Party spirit

Dialectical materialism has a class and a party character. The partiinost’ (party spirit) of any philosophy is above all its affiliation with one of the two main philosophical camps—materialism and idealism. In the final analysis, the struggle between them reflects the contradictions between the progressive and conservative tendencies in social development. The partiinost’ of dialectical materialism is manifested in the fact that it consistently adheres to the principle of materialism, which is in complete accordance with the interests of science and revolutionary social practice.

Dialectical materialism arose as the theoretical basis of the world view of the revolutionary class, the proletariat, and it constitutes the general ideological and methodological basis of the program, strategy, tactics, and politics of communist and workers’ parties. The political line of Marxism is at all times and in all issues “inseparably bound up with its philosophical principles” (Lenin, ibid., vol. 17, p. 418). The ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the revisionists exalt the non-partiinost’, setting forth the idea of a “third line” in philosophy. The idea of non-partiinost’ in a world view is a mistaken one. Lenin emphasized that there can be no non-party “social science in a society based on class struggle” (ibid., vol. 23, p. 40). The revisionists assert that partiinost’ is incompatible with the scientific approach. Actually, partiinost’ is incompatible with the reactionary world view, but it is fully compatible with the scientific approach where the progressive world view is concerned. Communist partiinost’ means also a genuinely scientific approach to the phenomena of reality, since the working class and the Communist Party, whose goal is the revolutionary transformation of the world, are vitally interested in the correct cognition of the world. The principle of partiinost’ demands consistent, uncompromising struggle against bourgeois theories and views, as well as against the ideas of right and “left” revisionism. The partiinost’ of dialectical materialism is based on the fact that it is precisely this world view that consciously and purposefully serves the interests of the great cause of the construction of socialism and communism.

Dialectical materialism develops in the struggle against various currents in contemporary bourgeois philosophy. Bourgeois ideologists, seeing in dialectical materialism a fundamental obstacle to the spread of their views, present criticisms of dialectical materialism with increasing frequency, distorting its essence in the process. Certain bourgeois ideologists strive to deprive materialist dialectics of its revolutionary content and in this form adapt it to their own needs. The majority of present-day bourgeois critics of dialectical materialism attempt to interpret it as a variant of religious faith, to deny its scientific nature, and to find features common to dialectical materialism and Catholic philosophy, in neo-Thomism. These and other “arguments” are used also by various representatives of modern revisionism in their attempts to revise and “correct” specific propositions of dialectical materialism.

Revisionists of the right and the “left” in fact deny the objective nature of social laws and the necessity for a revolutionary party to act in accordance with these laws. This relates also to the laws of dialectics. Reformists and right-wing revisionist ideologists recognize not the struggle but rather the conciliation of opposites; they deny qualitative changes, defending only “flat” evolutionism, and do not recognize the law of negation of the negation. In turn, left-wing revisionist theoreticians consider only antagonistic contradictions and their chaotic “struggle” to be real; they deny quantitative changes, fighting for continuous “leaps” and endorsing the complete negation of the old without preserving what was positive in it. For the reformists and right-wing revisionists, this serves as a methodological basis to justify opportunism, while for the “left” revisionists, their methodology is the basis for extreme voluntarism and subjectivism in politics.

In its struggle against bourgeois philosophy, as against contemporary revisionism and dogmatism, Marxism consistently adheres to the principle of the partiinost’ of philosophy, viewing the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism as a scientific weapon in the hands of the working class and toiling masses who are struggling for their liberation from capitalism and for the victory of communism.