
Marx elaborated on this concept in “ The German Ideology” while Lenin explained it in his “ Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.” Here’s a quick synopsis.

Simply put, the material world determines consciousness. All things, including ideas and consciousness, are a result of interactions between matter. Materialism is a philosophical view where matter is the primary and determinant substance in the natural world. The best place to start is dialectical materialism, the body of science established by Marx and his lifelong ideological contributor, Friedrich Engels.ĭialectical materialism can best be summed up as an approach to understanding and changing objective reality, both in nature and society. In an era where liberalism, conservatism and religion - the dominant trends of thought - are unable to explain global economic, political, social and environmental crises, the need to resuscitate Marxism becomes more urgent than ever. His writings have inspired countless revolutions around the world and have shaped the course of modern history. This is troubling, considering that Marx has been regarded numerous times as the world’s most influential scholar. Most have only read superficial critiques of his ideas. or European university, you’d be hard-pressed to find a professor who has read at least half of Marx’s writings. If you were to walk into any major social science department in a U.S. Instead, they rely solely on watered-down interpretations by bourgeois “scholars” who misread Marx and have never done anything tangible for the world. Perhaps the biggest error committed is failing to properly study Marx’s writings and those of his ideological successors - Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, among thousands of others. “It’s human nature to be greedy - that’s why capitalism will always win.”

“It looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work out in reality,” his critics often say.

They claim Marx’s ideas are irrelevant because a major socialist country carrying out his ideas was dismantled by counter-revolutionaries. Guided by misinformed perceptions about Karl Marx and the body of science he pioneered, these critics associate the collapse of the former Soviet Union with the collapse of Marxist science as a whole. These are the words that anti-communists typically use when attempting to describe Marxism and its central tenets.
