How could one start a socialist revolution in a country like ours without dreamers? - V.I Lenin

Formal logic, which is as far as schools go (and should go, with suitable abridgements for the lower forms), deals with formal definitions, draws on what is most common, or glaring, and stops there. When two or more different definitions are taken and combined at random (a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel), the result is an eclectic definition which is indicative of different facets of the object, and nothing more.

Dialectical logic demands that we should go further. Firstly, if we are to have a true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its facets, its connections and “mediacies”. That is something we cannot ever hope to achieve completely, but the rule of comprehensiveness is a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity. Secondly, dialectical logic requires that an object should be taken in development, in change, in “self-movement” (as Hegel sometimes puts it). This is not immediately obvious in respect of such an object as a tumbler, but it, too, is in flux, and this holds especially true for its purpose, use and connection with the surrounding world. Thirdly, a full “definition” of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants. Fourthly, dialectical logic holds that “truth is always concrete, never abstract”, as the late Plekhanov liked to say after Hegel. (Let me add in parenthesis for the benefit of young Party members that you cannot hope to become a real, intelligent Communist without making a study—and I mean study—of all of Plekhanov’s philosophical writings, because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world.[3b]) - Once Again On The Trade Unions

Marxism requires of us a strictly exact and objectively verifiable analysis of the relations of classes and of the concrete features peculiar to each historical situation. We Bolsheviks have always tried to meet this requirement, which is absolutely essential for giving a scientific foundation to policy.

“Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action,” Marx and Engels always said, rightly ridiculing the mere memorising and repetition of “formulas”, that at best are capable only of marking out general tasks, which are necessarily modifiable by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.

- Letters on Tactics


Revolutions are the locomotives of history. - The Class Struggles in France

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. - Theses On Feuerbach


Absolute Criticism proceeds from the dogma of the absolute competency of the 'spirit'. Furthermore, it proceeds from the dogma of the extramundane existence of the spirit, i.e. of its existence outside the mass of humanity. Finally it transforms 'the spirit', 'progress', on the one hand, and the 'mass', on the other, into fixed beings, into concepts, and relates them one to the other in that form as given invariable extremes. It does not occur to Absolute Criticism to investigate the 'spirit' itself, to find out whether it is not its own spiritualistic nature, its airy pretensions that justify 'the phrase', 'self-deception' and 'pithlessness'. The spirit, on the contrary, is absolute, but unfortunately at the same time it continually falls into spiritlessness; it continually calculates without the master, hence it must necessarily have an adversary that intrigues against it. That adversary is the mass.

- Karl Marx - The Holy Family

“ The great basic thought,” Engels writes, “that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away... this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things.... For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain.” Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is “the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought.

- Friedrich Engels - Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy(Part 4: Marx)



The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of that truth. To participate in the collaborative effort at bringing philosophy nearer to the form of science – to bring it nearer to the goal where it can lay aside the title of “love of knowledge” and be actual knowledge – is the task I have set for myself. The inner necessity that knowledge should be science lies in the nature of knowledge, and the satisfactory explanation for this inner necessity is solely the exposition of philosophy itself. However, external necessity, insofar as this is apprehended in a universal manner and insofar as personal contingencies and individual motivations are set aside, is the same as the internal necessity which takes on the shape in which time presents the existence of its moments. To demonstrate that it is now time for philosophy to be elevated into science would therefore be the only true justification of any attempt that has this as its aim, because it would demonstrate the necessity of that aim, and, at the same time, it would be the realization of the aim itself.

- Hegel - Phenomenology of spirit