p The philosophy of Marxism differs fundamentally from all preceding and currently existing philosophical doctrines. The revolution in philosophy achieved by Marxism signifies at the same time a qualitative change in the subject-matter of philosophy. Philosophy’s traditional themes are not cast aside but enriched and developed in every way on the basis of the dialectical materialist understanding of nature, society and cognition.

p Dialectical and historical materialism proceeds from a fundamentally new assessment of the philosophical significance of the advances of the natural sciences and social practice that is quite alien to all preceding philosophy. The philosophical substantiation of the communist transformation of social relations, direct, open and militant partisanship—all this strongly distinguishes the 334 subject-matter, the problems and aims of dialectical and historical materialism from the philosophical doctrines of the past, whose basic features are retained in modern bourgeois philosophy.

p The creation of a divide between philosophy and the specialised sciences investigating nature and society was a highly progressive historical process, in the course of which the pre-conditions were created for building up a scientific philosophy and scientific understanding of its subjectmatter. Marxism summarised this process of division, which made it possible to reveal the weakness of all the philosophical doctrines which sought to explain the concrete, definite phenomena of nature and society on the basis of general conceptions of the nature of things. Incidentally, science as well as philosophy was confronted with the task of overcoming the former approach, that is, it had to become aware that the answer to general questions presupposes the solution of specific questions as an essential prerequisite. Lenin wrote: ”. . .as long as people did not know how to set about studying the facts, they always invented a priori general theories, which were always sterile. The metaphysician-chemist, still unable to make a factual investigation of chemical processes, concocts a theory about chemical affinity as a force. The metaphysician-biologist talks about the nature of life and the vital force. The metaphysician-psychologist argues about the nature of the soul. Here it is the method itself that is absurd. You cannot argue about the soul without having explained psychical processes in particular: here progress must consist precisely in abandoning general theories and philosophical discourses about the nature of the soul, and in being able to put the study of the facts about 335 particular psychical processes on a scientific footing.”  [335•1 

p Of course, this is not to say that there is no meaning in such questions as: "What is matter? What is nature? What is man? What is the soul?" They remain unsolved until specialised research into specific forms of the motion of matter, the history of mankind, of psychical processes have provided a scientific foundation for the concrete, substantiated statement of such general philosophical questions. Philosophy did not pose these questions in vain. By posing them it stimulated specialised research, the results of which could not, however, be given scientific-philosophical generalisation from idealist and metaphysical positions.

p Marx and Engels criticised the previous sociology for trying to answer the questions: What is society in general? What is progress in general? without studying the concrete, historically transient types of society and progress. Marx made an all-round study of capitalist society and laid the foundations of a special scientific inquiry into other social formations. This made it possible to solve general sociological questions as well. Study of the parts should not be metaphysically counterposed to study of the whole. We have already referred to P. V. Kopnin’s remark that any specialised science investigates the world as a whole, not only in the one definite aspect determined by its subject-matter. This particular investigation of the whole prepares the ground for a scientific-philosophical understanding of the material unity of the world. In this connection T. Pavlov writes: "Philosophy is and should be the science of the whole, but even then it is not 336 merely a science of the whole in general, merely about the whole; it is a science of the whole taken in the dialectically indissoluble connection of its parts, aspects or qualities, i.e., of the whole and of the parts, of matter in general and of its basic qualities, aspects and forms of existence."  [336•1  This is not to say that scientific philosophy studies everything; it would be more correct to say that it studies that which is inherent in everything. The general, the universal is in dialectical unity with the particular and the individual. The universal as the concrete in theoretical cognition is the unity of various definitions. Thus scientific philosophy studies the basic, special forms of the universal.

p The development of the specialised sciences that study specific forms of the motion of matter and the special laws inherent in each of them reveals to man a world of diverse laws that are relatively independent of one another. But to stop at stating this fact, that is, to admit that certain special laws "reign supreme" in each qualitatively limited sphere of phenomena would be to adopt the positions of philosophical pluralism, which is constantly refuted by the specialised sciences, whose total achievements indicate the interconnection and mutual transformation, the dialectical unity of all forms of the existence of matter. It is for this reason that the significance of the question of the most general laws of all that exists is progressively increasing thanks to the discovery of the special laws of each qualitatively distinct sphere of the phenomena of nature or society.

p The first basic definition of the subject-matter 337 of Marxist philosophy lies in recognition of the existence of most general laws of the development of nature, society and cognition. This definition certainly needs to be elucidated and made more concrete, and this is bound to entail a certain degree of limitation. Natural science also studies certain universal laws of existence, the law of gravity, for example, the laws of the transformation and conservation of energy, and so on. But whereas every specialised science investigates the universal in a special form of its existence, it also, in so doing, discovers certain special, general laws. A law is a form of universality, and this universality, at any rate in terms of quantity, cannot always be limited. The mechanistic materialists of the 18th century were wrong not in recognising the laws of mechanics as universal, but in reducing the qualitative diversity of the laws of matter to mechanical laws, whereas the universality of laws and their qualitative limitation are in no way mutually exclusive.

p How, then, are we to understand the most general dialectical laws of motion, change and development studied by Marxism? If these are qualitatively limited laws, they must relate only to a certain class of phenomena and, consequently, are no different from the laws discovered by physics, chemistry and other specialised sciences. Does this not rule out any recognition of absolutely universal laws determining the course of processes in all spheres of reality, any recognition of the real, empirically established action of physical, chemical, biological and other laws? Here we are confronted with extremely important and complex philosophical questions and we are far from claiming to have arrived at their complete solution. The most general dialectical laws constitute the 338 essence, the general nature of the specific laws studied by the specialised sciences. Every law of nature or society is a definite form of dialectical relationship of phenomena. The laws of dialectics are the most general form of this relationship. Investigation of the nature of laws, cognition of the objective unity of all laws reveals to us the laws of dialectics, which do not constitute a special class of laws opposed to the laws of physics, chemistry and the other specialised sciences, because all laws are dialectical. Otherwise the philosophical concept of certain universal laws governing everything would be vague and unrelated to the real qualitative diversity of phenomena, like Heraclitus’s “logos”, which, so to speak, stands above all things and dominates them.

p In Capital Marx investigates the specific economic laws of capitalist production and, in so doing, investigates a historically determined form of the dialectical process modifying the universal dialectical laws, which nowhere exist in any pure form. Engels’s Dialectics of Nature expounds the laws of dialectics, the universal dialectical processes which natural scientists consciously or unconsciously reveal when discovering the specific laws of individual forms of the motion of matter. This is why we believe that it would be a concession to the idealist conception of dialectics to single out a special sphere of activity as the domain of universal dialectical laws.

p Thus, the subject-matter of the philosophy of Marxism is the universal objective dialectical process. Engels distinguished the objective dialectic and its reflection in historically developing cognition from the subjective dialectic. Dialectics, as the authors of the six-volume History of Philosophy published in the Soviet Union 339 emphasise, is "the process of self-motion, of selfdevelopment, of the unity and the struggle of internal contradictions, which is inherent in matter and whose necessary creation is the nonmaterial, that is to say, the consciousness, the reflection of the material world".  [339•1 

p The delimitation of the objective dialectic, whose qualitatively diverse forms are revealed in nature and society, from the subjective dialectic of the process of cognition is carried out within the framework of the fully integrated subjectmatter of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. This unity of qualitatively different dialectical processes constitutes the objective basis of the MarxistLeninist principle of the unity of dialectics, logic and the theory of knowledge. From this standpoint dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics are synonymous, because Marxism has welded materialism and dialectics into a single whole in accordance with the objective unity of the material and the dialectical. Marxist dialectics is materialist dialectics, Marxist materialism is dialectical materialism. The essence of dialectical laws, like all concrete identity, implies essential distinctions: the dialectics of nature differs from the dialectics of social life; the dialectics of the process of cognition is different again, not only in form but in content. In other words, dialectical laws are many and various, and knowledge of the general, basic features of dialectics is, of course, insufficient to provide an understanding of the specific nature of the dialectical process in various spheres of objective reality. This is, in our view, what determines the inner articulation and structure of the subject of Marxist philosophy.

p Historical materialism investigates special universal dialectical laws of development inherent only in society. It must be stressed that historical materialism—philosophical science applied to society—occupies a special place in Marxist philosophy. Marxist philosophy took shape historically as the substantiation, the proof, of the communist world view, which combines the materialist understanding of nature with the materialist understanding of social life and attaches primary importance to the fact that man transforms nature and, in so doing, his own, human nature. Spinoza’s natura naturata, which in his philosophical system was the totality of things (modi) generated by the original, substantial natura naturans, has in Marxist philosophy become the "second nature" created by man, a qualitatively new reality in which the natural and the social are united.

p Study of the formation of Marxist philosophy convincingly shows that the creation of the materialist conception of history, the philosophical elaboration of the doctrine of man and the role of labour in his anthropological development, of objective human activity and the unity of spiritual and material production, constitute vital elements in the historical process of the formation of dialectical and historical materialism. This truth is sometimes interpreted in the sense that dialectical materialism was created after historical materialism. This seems to be an oversimplified view, although it indicates certain fundamental peculiarities of the formation of the philosophy of Marxism. Dialectical and historical materialism is a unified philosophical doctrine, and the investigation of the dialectics of social development to which Marx and Engels devoted most of their writings also implies investigation of the most 341 general forms of the universal dialectical process. On the other hand, study of the dialectics of social life entailed a necessary scientific restriction of the qualitatively determinate action of the laws of nature, which is also manifest in the life of society but does not determine its specific character. This restriction could not have been made by pre-Marxist materialism, because it had not overcome the naturalistic understanding of history, which on closer examination proves to be sociological empiricism with idealist overtones, despite all its implacable opposition to the theological interpretation of the historical process.

p In recent years Soviet philosophers have done a great deal of research in order to elucidate the place in Marxist philosophy occupied by the problem of man, of creative activity, of the personal and the social. This has undoubtedly helped to provide a more concrete and diversified understanding of the subject-matter of MarxistLeninist philosophy and to prevent its unwarranted one-sided “ontologisation”.

p Cognition is the necessary, spiritual form of the social process, which is conditioned by the objective laws of social development. But the specific nature of cognition as progress from ignorance to knowledge, and from one knowledge to another, more profound knowledge, presupposes the existence of a special kind of dialectical laws of cognitive reflection, logical thinking, etc. It need not be proved that the significance of this aspect of the subject-matter of Marxist philosophy is constantly increasing thanks to the intensive development and differentiation of scientific knowledge, the elaboration of new methods of research, of cybernetics, and the development of new, extremely important logical disciplines, 342 which, strictly speaking, are no longer a part of philosophy.

p The question of the subject-matter of MarxistLeninist philosophy is of fundamental importance. The Marxist scholars who try to reduce the diverse content of the subject-matter of Marxist-Leninist philosophy to investigation of only the process of cognition are profoundly mistaken. But equally mistaken are those who restrict the subject-matter of philosophy to the universal laws of development, thus ignoring the general sociological laws of the cognitive process, their specific character.

p Marxist-Leninist philosophy today is a system of philosophical disciplines, each of which in the framework of the subject-matter common to the whole Marxist philosophy has its own target of research. Practical research has shown the wisdom of delimiting dialectical materialism, on the one hand, and historical materialism, on the other, as the two basic parts of the whole philosophy of Marxism. Specialised research in the field of the theory of knowledge, the philosophical problems of natural science, and also dialectical logic, shows that this range of questions also breaks down into specialised philosophical disciplines. Ethics and aesthetics may in the not far distant future become independent disciplines, although at present they are part of Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

Thus, the subject-matter of philosophy in general and the subject-matter of scientific, Marxist-Leninist philosophy in particular, cannot be simply stated or reduced to a single definition because the development of philosophy naturally transforms the subject-matter of philosophical inquiry into a system of targets, a system of historically developing philosophical disciplines that are constantly being enriched with new content.