Dawn of the International Socialist Revolution by Stefan Engel

Author:Stefan Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Neuer Weg
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Harmfulness of Petty-Bourgeois Idealism and Metaphysics for Proletarian Strategy and Tactics

Dialectical and historical materialism characterizes social systems primarily according to how the means of material life are produced. The production and reproduction of immediate life determine the mode of production. The production and reproduction of material goods and the production and reproduction of human beings, the forms in which they live, propagate and develop, always constitute a concrete historical unity. With the further development of the social productive forces 35 – which again receive their decisive impulses from the process of production and reproduction of immediate life as a whole – the production of material goods also is developed higher. Simultaneously, the relations of production 36, the relations between the classes change. The material preconditions for revolutionary changes of the production relations, for the overthrow of the old and the building of a new society emerge.

Lenin criticized the “subjective sociologists” who called themselves “friends of the people” in Russia at that time. They were of the opinion that “the aim of society is to benefit all its members, that justice, therefore, demands such and such an organisation, and that a system that is out of harmony with this ideal organisation … is abnormal and should be set aside” (“What the ‘Friends of the People’Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats,” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 137).

There are a great number of “friends of the people” also today who lecture the masses that the recently erupted “predator capitalism” cannot be accepted, that the speculators on the international financial markets got out of control and must be curbed by rigid rules. This method of simply replacing the reality of the imperialist world system by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideals obscures the dictatorship of international finance capital. Strategy and tactics built on such idealism can lead to nothing but entreaties, fervent and futile at the same time, that the social relations should be improved – with the result that they are cemented.

Contrary to the pipe dreams of petty-bourgeois idealists, proletarian strategy and tactics does not aim at realizing utopias and creating a society without conflicts which does justice to everybody. Instead, it uncovers the material preconditions and contradictions, and mainly the driving forces of social progress, which have already matured within the capitalist social system, to consciously help them break through.

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