Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was cunducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. He enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel's system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics , i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include recognition of human society . His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking.
Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value . He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production. Marx revealed a relation between people . The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole.