This was article written by Adam Buick for the journal Radical Philosophy 10. Spring 1975 . JOSEPH DIETZGEN is indeed a neglected philosopher. How many people know that he was the man Marx introduced to the 1872 Congress of the First International as ‘our philosopher’? Or that it was Dietzgen, not Plekhanov, who first coined the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’? Or that for the first thirty or so years of this century Dietzgen’s Philosophical Essays were to he found on the bookshelves of any working class militant with Marxist pretensions? Who, then, was Dietzgen? What were his views? And, indeed,...
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Scientific socialism rejects the delusive concepts that make up religion. This does not mean that socialism is committed to any fanatically narrow conceptions of rationality such as characterized some nineteenth-century materialisms. It means that socialism is opposed to superstition in any and all forms. Socialists see human beings as fully capable of shaping human life, subject only to the limitations posed by the material world. The reason for our opposition has three principal points of focus, historical, philosophical, and social. Historically, religion has always been allied with the authority of the state, and the state has always been the...
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Herbert Spencer’s concept of Survival of the fittest…Pseudo Scientists, in Economics, Anthropology, History, etc., have have probably erected more obstacles to the clear understanding of reality than any other group, for their misconceptions are tinted with the gild of scholarship. Herbert Spencer, with his Social Statics, was perhaps the most outstanding of those scholars whose opinions and conclusions were accepted on a large scale by peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain he developed quite a following, but nowhere so avid and devoted desciples as among the burgeoning tycoons in the U.S.A. Following the American Civil War,...
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The starting point, or rather, the pivotal centre of our logic is the conception of the universe as being a oneness, a unity, an eternal, absolute truth, all embracing, infinite and unlimited. It is impossible to conceive of anything outside the universe. To attempt it would not only be useless, but folly. The parts composing the universe partake of its infinite nature, i.e., of existence. A mahogany chair has the characteristics of all chairs, regardless of where it is found, on earth or in the heavens above. Yet, at the same time, it is finite. The chair is built,...
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Man, The Enigma
From The Western Socialist, January, 1948 A strange animal – man – until we get to know him. Brilliant, in a sense, he has developed systems of production, exchange, communication, and transportation that make the other animals look rather stupid. But, on the opposite side of the scale, he suffers deficiencies that enhance the prestige of every competing organism. While not the only animal that works, he is the only one that looks for work; the only one that works for wages, the only one that the boss can afford to leave alone while working. The only one subject...
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