were no less concerned with the then-emerging early achievements of what we might now call modern science, and viewed their work as belonging to the same category.10 Marx himself had direct correspondence with figures such as Charles Darwin,11 and even the American President, Abraham Lincoln.12 It is thus our first illustration of the material ground of knowledge that individuals of disparate backgrounds and purposes existing within the same society, regardless of interpersonal connection, tend inextricably towards interconnected knowledge-systems, trends in thought, etc.13

Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian martyr, illustrates what we have thus considered, that:

Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously “born” in each individual brain: they have had a center of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion—a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.14

Meaning that, in plain terms, no knowledge or system of thought whatsoever may be said to have been arrived at spontaneously, purely of its own fruition.

Mao Zedong then, in part, explains the Marxist understanding and interpretation of these facts, writing that:

In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.15

That is, that knowledge, represented in the physical structures and neurophysiological processes of the brain, is itself structured by the material situationality of the individual subject—specifically as regards the conditions necessary for the subject’s survival, reproduction, and self-actualization. A single idea or piece of knowledge is at once, then, both the product of material shaping, as well as the producer of the subjective interpretation thereof. Here we arrive at the process of knowledge from the Marxist perspective.

The Marxist Theory of Knowledge

The young Karl Marx asserts, in his Theses on Feuerbach, that:

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.16

That is, for Marx, three matters are explicitly clear:

First, that thought is fundamentally a material process, as we have established above: that thought-as-product arises from the material, neurophysiological processes of the brain, shaped by the experience of our natural and social environments; and, in turn, thought-as-producer forms the basis of individual and collective social actions. The collective result of which is then the formation of schemas, knowledge-systems, etc.17

The second, that objective truth is discernible through guided action. That is, that know-what (epistēmē) and know-how (tékhnē) find their dialectical unity and higher expression in doing (praxis).18 It is then, through praxis, that real, objective truth is revealed. This likewise implies an order of knowledge, ascending from individual or subjective forms of knowledge (opinion, experience, expectation; fluid and parallactic), upwards, into systemic or objective forms (factual, static, unchanging truths) that are attainable only through collective, social praxis.

The third, that social thought (referring to the epistemological category; epistēmē) as isolated or disconnected from social practice (the technical category; tékhnē), is irrelevant outside of academic discourse. This matter appears most clearly in the light of what we have discussed previously; that when pursued in isolation from one-another, neither the epistemic nor the technical yield truth; only in their dialectical unity, at the level of mass movement, is the fullness of the material world revealed.

This, fundamentally, forms the basis of the Marxist theory of knowledge.

It then follows from this foundation that, foremost, not all thought necessarily constitutes knowledge, while all knowledge can, and eventually may, exist in some form of thought. Specifically, thought encompasses the totality of one’s inner life, while knowledge refers to the aforementioned systems of neurophysiological production and the dialectic of creating and being created. As material beings undergoing this constant creation of new knowledge (learning) throughout our lifespan, inhabiting a material world bound up by natural forces, the case arises that, save for some intervening force, if given a long enough period of time, the entirety of that material world, and those natural forces, will come to be held in totality by the collective of human knowledge; from that knowledge the world may then be, once again, made anew.19

Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth

20

Mao Zedong writes:

Man’s knowledge makes another leap through the test of practice… it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in cognition, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no other way of testing truth.

Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.21

Just as not all thought is necessarily knowledge, not all knowledge is necessarily truth; truth, as a category, is objective, historically constituted, and materially bound. In turn, all truth may exist as knowledge in thought, but is not dependent on them, and is only mediated by the dialectical motion of human consciousness and social practice. On this matter, the tradition of Marxism-Leninism is equally clear that practice is the sole criterion for truth, especially when dealing with matters of a societal scale,22 and, further, that truth itself encompasses three distinct categories of its own: objective truth, relative truth, and absolute truth.

Objective Truth

Objective truth is that truth which exists, as an accurate reflection of material reality, independently of human thought. It is the correspondence of ideas with reality as it is accurate regardless of whether the human subject recognizes or believes it. This grounding in material reality situates objective truth over and above mere opinion or social convention.

This objective truth is likewise the fundamental entrypoint of dialectical and historical materialism, and thus, the lynchpin of Marxist thought.23

Relative Truth

Relative truth is that truth which exists, as a partial, or fragmentary reflection of material reality, bound up within the dialectical motion of human consciousness and world-historic progression; inherently relative to the level of development of science, technology, and social practice of the society which bore it. It is not necessarily subjective or incorrect, but rather, by definition, incomplete or conditional.

This relative truth is significant, as it is the first, or infantile form in the evolution of human thought towards objective truth, bound up within the historically-constituted material world.

Absolute Truth

Absolute truth, arising from the philosopher Hegel’s conception of Absolute Notion, is that category which encompasses the totality of truth in the natural world; the eternal synthesis of the Objective and the Relative. The pursuit of Absolute truth is less overtly discussed in general Marxist-Leninist works; rather, it is understood abstractly in the formulation of combining theory with practice and seeking truth from facts.

As a purely theoretical category, the usefulness of the Absolute in the Marxist-Leninist worldview extends only insofar as it provides a clear grounding in the knowability and materiality of the natural world, and of humanity’s place within that historically-constituted natural world as both product and producer. It eschews excesses of both relativism and skepticism by ruthlessly declaring that the world is both fixed by certain laws and simultaneously undergoing continuous, influenceable, dialectical change.

B. Revolutionary Morality

• Morality as a social product of material conditions.
• The contradiction between moral ideals and material realities.
• Socialism as the dawn of a new, progressive, human morality.

As V.I. Lenin clarifies in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), human consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it. That is, human consciousness, which is shaped by the material world, actively shapes the material world in turn through guided action. Knowledge, therefore, cannot be divorced from its dialectically transformative role in life itself. This recognition provides the direct bridge from epistemology and technology to morality and ethics: for, if practice is the sole criteria of truth, then the morality of a given idea or action is derived precisely from that idea or action’s concrete contribution to the revolutionary transformation of the material world towards higher human flourishing.

If the basis of thought is material and relative, meaning that each individual person develops ideas and thoughts through their lived experience, with higher (Objective) knowledge or thought emerging through the dialectical process of learning,24 then it would appear equally that morality itself is, in the first, a relative or reactionary product of material forces that then arises dialectically towards higher consciousness. It is thus necessary to attain a clear understanding of the dialectical unity of morality and ethics.

Where morality25 refers specifically to the “right” and “wrong” content of a specific act or judgment, ethics26 refers to the socio-ideological system of moral understanding within a given society. That is, that morality is the “rightness” of a discrete act or judgment, while ethics is the collective social framework of expectation, judgment, and evaluation of moral value; ethics is thus itself a dialectical product of social morality and material reality. It is thus that morality may condemn theft as “wrong,” while ethics judge the act of theft within the context of starvation to be permissible, or even heroic. In simplest terms, morality is content—the immediate, qualitative, concrete determination of “proper” or “improper”—while ethics is form—the mediated, qualitative, abstract determination of “justifiable” or “unjustifiable.”

Just as epistemology and technology form the dialectical unity of correct thought (orthodoxy), morality and ethics form the dialectical unity of correct action (orthopraxis). Together, this orthodoxy and orthopraxis form the foundation of the moral-intellectual leadership of the Communist Party.27

Revolutionary Morality

In a letter, dated 01 August 1966, Mao Zedong enthusiastically commended the slogan that it is right to rebel against reactionaries.28 In the months and years that followed, as if to reflect the shifting character of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution itself, this slogan was shortened and popularized as simply it is right to rebel.29 This shift away from the specificity and grounding contextualization of the slogan’s original usage points towards both the fundamental nature of Marxist understandings of morality, in theoretical-ideological terms, as well as the trajectory of the Cultural Revolution period of China, in specific historical-practical terms; for our purposes here, we shall focus primarily on the former.30

Mao Zedong’s remark that it is right to rebel against reactionaries was not a new or controversial position within the Marxist-Leninist tradition. Rather, it represents a crystallization of the Marxist understanding of morality. That is, for Marxist-Leninists, morality itself is rooted in materiality, social relations, and, very importantly, the relations of production within a given society: that the “rightness” or “wrongness” of an action is itself informed by the prevailing class relations within that society where it occurs, within the context of dialectical motion.

First and foremost, this necessitates the distinction between proletarian and bourgeois morality, and their necessary state of conflict, within capitalist society. Where the former is concerned with the right and wrong of the proletariat as a class, of their own benefit, survival, and empowerment, the latter is concerned precisely with that of the owning class. These two competing interests are unavoidably in contradiction with one-another, just as the classes with which they correspond; the good of the proletariat, as a collective, is necessarily the bad of the bourgeoisie, and vice versa. Most precisely, proletarian morality finds expression in liberation from oppression and freedom of the individual subject, ultimately expressed in the complete abolition of all fetters, natural, material, artificial, etc., against the will of the collective mass of humanity itself; in the abolition of the exploitation of man by man in the first, and in the abolition of all exploitation and hindrance of humanity as a whole in its conclusion.

In that struggle likewise arises the contradiction of liberal morality; the presupposition that a morality of liberation and freedom may be achieved on its own basis, and of its own merits, purely from the good-will and well-wishes of some pure souls. For, it assumes, naively, that such good of liberation is already universal, when in fact the state of human development remains largely uneven. It is here that bourgeois morality is thrown into clearest relief: for it proclaims the universality of the rights of all people in its words, as its deeds simultaneously necessitate and perpetuate the continuation of human suffering, oppression, and exploitation.

It is at this point that the liberal conception finds its climax in G.W.F. Hegel’s identification of tragic contradiction:

[T]he conflict of two substantive positions, each of which is justified, yet each of which is wrong to the extent that it fails either to recognize the validity of the other position or to grant it its moment of truth.31

However, the Marxist-Leninist position draws a clear demarcation between the moralities of the oppressed and the moralities of the oppressors, aligning unapologetically with the working and oppressed specifically. Whereas Hegel asserts the completion of this conflict through the sublation of its component parts into a final unity, Marxism here identifies the oppressed in the ascendant or dominant position;32 that the dialectical motion of human moral development itself arcs towards, and is bound up within, the march of liberation.

This is not, however, to imply that there is no collective, objective underlying human morality. To the contrary, it means simultaneously that such morality must exist in the maximization of collective human flourishing, but is also, simultaneously, idealistic and unachievable under class society. The first moral imperative, then, from the Marxist position, arises in the moral righteousness (objective necessity) of capitalism being superseded by Socialism, and, eventually, Communism. The second moral imperative (subjective duty), then, arises in the clear pronouncement, as once given by Mao Zedong, that it is right to rebel against reactionaries, and that right itself is understood to mean that which serves the interests of the working and oppressed as a collective whole.

The Ethics of Struggle

The moral content of righteousness, from the Marxist perspective, is encompassed in that which serves the interests of the working and oppressed as a collective whole. That is, that right action, in the sense of justification, is straightforwardly that action that serves the working and oppressed. It then follows that its ethical concern—its mediated, qualitative determination of correct and incorrect within the space of right and wrong—begins and ends in the act’s relationality with, and contribution to, the revolutionary transformation of the material world towards higher mass-human flourishing. That is to say, that the ethical content of revolutionary morality resides in the material context and relationality of the act or judgment, bound up within the dialectical motion of societal development. In simplest terms, the liberation of the oppressed and working people is the highest moral and ethical pursuit.

From this general prescription, a number of acute examples arise. None more so, it may be said, than Mao Zedong’s earlier slogan, that it is right to rebel against reactionaries, and its simplification, that it is right to rebel in general. It is not, from the Marxist position, right (moral) to rebel in all circumstances; such generalization of the very narrow and specific case (against reactionaries) represents both a (revisionist) debasement of Marxism, as well as a dangerous departure from its ethical basis in the material empowerment of the working and oppressed classes under capitalism, and the development of that power towards Communism.

From this standpoint, the content of the Marxist ethical worldview is deceptively simple. This appearance of simplicity is deceptive, as the individual content of revolutionary morality is modulated dialectically through the collective development and determination of the revolutionary organization itself.33 This likewise further highlights the moral-intellectual leadership role of the Communist Party.

It is, thus, that morality and ethics, from the Marxist perspective, arise simultaneously from two sources: the material grounding of human society, as bound up within the dialectical motion of class conflict; and the fundamental, raw yearnings of the working and oppressed masses of humanity for a more just, equitable, and free world. Both sources are, themselves, fundamentally bound up within, and shaped by, the motion of base and superstructure within any given human society.34 It is within the totality of the whole—the dialectical unity of these two sources, within their encapsulating reality and relationality—that the Communist Party emerges as a category; scientifically, not merely as a political slogan or aspiration.35

As clarified by President Hồ Chí Minh:

People with revolutionary virtues fear neither difficulties, hardships nor failures; they neither waver nor step back. For the sake of the interests of the Party, the revolution, the class, the nation and mankind, they never hesitate to sacrifice their own interests, and if need be, even their own lives. This is a very clear and lofty expression of revolutionary morality…

People with revolutionary virtues remain simple, modest, and ready to face more hardships, even when meeting with work, thinking of how best to fulfil our task, not of how to get the greatest reward. We must avoid boasting about past achievements and claiming special prerogatives, or indulging in bureaucratism, conceit and deprivation. This also is an expression of revolutionary morality…

Revolutionary morality does not fall from the sky. It is developed and consolidated through persevering daily struggle and effort. Like jade, the more it is polished the more it shines. Like gold, it grows ever purer as it goes into the melting pot. 36

This moral-intellectual leadership of the Communist Party provides orientation to the emergence of a new morality, reflective of the new emerging superstructure*,* which finds its highest expression in the revolutionary morality and ethics of Socialist, and ultimately Communist, society. This new morality encompasses both the limited, individual aspects of personal righteousness, while also being informed by the general, systemic aspects of collective wellbeing.37 In the final analysis, the Communist Party arises as the highest (world-historic) organizational product of proletarian class struggle, within which moral-intellectual development is consciously unified; the Party thereby, likewise, constitutes the highest (world-historic) conscious and institutional source of revolutionary morality.38

In the pursuit of those three sources and two expressions of righteousness, then, revolutionary ethics may be grasped as the collective pursuit of progress, liberation, and unity. For the individual, this appears most acutely in self-cultivation, concerted effort towards social and economic progress, and conscious adherence to the people and the Party. For the collective, this appears most acutely in the fundamental, uncompromising need for the Communist Party to actively breathe life—through ceaseless organization, agitation, and education—into the mass movement.

C. The Unity of Revolutionary Epistemology and Ethics

• Knowledge as revolutionary theory.
• Ethics as revolutionary praxis.
• The unity of theory and praxis in revolution.

Revolutionary knowledge, which we have described as the dialectical unity of thought and action, and revolutionary morality, which we have described as the dialectical unity of righteous action and pragmatic discernment, find their own dialectical unity in what we have described here as the moral-intellectual leadership of the Communist Party. That is, that the moral-intellectual leadership of the Communist Party bears the responsibility of the full unity of both Marxist-Leninist theory (knowledge) and praxis (ethics). It is thus that the first moral necessity of the Marxist-Leninist is to safeguard and uphold the Communist Party as principle.

Knowledge is a Guide, Morality is a Compass

In its totality, revolutionary knowledge,39 whether intentionally dressed in the verbiage of Marxist analysis or not, encompasses both the theoretical and practical aspects of social transformation; as a dialectical whole it is the unity of guided action (praxis) that turns the wheel of the old into the new. This turning, or revolution, of human society does not exist as an end unto itself, however, and must at all times remain oriented by the compass of revolutionary morality. This is the content—the dialectical whole—of the moral-intellectual leadership of the Communist Party.

If divorced from thought, action becomes erratic, chaotic, and self-defeating; like vapor rising and dissipating aimlessly in the air. In the inverse, thought that is divorced from action is little more than fantasy or make-belief; like a beautiful, intricate machine that serves no purpose, and produces nothing. It is precisely in their unity, as we have said, that the steam engine radically transformed, revolutionized, the world as we know it.

This is the same dialectical relationship that exists between revolutionary knowledge and morality. To wit, revolutionary knowledge that is divorced from the grounding force of revolutionary morality quickly becomes unstable, and, if not corrected, is equally likely to fall into self-destruction or subversion by outside forces. Examples of this principle abound, but none more encapsulates the tragedy of moral dysregulation in the revolutionary movement than the well-known excesses that have arisen in periods of rapid advancement; none more encapsulates its farce than when those excesses are then subverted, turned back inwards, against the movement itself. Simultaneously, revolutionary morality that is divorced from the living force of revolutionary knowledge is little more than esotericism; therein lies the most wretched opportunists.

It is only in the unity of revolutionary knowledge and morality—in the moral-intellectual leadership of the Communist Party—that the revolutionary movement finds its highest expression and achieves full victory.

The Vanguard Party & Moral-Intellectual Leadership

In the first chapter of his 1917 text, The State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin asserts that:

By educating the workers’ party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.40

Cde. Lenin’s meaning, quite clearly, is that Marxism—specifically Marxist education—transforms the workers’ party into the vanguard; that is, that Marxist education imbues the party’s working-class character with a new revolutionary orientation, and it evolves it into the Communist Party.

In his earlier work, What is to be Done? (1902), he is even more explicit:

[I]t is not enough to call ourselves the “vanguard”, the advanced contingent; we must act in such a way that all the other contingents recognise and are obliged to admit that we are marching in the vanguard… only a party that will organise really nation-wide exposures can become the vanguard of the revolutionary forces.41

It is thus not only that the dialectical whole of moral-intellectual leadership necessitates the development of the Communist Party, but, even further, that the march of human liberation itself necessitates the birth of a people’s revolutionary party capable of taking up that cause.42 The leading aspect, thus, is not merely the existence of the Party as an institution, but, rather, its collective self-cultivation and continuous renewal.

Revolutionary Virtues

From this understanding, a number of revolutionary virtues may be identified:

1. Discipline

Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries place the will of the collective—community, class, and Party—over their own individual preferences. Rather than blind obedience, however, this virtue arises as the principled and conscious adherence to material and political reality as first-priority.43

To be a Marxist-Leninist means that one is disciplined in their adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles and the collective pursuit of human liberation wellbeing.44 In the final analysis, to be a Marxist-Leninist means that one is willing to lay down their own life for the cause of progress.45

2. Labor

Marxism-Leninism places the highest emphasis not only on understanding the world, but of changing it.46 As such, active transformation (praxis) is itself the highest form of work, and labor itself the highest form of human activity.47

To be a Marxist-Leninist means that one is first and foremost either a laborer or an ally of labor.

3. Truth

As established, truth is understood to be the very life-blood of Marxism-Leninism itself; for so long as the Marxist-Leninist seeks truth from facts through criticism and self-criticism, truth itself will lead them towards progress and liberation in the material struggle.48

To be a Marxist-Leninist means that one is devoted to the truth in all matters, over and above convenience.

4. Mass Line

The Marxist-Leninist not only holds to the people, but is, in the fullest sense, both one of them, and one with them, just as a fish is both one of the members of a school, but, also, one with it. Righteousness is, in the final analysis, measured by service to the people: by one’s fulfilment of this unity through praxis.49

To be a Marxist-Leninist means to be one with the people, to be inseparable from them; to be oneself a living catalyst of the world-historic struggle for human liberation.