Under the Banner of Marxism

In a letter published in the first issue, Trotsky wrote: Arm the will and not only the thought, we say, because, in the era of great world upheavals, now more than ever before our will cannot break, but must harden only if it rests upon the scientific understanding of the conditions and causes of historical developmentOn the other hand, it is precisely in such a critical era as ours, especially if it drags on – i.e., if the pace of revolutionary events in the West proves slower than hoped for – that attempts of various idealist and semi-idealist philosophical schools and sects will likely possess the consciousness of young workers.

Captured unaware by the events – without prior extensive experience of practical class struggle – the thought of young workers could be defenseless against various doctrines of idealism, which are essentially translations of religious dogma into the language of pseudo-philosophy.

All of these schools, despite the diversity of their idealist, Kantian, empirio-critical, and other designations, in the end agree that consciousness, thought, knowledge prefaces matter, and not vice versa.Alexander Bogdanov, referred to by the term "empirio-critical" saw this as an attack upon himself and his science of organisation, Tektology.

[3] Bonifaty Kedrov (first editor-in-chief of Problems of Philosophy) wrote: Among Soviet philosophers, during 1922-1943 there was a magazine called Under the Banner of Marxism.

For 20 years, this magazine published a lot of good militant articles on their pages; but during the war it somehow faded and in the middle of 1943 its existence stopped altogether.