Marxist/Leninist History
by David A. Noebel
The Marxist/Leninist interpretation of history consists of one major and a few minor players. The major player is the dialectical nature of matter. All history—all reality—is seen as the outworking of this all-encompassing concept. It isn’t just that matter is eternal, but that dialectical matter is eternal. All else follows from this premise. Dialectical matter determines history and all that history encompasses.
Marxist/Leninists understand matter or reality (whether the reality of physics, biology, or the social sciences) to operate through a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Whether subatomic or atomic, animate matter or inanimate, individual man or society, all live and move dialectically, since dialectics is the essence of matter and matter is ultimately all that is real. The so-called "hidden laws of nature" are the laws of dialectical process, and all nature obeys these laws. These laws were "discovered" by Marx and Engels and are as important to comprehending historical reality scientifically as Darwin’s discovery of evolutionary law is to comprehending biology scientifically.
Marxist/Leninists begin with eternal matter and spontaneous generation and view history as a progression of biological and economic evolution that ultimately will result in a society of communist man in a communist paradise. According to Marxists, the future communist society is written into nature itself. The hidden, impersonal laws of nature—dialectical matter—have so determined the outcome. Man is merely the consequence of these impersonal happenings, but man is given a minor role to play, i.e., to nudge history along a little faster toward its predetermined end.
History records that socialist-communist man has been responsible for the death of millions in his attempt to nudge history. Joseph Stalin alone was guilty of "the persecution, imprisonment, torture and death of some fifty million human beings" prior to World War II.1 The historical struggle for communism is looked on as synonymous with the biological struggle for existence. Only the fit will survive, and the Marxists believe that the proletariat are the fit.
The problem, of course, is calling a halt to the historical process once the desired end is accomplished. According to the dialectical interpretation of reality, all syntheses are transitory, that is, all become new theses that, in turn, rouse their particular antitheses. The process never ends; it is eternal. To view history as a move from eternal nonliving matter to living matter, from living matter to man, from man the biological animal to man the economic animal, from the economic to the social, and from the social to the paradise of a communist society—and then call off the dialectical process because the end has been accomplished—is a problem of major proportions.
The whole process of human history is the workings of dialectical matter through biological evolution, economics, and the social order. The struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat on the economic-social level is basically the same struggle involved in the atom and in the evolutionary process of living matter. Historical materialism is dialectical materialism wrought in history. It is historical determinism with a vengeance. While Marxists seek to make man significant in some ways, impersonal, dialectical matter is the only critical aspect of the equation. Life, man, mind, love, ideas, and consciousness are all secondary to the great forces determining nature and history.
- Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 177.
