Marxist Philosophy Research Articles

Marek Siemek as a Hegelian. Between Marx and Lukács

In our article we discuss the Hegelian reading of Marxism put forward by the famous Polish philosopher Marek Siemek. He exposed the deep but often unrealized dependence of Marxism upon Hegelian thought. This is particularly true with regard to Marxism’s attempts to develop a theory of philosophical self-knowledge. For Siemek, this philosophical dimension of Marxism is manifested in a dialectical critique of ideology, which then develops into a mature critique of political economy. The conceptual matrix of historical materialism is in turn fully utilized in the work of György Lukács, who for Siemek was the perfect example of ‘Marxist philosopher’, with all the ambiguities that this term entails. By analysing these issues, we will also identify an evolution in Siemek’s own thought: from Lukácsian/Hegelian Marxism to ‘transcendental social philosophy’ indebted to Habermasian communicative rationality. His transformation raises a question: does the dialectical Hegelian Marxist tradition lead, in its very conceptual structure—with the primacy of mediation, to the practical outcome of moderate social democratic policy, rather than revolutionary communism? Therefore, in our conclusion we would like to reconsider the possible internal limitations of this philosophical approach in the context of social praxis.

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ <i>Life in the Iron Mills</i>

Історія та сучасні тенденції вивчення філософії А. Ґрамші в Китаї

This paper examines the perception of the political philosophy of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci by Chinese scholars. It is shown that during the 1950s–1990s the conception of Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy was formed in China in the context of the study of Western Marxism. It is pointed out that in the second half of the 1980s and in the 1990s, Chinese philosophers began to conduct deeper research of Western Marxism in general and Gramsci’s theoretical heritage in particular, and the formation of Gramscian studies was started in China. The Italian Marxist’s practical philosophy became the focus of attention, and his concepts of civil society, cultural hegemony, and other ideas started to be the subject of discussion in philosophy, political science, literary studies, party-building, etc. It is shown that the first serious contribution to the critical study of the Italian philosopher’s heritage was made by Xu Chongwen, and due to the works of Yu Wujin such Gramscian terms as “cultural hegemony”, “civil society” and “organic intellectual” were widely spread among the Chinese Marxist philosophers. In the early twenty-first century, there were determined the significant changes in the study of Gramsci’s philosophy in China, which were primarily due to the appearance of new translations into Chinese of the works of the Italian philosopher. At the same time, the main directions of Gramscian studies in China were formed: the problem of Gramsci’s ideological affiliation (Pan Xihua, Bao&nbsp;Yi, He&nbsp;Ping, Wang Fengcai), the theory of hegemony (Tian Shigang, Zhan Jiang, Peng Guibing, Sun Jing, Liang Shufa, Zhou Fan, Hu Ailing, Yang Haifeng, Kang Xiaoguang, Liu Shilin, Wang Jin, He Lei, Zhou Xingjie, Pan Xihua, Sun Min, Ye Huizhen), the civil society theory (Li Dianlai, Yang Ping, Yang Renzhong, Shan Tiping), the intellectual theory (Yang Haifeng, Guo Meini, Hu Ailing, Pan Xihua, Yu Yifan). It is emphasized that Gramsci’s hegemonic theory in combination with the ideas of structuralism, poststructuralism, orientalism, feminism, and other schools of thought have influenced the formation of literary theory in China. There were explored diverse research works in various scientific disciplines representing contemporary Gramscian studies in China.

The spirituality in the views of the Soviet and post-Soviet man. Part 1

The main objectives of this article are to consider the various meanings of the concept of spirituality, religious (Christian) and non-religious. The authors analysed scientific literature, including such authors, who was directly involved in the study of the spirituality of the Soviet person (L. N. Kogan), and many others who devoted themselves to the study of youth in the USSR, including various aspects of its spirituality (V. T. Lisovskii, S. N. Ikonnikova, V. G. Mordkovich, L. Ya. Rubina, M. Kh. Titma, V. I. Chuprov, V. N. Shubkin). As a result of the analysis, a model was developed that makes it possible to talk about the spirituality of the Christian, Marxist, modern new age movement, with the allocation of basic values, the desired ideal, subjects of the process, etc. Correlation with this model should allow us to solve the main goal of the article – to identify how spirituality (in a religious or non-religious context) is understood by the current generation of student youth, what definitions are given to it, and whether there is continuity in this sense with Soviet ideas about spirituality. The authors came to the following conclusion: the meanings of the spirituality of the Soviet period corresponded to the humanism of the Marxist philosophy of «active man», «creator of culture», transforming not only religious tradition, but also various spheres of private life to suit their ideological needs – family and marriage relations, work, leisure, friendship, set the meaning and purpose of the Soviet man.

A study on the educational aspects of Marxist philosophy of practice

This study will help us comprehend Marxist practice philosophy's educational aspects. Forty students were asked to complete a questionnaire and provide their information. And display it using descriptive statistics. This talk will examine how Marx's promotion theories and subsequent Marxism affected the study of various worker organizations. It summarizes Marx's political economy's fundamental philosophies, historical hypotheses, and studies. It differentiates between more fundamental and optimistic variants of the Marxist hypothesis. It then demonstrates how these ideas were applied to analyzing significant hierarchies, differentiates between Marxist and non-Marxist approaches, and provides a fundamental and optimistic interpretation of Marxism. I believe Marx encouraged the development of additional Marxist educational theories. Education implies that it is not essential to the process of "becoming" like the ingrained process that enables it but exists in other facets of human existence. Our collective human abilities and powers It is also the fact that our continued existence can be viewed as a collection of numerous distinct and distinct parts rather than as a whole of interconnected links. The instructional method is at its peak when illustrations are structured in the applied examination of genuine societal wholeness and supported by verified realism research. Aggregation is essential for outstanding instructional approaches because it enables the student - the future laborer - to "see society from the center, as a conscious whole," and so "act to modify reality."

The Basic Principles of Marxism with the Internet as a Carrier

We live in a real society today with the Internet as the carrier. Marxist philosophy is of great significance to the study of computer science and technology majors, such as the standardization of learning methods and the improvement of learning horizons. In order to study the ideology of the current Internet carrier, this study first introduces the ideology in the Internet scenario and again describes the basic principles of Marxism. Web text data were collected from both static and dynamic websites, and the data were initially preprocessed using the ICTCLAS word separation tool. After that, a text lexicon set related to Marxism was built and combined with the surplus value calculation formula. Analysis of the text data shows that the expectation error of the Internet population approximately obeys a positive-term distribution, and the online text data are feasible in the estimation of the influence of Marxism. The statistical results show that the percentage of serious philosophical discussions from 2017 to 2021 in which Marxism is mentioned has steadily increased from 62% to 78%, indicating that Marxism still has great influence to this day. For these three different attitudes toward Marxism, the number of comments agreeing and disagreeing differed significantly, indicating that different groups of people show very different attitudes toward Marxism.

The Curriculum Knowledge Analysis of Marxist Philosophy and System Theory Based on Association Rules.

Systems theory and Marxist philosophy are inextricably linked. Systems theory and Marxist philosophy are both methodologies in a sense and share the perspective of movement and development. The system theory is also embodied in the Marxist philosophy's conceptions of nature, social history, and epistemology. Studying the system theory in Marxist philosophy will undoubtedly benefit from having a solid understanding of the connection between system theory and that philosophy. It has become crucial to enhance the quality of instruction by analyzing student learning data and providing constructive criticism for teaching methods. The students' learning data from the course teaching Marxist philosophy and systems theory were mined and analyzed based on the Apriori algorithm, and strong association rules between the course teaching contents were generated. We can determine the challenging teaching material that has an impact on students' performance through the analysis of these generation rules, enabling teachers to use this feedback information to enhance their pedagogical approaches.

Doing Philosophy Comparatively in China: Constructive Engagement between Marxist, Western, and Chinese Traditional Philosophy (2000-2022)

Marxist philosophy, Western philosophy, and Chinese traditional philosophy constitute three main forces of contemporary Chinese philosophy. In the past two decades, a great deal of in-depth and extensive constructive engagement has been carried out among the three. Previous studies on such constructive engagement have focused on the perspectives of Western or Chinese traditional philosophy, while the perspective of Marxist philosophy has been neglected to a large extent. Given the key position of Marxist philosophy in contemporary Chinese philosophy, it is undoubtedly regrettable that such a perspective is missing. This paper aims to fill this gap in the perspective of examination from the perspective of Marxist philosophy by examining the constructive engagement between various research paths within contemporary Chinese Marxist philosophy on the one hand, and the constructive engagement between Marxist philosophy, Western and Chinese traditional philosophy on the other hand.

On the Ways of Political Philosophy Innovation and Popularization under the Network Environment.

From the perspective of comprehensive modernization, the Sinicization and modernization of Marxism are inseparable from the popularization of Marxism, which will promote the Sinicization and modernization of Marxism and make it more practical and vital. Time has changed, and the traditional ways and methods have faced a new pattern, but they still contain the practical value worth exploring and give full play to the contemporary function of beneficial historical experience. On the basis of drawing on historical experience, we follow the idea of establishing basic principles, focusing on important ways and looking for the development prospects, and discuss the discussion layer by layer in clear guidance, grasping the key points and thinking about the future. In today's era, with the development of the network, the popularization of Marxist philosophy has ushered in a period of opportunity for development, but at the same time, the development has also encountered some challenges. Based on the actual situation of contemporary China, in recent years, the popularization of Marxism has made great achievements, but it also presents the phenomenon of unbalanced overall development, low operation efficiency, and uneven cooling between the officials and the people. Under these conditions, popularizing network knowledge, developing network culture, improving relevant laws, and making its theories more popular are all important ways to realize the popularization of Marxist philosophy. The research on the popularization of Marxism and the academic level is more profound, while the practical practice is more lacking. In order to correct the bias of emphasizing science and theory, it is of strong practical significance to conduct in-depth theoretical research and practical discussion from the perspective of “ways and methods.”

The Difficulty of Being a Marxist in Philosophy

Abstract This article seeks to locate Louis Althusser’s late preoccupation with the status of Marxists in philosophy through a survey of archival and marginal texts written on and amid struggles within the French education system. This material evidences that Althusser held a long-term ambition to reconcile the demands of being a Marxist in his professional life with the demands of being a philosopher in his political life. On this basis, this article offers an expanded contextualisation of the stakes that weighed upon Althusser’s shifting understanding and inhabitation of a Marxist position in philosophy. It aims to show that Althusser’s involvement with, and changing attitudes towards, the educational institution (and in particular the teaching of philosophy) played a significant role in forging the discontinuities in his conceptualisation of Marxist philosophy. The article additionally traces the afterlife of this practice in the work of Jacques Derrida and the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement de a philosophe (GREPH).

Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century by Dawid Rogacz

Reviewed by: Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century by Dawid Rogacz Don J. Wyatt (bio) Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century. By Dawid Rogacz. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. vi + 258. Paper $39.95, ISBN 978-1-350215-34-4. Discernible in the very opening pages of Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century is the fact that, within a single work, Dawid Rogacz will be providing us with two services normally regarded as oppositional. On the one hand, clear from the very title is the discreteness of his undertaking. In other words, he will be straightforwardly addressing a subject that philosophers as well as historians of China frequently refer to but, nonetheless, so very seldom subject to critical examination--namely, the uniquely Chinese, as distinguished from that which subsequently developed in the West, philosophy of history. Yet, on the other hand, even as he is intent on immediately distinguishing between the two traditions, Rogacz simultaneously signals his desire throughout his study to bring the Chinese and the Western, almost exclusively European, traditions of the philosophy of history into fruitful comparative dialogue. To achieve these superficially adversative but, in reality, quite complementary goals, excluding its introduction and its exceedingly brief conclusion, wherein a fleeting summary of the immediate prelude to and installment of the Chinese Marxist philosophy of history is afforded to us, Rogacz has segmented his study into seven logically directed and sequenced chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to the unavoidable discussion of what precisely the philosophy of history is. However, at least an equally prioritized function of this first chapter is the introduction and explication of the theoretical lens of interpretation on which Rogacz' ensuing analyses will rely. This crucial lens is the concept of holism, which was first developed and promoted by the South African politician, militarist, and philosopher Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950) as a standpoint on understanding wherein such an intimate unity is forged between the parts of an entity that, in surpassing their aggregate, "'the whole and the part therefore reciprocally influence and determine each other'" (p. 16). In Chapter 2, Rogacz necessarily considers the Chinese philosophy of history as it was variously expressed by the all-important Confucians of the pre-imperial era. The predominant concept in this chapter is that of historiosophy, [End Page 1] which is employed to encompass the "religious, artistic, literary and historiographical visions of history" (p. 19). Rogacz' initial analysis is directed toward the two oldest of the works eventually incorporated in the initial Confucian canon, the Book of Songs (Shījīng 詩經) and the Book of Documents (Shūjīng 書經). The thread of historical continuity that Rogacz discovers as coursing throughout these two works is that of Tiān 天 or Heaven (pp. 24–27), which is found to be something like the arbiter of the knowledge to humankind that history bestows. Also here accounted for are the classic views of Mencius and Xunzi, who differ on this score just as consistently as they do on other questions of consequence, such as the quality of human nature (pp. 36–46). Chapter 3 of Chinese Philosophy of History focuses on the theories of the non-Confucian schools of the Warring States period (ca. 475–221 BC). In it, particular attention is understandably devoted to the disparate views of Legalists (pp. 49–56) but also the Mohists, the Daoists, and the School of Yin-Yang, headed by Zou Yan 鄒衍 (305–240 BC) (pp. 56–68). We may contrast the welter of views that emerged during these turbulent, war-torn centuries with the more uniformly adopted one that, as the subject of Chapter 4, established itself with the advent of the Han dynastic philosophy of history, rooted as it was in the idea of correlation between Heaven (which we may also interpret as physical nature) and humanity. Pointedly with reference to history, these correlations involved purported taxonomic connections between history and cyclical patterns of seasonal events. The state-preservationist doctrines of Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 179–104 BC) serve as the standard but the chapter concludes with a consideration...

The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights by Robert Elliott Allinson

Reviewed by: The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights by Robert Elliott Allinson Robert Cummings Neville (bio) The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights. By Robert Elliott Allinson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xxiv + 256. Paperback $30.95, ISBN 978-1-350-05986-3. This is a most unusual book. Mao Zedong was one of the most powerful people in the twentieth century. With Chiang Kai-shek he drove out the Japanese from China and then defeated Chiang in turn and carried out a major revolution over which he presided for many years. Everyone knows he was a poet and, like every Marxist leader, he was a philosopher of sorts. His Marxist philosophy evolved from his youth to old age, and he developed differences from the Soviet model of Marxism that were quite significant. He "converted" to Marxism in his twenties and identified himself with that movement until he died in his eighties. But what was his education in philosophy like before he encountered Marxism? Whereas Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had educations in Western philosophy before and as undergirding their Marxism, did Mao have an education in Chinese philosophy, or Western philosophy, before and undergirding his Marxism? This book sets out to answer these questions. Robert Elliott Allinson is a professional philosopher who went to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1977, just after Mao's death. (I lectured in that university that year and met Allinson with whom I had several congenial talks, and a walk around the top of a Hong Kong mountain). Allinson served on many committees and held visiting professorships in a number of Chinese universities before moving, in the present century, to Soka University in California where he now teaches. He is ideally placed to answer these questions, especially to an English-reading audience. Mao himself did not have a splendid early education. In 1909, at the age of fifteen, he attended the Dongshan Higher Primary School, a middle school that taught the Western as well as Chinese classics. He was devoted enough to Confucius that in 1919 he visited Confucius's birthplace in Shandong Province. Mao's college was the First Teachers Training School in Changsha where his major professor was a philosopher, Yang Changji. Professor Yang's daughter became Mao's first wife. Yang first introduced Mao to the German idealist philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen, whose large book on the history of Western philosophy Mao annotated copiously in 1917 and 1918. Mao followed Yang to Beijing and sat in [End Page 1] on his classes at Peking University. He was much involved in the revolutionary events around the time of the May 4th movement in 1919 and worked on making arrangements for the lectures of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. So it was very clear, before Mao converted to Marxism, that he was reasonably well read, at least according to the standards of his time, in both the Chinese and Western classical ideas. Except for brief mentions of other philosophers, Chinese and Western, Allinson found Mao's complex annotation of Paulsen's text to be the best source of his early philosophy. Sometimes the annotations were just agreements or disagreements. But most of the time they developed Mao's own philosophy that was a combination of Eastern and Western sources. First of all, the young Mao was an egoist, meaning that he thought philosophy takes its start from an individual's conception of the self. Whereas Confucius had thought that the ego by itself was just a path toward selfishness, Mao's conception was more materialistic. Mao thought that the self can be expanded to include others, not on their own terms necessarily, but on terms that expanded the individual's own sense of self. Mao never became clear about how this purification of the self so as to include others took place. He rejected altruism as the alternative to his egoism. Second, Mao took Paulsen to demonstrate the history of ideas, Western ideas to be sure, but still ideas in a history. Paulsen's history led up through German idealism. Mao took over Marx's conception of material history, upsetting the Paulsen ideal...

The Future Belongs to Us

As a principle of industrial and spatial organisation, self-management enabled Yugoslavia to shape its own socialism after the breakup with the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc — in 1986. It even represented the paradigmatic element of a proposal for an urban restructuring of New Belgrade submitted by Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre and architects Renaudie and Gilbaud. The Yugoslav experience of self-management is not the only one. The oldest precedent probably is the Paris Commune. Bottom-up self-management has unravelled the planet over, in factories of Eastern Europe, neighbourhoods in South American cities, and rural communities in North Africa and the Middle East, to mention some.&#x0D; This essay will look at self-management as a critical socio-political paradigm inherently connected to spatial determinants and both a means and a goal of reorganising society in the contemporary moment and for the ever nearer future.&#x0D; The narrative is positioned in a broader temporal context of mass misappropriation of space by mechanisms of power: be it state, corporate, state-corporate, or architectural; the context, that is, of “flat hierarchies” as the new office ping pong tables and bean bags and corporate campuses as the new public spaces, and in the narrower temporal context of a global pandemic forcing a redefinition of public and private, of work and labour relations.

On the Metaphilosophical Conception of G.E. Koryavko

The article examines the metaphilosophical conception of Galina Koryavko (1944–2018), doctor of philosophy, professor, an outstanding scholar and teacher, who worked in Samara in the 1990s. Those years were difficult not only for the country but also for Russian philosophy, it was caused by a radical revision of the attitude to Marxist philosophy, which in the Soviet period was considered as the only true philosophical teaching, whereas in the post-Soviet period, Marxism was mostly passed over in silence. This circumstance initiated the search for new, often very far from Marxism, interpretations of the meaning of philosophical activity, the nature of philosophy, its place in the intellectual culture of modern Russia. The practical significance of such studies was determined, first of all, by the fact that under the new conditions it was necessary, in a short time, to qualitatively restructure the teaching of philosophy courses in Russian universities. The metaphilosophical conception of G.E. Koryavko, developed in the late 1980s, was based, like the vast majority of philosophical works of that time, on the Marxist philosophical paradigm, which, in the spiritual atmosphere that has developed in Russia over the past 30 years, expectedly led this conception to almost complete oblivion. This study identifies the strengths of G.E. Koryavko’s interpretation of philosophy and also identifies the controversial points inherent in that interpretation. The goal of the article to reconsider G.E. Koryavko’s conception in order to indicate the directions of strengthening and modernization, to carry out its new reading. The article’s author comes to the conclusion that this conception represented one of the significant and timely attempts to comprehend the conceptual prerequisites of the crisis of public consciousness in the USSR in the 1980s, which implied a a demand for significant modernization of Soviet Marxism, taking into account the latest scientific achievements for that time, the entry of mankind into the post-industrial and information era. Unfortunately, the author of the conception failed to dialectically reconstruct the interpretation of ideology as “false consciousness” (F. Engels), as well as to substantiate the fundamental need for the presence of qualitatively different forms of false consciousness in any historical types of civilizations.

Э. В. Ильенков и борьба за подлинный марксизм: философское свободомыслие в позднем СССР

Introduction. The article deals with the life and philosophical work of the Soviet Marxist philosopher E.V. Ilyenkov. It emphasizes the importance of a thoughtful return to his philosophical ideas. Theoretical analysis. Based on selected texts by Ilyenkov and with reference to contemporary studies of his work, three subjects are examined: the philosopher’s struggle to preserve Marx’s ideas within Soviet philosophy, his ideas about the fate of socialism in the USSR, and his attitude toward the West and the influence of Western philosophical ideas on Soviet society. Ilyenkov is shown as a bearer of a different type of thinking, which is a challenge for contemporary philosophical culture. He associated his struggle for Marxism with the need to reform the party-ideological system through the return to authentic ideas of Marx and Lenin. He saw the future of socialism in the USSR in the transition from “rough communism” to a state of complete liberation of a man from the power of private property. He perceived the West as the soulless power of private property, and modern trends of Western thought as forms of its apology. Conclusions. It is concluded that Ilyenkov’s philosophical freethinking remained Marxist quixotry within the framework of Soviet reality.

Feminist and Materialist Philosophies of History in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls

The first act of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls does away with temporal boundaries, inviting women across historical periods, artistic masterworks, and literary epics to a dinner party. During the evening, the women share their life stories, interrupt each other, and attempt to be heard over the roar of their fellow guests. In some ways, it resembles an indecipherable oral history. What is history if not indecipherable? It is the role of the historian to wade through primary and secondary sources, cultural memories and forgotten artifacts, in order to construct a written, visual, or auditory historical narrative. Thus, a history as we consume it, although based in fact, necessarily relies on narrative structure. Top Girls reminds us that history is like any other narrative: shaped by social, political, and economic forces; made unintelligible, fantastical, and surreal at times, by representative modes and their failings. By playing with the notion of history, notably combining fictional and historical figures in the first act, Top Girls emphasizes the claim that history is, among other things, reliant on both factual and fictional elements, like concrete dates and narrative structures. Top Girls narrows in on two models of historical narratives: the feminist history and materialist history. In this play, there are only women onstage. Women picture, or reference, the men in their past and present—an alcoholic father, a lousy ex-husband, an insecure coworker, Rocky Mountain Jim, and the Emperor of Japan—but a man never sets foot on stage. Only women enter and exit, only women go to and from work, only women tell their histories, signaling Churchill’s dual interest in a Marxist philosophy of history and the notion of a feminist history, which emerged in the feminist movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Through the dramatic form, which provides a fantastical element, Churchill animates and complicates history as a feminist and socialist practice.

One hundred years of Chinese dialectical logic: An academic history of logic relating to contemporary Chinese Marxism

The study of dialectical logic has a history of nearly one hundred years in China. It is significant for understanding both the growth of Chinese logic and the Sinicization of Marxism to review dialectical logic in the context of introducing the study of Marxism in China. Debates about dialectical logic in Chinese academic circles involve not only the problems of logic itself, but more importantly the understanding of Marxist philosophy. In the 1920s and 1930s, some Marxist researchers in China were influenced by the philosophers and logicians of the former Soviet Union, and they came very close to equating dialectical logic with Marxist dialectics. They also identified the formal logic originating from ancient Greece as metaphysics, praising the former and criticizing the latter. In the upsurge of Marxist philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese logicians carried out normal and formal academic research on dialectical logic. During the period from the end of 1970s to the end of 1990s, the research and teaching of dialectical logic in China reached its heyday, and logicians performed comprehensive and detailed research on some critical issues, including the basic laws of dialectical logic, which they tried to formalize. Since the beginning of the 21st century, dialectical logic has ceased to prosper and has faded from the core field of the discipline of logic, although some honorable scholars still persist in studying it.

Marxist Philosophy and the Themes of Materialism and Capitalism in Dickens’s Hard Times

This study aimed to analyze the themes of materialism and capitalism in one of Charles Dickens’s novels entitled Hard Times, which is thick with industrial capitalism. Specifically, it aims at (1) finding the themes of materialism and capitalism by coding themes in terms of words and/or phrases frequency in Dickens’s Hard Times and (2) analyzing and interpreting the theme of materialism and capitalism exposure through the characters’ discursive, setting, and narration in the novel. This research was included in a thematic study that employed a quantitative content analysis. The findings showed that the themes of this novel were materialism and capitalism. Some of the most frequently used words are ‘fact’, ‘money’, and ‘capital’, representing materialism and capitalism. The story of this novel reflects the vice or negative society that happened in England during the 18-19th century as the impacts of industrial capitalism and materialism.

The Hypothesis of "Civilized People": Connotation and Reflection

To put it simply, the hypothesis of "civilized people" mainly refers to accounting for individuals' behavioural motivations with the help of civilization. Specifically, in the process of "civilization" and "humanization", cultural elements are the primary incentive of personal behaviours. Through comparative analysis, this paper points out the main shortcomings of the unitary "civilized people" and explains in detail the fundamental proposition of the dual "civilized people". Finally, relying on the "interpretation" and "transformation" functions of Marxist philosophy, this paper makes a profound reflection on the content of the "civilized people" and its future development direction.

The implications of the thinking paradigms of British neo-Marxism

British neo-Marxism is a novel theory that emerged and developed in the UK during the period from 1950s to 1980s. It encompasses issues of history, culture, politics, society, technology, and outer space as it continues to broaden alternate critical research approaches. It carries on the intellectual tradition of British Marxism and is guided by the guiding role of Marx’s thought. British neo-Marxism has contributed to the formation of multiple neo-Marxist thinking paradigms with unique British characteristics, and its theatrical implications concern the new historicism focused on cultural criticism, the neo-rationalist thinking of changing social orders, and the neo-humanistic thinking aiming to fulfill the reform of social institutions. Its innovation in the systemization of thinking paradigms is doubtless an effect of the paradigm shift in the way of thinking of humankind to change the social order. Our study of British neo-Marxism is of important theoretical significance and practical value for both the enhancement of research on Marxist philosophy, and the innovation in the Marxist thinking paradigm.