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Since the early history of man, we have tried to progress ourselves, to find ways of creating an ‘ideal society’ in all arts and sciences.
In modern stages of time, Marx believed that Hegel had found a general historical law, called ‘the dialectic’, but he thought that Hegel’s use of it was metaphysical, rather than scientific. He accepted the existence of the dialectic, but attempted to make it materialistic by explaining the historical process in economic rather than metaphysical terms and by applying it to classes instead of the struggle between nations, as Hegel had done.
The role in carrying forward and upholding the traditions of a society-dialectical and historical materialism which arose as a continuation of forward-looking trends in ‘science’ including philosophy, and social thought has inherited a number of progressive traditions.
Among these traditions preceding the emergence of ‘Marxism’ the following were particularly prominent: the traditions of conscious and militant, albeit not yet consistent, materialism which at that period did not yet extend to the history of society; a dialectical approach to the cognition of reality which manifested itself in particular in German philosophy, but was in sharp contradiction to the idealistic philosophical systems within which it took shape; the humanist, and democratic traditions of social-thought directed at emancipating the individual from feudal, mechanical, religious and national oppression; spontaneously materialistic, and spontaneously dialectic traditions in science, and its alliance with progressive philosophy; anti-clericalism, atheism and free-thinking; realism in literature, and art associated with progressive trends in philosophy, the critical traditions of socialist theories which had not yet reached the level of scientific socialism but which actively opposed capitalism, and all its institutions; continuity of the development of ideas, concepts and the conceptual material of philosophy handed down from generation to generation.
Finally, the traditions of Marxist philosophy, carried forward by the followers of Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century, were carried forward to a higher stage in the twentieth century, by Lenin and Leninism.
Chev Charles G Cutajar
Floriana
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