Publication Details

Abstract

In his paper Marxism and Structuralism the author deals with the problems of structuralism and criticizes it from the positions of Marxism-Leninism. Structuralism as a philosophical system „spiritual“ belongs substantially to idealistic streams and in its socialpolitical consequences it is literally anticommunist. It is characterized by anti-historicism, anti-materialism and anti-dialectics. The structuralists attempted at „promoting the structure to a philosophical system“. According to the author’s opinion, the philosophical character of structuralism dwells actually in mystifying the objective world, in metaphysical absolutization of the spiritual aspect of cognition and in synchronization, by denying the „historicity“ of the theoretical and methodological aspects of scientific thinking. The author deals briefly with the history of structuralism, he points out its sources in ethnology and linguistics. He pays closer attention to the analysis of structure and system, and to structural and systemic analysis. In conclusion of his paper the author analyzes the theoretical-methodological problems of structuralism and states that structuralism as a „rounded-off philosophical conception“ does not reach with its theoretical and methodological generalization as a „universal method of research“ — the level and value of dialectical and historical materialism. Its „contribution“ (some aspects of structural and systemic analysis) is conditioned by the employment of materialist dialectics. In Marxism-Leninism, in materialist dialectics the contradicton between „the thing“ and „the motion”, between the logical (synchronism) and the historical (diachronism) and in the whole system of relations between being and consciousness, between object and subject and between various components of objective reality the primary (material, economic, social) factors of historical, social and ideological development are unambiguously emphasized.