(iv) Philosophy and the Concrete Study of Concrete Conditions[1]

What has been said so far about the importance of philosophy as a weapon in the class struggle should not be taken to mean (as the Maoists seem to think) that everything can be found in a little Red Book which instantly opens all doors with its simple answers.

Marxist philosophy must be understood as a guide to action and not as some kind of self-contained system of ideas which can be used as a substitute for the actual task of care fully studying the real world. The general principles of dialectical materialism act as a framework to assist us in our search for the laws of development at work in a particular situation so that we become more sharply in tune with the precise features of objective reality and understand how they flu idly interrelate as a process of change. The stress placed upon the importance of the national liberation struggle as the particular form of the class struggle to be waged under present South African conditions is a good example of the creative application of Marxist philosophy to a specific situation. One of the great achievements of Communists like Moses Kotane was that he immediately grasped (as Dr. Yusuf Dadoo puts it)

the need to indigenise Marxism so as to give it meaning for the millions of our workers and peasants,[2]

for it is the specific feature of the South African situation that there can be “no working class victory without black liberation and no black liberation without the destruction of capitalism in all its forms."[3] The general principles of Marxism-Leninism have to be concretely applied and it is simply not good enough to speak in the abstract about the contradiction between worker and capitalist as though this is all the class struggle involved!

Lenin put the question well when he said that

it is not enough to be a revolutionary and an adherent of socialism or a Communist in general. You must be able at each particular moment to find the particular link in the chain which you must grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link...[4]

For this is the essence of the dialectical materialist approach: to discover both the particular links in the revolutionary chain and to work out how these links fit together as a whole, so that the constituent elements in the struggle—"the African revolution," “the national democratic revolution” and “the struggle for socialism"—are properly integrated into a coherent and overall revolutionary strategy.

Under no circumstances can dialectical materialism serve, as Engels once put it, “as an excuse for not studying history [5] as a pretext for skating over the complexities of a particular situation. Indeed, why this is so will become clearer once we understand the character of [...click "Next"]