ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism

The mass-market entry point to Soviet philosophy: a popular essay on dialectical and historical materialism by a collective of five philosophers, doctors and candidates of philosophical science, addressed in its foreword to people trying to grasp the meaning of the rapid changes happening in front of them and wanting a scientific world outlook to do it with.

It is not a textbook and does not pretend to be one. Its academic sibling sets out the same doctrine across twenty-two examinable chapters; this reduces it to an ABC. And that reduction is what makes it worth reading closely. Where a textbook can bury its assumptions in qualifications, a primer has to state them plainly - so what a doctrine chooses to teach a beginner is a good guide to what it most wants believed.

The doctrine is set out in order: matter and its forms of motion, consciousness, the knowability of the world, the three laws and the categories of dialectics, then the historical-materialist account of production, classes, the state, revolution and the transition to communism.

The dating needs a note, because the front matter does not settle it and the text does. Whatever the 1975 printing line refers to, the book in hand knows things that had not happened by then: it quotes the Constitution adopted in 1977, names its Article 48, cites Brezhnev's sixtieth-anniversary report of November 1977, and measures history over the past sixty years. It was closed after October 1977.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.