Socio-Economic Basis of Philosophy

The article examines how the socio-economic basis determines the direction of development of philosophical knowledge from the standpoint of historical materialism. It was found that philosophy reflects the trends of socio-economic development and responds to the contradictions inherent in a particular stage. However, this determinism should not be absolutized, since philosophy in the 20th century is not limited to only analyzing the consequences of economic development. An analysis of the seminal works that address the intricacies of societal operation in a market-driven economy reveals a preoccupation of the philosophical discourse of the period with the notion of human existence being completely predetermined by the economic order. The authors are unanimous in the question of the main problem of consumer society, seeing it in the dehumanization of value guidelines and the spread of the cult of consumption. K. Marx’s position on the division of society into two classes depending on the attitude to the means of production and the consideration of this attitude as a social marker was confirmed by T. Veblen, when he discovered an associative connection between moral degradation and hard physical labor. It was found that the views of O. Spengler, although they contradict all socialist values and are an apology for predatory capitalism, in essence confirm the historicity of philosophy as a superstructure, in this case, a superstructure over the socio-economic system of pre-war Germany. Since the second half of the 20th century, in the philosophy of this direction, wariness of economic dictates is replaced by a statement of the impossibility of another option for the development of society. From the perspective of historical materialism, such an assessment of the modern socio-economic situation by philosophy testifies to the growth of contradictions in it due to the endowment of material goods with symbolic value and its extension to life-meaning guidelines.