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Materialism and Revolution
samedi 16 août 2025, par
Materialism and Revolution
The standpoint of old materialism is bourgeois society. The standpoint of new materialism is human society, or socialized humanity."
Theses on Feuerbach (1845) by Karl Marx
How does the question of materialism arise for revolutionary militants ?
The materialism we are talking about here is not the so-called "down-to-earth" way of thinking or purely material interest opposed to thought. It is the philosophical conception - a conception of everyone and not only of philosophers and "thinkers" - which considers that human consciousness is most often behind reality and that it only truly transforms reality by following it and not by preceding it. It is reality that must be transformed and not only the thought about this reality. It is reality that must be studied and not only opinion. Public opinion can not only be behind reality but even completely contrary to reality. Most often, public opinion is what the ruling class wants us to think and it is not even what this propertied class itself thinks.
The most common idea is that society follows public opinion and not the other way around. This is not ours.
The most common idea is that it is the majority that determines the course of events in so-called democratic societies. This is not ours. It is the tiny minority of owners of capital, with the sole exception of so-called revolutionary periods, which are relatively short and rare periods in history, the exploited being most often also oppressed in terms of their consciousness, their organization and their capacity to govern themselves.
The most common idea is that men sin primarily through their conscience and not through their objective situation. This is not ours.
The most common idea is that we must first change the education of men and thus we will change the social and political state. This is still not ours. Educators themselves are first educated by the social state and not by pedagogy or school. Society and the system it presupposes are the first education of all men and it penetrates them almost completely to the point that the social system can revolt them but not astonish them !
Our approach is completely different. It does not start from what people think about the world, but from what we can objectively know about the world. When it seeks people’s ideas, they are directly the ideas of the ruling class, of the exploiters, of those who dictate their law to the world. There is no point in dwelling too much on the so-called democrats, on the makers of soothing and deceptive speeches.... There is no point in following the speeches of the reformists.
Nor do we start from popular demands, not that we despise or neglect them, but because revolutionary thought does not follow workers’ or popular demands ; it simply seeks to illuminate its path by pointing out elements that are not obvious to the majority. This is what makes it scientific, whereas the approach of the oppressed generally is not. The approach of revolutionary militants who want to transform reality must focus on reality without allowing themselves to be diverted, even by workers’ or popular opinion, which is too often influenced by the panics, illusions and errors of the petty bourgeoisie or by media discourse.
The guiding principle of revolutionary thought is not the suffering of the exploited and oppressed masses but the capacity of the exploiting and oppressing classes.
Thus, the revolutionary of 1914 does not allow himself to be polarized by the fact that the ruling classes have succeeded in setting peoples violently against each other without any great anti-war reaction, but he studies the fact that the possessing classes are forced into world war by fear of social revolution and he examines the fact that the revolutionary threat having produced war, war can also produce revolution, by a dialectical mechanism stronger than the conscience of men. In one fell swoop, the hatreds rising between peoples can be transformed into revolutionary agreement against the ruling classes. And history shows that this is not a false idealistic hope but a materialist analysis.
What must guide the revolutionary militant is first of all the state of the crisis of capitalist domination and not first of all the crisis of consciousness or of proletarian organization, even if the latter must not be neglected. For what can reverse the situation is first of all the crisis of the ruling classes. It is only then that the question of consciousness and of proletarian organization become decisive, in the midst of a revolutionary situation or, at least, a pre-revolutionary one. But the definition of the revolutionary situation requires first of all an objective crisis of the domination of the possessing class which comes from a profound economic crisis affecting the very foundations of the system, on a global scale…
Those who believe that the revolutionary situation is primarily determined by consciousness are deceiving themselves and others.
This would mean that social and proletarian revolutions would never occur or would only occur in the continuity of an advance in consciousness and organization, which is almost the opposite of what History teaches us.
The state of the capitalist system, its capacity or not to develop, to grow, to invest its surplus value by creating new wealth, this is the locomotive of capitalism. When this is, temporarily or permanently, broken down, the ruling classes know that the factor that will have to be taken into account from now on is the social revolution. Because the system is based not on a single class, the capitalist class, but on a class struggle, comprising three important classes (bourgeois, petty bourgeois, proletarian) plus some important layers (poor, unemployed, national or religious minorities, women, youth, etc.).
Here again, in this class struggle, it is reality which takes precedence over thought, it is the objective situation of the classes which prevails over the image they have of themselves.
The petty bourgeoisie, youth, the poor, national or religious minorities may feel they have primacy over the proletarian masses. This is what their social consciousness tells them, but it is not reality. The latter tells us that there are two main classes : the capitalist class and the proletarian class. No major historical event has shown us otherwise.
It is not an illusion of revolutionary communist militants to think of the leading role of the proletariat in revolutionary struggles. It is an illusion, on the contrary, to think of the leading role of the democratic and petty bourgeois layers. We have seen this amply in recent years.
It is not an illusion to think that the future of humanity is communist, that is, based on the collective ownership of the means of production. The capitalist crisis itself fully demonstrates this by the fact that capitalism has only been able to sustain itself, to prevent its immediate fall, through the collective intervention of states and central institutions and not through the intervention of capitalist individuals, an intervention which, on the contrary, constantly leads to the collapse of the system, intervenes in a necrophilic and destructive manner.
Of course, public opinion, following the fall of Stalinism, believes that communism is dead. But this opinion has believed it many times. Moreover, the fact that the ruling class still considers it necessary to maintain pressure to make people believe this shows the opposite. The fact, above all, that the states and propertied classes are increasingly developing counter-revolutionary policies (dictatorship, war, violence, fascism, etc.) shows that they consider social revolution to be a real threat, despite the low level of consciousness and organization of the proletarian masses.
In this period, when the ruling classes are trying to disorient the workers, to disgust them with their own class politics, their own class organization, the way to have a policy based on a class compass is neither proletarian moralism, nor withdrawal into corporate demands, nor opportunism with regard to reformist political and trade union organizations, nor pessimistic isolation, it is precisely a materialist attitude which is attached to the study of economic, social and political reality and not only to public opinion…, even that of the proletarians themselves ! In this situation, following the proletarians is in no way a good guide for a proletarian communist policy. The periods in which the ruling classes are objectively destabilized are those in which opinion passes easily and quickly from one extreme to the other…
What is the link between philosophy and revolutionary politics ?
"The distinctive sign of opportunism is, first of all, hostility to ’theory’. This is quite natural, since our ’theory’ - that is, the principles of scientific socialism - sets very firm limits to practical action both in terms of the objectives sought, the means of struggle, and finally the mode of struggle itself. Also, those who seek only practical success have a natural tendency to demand freedom of maneuver, that is, to separate practice from ’theory’, to make themselves independent of it."
Rosa Luxemburg, “Social Reform or Revolution”
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