The popular scientific term for modern humans, “homo sapiens”, means “human that knows”.
However, the full name of our species is actually “homo sapiens sapiens”, meaning “human
that knows it knows”.
In other words, the being that possesses not only awareness, but self-awareness of this
fact, too.
But how do we know we know, and where does this knowledge come from?
Various philosophical schools have tried to answer this question from different perspectives
down the years.
And Marxism has certainly been a part of this process of carving out a theory of knowledge
that maps out the process of its development.
However, Marxism is concerned not only with understanding the world, but - crucially – with
changing it.
These two tasks – understanding and transforming – for Marxists are inseparable.
And so, as Marxists, it’s important to explain our specific theory of knowledge as one that
not only understands the world, but one that transforms the world; generating the revolutionary
transformation from capitalism to socialism.
This video aims to provide a basic overview of the Marxist theory of knowledge, or (if
you want to be fancy) “Marxist epistemology”, particularly focusing on how we develop correct
ideas which will advance us towards social progress, and sort them from incorrect ideas
that hold us back.
We’ll also look at why it’s necessary for Marxists today to be able to thoroughly
apply this theory of knowledge to the ever-changing world around us and not just rely on reciting
quotes from dusty old tomes from the 1800s like it’s sacred scripture.
But first, speaking of Marxism for the modern day, this video has been made possible by
Leftwingbooks.net, a radical left-wing distributor based in Montreal, where you can find Kersplebedeb’s
publications, as well as numerous other texts relating to anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism,
women’s liberation, and other general left-wing matters.
They stock numerous fantastic texts for both beginners and more advanced learners alike.
For those new to the left in particular, I highly recommend Joshua Moufawad-Paul’s
2014 book “The Communist Necessity”, which critically examines the shortcomings of recent
popular left-wing movements like Occupy and other spontaneous uprisings that see massive
surges of energy and participation, but then all seem to just fizzle out for one reason
or another.
JMP argues that in order to escape this endless cycle of left-wing activism that goes nowhere,
we need to make a new return to revolutionary communism.
There are also texts on Leftwingbooks.net which have deeply challenged the ways I personally
had previously understood the world and forced me to re-evaluate aspects of my political
positions, such as JMP’s 2016 “Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain”.
This was perhaps the single most influential text for me in getting to grips with understanding
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the third and highest stage of proletarian revolutionary science
to date.
Likewise, Torkil Lauesen’s “The Principal Contradiction” from 2020 played a crucial
role in helping me to comes to terms with a modern understanding of the global system
of capitalism-imperialism through the lens of dialectical materialism.
It’s a much-needed breath of fresh air to read theorists from the 21st century confronting
the matters that lie in front of us by applying the Marxist method to the modern world, rather
than remaining stuck eternally in the aforementioned dusty tomes of the mid-1800s or the mid-1900s.
I highly recommend each of these texts to everyone, whether beginner or advanced – and
Leftwingbooks.net is currently offering a 25% discount on them by using the Coupon Code
“THEPOINTISTOCHANGETHEWORLD” – very appropriate for the subject matter of today’s
video!
This Coupon Code works on the numerous radical Marxist and Anarchist philosophical texts
available on Leftwingbooks.net – but get over there quickly as this Coupon Code expires
on the 28th of October.
Free Shipping is available on all North American orders over $50, and inexpensive shipping
is also available on all Kersplebedeb publications in Europe.
A massive thanks to Leftwingbooks.net for sponsoring this video and making its production
possible, as well as for helping to spread the revolutionary political message through
their work.
And now back to the video.
Now, while certain other philosophical viewpoints question the nature of if their can even be
a true idea with endless debates on the epistemic nature of truth, the Marxist theory of knowledge
cuts through the nonsense and holds that we as human beings can find and develop true
ideas about the world around us; that objective truth exists and, moreover, it’s knowable
to us.
In a straight-to-the-point short essay, simply titled “Where do correct ideas come from?”
Mao Tse-tung explains that correct ideas do not “drop from the sky”, nor are they
“innate in the mind.”
Dismissing these bourgeois perspectives, Mao explains that ideas do not exist in a vacuum,
floating around in the ether waiting to be discovered.
Instead, Mao states clearly that correct ideas “come from social practice, and from it
alone; they come from three kinds of social practice; the struggle for production, the
class struggle and scientific experiment.”
– put even more simply, correct ideas come from experience of people actually trying
things - experimentation with this and that, seeing what works and what doesn’t.
Simple, yeah?
Well, here’s where things get a little bit more complicated.
That’s certainly a useful starting point, but there are different stages in the development
of knowledge, from shallow, surface-level knowledge to deep, higher-level knowledge.
Let’s take a look at these different stages.
The first stage in the process of developing knowledge is known as the perceptual stage
– referred to as such because this is the first time that we perceive something particular
through our various senses; be that sight, touch, smell, taste, etc.
Through the experience of social practice referred to earlier, the world is engaged
with in various different ways, and this engagement with the world around us is the beginning
of the development of knowledge of a particular thing.
Once we have enough perceptual data from the world around us (again, gathered through our
perception, our senses, and so on), we then advance from Perceptual knowledge of the particular
phenomenon to general Conceptual knowledge; that is, the formation of ideas and concepts
from those perceptions.
This is when people take the particular raw material of their experiences in the world,
and synthesise it into general abstract ideas and concepts that can then be reapplied to
the world around us.
We move from the particular Perceptual knowledge, to the general Conceptual knowledge, and then
return to particular phenomena to test out and verify the ideas of our conceptual knowledge
through further social practice.
For example, if we didn’t understand the laws of physics, one might drop an object
and see that it falls to the ground.
This would be the first, very basic Perceptual stage of knowledge: we perceive that we were
holding an object, then we let go of the object, and it moved to the ground.
By pondering the fact that the object falls to the ground, and realising then that there
must be some kind of force that pulls it to the ground every time, we move to the next
stage.
Here, we see the qualitative leap from a lower-stage Perceptual knowledge, to a higher-stage Conceptual
knowledge.
The conception of gravity begins to emerge.
Now, it’s all well and good to form such conceptions in our minds from what we’ve
perceived, but in order to figure out if such an idea or concept is correct, we then need
to surpass the conceptual knowledge in our minds, and return these ideas to the conditions
around us, testing them out in order to verify if they’re true.
We must move from our perceptions of the world, to our conceptions or ideas about the world,
and then return to the world once more by re-introducing and testing these ideas through
experimentation.
From the world, to our minds, and back to the world; from the particular, to the general,
and back to the particular – reaching a higher level of knowledge at each step along
the way, moving not in a circle, but in an ever-ascending spiral.
For example, returning to the idea of physics and gravity, we could see if our conceptual
knowledge of gravity is correct by testing it out in different scenarios.
We might create a machine that relies on our concept of gravity to function.
If this machine functions correctly, as anticipated, and we perceive that our applied practice
is successful, then we have more evidence of our conceptual knowledge being correct.
If the machine doesn’t function as expected, then this new higher-level Perceptual Knowledge
of gravity still allows us to move to a higher level of Conceptual Knowledge as our previously
incorrect ideas are updated and refined to more accurately reflect truth, from which
point we can conduct further and further experiments.
As they say, “failure is the mother of success”.
To reiterate the Marxist theory of knowledge in the terms of the underlying philosophy
of dialectical materialism: As materialists, our knowledge begins with
the perceptual stage; the stage at which we perceive phenomena in the material world through
our senses; the level of the particular.
As dialecticians, that knowledge is then synthesised through conceptualisation to the logical,
rational, conceptual stage; the level of the general.
This is conceptual knowledge that must then be applied once again via social practice
to be verified at the level of the particular so as to draw even higher-level conclusions
about the general.
And on and on, over and over again, in an iterative process from lower to higher levels
of knowledge, from the shallow to the deep.
Now, all knowledge ultimately comes from experience, whether that’s one’s own direct (first-hand)
experience or indirect experience learnt elsewhere (that is, the experience of others).
This distinction is important to keep in mind: we don’t each individually need to re-discover
fire.
With widespread access to information through things like the internet these days, especially
with websites like Marxists.org, we have a seemingly never-ending source of wealth of
experience of others who’ve engaged in real-world practice to draw from.
As scientific socialists, we’re tasked with learning from the experience of proletarian
revolutionary practice from the past and the present – from the Paris Commune, through
the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions, right up to the revolutionary struggles being waged
in places like India and the Philippines today – from which high-level conceptual knowledge
has been developed, and from here we need to verify and further develop this knowledge
through our own revolutionary practice.
We need to make sure we understand what worked and what didn’t work.
And that way we can proceed from where those engaged in practice before us left off, rather
than just starting again from scratch.
Indeed, this is an absolute necessity as we’ve got over 150 years of proletarian revolutionary
experience in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist canon to study and learn from, and we can’t
doom ourselves to repeating the same mistakes of the past over and over again.
Now, it’s crucial that we learn this theory of knowledge in order to apply it to our practice
and develop our knowledge to a higher level, beyond even that which was possible by the
major Marxist theoreticians and practitioners of history.
Unfortunately - and I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself at various times - many
Marxists spend hours upon hours arguing with one another through nothing more than dogmatically
parroting off what their favourite Marxist theorist wrote on this or that matter – “Marx
said this” or “Lenin said that”.
And yet, we rarely critically subject these statements themselves to the Marxist theory
of knowledge, as though knowledge simply stopped and hasn’t progressed beyond what people
wrote in the middle of the 1800s or even the 1900s.
That is, they demonstrate that they’ve rote-learnt the words and the paragraphs, but crucially
they haven’t learnt how to apply the method itself – the method of dialectical materialism
and the Marxist theory of knowledge which flows from it.
Marx may have said X, and this may have been a reasonable conceptualisation based on his
perceptions from the practice he had engaged in at that place and time, but what happened
when that conceptual knowledge was applied to revolutionary practice?
Did it work?
Did it fail?
Were certain aspects of it proven correct, and others incorrect?
What happened when other revolutionary groups put it into practice, and from this indirect
practical experience, what higher-level of conceptual, rational, logical knowledge can
we arrive at, beyond earlier Marxist theorists and practitioners?
It's crucial that Marxists don’t solely rely on simply quoting Marx, Lenin or Mao
to justify our views.
We always have to remember that the conceptual knowledge that they themselves had was limited
by their times and places in the world, which led them to (what we can now clearly identify
as) errors – take, for example, tendencies towards Eurocentrism in some of the analyses
of Marx and Engels, an issue which has thankfully been corrected by more recent Marxists.
And it’s crucial to understand Marxism as this evolving, updating and self-correcting
scientific method, and not merely just the thoughts and writings of Marx and Engels themselves.
The Marxist theory of knowledge as a methodology infinitely surpasses the limitations of any
individual Marxist theoretician and practitioner.
But the Marxist theory of knowledge, like its underlying philosophy of dialectical materialism,
must be applied, rather than just parroted off, in order to surpass these limitations
and to advance the theoretical scope of Marxism.
There are many areas where Marxism is severely under theorised, and so it remains the task
of Marxists today to creatively apply the Marxist theory of knowledge in order to develop
higher-level concepts and analyses that can build up the collective knowledge of the Marxist
movement.
We can’t just quote Lenin for the correct position on LGBT+ Emancipation, nor Marx on
the correct position for how socialists should utilise social media in our activism – at
least not on either of these matters explicitly.
So it falls to us today, as Marxists of the 21st century, to use the tools we’ve been
handed down do the hard work of applying Marxist analysis to contemporary issues of the day;
to continually practice, fail, re-conceptualise and practice our ideas again and again in
the arena of class struggle to gain a better understanding of our conditions, and how to
overcome them – and ultimately, to bring about socialist society.
That’s a lot more difficult than simply just parroting off our favourite Mao quotes,
but that’s the task that lies before us.
Nobody said liberation was going to be easy.
Now, as with all “Socialism 101”-style videos, this is only an introduction that
should be treated as a supplement, not a substitute.
You do ultimately need to go study the theory for yourselves in order to deepen your understanding
of this subject, preferably in an organisation or another collective reading group setting,
and then, crucially, to verify it in practice.
Now, this video purposefully avoided getting too deep into the various schools of philosophy
so as not to scare off any potential newcomers.
But, speaking of philosophy for the slightly more advanced viewers, Marxist Epistemology
can’t be understood purely as a “rationalist” process, which happens solely in people’s
brains by reason and rationality alone in a vacuum, nor is it a purely “empirical”
process that doesn’t move past our sensorial experiences.
Knowledge from the Marxist perspective is a process of not only just human reason, but
it dialectically relates to our sensory experiences – incorporating the correct, materially-grounded
elements that exist in both rationalism and empiricism, while discarding with the idealist
and metaphysical elements.
Knowledge develops in ebbs and flows between the material world and specific conditions
we find ourselves in, and our interpretation and re-interpretation of the world around
us, towards the ultimate end of transforming that world.
As Mao summarizes: “Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify
and develop the truth.
Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational [or conceptual] knowledge;
then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both
the subjective and the objective world.
Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge.
This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice
and knowledge rises to a higher level.
Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist
theory of the unity of knowing and doing.”
Speaking of dialectics - even more philosophy – a thorough understanding of dialectical
and historical materialism is central to truly grasping the Marxist Theory of Knowledge.
If you’re interested in learning more about these, check out the 3-part Socialism 101
series on Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism and Contradiction, as well as
the accompanying reading lists in the description boxes below each of the videos.
As for more deeply understanding the Marxist Theory of Knowledge itself, there are no better
texts for this than the very short “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” and “On Practice”
by Mao Tse-Tung – both of which are linked below, as well as other useful related texts,
videos, podcasts, and so on.
Thank you for watching this video, and thanks especially to the supporters on Patreon who
continue to make each of these possible with their generous donations.
Thank you BlueCollarRed, Julia Affentranger, Eric Graham MacEachern, BJB7, Gato Ansoc,
Vangelo, Joely, Yugopnik, Grimwater, Ryan Hodgson, soup, Michaela Schmid, Christian
Nipales, Alfonso Dingo Torres, Rotgardist, zakasi, Anglo-Irish Bolshevik, Thomas Rawson-Wood,
Bobby Block, Jason Schmidt, Mitch Schiller, Saoirse Ní Bhaoighealláin, Roja, MLMinPractice,
Eric Lindahl, Robert Jarczak, Anastassia, Wonderbad, JT Chapman, Joseph Sheppard, Comrade
Amara, WealthForThe99Percent, Petr Kraus, Hagen Michels, Carlos De Luna, 23 ska-doo,
John Purser, Rodrigo Pichardo, ChairmanBruh, Faite Fioca, Tears Cadigan, Brian Lounge,
Sexysocialist, Catraist Maoist, Noelle Hemdal, Richard Scott Wigton, Conor L, Chairman Eris,
and Dormin.
Cheers everyone, agus slán go fóill.