Fundamental Principles of Marxism

Basic theories and core contents of the scientific system of Marxism; the concentrated generalization and theoretical formulation of the basic standpoint, viewpoint and method of Marxism; the soul and quintessence of Marxism.

The fundamental principles of Marxism are an organic and unified whole. When Marx and Engels founded the materialist conception of history and revealed the essence of human society and its laws of development, they grasped human society as an organically unified system and opposed observing, understanding and interpreting individual social phenomena divorced and isolated from the society as a whole. In his 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx criticized Proudhon’s idealist conception of history and his metaphysical method of inquiry, emphasizing that the society “is a structure, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another”. In his 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx expressed the fundamental principles of historical materialism in classical terms, in particular the theory of the structure of society as a whole and the thought of the social organism. On the one hand, Lenin divided Marxism into three major component parts: Marxist philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism, and wrote famous works such as The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, but, at the same time, Lenin placed great emphasis on the fact that Marxism is a rigorous scientific system “cast from a single piece of steel”, “Marxism is the system of Marx’s views and teaching, which have a remarkable consistency and integrity”, “it is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defense of bourgeois oppression.” “The whole spirit of Marxism, its whole system, demands that each proposition should be considered (α) only historically, (β) only in connection with others, (γ) only in connection with the concrete experience of history”.

The fundamental principles of Marxism chiefly include eleven aspects: the principle of interconnection, interaction and motion and development of the objective material world, the principle of the law of evolution and development of human social formations from the lower to the higher, the principle of the dialectical unity of the productive forces and the relations of production, and of the economic foundation and the superstructure, the principle of classes, class struggle and class analysis, the theory of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the principle that the masses are the creators of history, the doctrine of surplus-value and the theory of the fundamental contradictions and principal contradictions of capitalist society, the doctrine of the historical necessity of socialism and the historical mission of the working class, the theory of the laws of socialist revolution (including reform) and construction, the doctrines on the party of the proletariat and the theory of construction of communist party, and the principle of full development of man and communism.

The fundamental principles of Marxism are closely bound up with the history of development of Marxism and the classics of Marxism. The fundamental principles of Marxism arose and evolved in the course of the historical development of Marxism, and are a summation of social practice and experiences and a crystallization of the development of human thought. Without the historical development of Marxism, the fundamental principles of Marxism will be “water without source” and “tree without roots”. Moreover, the fundamental principles of Marxism are also the “arteries” and “red threads” that run through the development of Marxist thought. Without the permeation of the “red threads” the fundamental principles of Marxism, the development history of Marxism will become a “pile-up” of historical data or of data of the history of ideas, devoid of “soul” and “arteries”. The fundamental principles of Marxism were elucidated by the classics of Marxism, and the classics of Marxism are the textual manifestation of the fundamental principles of Marxism and their intellectual development, the carrier of Marxist theories. Only by organically unifying the fundamental principles of Marxism, the history of development of Marxism and the classics of Marxism can we understand and accurately grasp the fundamental principles of Marxism and their spiritual essence.