23 June 2014

Philosophy and Religion, Introduction

Philosophy and Religion, Part 0


Philosophy and Religion, Introduction

The series now beginning on this Communist University forum attempts to show how it is finally on the battlefield of Philosophy that the struggle for freedom is won or lost. It shows that this battlefield is a Freirean battlefield. It is the crucial battle of the free-willing human Subject, otherwise known as “The Subject of History”.

Our course attempts to show that some of the philosophical touchstones or “shibboleths” of the communist movement have been terribly mistaken. It shows that the opposition of idealism to materialism, where the latter is supposed to eliminate the former, is not dialectical.

What is dialectical is the counterposition of the human with the material world. These two can never be collapsed into one, so long as human life continues. One does not eliminate the other. Hence this is a true dialectic: a unity and struggle of opposites.

In retrospect it seems clear that at the time of the Great October Revolution in 1917 in Russia there was a philosophical deficit among the revolutionaries; and that this philosophical deficit got worse as time went on; and that this weakness eventually undermined the revolution and caused it to topple, in the “collapse of the Soviet Union” from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.

We will succeed or fail in the future, in proportion to our grasp of philosophy.

Philosophy is a beautiful study, and nothing to fear.

Illustration: “Question Everything!” – the sometime logo of the Communist University of London

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