'Il materialismo storico di Marx, una delle più grandi conquiste del pensiero scientifico'

“Marx and Engels defended philosophic materialism with the utmost determination, and many times explained the profound error of any departure from this foundation. Their views are expounded most clearly and in the greatest detail in the works of Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, and ‘Anti-Dühring’, works which, like the ‘Communist Manifesto’, are everyday books on the table of the class-conscious worker. But Marx did not rest in the materialism of the 18th century. He made an advance in philosophy. He enriched materialism with the acquisitions of the German classic philosophy, especially the system of Hegel which had led in its turn to the materialism of Feuerbach. The chief of these acquisitions is the dialectic – that is, the understanding of evolution in its fullest, deepest and most universal aspect, the understanding of the relativity of human knowledge, which gives us a reflection of eternally evolving matter. The most recent discoveries of natural science, radium, the electron, the transmutation of elements, have admirably confirmed the dialectic materialism of Marx – all the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers, with their “new” ways of returning to an old and rotten idealism, to the contrary notwithstanding. While deepening and developing philosophic materialism Marx carried it through to the end, extending its mode of understanding nature to the understanding of human society. The historic materialism of Marx is one of the greatest achievements of scientific thought” [V.I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Constituent Parts of Marxism’ (1913)] [(in) Karl Marx, ‘Capital, the Communist Manifesto and Other Writings’ (1932)] [V.I. Lenin – Materiali Bibliografici] [LBM*]