Introduction: At the end of my previous article, on the New York Times and War Crimes* I indicated the following.
COMING SOON: A series on The Declaration of Independence (and related questions): Inventions and Distortions of Reality and History—in the Service of Real and Repeated Atrocity.
After That: Why Black People Flooded into the Union Army in the Civil War...And What That Has to do with Now.
Those articles are in fact coming soon, but before that, it seems important to answer two ignorant and idiotic ideas that, unfortunately, are held onto by too many people who consider themselves “thinking people” and/or “woke”...“progressive”...“left.” These two ignorant and idiotic ideas are: 1) There is no such thing as objective truth...and it is not even possible to know what is true; and 2) Any kind of state power, even revolutionary socialist state power, is a terrible, oppressive thing.
In this Part 1 of my response, I answer the first of these ignorant and idiotic ideas; and then, in a separate Part 2, I will answer the second of these very wrong and harmful ideas.
Part 1: Yes—There Is Objective Truth—and It Is Possible To Know What Is True.
Currently, one of the main, and most harmful, expressions of opposition to the correct, scientific understanding of what truth is, and how to arrive at truth, is the completely erroneous notion, promoted by “woke identity” relativism, that there is no objective truth, but instead there are different particular, subjective “truths” corresponding to the “lived experience” of different “marginalized” groups, and that only someone within a particular “marginalized group” can understand the “truth” about that group and its “lived experience.” In my social media message number 23 last year (2025), I directly answered this:
There is no such thing as different “truths” for different people. People’s experiences may be different, but the truth about all that is the same for everybody. Once more: Truth is...truth.
And it has to be plainly said that “direct experience” is not, in itself, the basis for grasping the truth. Experience is only the “threshold” of correct understanding. Especially when dealing with anything beyond the most simple phenomena, to get a true understanding of something it is necessary to penetrate beyond the threshold of experience and make a scientific analysis and synthesis: identify the larger reality that this experience is part of, and the patterns, and underlying and driving forces involved. This scientific method can be, and needs to be, applied by people generally—not only in terms of what people experience directly, but with regard to human experience more broadly.
A basic example—the relation between a patient and a doctor—can serve to further illustrate this important question of method and approach to truth. A patient has the “lived experience” of the symptoms they are suffering, but that is not the same thing as understanding the causes of those symptoms and a possible cure. That requires science—and specifically in this case the science of medicine—and, for that, you need to go to a doctor who has acquired and applies that science.
In Breakthroughs and other works by myself and others (at revcom.us and in the online theoretical journal Demarcations), there is extensive discussion of epistemology (the approach to knowledge and truth) and specifically why and how it is possible to determine what is true. (Some of this analysis, and reference to relevant sources, is contained in a footnote [**] at the end of this article).
The following, from my article “Philosophy and Revolution,” Part 1 (available at revcom.us), gets to the heart of this:
[W]hether you have actually arrived at the truth is determined by whether or not your understanding is in correspondence with—is an accurate reflection of—objective reality. (To take a simple example: If someone says it is raining, but there is no rain, their statement is not true—because it is not a correct reflection of objective reality. Or, if someone says that the disease of rabies gets a hold of people because they are possessed by the devil, or that COVID does not actually exist but has been invented by drug companies so they can make money—those statements are also not a correct reflection of reality. But, if someone says rabies is caused by a virus, and it can be effectively combated with a vaccine—and COVID is a different virus whose effects can be minimized with a different vaccine—those statements are a correct reflection of objective reality, and therefore are true.)
Think about it: If it actually were not possible to know what is true, there would be no vaccine to combat the effects of COVID, no vaccine to deal with the terrible scourge of rabies—and no prevention or cure for diseases, including smallpox and the plague, that have killed huge numbers of human beings in the past. In fact, all significant advances, not just in medicine but in all fields of science—and in technology, and generally the transformation of physical reality, which has brought into being so many things that we are now familiar with, and generally take for granted—all this could not have been brought about, if it really were impossible to know what is true.
Even the computers on which some people write this nonsense, about how it is not possible to know what is true, could not have been brought into being if it were actually not possible to know what is true!
It is true that some terrible things have been brought into being on the basis of some human beings coming to understand the truth about significant things—as with the development of nuclear weapons. But, as terrible as something like that is, it is nevertheless an expression of the basic scientific fact that it is possible to come to know truth about reality (including the truth about the horror of nuclear weapons).
It is also true that, as pointed to in Breakthroughs, it is not possible to know all of the truth about everything—and certain things that were thought to be true have been shown not to be true, in part or as a whole, as a result of human beings continuing to acquire knowledge, especially through the application of the scientific method. This correction of previously held, but actually incorrect, ideas is part of the ongoing accumulation of knowledge (coming to know the actual truth about actual, objective reality) by human beings.
Once again, from “Philosophy and Revolution,” Part 1:
Of course, the determination that something is true—is actually a correct reflection of objective reality—is not just a matter of declaring that this is so. The test of truth is reality itself. In order to firmly establish the truth of something (an idea, theory, and so on) it is necessary to carry out an evidence-based process, probing reality, identifying the patterns and the underlying and driving forces and causes in the reality being investigated, making projections about what certain actions and transformations of this reality would lead to, and proceeding to consciously interact with reality to test—verify, or disprove—the projections that have been made.
Ultimately, the test of any theory, etc., is whether or not what it projects about reality is borne out (or not). At the same time, a scientific theory, correctly wielded, can—on the basis of accumulated historical experience and knowledge—accurately project what would likely result from a developing trajectory of things. This, for example, is the basis on which climate scientists can make essentially correct projections about what will develop from historical and current trends. And this is why it can be scientifically asserted that the overthrow of capitalism, and its replacement by communism, is in the fundamental interests of the masses of humanity, and ultimately humanity as a whole.
Once more, the fact is that human beings have arrived (and will continue to arrive) at the truth about many things. And one of the most essential and crucial truths, which not just a few people, but masses of people, need to come to an understanding of, is the truth about the fundamental nature (the basic relations, dynamics and “laws of motion”) of the system we are now forced to live under—the system of capitalism-imperialism—and the profound truth that this system cannot be reformed into something positive for humanity, and on the contrary it must be, and can be, swept away through an actual revolution and replaced by a fundamentally different, really emancipating system: socialism, aiming for the achievement of communism throughout the world, with the abolition of all relations of oppression and exploitation, everywhere***
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FOOTNOTES:
* The full title of this article, about the New York Times and War Crimes, is The New York Times Insists on Support for War Crimes—When They Are “Our” War Crimes. This article is available at revcom.us. [back]
** The following, from my work Breakthroughs: The Historic Breakthrough by Marx, and the Further Breakthrough with the New Communism, A Basic Summary includes this discussion of what is truth and the possibility of (and means for) arriving at truth:
[O]n the campuses and elsewhere, particularly among the intelligentsia (using that term somewhat advisedly) there’s the notion, a pretty widely-held notion, that the very concept of the truth, as opposed to different narratives and different “truths,” is a totalizing and fundamentally totalitarian concept—the idea that anybody can have the truth is totalizing and verging on, if not actually already in, the province of totalitarianism. Well, something is being smuggled in there, which is an unscientific idea of what the truth is. What’s really being said here, or objectively what’s reflected here, is the notion that the truth is just another narrative and that when you say you have the truth, you’re trying to impose your narrative on somebody else’s, and nobody should be trying to impose their narrative as the narrative that encompasses everything. What is at issue and at stake here is precisely: What is the truth? The truth is an actual correct reflection of reality, including in its motion and development. And, of course, it is true that nobody can ever have all of the truth. That’s part of understanding reality correctly, part of the scientific method. But...it is true that you can come to definite and definitive determinations about the reality of many particular things, even while you always have to be open to learning more, and to the possibility that some of what you thought to be true may not turn out to be true, or new developments occur which mean that the world has changed in such a way that your understanding has to be modified. That’s all part of the scientific method as well. When we talk about the truth, we’re not talking about THE TRUTH as an absolute and final truth, but we are also not talking about a narrative. We’re talking about a scientific approach to understanding reality and then, on that basis, transforming it. And the scientific approach to that process of analyzing and synthesizing reality can come to important definitive conclusions, even as this is an ongoing process which is never complete because you can never grasp all of reality—including because it’s constantly changing and because there will always be aspects of reality that human beings will not even have penetrated at any given time, let alone come to understand. So this idea of truth as a totalizing and totalitarian concept is smuggling in a whole bunch of concepts and approaches that are themselves unscientific, untrue.
Questions relating to the nature of truth, and coming to an understanding of truth, are also gone into in the essay in Demarcations, Issue Number 4: Ajith: A Portrait of the Residue of the Past, by Ishak Baran and KJA, especially in section IV, “Does Truth Have A Class Character?” and section VI, “Some Points On Philosophy And Science,”; and in my work Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity, Part 1, “Beyond The Narrow Horizon Of Bourgeois Right,” particularly the section “Marxism as a Science—Refuting Karl Popper,” and more specifically the sub-section “Science and scientific truths” (this is available in BA’s Collected Works at revcom.us.). [back]
*** A discussion of the basic dynamics and “laws of motion” of the capitalist system, especially as this has developed into capitalism-imperialism, and the un-reformability of this system, is contained in my article Preliminary Transformation into Capital...And Putting an End to Capitalism. This is gone into further in my recent work HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness? and more extensively in the article by Raymond Lotta in Demarcations Issue Number 3: “On the ‘Driving Force of Anarchy’ and the Dynamics of Change, A Sharp Debate and Urgent Polemic: The Struggle for a Radically Different World and the Struggle for a Scientific Approach to Reality.”
The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have authored, provides a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for a fundamentally different, really emancipating system: socialism, aiming for the achievement of communism throughout the world . This is discussed further in Part 2. [back]