I am a Marxist in philosophy. Yet, this was not always so. In fact, I was trained in analytic philosophy and mathematical logic at Columbia University. Radical beginnings indeed !

With the crisis of our age I became a Marxist, and the effect was more drastic than I could have realized at first. The practice of Marxism fundamentally transformed my understanding and practice of philosophy. I became a Marxist in philosophy, and so gave up on trying to find a total, a priori and deductive theory of reality.  Instead, I felt the profound need to understand the world , even if a bit, so as to be able to change it, and saw philosophy as a particular means to understand, so as to act on, the world.

I believe that philosophy has the specific task of systematizing and unifying the results of science and politics. Hence, Marxist philosophy is the general theory of Marxist science and politics.

Another way of putting this is that science and politics are both methods of acquiring or using objective knowledge. Science tells us how nature is. Politics tells us how society is and should be, and ostensibly on that basis how “we” should act to make that possibility a reality. Philosophy tells us about both science and politics, hence it comes to abstract and general conclusions on how nature and society are, as well as how the latter should be and how it should be acted on to make that possibility a concrete state of affairs. For instance, the materialist principle that “the world is explained by the world itself” is a abstract, general conclusion made from the results of scientific theory and practice. Philosophy sums up in theory, and as a whole, the results of science and politics.

My task in this blog are varied.  Above all, I wish to produce a rigorous and general statement of Marxist philosophy, so as to help give defense to the theory and practice of Marxism. It is my belief that Marxism is the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” and guide to action in the life-or-death fight against capitalism. However, for the most part the blog will be focused on posing and answering questions about science i.e. the structure, and development of science, its relation to society and its history. I will be reading and analyzing texts from many different traditions, taking notes on scattered problematiques in philosophy , and commenting on discoveries, crises, revolutions in the history of science, as well as discoveries, crises and revolutions in history at large.

I am in fact preparing for that rigorous and general statement of Marxist philosophy.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a change of gaining its luminous summits. Hopefully in the work of philosophy we may reach some kind of station in the steep path towards science.