Communism and Philosophy:
Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism

Maurice Cornforth

Preface

A discussion about communism and philosophy must lead, it seems to me, to a much wider discussion of the problems of modern philosophy, particularly since Hegel, as they have been expounded not only by professed Marxists but by others. It is my intention to attempt such a discussion covering the main problems of modern philosophy, in a series of books following this one.

Such a discussion as I propose on problems of modern philosophy in general must be centred, in my opinion, on discussions of Marxism. For Marxism has opened up new approaches to problems. And any philosopher, whatever his point of view, has now whether he likes it or not to come to terms with Marxism and can no longer get away with ignoring it.

In the current English edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels the editors said, by way of general introduction, that “Marxism offers a scientifically-based theory of the concepts and methods man can employ for comprehending both his own existence and that of the world about him”. Accordingly, this book and those which follow have been written in the hope of being of some use to anyone who is interested in such “concepts and methods”.

I have used the phrase “comprehending the human condition” as a convenient way of condensing the longer phrase “man’s comprehension of both his own existence and that of the world about him”. The same phrase is often used by people who take a rather gloomy view of our potentials and prospects, to draw attention to numerous sordid miseries attending what they call “the human condition”. My intention in using it is simply to suggest that the object of all scientifically-based theory is to comprehend as objectively, fully and accurately as possible our condition of existence in the world about us, and that the object of philosophy should be to promote the unification of all scientific investigations and theory towards this end.

Marxism, it is contended, offers a scientifically-based theory, or at least essential foundations for it, for accomplishing precisely that. Certain dogmas of Marxism get in the way, and so do certain revisions of Marxism. At the same time, various theories of “bourgeois” philosophy, especially modern “logic”, “philosophy of science” and

2 Communism and Philosophy

“social and political philosophy”, have made important contributions to our “comprehension of the human condition”. But others (often theories of the self-same theoreticians) lead, as I shall argue, far astray.

After saying this, it may be useful, by way of a Preface, to proceed to say something of how I personally came to write such a book and books as this. I hesitate to bring in merely personal matters, which are not of much importance to anyone but myself. But they may help to show the point of the rather complicated and often difficult discussions that will follow.

I should explain first of all that I have been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain since 1931. I have never seen any good reason (as many of my good friends have done) to cease being a member of it, and I have seen a lot of good reasons to continue. Indeed, I called myself a “communist” long before I joined the Communist Party— in fact, since I read the plays of George Bernard Shaw as a schoolboy (not yet having had the benefit of Lenin’s description of him as “a good man fallen among Fabians”). In 1925 I stood as Communist candidate in a “mock election” at University College School, where I got one vote, having finished with the impressive statement, “If social justice cannot be won by peaceful means, it must be won by the sword” (not that I possessed any sword then or at any subsequent time).

Being of an introverted character and much given to theorising, I early became interested in philosophy—this was also due to Shaw, who in my innocence I thought must be a great philosopher when he talked about “the Life Force”. When I entered the University of London (of which city I am native) it was to study philosophy—and having graduated there, I took up the specialised course on Logic available at Cambridge. It was in fact so specialised that I was the only student taking it.

I attended the lectures at University College, London, on the history of philosophy, both ancient and modern, given at that time by Professor Dawes Hicks. Thus I gained an insight into the history of philosophy which was denied those studying in Cambridge, owing to the very tendentious character of the lectures being currently given there by C. D. Broad. In Cambridge, I attended seminars on “logical-analytic” philosophy by G. E. Moore, enjoyed special tuition on Russell's Principia Mathematica by R. B. Braitwaite, and sat for one year at the feet of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the end I gained a good deal of insight

Preface 3

into modern “logical-analytic” philosophy. It was practised by people whose main concern (one might almost say, obsession) was for clarity typified by the question G. E. Moore was always asking: “Whatever can be meant by that?” This influence has remained throughout my life.

However, towards the end of my studies as an undergraduate at Cambridge I became increasingly convinced that while my tutors sought for clarity they had not succeeded in finding it. What I was particularly dissatisfied about was their “subjective idealism”, which I saw as the continuation of the so-called “British Empiricism” which then penetrated all their teachings; and, along with that, the complete disconnection and irrelevance of all they had to say to the social problems of which my much earlier interest in Communism had made me aware. This was heightened by the fact that while I was discussing problems of logic at Cambridge the worst crisis of capitalism yet experienced was going on outside.

It was at this point that I was introduced to Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism—by David Guest, who was later to die fighting fascism in Spain and who was a close friend of mine. I found its impact—along with that of the first volume of Marx’s Capital, which I had already studied after borrowing it from the library of University College, London—quite overwhelming. No sooner had I managed to take the final examinations in logic, than I joined the Communist Party. Several other students had simultaneously the same idea—and with Maurice Dobb and two other “dons” who already belonged to the Communist Party, this was how the first Party organisation was formed in Cambridge. We took the party work very seriously: I remember a resolution being passed that the dons should cease serving tea at meetings, because we had no time for drinking tea (especially not that of the Orange Pekoe variety).

My having distinguished myself at logic earned me a three-year scholarship at Trinity College. I made use of the advantages of a life of leisure which this afforded by reading and rereading all the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin then available in English (there were a lot of them already)—research quite different from that for which the scholarship was actually awarded, but which was, as I satisfied and still satisfy my conscience, a far better use of it, which has served me all my life. At the same time, I repaid the College’s generosity by spending most of my time trying to organise the unemployed at the Labour Exchange in Cambridge, selling and organising the sale of the Daily

4 Communism and Philosophy

Worker in the town, and later chasing round on a bicycle trying to be of assistance to small groups of Communist Party members (mostly “proletarians”) who had gathered in various towns and villages in the Eastern Counties.

The latter was sometimes an uphill task—for example, when I first asked “What is the situation in Ipswich?” the answer was given, “The point is, comrade, that there is no situation in Ipswich”. But anyway, we formed by about 1933 a new District Committee of the Party—the Eastern Counties District Committee. I became the District Organiser (the contemporary term is “District Secretary”)—and left academic life, as it turned out, permanently, to become a full-time employee of the Communist Party. I cannot say I have ever regretted it.

I will not recount the ups and downs of the “struggles” engaged in by the Party in the Eastern Counties up to the time when I left the district to reside again in London in 1945—except for a recollection of a lesson I learnt against the use of “party jargon” from a road worker in a remote part of North Essex. “It's a funny thing,” he said, “that the capitalist press tells lies but they sound like the truth, but we tell the truth and it mostly sounds like lies.”

I was disqualified for military service during the war owing to a disability. For about two years I worked as a farm labourer, but eventually wangled myself out of farm work to work full-time again for the Party. It was while I was a farmer’s boy that I thought it about time that I put my knowledge of philosophy to some use—I suppose there can be few occupations more conducive to reflection than hoeing long rows of sugar beet. So in the evenings after my labours, in the tumbledown cottage I and my wife inhabited, I wrote my first book, Science versus Idealism, which was eventually published in 1946 by Lawrence and Wishart. Luckily, it was an immediate success (partly due to a review in the Sunday Times which said it reminded them of a duel with poisoned daggers) and it was not long before the Russians decided they liked it and published it in Russian translation.

In Science versus Idealism I tried to come to terms with my previous studies of philosophy in the light of my new Marxist convictions. It was written from the point of view, stressed by Engels, that there were “two camps in philosophy”, which had currently become the “proletarian” camp versus the “bourgeois” one. And I took it as gospel for the “proletarian” camp that Marx, Engels and Lenin were undoubtedly

Preface 5

right in everything they taught, and that whatever they said (especially when they said it at least three times) must be true.

What was specific and, to some extent, original about the book was that I saw the struggle between the “two camps” as having become, in modern and contemporary philosophy, above all a struggle about “science”—about what science was about and what it was for. I regarded (and still regard) the right understanding of the social functions and general theories of the sciences as the key issue of contemporary philosophy.

The book Dialectical Materialism, an Introduction, is very much a “Party” book. Stalin was then at the very height of his authority in the world communist movement, and Marx, Engels and Lenin had been joined by a fourth author of “Marxist Classics”, who was regarded as having said the last word on everything. So, in the original edition of the three volumes, not only was Marxism regarded as unquestionably (to quote a phrase of Lenin) “omnipotent because it is true”, but Stalin was the greatest Marxist, and the Soviet Union, under the direct guidance of Stalin, could, as the current phrase went, “do no wrong”.

What I tried to bring to this exposition of “dialectical materialism” as the “philosophy of the proletarian Party” was, however, the benefit of what I had learned about philosophy from my former teachers at Cambridge—namely, not their “theories”, which I rejected, but their insistence that everything in philosophy should be “clear”, that the meaning of terms should be “clearly defined” in use, and that—to adapt an expression of Wittgenstein—what could not be said clearly should not be said at all.

In the accounts of “materialism” and “dialectics” in the first volume, I virtually ignored Stalin’s dictum that Marxist philosophy is “materialist in theory and dialectical in method”—for, indeed, he had made no attempt to make clear the difference between “a theory” and “a method”. I treated “materialism”' as itself a “method”. “Materialism” and idealism are not two opposed theories of the nature of the world,” I declared. “They are opposed ways of interpreting and understanding every question, and, consequently, they express opposite approaches in practice and lead to very different conclusions in terms of practical activity”. I then tried to show that first Engels’ distinction of materialism and idealism in terms of “the relation of thinking and being”, and then Stalin’s formulations of the three main “assertions” of materialism as opposed to idealism, were essentially the indications of a

6 Communism and Philosophy

method of answering questions of practical concern. After that, I tried to explain that “dialectics” consists in substituting for “ready-made schemes” and “abstract formulas” a procedure of asking questions about the “interconnections and movements” in processes involved in whatever one was trying to answer questions about. I quoted a saying of Lenin that “genuine dialectics” means “a thorough detailed analysis of a process”.

In this way, while professing to produce a very “orthodox” book, I in fact, in the three volumes of it, took considerable liberties with “the Classics” while intending to do no more than write up a clear account of their teachings. But I have come to adopt some very different attitudes to Marxism from those which I formerly held.

In this, however, I have been mindful of the concluding lines of King Lear:

“The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

As soon as I had finished Dialectical Materialism, an Introduction (in 1954) I began to want to work on certain themes of Marxist theory which I saw as coming out of it. Roughly, there were six of them.

First, there was need for much more work on the central theme of “materialism”, so as to remove it altogether from the status of a “camp” of “materialists”, who held one dogmatically conceived view “of the universe and man’s place in it”, in opposition to “idealists” who held an opposite view. I came to realise that this entailed thinking much more about what Engels had called “the relation of thinking and being”, in the sense of thinking much more about the actual nature and functions of “thinking”.

Second, there was the need to think much more about the actual problems and tenets of past philosophy—and particularly about modern “neo-Kantian” and “positivist” views of the relation of philosophy with the sciences.

Third, there was the need to think much more about “historical materialism” and its relation with “dialectical materialism”. This ties up, as I came to see it, with problems of the difference and relationship of the social sciences and the natural sciences, of “man” and “nature”; and, moreover, with the fact that historical materialism provides the key to understanding science as not merely a set of theories and hypotheses proposed by scientists. It was necessary to grasp the social functions of

Preface 7

science and of the unity of all science with philosophy in its social function. In this regard, my association with J. D. Bernal, which began in the 50’s (after a discussion club was started up, called the “Engels Society”, to discuss the philosophy of science), was to exercise a decisive influence in all my subsequent thinking.

Fourth, there was the need to think much more about “logic”, in the specialised sense of the “science of logic” which I had taken a course in at Cambridge—of the difference between traditional “formal logic” and logic as a formal mathematical science, of the subject-matter and uses of the latter, and the criticism of the original founders of mathematical logic and of its developments since Principia Mathematica.

Fifth, there was the need for much more clarification of what was meant by “dialectics”—the removal of the idea so often propagated that “dialectics” was in some way opposed to “logic”; the demonstration that “dialectics” was, on the contrary, not understandable except on a grounding in “logic”; and the correction of the dogmatic conception of “dialectics” as summed up in the enunciation of a few “dialectical laws”.

Sixth, there was the need for a study, based at once on historical materialism, logic and dialectics, of what are vaguely called “human values”. This would involve considering the difference between “matter of fact” and “values”, and how “values” could be founded not on merely personal or class preferences but on “objective” grounds. And it would in turn connect with the conception of “communist society”, not as either a millennium or utopia, nor only as the consummation of a class struggle ending “inevitably” in the abolition of classes and the satisfaction of all human “needs” by the application of a high technology, but as the consummation of a struggle for the recognition of human values.

The first product of this, by way of a book, was the rather drastic revision of Science versus Idealism published in 1955.

After that I realised that it was necessary carefully to consider and come to terms with the innovations and new ideas—all of them moving away from former positions of “subjectivism” and traditional “positivist” notions on science—which had come into vogue in “bourgeois” academic philosophy in Britain following Wittgenstein’s later work, in Philosophical Investigations and his other later writings, and the so-called “linguistic philosophy”, particularly in the work at Oxford of Professors Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin. This led to my

8 Communism and Philosophy

writing Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965), which is as much a critique of some of my own earlier ideas about Marxism in the light of linguistic philosophy as a critique of linguistic philosophy in the light of Marxism.

In particular, I gained from linguistic philosophy a heightened appreciation of the importance of distinguishing the use of words in one context of their use from those in which they are used in others, if one is to avoid confusion and even literal nonsense. And in general, I came to realise the fundamental importance for philosophy of the close examination of language as the essential instrumentality not only for all thought but for all human social activities as well.

It was then, too, that I came to the conclusion that Marx’s essential contribution was what I have called “comprehension of the human condition” based on his having laid the foundation for the science of mankind and human society in historical materialism; and various conclusions on the subject of “human values”, which drew on the “linguistic” philosophers’ studies of the “language” of “value judgment” as distinct from statement of “fact”.

Meantime, in 1956, there had taken place a traumatic experience for the world communist movement. It came when the revelations at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union revealed the atrocious state of tyrannical misrule which had been going on all the time in which the successful building of a socialist economy, the war against fascism, and the subsequent economic reconstruction, had been triumphantly concluded. Many communists were led to renounce communism. Many others comforted themselves by saying that while the cold-blooded murder of millions of people was unfortunate, it made no essential difference to the general correctness of the Communist Party’s doctrines. The foolish phrase “Cult of Personality”, referring to the excessive adulation of the personality of Stalin, was said to explain everything bad during that period—as though all the misdeeds of a ruling party could be the sole fault of the accidental circumstance that its General Secretary (to quote the words of Alice when she heard the poem of The Walrus and the Carpenter) was a “very unpleasant character”.

I found myself unable to accept, as were also many and a growing number of British communists, that under the influence of Stalin there had simply been “mistakes” in the internal policies of the Soviet Union. For not “mistakes” but hideous “crimes against humanity” had been

Preface 9

committed, of a character which was totally contrary to our own British ideas of the aims of a socialist society. This was no doubt why we had refused to believe that such things could be possible until forced by irrefutable evidence to do so. Evidently, then, first there must have long been something very badly wrong in the former communist understanding of communist principles, in theory and practice, to have made possible what had actually been done in the name of communist principles. And secondly, the former idea of the “leading role” of the Soviet Union in the world communist movement was no longer acceptable. Neither was the former idea that no objections to Soviet policy (except strictly private ones, which one kept to oneself), and still less any opposition to it, were permissible.

One reason why I thought it important to make a special study of “linguistic philosophy” was because I thought it important that Marxists should get clearer about what was now required from us by way of revolutionary theory for revolutionary practice. To do so, we must not in former “sectarian” fashion simply “refute” any trend in philosophy which was not Marxist, but must take critical account of all that modern philosophy and science had new to say, instead of continuing to stew in our own dogmas and illusions of the infallibility of traditional “teachings” of Marxism.

Immediately after finishing Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy I got the idea of trying to show, as systematically as I could, that Marxism, properly understood, was not a dogma which could be used to justify any actions which a supposedly infallible “Marxist-Leninist” leadership saw fit to enforce, but a scientific conception of mankind which could show the way to a better society in which human needs could be satisfied.

For this purpose, I thought I could not do better than examine in detail the then very influential denunciations of Marxism by Karl Popper who, having got a reputation as a “philosopher of science”, wrote the books The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism to demonstrate, first, the alleged “unscientific” character of Marxism and, second, the pernicious social effects which Marxism had had and would continue to have in the future unless it was put down. Popper described Marxism as a “closed” system of thought, impermeable to science or reason, which advocated a “closed society” in opposition to capitalism and “Western Democracy”, which he called

10 Communism and Philosophy

“the open society”. By 1967 I had written a rather long book in reply to Karl Popper—The Open Philosophy and the Open Society, published in 1968.

This book began by trying to demonstrate that the Marxist philosophy, with its “materialist” and “dialectical” approach, was based on science, and that fundamental in it was “historical materialism”, which (as Engels had said) had laid the foundations for the sciences of mankind and human society in the same way as Darwin had laid them for the sciences of “living nature”. It went on to discuss the application of social science to questions of politics, and finished by discussing “democracy”, “equality”, “freedom” and the Marxist idea of a communist society.

But meanwhile, and just as The Open Philosophy and the Open Society was published, another very shattering event in which the Soviet Union was involved took place—the Soviet Army’s invasion and occupation of the socialist republic of Czechoslovakia. This was done to put down a new regime which was aiming to realise in Czechoslovakia more or less the same kind of democratically based socialism as British Communists had long advocated. Of course, the majority of communists in Britain had welcomed the new regime. And when it was put down by force of arms, this was the first occasion on which the British Communist Party expressed open disagreement and disapproval of any action of the Soviet leadership.

The Soviet intervention in 1968 in Czechoslovakia was unlike its intervention in Hungary in 1956—about which there had been a furore following that over the “revelations” about Stalin. In the latter case, intervention was to aid socialist Hungary to defeat counter-revolution. But in Czechoslovakia it was to crush socialists who had a different idea of how to run a socialist society from that of the current Soviet leadership. The first thing the Soviet Army did was not to attack strongholds of counter-revolution (of which in fact none existed), but to arrest and deport the elected leadership of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.

This event had a profound effect on the thinking of many communists, including myself. It reinforced the realisation that unconditional support for “the Soviet Union, right or wrong”, is untenable. Far from the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party being the rightful custodian of the interpretation and development of Marxist theory, it was necessary openly to call their exercise of it in question. It also brought forward the lesson, which many find it much

Preface I I

harder to learn, that while the Soviet Union may be relied upon for solidarity and aid against imperialism for national liberation movements, at the same time socialist countries and countries which may later establish a socialist economy may have to find the means to protect themselves from interference and intervention.

Between 1956 and 1968 I, along with many other communists, had been anticipating a gradual “liberalization” of the internal regime in the Soviet Union, following the reforms introduced to remedy the dictatorship and terror under Stalin. We did not anticipate the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which came as a severe shock, nor the subsequent tightening of what has been euphemistically called “administrative measures” against “dissidents”. In contrast with the views developed by so-called “Euro-communist” Communist Parties, the set of beliefs officially approved by the Soviet State and Party, and upheld elsewhere by those who seek to justify every action of the latter, have been far from conforming to what I had described as an “open” philosophy based not on dogmas but on a genuine science of human society. And as for the intervention in Czechoslovakia, it was far from being in favour of an “open society”.

In my own studies of Marxist philosophy, the events in Czechoslovakia thus caused me an increasingly uncomfortable realisation that there was something wrong with the arguments which I had used to make out that Marxism was—by its very nature, so to speak—an “open philosophy” in support of an “open society”.

What gradually dawned on me was that I was still, nearly forty years later, clinging to the same naïve attitude which I had adopted when I first joined the Communist Party and studied the “Marxist Classics”—namely, that the latter had formulated, virtually for all time and all circumstances, a set of teachings not to be questioned but only understood and applied aright.

In fact, misunderstandings and dogmas can be shown to have arisen, not from misreading the “Classics”, but rather from uncritical attitudes towards misleading or unclear formulations of various themes on the part of Marx, Engels and Lenin themselves. Thus the claim that in the “Classics” themselves are to be found all the communist views which one now wants to justify represents a degree of intellectual dishonesty which, however customary and expedient in politics, is one of the worst sins in scholarship or science.

12 Communism and Philosophy

Since I finished The Open Philosophy and the Open Society (my last book to be published) I have been occupied with a process of “rethinking” from which the present book and those which follow it have emerged. But the themes, conclusions about which I am now presenting, are the same as I have indicated as coming up out of my original study of “dialectical materialism”.

Where I have made a definite and self-conscious break with my former treatment of such themes is that, instead of proceeding on the assumption that everything is in the “Marxist Classics” if only one could contrive to put it clearly, I have subjected the “Marxist Classics” themselves to critical examination. I have discussed writings by Marx, Engels or Lenin in the same critical spirit as one would discuss any other writings of philosophy, history or sociology. Consequently, when I have quoted Marx, Engels or Lenin, it is as often as not to lodge some objection to something they have said.

The central achievement of Marx, and of Marx’s collaboration with Engels, was—as I have maintained and shall continue to maintain—in their having established in “historical materialism” the fundamentals for the science of mankind and human society. It was a “scientific” rather than a “philosophical” achievement, comparable with that of others who have established fundamentals for the sciences of nature, such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. Its “philosophical” significance was immense, since it provides the basis of a “comprehension of human practice” which, in Marx's words, will solve all “mysteries which lead theory into mysticism”.

I continue to write as “a Marxist”, then, in the sense that the themes I am writing about are the themes which seem to me to arise from Marx’s central achievement. And these seem to me to be the main themes with which philosophy should be concerned, all centring on the problem of what I have called, generally, “comprehending the human condition”.

So far as “orthodox” Marxism is concerned, what I have principally to say is obviously “revisionist”. It is unlike the “revision” to which the “orthodox” have mainly objected, however, in that I have tried to “revise” on the basis of what I take to be “fundamentals” which there is no occasion to “revise” or to think will ever need revision, which Marx and Engels established for the sciences of mankind and human society just as surely as in the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection Darwin established those for the sciences of living nature.

But yet the question of how far it is proposed to “revise” or not revise

Preface 13

"Marxism" is a mere side-issue in the work on philosophy which I am attempting in this book.

The aim of philosophy should be, it seems to me, to try to comprehend the human condition, and to do so scientifically in such a way as will achieve a “comprehension of human practice”. That will help us to see the way towards a better life and the comprehension and realisation of human values. So I am writing about philosophy to contribute, if I can, towards this end of philosophy.

This enterprise which I have now commenced is an attempt, on the basis of the scientific achievements of Marx’s fundamental formulations of historical materialism, to work out, in detail, a consistent philosophical position—on the criticism of current Marxist views; on the criticism of views of other philosophers, both in the past and at the present day; on scientific method, philosophical method, the social functions of science, and the achievement of a unified conception of mankind and nature by science coupled with philosophy; on questions of how we ascertain information about ourselves and our environment, and of human knowledge; on questions of logic and dialectics; and finally on questions of human values and value-judgments.

I have avoided as much as I could sticking my neck out on questions of current party politics.

But I hope that this may be of interest, and even of help, by way of suggestions about “ideology”, to anyone who, in Britain in particular, but also anywhere, is concerned about securing a better future than the past has been; and that it may also help, at least by the attempt to contribute to a rational scientific “ideology”, to promote mutual understanding and unity among those with such aspirations. I would like to think, too, that religious people will find in it something worthy of more consideration than the common run of vulgar “atheism”. And perhaps that even conservatives may find in it ideas not unworthy of some consideration.

I have laboured rather long at these books, which though dealing with separate themes are all closely connected together. Owing to that connection, I could not complete one without having done work on the others. They are the products of a great many false starts, attempted drafts and experimental efforts to find the best way to arrange them. In the main, most of them are already finished as the first is published.

I am only too conscious of imperfection. Perhaps if I could take

14 Communism and Philosophy

another eleven years I could make them better. But as it is, gentle reader (if I may use the old Victorian phrase, though conscious that readers nowadays, especially younger ones, are far from “gentle”), I recommend the best I could manage to your attention and charity.

April, 1979

SOURCE: Cornforth, Maurice. Communism and Philosophy: Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980. ix, 282 pp. Preface, pp. 1-14.

Communism and Philosophy: Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism
(Table of Contents) by Maurice Cornforth

The Open Philosophy and the Open Society:
A Reply to Dr. Karl Popper’s Refutations of Marxism
by Maurice Cornforth

Logical Empiricism by Maurice Cornforth

Science versus Idealism by Maurice Cornforth

Maurice Cornforth on William Blake vs. the Fetishism of Language

Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy by Maurice Cornforth

Science and Evaluation by Maurice Cornforth

Partisanship and Objectivity in Theoretical Work by Maurice Cornforth

Maurice Cornforth on Partisanship and Objectivity by Ralph Dumain

Marx and Marxism Web Guide