The development of the Monist View of History

The great task that confronted socialist leaders in the aftermath of Marx’s death, in 1883, was the systematization and consolidation of his vast theoretical legacy into a unified and comprehensive scientific world outlook, upon which the revolutionary education of the emerging industrial proletariat could be based. The vast pedagogical responsibilities of the socialist movement, as it sought to create and mentor a class-conscious proletariat, determined the form and character of the theoretical work of the period… In his _Development of the Monist View of History,_ and innumerable essays, Plekhanov elaborated the world scientific outlook of “dialectical materialism,” a term he authored … It was on the basis of the theoretical and programmatic foundations, created by this extraordinary collective intellectual effort \[of Engels, Mehring, Kautsky and Plekhanov\], that the authority of Marxism in the European mass workers movement was established. David North _Plekhanov and the Tragedy of the Second International_

“Let me add in parenthesis for the benefit of young Party members that you _cannot_ hope to become a _real_ intelligent Communist without making a study—and I mean _study_ —of all of Plekhanov’s philosophical writings, because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world.”