The Development Of Mind - Selected Works Of Ale...
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Before Marx, materialism examined the problem of knowledge apart from thesocial nature of man and apart from his historical development, and was thereforeincapable of understanding the dependence of knowledge on social practice,that is, the dependence of knowledge on production and the class struggle.Above all, Marxists regard man's activity in production as the most fundamentalpractical activity, the determinant of all his other activities. Man's knowledgedepends mainly on his activity in material production, through which he comesgradually to understand the phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature,and the relations between himself and nature; and through his activity inproduction he also gradually comes to understand, in varying degrees, certainrelations that exist between man and man. None of this knowledge can be acquiredapart from activity in production. In a classless society every person, asa member of society, joins in common effort with the other members, entersinto definite relations of production with them and engages in productionto meet man's material needs. In all class societies, the members of thedifferent social classes also enter, in different ways, into definite relationsof production and engage in production to meet their material needs. Thisis the primary source from which human knowledge develops.Man's social practice is not confined to activity in production, but takesmany other forms--class struggle, political life, scientific and artisticpursuits; in short, as a social being, man participates in all spheres ofthe practical life of society. Thus man, in varying degrees, comes to knowthe different relations between man and man, not only through his materiallife but also through his political and cultural life (both of which areintimately bound up with material life). Of these other types of social practice,class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profoundinfluence on the development of man's knowledge. In class society everyonelives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, withoutexception, is stamped with the brand of a class.Marxists hold that in human society activity in production develops stepby step from a lower to a higher level and that consequently man's knowledge,whether of nature or of society, also develops step by step from a lowerto a higher level, that is, from the shallower to the deeper, from the one-sidedto the many-sided. For a very long period in history, men were necessarilyconfined to a one-sided understanding of the history of society because,for one thing, the bias of the exploiting classes always distorted historyand, for another, the small scale of production limited man's outlook. Itwas not until the modern proletariat emerged along with immense forces ofproduction (large-scale industry) that man was able to acquire a comprehensive,historical understanding of the development of society and turn this knowledgeinto a science, the science of Marxism.Marxists hold that man's social practice alone is the criterion of the truthof his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man'sknowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in theprocess of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientificexperiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve theanticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with thelaws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he willfail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects hisideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and canthus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by "failure is themother of success" and "a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit". Thedialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primaryposition, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practiceand repudiating all the erroneou