Stalin: Anarchism or Socialism - Classic exposition of the Marxist critique of anarchism.
The relation between materialism and idealism - ...the materialism of Marx and Engels was not mechanistic. In rejecting idealism and asserting that consciousness is determined by life rather than vice versa, they were certainly not suggesting that correct ideas were automatically (mechanically) generated inside our heads as some sort of knee-jerk response to ‘the conditions of life’. Although they sometimes talked of the human mind as a “mirror” of reality, it was always clear that human cognition must be seen as an active process of moving from the concrete to the abstract, rather than just a passive reflection of reality. Marx ‘s statement that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.” puts this in a nutshell And Engels’ extensive writings on natural science and dialectics leave us in no doubt that there was nothing crudely mechanical in the way he viewed the relation between the ideal and the material. However while materialist dialectics in no way demeans the human capacity for thought and understanding, it does reject the idealist premise that human thought (rationality, consciousness) must be the starting point for philosophy.
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