The economic crisis throughout the world, including the US, continues to unfold, and the outline of a political crisis in the US is beginning to emerge. It is becoming urgent for those of us who see the necessity of fundamental societal change to deepen our understanding of how and why societies change. This demands we turn to the study and the further development of Marxist thought.It is impossible to have an in-depth understanding of the world we live in today without developing an understanding of, at least, the basics of Marxist philosophy. As Harry Selsam and Harry Martel put it in Reader in Marxist Philosophy, Marx and Engels believed “philosophy, in the old sense of the term, had come to an end, and that the solutions offered by conventional philosophy, brilliant as many of them were, were nevertheless infected with an alienation from reality. The time had come, they maintained, for the emergence of a new type of philosopher, one whose feet were on the ground, and who regarded the social practice of mankind as both the source of philosophical concepts and the criterion of their truth.” These “new philosophers” were not inventing or discovering anything, but rather only giving expression to the actual realities of the world as it existed.
