The book by the well-known English Marxist theoretician M. Kornfort “Dialectical Materialism” was published in England in three separate issues: Volume I—“Materialism and the Dialectical Method” in 1952, Volume II—“Historical Materialism” in 1953, and Volume III—“Theory of Knowledge” in 1954.
At the request of the Foreign Literature Publishing House, M. Kornfort reviewed, corrected, and expanded his work for the Russian edition, which is now published as a single combined volume.
From the Author’s Preface:
This book is based on a series of public lectures organized by the Communist Party of Great Britain in London, as well as on a series of lectures delivered at two party schools devoted to the study of philosophy. This book is not written as a textbook. It is intended for workers who are not engaged specifically in philosophy or science, and its purpose is simply to acquaint them with some of the main ideas of Marxist philosophy and to show, to a certain extent, its purpose and practical application.
I sought to stick to a popular form of explaining these ideas, without complicating my exposition with digressions into more specialized areas of philosophy, with an analysis of any more difficult philosophical theories of the past and present, or with numerous arguments on individual questions that might be needed to defend these positions against philosophical opponents. I reduced the use of special terms to a minimum.