Franz Mehring's Defense And Development Of Historical Materialism And Its Contemporary Enlightenment

Franz Mehring was a famous Marxist theorist and German labor movement activist who had made an important contribution to the development of Marxism in the second international period. Mehring had rich ideas, it was beneficial for him to defend and develop historical materialism. In order to comb the second international period of Marxist theorist's thought comprehensively, we must stand on the top development of contemporary Marxist to review relative discourse of Mehring. This article will treat it as an entry point to try to widely discourse Mehring's defense and development of thought of Marxist historical materialism theory and give objective evaluation.European capitalist society was in transition from free capitalism to monopoly during the second international period. However, society development wasn't so consistent to Mehring's thought that Marxism suffered challenge, historical materialism even suffered crisis-stricken from different thinking trend during the second international period. Mehring believed scientific Marxism and defended historical materialism concept resolutely. Not only did Mehring criticize the reactionary philosophy trend of bourgeois theorists but also refute the Marx philosophy within the camp of revisionism, further keeping pace with the times developing historical materialism. Although Mehring is still inadequate in defending historical materialism process, even imperfect, his contribution on Marxism defense is still a great achievement. Studying the defense and development of historical materialism could comb Marxist concept, besides, we would learned theoretical status and rheological process of Marxism from the entire Second International period which providing reference to develop Marxism currently.