From The Marxist Archives -In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International-
Marxism and Science
(Quote of the Week)
Anti-scientific quackery and all forms of religious and
superstitious backwardness, including on sexuality and abortion, are on the rise
in this period, marked by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet
Union in 1991-92. Referring to the great German philosopher Georg Hegel,
Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky defended the scientific nature of Marxism in a
1939 piece written against an opposition in the then-Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party that shrank from defense of the USSR on the eve of the Second
World War and included elements who renounced dialectical materialism.
Hegel wrote before Darwin and before Marx. Thanks to the powerful
impulse given to thought by the French Revolution, Hegel anticipated the general
movement of science. But because it was only an anticipation,
although by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel
operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated
that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the
movement of material bodies.
We call our dialectic, materialist, since its roots are neither in
heaven nor in the depths of our “free will,” but in objective reality, in
nature. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology,
the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebulae. On all
the rungs of this ladder of development, the quantitative changes were
transformed into qualitative. Our thought, including dialectical thought, is
only one of the forms of the expression of changing matter. There is place
within this system for neither God, nor Devil, nor immortal soul, nor eternal
norms of laws and morals. The dialectic of thinking, having grown out of the
dialectic of nature, possesses consequently a thoroughly materialist
character.
Darwinism, which explained the evolution of species through
quantitative transformations passing into qualitative, was the highest triumph
of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter….
Marx, who in distinction from Darwin was a conscious dialectician,
discovered a basis for the scientific classification of human societies in the
development of their productive forces and the structure of the relations of
ownership which constitute the anatomy of society. Marxism substituted for the
vulgar descriptive classification of societies and states, which even up to now
still flourishes in the universities, a materialistic dialectical
classification. Only through using the method of Marx is it possible correctly
to determine both the concept of a workers’ state and the moment of its
downfall.
All this, as we see, contains nothing “metaphysical” or
“scholastic,” as conceited ignorance affirms. Dialectic logic expresses the laws
of motion in contemporary scientific thought. The struggle against materialist
dialectics on the contrary expresses a distant past, conservatism of the petty
bourgeoisie, the self-conceit of university routinists and…a spark of hope for
an after-life.
—Leon Trotsky, “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist
Workers Party” (1939), printed in In Defense of Marxism (Pathfinder,
1973)
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