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Progress Publishers [Published Date: 1975] Hardcover, 269 pp. Second Revised Edition, 1975. Very good in very good dust jacket. Grey cloth covered boards with gold lettering on front and spine. Light bumping, scuffing and aging to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing along edges. light overall scuffing to covers as well. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, page 7] The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno Bauer and Co. is the first joint work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. At the end of August 1844 Marx and Engels met in Paris and their meeting was the beginning of their joint creative work in all fields of theoretical and practical revolutionary activity. By this time Marx and Engels had completed the transition from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democratism to communism. The polemic The Holy Family was written in Paris in autumn 1844. It reflects the progress in the formation of Marx and Engels's revolutionary materialistic world outlook. In The Holy Family Marx and Engels give a devastating criticism of the subjectivist views of the Young Hegelians from the position of militant materialists. They, also criticize Hegel's own idealistic philosophy: giving credit for the rational element in his dialectics, they criticize the mystic side of it. The Holy Family formulates a number of fundamental theses of dialectical and historical materialism. In it Marx already approaches the basic idea of historical materialism - the decisive role of the mode of production in the development of society. Refuting the idealistic views of history which had dominated up to that time, Marx and Engels prove that of themselves progressive ideas can lead society only beyond the ideas of the old system and that "in order to carry out ideas men are needed who dispose of a certain practical force." . . . The Holy Family contains the almost mature view of the historic role of the proletariat as the class which, by virtue of its position in capitalism, "can and must free itself" and at the same time abolish all the inhuman conditions of life of bourgeois society, for "not in vain does" the proletariat "go through the stern but steeling school of labour. The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do." . . . The Holy Family was written largely under the influence of the materialistic views of Ludwig Feuerbach, who was, responsible to a great extent for Marx's and Engels's transition from idealism to materialism; the work also contains elements of the criticism of Feuerbach's metaphysical and contemplative materialism given by Marx in spring 1845 in his Theses on Feuerbach. . . The Holy Family dates from a period when the process of the formation of Marxism was not yet completed. This is reflected in the terminology used by Marx and Engels. Marxist scientific terminology was gradually elaborated and defined by Marx and Engels as the formation and development of their teaching progressed. Seller Inventory # 20240824027
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