SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



the labyrinth of bourgeois thought independently 

 of Marx and Engels, by self-study. This man 

 was Josef Dietzgen, who wrote to Marx on No- 

 vember 7, 1867 : " You have expressed for the 

 first time in a clear, resistless, scientific form 

 what will be from now on the conscious tendency 

 of historical development, namely, to subordinate 

 the hitherto blind forces of the process of pro- 

 duction to human consciousness." 



Dietzgen was a natural philosopher in the true 

 sense of the word. He realized that the Marxian 

 conception of history stated a truth which, in its 

 logical bearing, extended far beyond the sphere 

 of mere social evolution. If the materialist con- 

 ception of history claimed that material conditions 

 shape human thought, then it was the task of the 

 proletarian thinker to demonstrate, by what means 

 material conditions were converted into human 

 thought. And if this process was a historical 

 evolution, then it devolved upon the proletarian 

 thinker to show by what processes the evolution 

 of the universe resulted in the development of 

 the faculty of human thought and how this in- 

 strument of understanding did its work. 



Dietzgen, therefore, wrote in the above letter 

 to Marx: "The fundament of all science con- 

 sists in the understanding of the thinking process. 



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