Despite what bourgeois economists, the priests of property and profit, would have us believe, capitalism isn’t the eternal way of things. It had a beginning, and it will have an end. As we begin our discussion of political economy, let’s draw upon historical materialism to examine how capitalism arose.

Thanks to Marxism, we know that ideological superstructure of society arises from and supports the material, economic base of society. What we think is shaped primarily by our practical activity in production, class struggle and scientific experiment. Furthermore, Marx was fundamentally a revolutionary organizer, interested in helping the working class to understand and overthrow its exploitation. This is why Marx devoted the bulk of his theoretical work to an analysis of political economy.

In the ideological terrain today, Marxism must struggle against postmodernism. What is postmodernism? In The Postmodern Condition, the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard summed up the postmodern view as the rejection of “metanarratives.” By “metanarratives” Lyotard means any theory that claims to be able to explain the totality of social, historical and cultural phenomena. This includes the Enlightenment and Marxism. In other words, postmodernism opposes the idea that the world can or should be objectively and rationally understood. The idea that the world as a whole is rational and comprehensible is thus deemed “modern” and postmodernism claims to have gone beyond modernism.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization has announced nation-wide zoom study sessions on the Fight Back! News Red Theory article series by J. Sykes. The first group of four sessions will cover the first five articles in the series and will occur biweekly, with the first session happening Thursday, July 14. You can find all the articles in the series here.

Marxist-Leninists are practical people. This has been true since Marx wrote his famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Many Marxists might even consider themselves “pragmatists.” But Marxism and pragmatism, though there may be some superficial similarities, are, in fact, fundamentally opposed. So, let’s look more closely at this. What is pragmatism?

In our exploration of the fundamental concepts of historical materialism so far, we have looked closely at the economic and material base of society. We’ve talked about the forces and relations of production that make up a mode of production. But every mode of production which forms the base of society has a superstructure that arises from it and in turn reinforces it. So, let’s look now at what the superstructure is and the relationship between it and the base.

Much is made of what is often referred to as the urban/rural divide. There is a fundamental disconnect, we are told, between the people from the cities and the rural population. Marx and Engels called this contradiction the division between town and country. Marxism-Leninism can help us understand this contradiction, how it arose historically, and how it can be overcome.

Since the very origin of class society, when the productive forces developed to the point of producing some surplus beyond bare subsistence, the contradiction between mental and manual labor has been a characteristic of productive relations. Broadly speaking this means that the majority of people toil away physically, while a small minority conducts intellectual labor, such as science and art or planning and administration. Historically, this contradiction arose alongside the contradiction between town and country, specifically when the cities of the ancient slave societies came to dominate society.

Now that we’ve nailed down what we mean by forces of production, let’s talk about the other aspect of the mode of production: the relations of production. Remember that the forces of production are comprised of the means of production (the instruments of production, such as factories and tools, and the objects of labor, like raw materials, land and natural resources) and the agents of production (the workers themselves and their techniques of labor).

Up to now we have studied dialectical materialism and given a general overview of its application to history, historical materialism. Now let’s look more closely at some of the core concepts that make up Marxism’s materialist conception of history, starting with the forces of production.

The cornerstone of historical materialism is class struggle as the motor driving historical change. So, what is the role of labor in historical development?

Now that we have talked about the Marxist theory of knowledge and examined the meaning and function of dialectical materialism, let’s look at how that is applied to studying the historical development of society. Marx called this “the materialist conception of history,” or historical materialism. It is historical materialism that demonstrates the link between dialectical materialism and political economy. Here we have dialectical materialism applied to history.

In our study of the three laws of dialectics presented by Engels, we’ve examined the law of contradiction and the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Finally, Engels says that the third law of dialectics is the “law of the negation of the negation.”

Now that we’ve gone into some detail on contradiction, let’s look at the question of the transformation of quantity into quality.

In our last article we looked at some of the core concepts of dialectical materialism. We broke down the meaning of contradiction, and we looked at how contradictions develop unevenly in complex processes, into principal and secondary contradictions. We also looked at how any given contradiction has its own principal and secondary aspects, with the principal aspect playing the dominant role. Now let's look more closely at identity in contradiction and the role of antagonism in resolving contradictions of different types.

Friedrich Engels lists three laws of dialectics, but, as we shall see, the most important is the law of contradiction, which he calls the law of the interpenetration of opposites. Before we discuss the other two (the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation), let’s look closely at contradiction.

In our last article we saw that Marxism-Leninism bases itself on a materialist worldview. But we saw, at the same time, that materialism as it came to be understood with the rise of bourgeois society was still metaphysical in its method of analysis. At this point, let’s look at the difference between the metaphysical and dialectical method. Then we can better understand how Karl Marx established the philosophical basis of revolutionary science, dialectical materialism.

When we talk about the philosophy that forms the basis of Marxism-Leninism, we say that that philosophy is dialectical materialism. At this point in our series on the theoretical concepts of Marxism-Leninism, we are going to focus on the materialism of dialectical materialism and try to come to a clear understanding of what that means. And to do that, we’re going to also look at materialism’s philosophical opposite: idealism.

In the last article in our series on Marxist-Leninist theoretical concepts, on Marxist epistemology, How We Learn: Theory and Practice, we looked at the process of cognition from a dialectical materialist point of view. In this article we’re going to look at how this plays out from an organizational and practical perspective. Theory and practice are linked together, both for us as individuals and for revolutionary organizations and mass organizations in popular struggles.

At this point in our series, it would serve us well to zoom in on the process by which practice becomes theory, and vice versa. Stalin said that “theory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.” This is a good summation, but what does that really mean?