The scientific worldview of Marxism-Leninism
The fundamental question in philosophy is the relationship between matter and consciousness, between being and thought. There are only two consistent answers: materialism, which holds that matter is primary and consciousness is a product of matter; and idealism, which holds that consciousness, spirit, or idea is primary.
Marxism-Leninism stands on the ground of materialism. The world is physical, exists independently of our perception of it, and is knowable through science. Consciousness is not a mysterious soul or spirit — it is a product of highly organised matter (the brain), and ultimately a form of computation. There is no God, no afterlife, no supernatural realm.
All forms of idealism — whether religious, Hegelian, or Kantian — serve the interests of the ruling class by mystifying reality and diverting the working class from understanding the material conditions of their exploitation.
The material world exists objectively, independently of human consciousness. Our ideas, laws, religions, and institutions are products of material conditions — not the other way around.
There are no unknowable "things-in-themselves". Science progressively reveals the laws governing nature and society. What we do not yet know, we can learn through investigation and practice.
Consciousness is a property of highly organised matter. There is no soul, no spirit, no divine spark. The mind is what the brain does — ultimately, consciousness is computation performed by physical systems.
The truth of any idea is tested in practice. Revolutionary theory is confirmed or refuted by revolutionary practice. This is what makes Marxism a science, not a dogma.
No phenomenon exists in isolation. Everything in nature and society is interconnected and interdependent. To understand any phenomenon, we must study it in its connections and development.
Nothing is eternal or fixed. All things come into being, develop, and pass away. Capitalism, like feudalism before it, is a transient form of social organisation that will be superseded by socialism.
"The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life — and, next to production, the exchange of things produced — is the basis of all social structure."
— Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (1878)Historical materialism is the application of materialist philosophy to the study of society and history. Its central insight is that the mode of production — how a society organises its economic life — is the foundation upon which all social, political, and ideological structures arise.
Every society has an economic base (the forces of production and the relations of production) and a superstructure (the state, law, politics, religion, philosophy, art). The base fundamentally determines the superstructure. When the base changes — when the productive forces outgrow the existing relations of production — the superstructure must eventually change too, often through revolution.
All recorded history is the history of class struggles. Free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian — each epoch has its fundamental class antagonism. These contradictions drive historical development forward.
Human society has passed through successive modes of production: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, and capitalism. Each arose from the contradictions of the previous system. Capitalism, despite its enormous productive achievements, generates contradictions that point toward its own supersession by socialism.
When the productive forces can no longer develop within the existing relations of production, an era of social revolution begins. The old ruling class resists change; the rising class fights for a new social order. This is not a gradual, peaceful process — it requires the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order.
"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)The MLPBF takes a firm position against all forms of idealism:
While Marx learned from Hegel, he fundamentally broke with Hegelian idealism. The so-called "dialectic" of Hegel — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — is an idealist schema imposed on reality. We reject Hegelian dialectics as mystification. The world is physical, causal, and knowable through empirical science, not through speculative philosophy.
Religion is the opium of the people. It provides false consolation for real suffering, promises justice in an afterlife while tolerating injustice in this one, and teaches submission to earthly authority as the will of God. No genuine communist movement can be built on religious foundations.
Postmodernism denies objective truth, rejects grand narratives, and dissolves material reality into "discourse" and "power relations" divorced from economic foundations. It is the ideology of a demoralised petty bourgeoisie that has given up on changing the world. Marxism-Leninism asserts that objective truth exists and that science can discover it.
We embrace the full programme of materialist science: physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, computer science. Consciousness is computation. Evolution is fact. The universe is governed by discoverable laws. There is no supernatural, no soul, no God. This is the philosophical foundation upon which all revolutionary theory rests.
Engels' concise account of how Marx and he arrived at materialism through a critique of Hegel and Feuerbach.
Lenin's defence of materialist philosophy against idealist distortions by Mach, Avenarius, and their Russian followers.
Marx and Engels' first systematic statement of historical materialism and the materialist conception of history.
Engels' comprehensive defence of Marxist philosophy, political economy, and socialism against Eugen Duhring's eclecticism.
Think you understand materialist philosophy? Test yourself with our interactive quiz or discuss with ML Comrade.