Marxist Conception of Practice

Marxist theory on the essence, features, forms of practice and its important position in Marxist theory. A general concept that includes men’s material productive activity, political activity, scientific experiments and other activities. The standpoint of practice is the primary and basic standpoint of Marxist epistemology.

Practice is a historical category. Ancient thinkers noticed early on that human activity differs from the activity of animals, and man’s activity is an activity in which a man’s ends and will is involved. Therefore, the category of practice was often associated with moral behavior and referred to the rational and autonomous moral activity of the subject. Since modern times, European thinkers have extended concept of the practice from the moral sphere to the whole sphere of reason and developed the connotation of practice from the perspective of activity and creativity. Kant raised the question of “practice” from the perspective of morality and goodness, and divided reason into two categories: theoretical reason and practical reason. Fichte called the action of the object on the subject “theoretical activity” and the creation of the object by the subject “practical activity”. Hegel regarded practical activity as an inner moment to arrive at truth, and held that practice possesses not only the worth of the universal but also of the out-and-out actual. However, in Hegel’s view, practice is merely a moment in the process of self-movement of the absolute Idea, essentially a non-actual intellectual activity. Idealist philosophy, then, regarded practice as an activity of the idea and denied that practice is an objective, sensuous activity. On the contrary, materialist philosophy regards practice as a sensuous activity, but old materialist understanding of the practice was limited. With the development of experimental science and the rise of epistemological questions, F. Bacon of Britain and La Mettrie and Diderot of France and other materialist thinkers have given concrete accounts of experimental methods and technical operations, etc., which were very significant, but their studies were limited to scientific experiments. German materialist thinkers such as Feuerbach emphasized the importance of life practice, but what they understood as practice was merely man’s activity of adaptation to his environment, including the individual’s acts of eating and living or seeking personal gain, and practical activity was small and fragmentary. With the increasing richness of human activity since the 19th century, the content and scale of people’s economic activity, political activity, artistic creations and scientific experiments were unprecedented, and the power of human reason came to the fore in a way that was not able to be covered by the traditional concept of labor and the category of practice. The use of a higher-level category to summarize human activity became an urgent actual need. It was against this background that Marx and Engels changed the old philosophical conception of practice and established the scientific conception of practice. in the spring of 1845, in his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx clearly put forth the Marxist category of practice, and later, in his works such as The German Ideology, he further elaborated the practice of material production and its significance, thus established the Marxist scientific conception of practice.

Marxist conception of practice holds that practice is man’s objective material activity of purposively and consciously reshaping the world, and that it is an activity of translating the subjective into the objective unique to man. Practice has the following essential properties: First, practice has objective materiality. Practice is an activity that inevitably takes place between man and the outside world in order to satisfy his natural needs; the object, the means and the result of practice have objective materiality. Although practice is man’s conscious and purposive activity governed by certain ends, it is not a merely intellectual activity. Practice uses material means to bring about immediate changes in real things to satisfy men’s practical needs, while thought itself cannot achieve anything at all. Second, practice has immediate reality. Practice is the activity of translating the subjective into the objective, an actual and sensuous activity, the activity of actually reshaping the object; practical activity inevitably causes certain changes in the objective world, and through human practice, the ideal being in human mind becomes a real being, thus practice has immediate reality. Third, practice has dynamic creativity. Unlike the instinctive activity of animals, human practice is an activity guided by thought, in which man not only makes changes in the form of natural objects, but also achieves his own ends in them. The creativity of practice stems from man’s own essential powers generated and developed in practice, and is chiefly that man has developed human consciousness and thinking on the basis of animal consciousness and that men change objects by making physical instruments of labor and construct an ideal world of ideas with the help of language, writing, etc., thus create a humanized world in constant development. Fourth, practice has a socio-historical nature. Practice is a social activity, which is the basis and bond for realizing the unity of man and nature, as well as the basis and bond to connect people together to form the human society. Moreover, practice is also a historical activity. Future generations always build on the achievements of the practice of their predecessors to create new creations, and each generation incorporates into its own activity the essential powers of man accumulated by the practice of their predecessors to strengthen their own practical capacity. Thus, human practice is always an activity that contains all results of previous development, and individuals in any society practice by virtue of their human powers. The dynamic creativity and the socio-historical nature of practice determines that the isolated activities of individuals in practical activity do not occur accidentally or randomly, but are interconnected and have a universal characteristics.

The forms of practice are diverse, chiefly including forms such as productive practice, class struggle and scientific experiments. Among them, productive practice is the most fundamental human practical activity, and man’s activity of production of material means in order to satisfy his natural needs is a fundamental and originary activity that determines all their other activities, the material basis of human society. The practice of social relations is a practical activity to coordinate people’s relations and resolve social contradictions based on the practice of material production. In class society, the fundamental contradictions of society manifest themselves as class relations, i.e., class contradictions and class struggles, and class struggles are the immediate driving force of development of class society. Scientific experiment is a practical activity in which people explore and know the laws of nature and acquire knowledge about objects. As an independent practical activity, it has increasingly shown its important role in modern society.

The category of practice is of great and far-reaching significance among the doctrines of Marxism and even in the history of human thought. It is on the basis of scientific conception of practice that Marxism has correctly solved the question of the unity of thinking and being, matter and consciousness, dialectics and materialism, conception of nature and conception of history, and established a complete and unified theoretical system. Mao Zedong’s work On Practice has greatly enriched and developed the Marxist conception of practice.

See On Practice on p. 1126.