Tuesday 30 June 2015

Trotsky Quotes - On Marxist Philosophy

The essence of Marxism consists in this, that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for objective research, and analyzes human history as one would a colossal laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in turn are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight.

Dialectical Materialism and Science (1925)

If it is possible to place a given person’s general type of thought on the basis of his relation to concrete practical problems, it is also possible to predict approximately, knowing his general type of thought, how a given individual will approach one or another practical question. That is the incomparable educational value of the dialectical method of thought.

A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party (1939)

Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.

The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939)

The dialectic is not a magic master key for all questions. It does not replace concrete scientific analysis. But it directs this analysis along the correct road, securing it against sterile wanderings in the desert of subjectivism and scholasticism.

The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939)

The democratic regime is the most aristocratic way of ruling. It is possible only to a rich nation.

Discussions on the Transitional Program (1938)

We must give a scientific explanation of society, and clearly explain it to the masses. That is the difference between Marxism and reformism.

Discussions on the Transitional Program (1938)

Such categories as ‘commodity’, ‘money’, ‘wages’, ‘capital’, ‘profit’, ‘tax’, and the like are only semi-mystical reflections in men’s heads of the various aspects of a process of economy which they do not understand and which is not under their control. To decipher them, a thoroughgoing scientific analysis is indispensable.

Marxism in Our Time (1939)

It was not Marx’s aim to discover the ‘eternal laws’ of economy. He denied the existence of such laws. The history of the development of human society is the history of the succession of various systems of economy, each operating in accordance with its own laws. ... In his Capital, Marx does not study economy in general, but capitalist economy, which has its own specific laws. Only in passing does he refer to the other economic systems to elucidate the characteristics of capitalism.

Marxism in Our Time (1939)

Just as the operation of the laws of physiology yields different results in a growing than in a dying organism, so the laws of Marxist economy assert themselves differently in a developing and disintegrating capitalism.

Marxism in Our Time (1939)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/quotes.htm