To proceed. Our "celebrated" Anarchists heard somewhere that Marx's materialism was a "belly theory," and so they rebuke us, Marxists, saying :
"In the opinion of Feuerbach, man is what he eats. This formula had a magic effect on Marx and Engels," and, as a consequence, Marx drew the conclusion that "the main and primary thing is economic conditions, relations of production. . . ." And then the Anarchists proceed to instruct us in a philosophical tone: "It would be a mistake to say that the sole means of achieving this object of social life) is eating and economic production. . . . If ideology were determined mainly, monistically, by eating and economic conditions—then some gluttons would be geniuses" (see Nobati, No. 6. Sh. G.).
You see how easy it is to refute the materialism of Marx and Engels! It is sufficient to hear some gossip in the street from some schoolgirl about Marx and
Engels, it is sufficient to repeat that street gossip with philosophical aplomb in the columns of a paper like Nobati, to leap into fame as a "critic" of Marxism!
But tell me, gentlemen: Where, when, on which planet, and which Marx did you hear say that "eating determines ideology"? Why did you not cite a single sentence, a single word from the works of Marx to back your assertion? True, Marx said that the economic conditions of men determine their consciousness, their ideology, but who told you that eating and economic conditions are the same thing? Don't you really know that physiological phenomena, such as eating, for example, differ fundamentally from sociological phenomena, such as the economic conditions of men, for example? One can forgive a schoolgirl, say, for confusing these two different phenomena; but how is it that you, the "vanquishers of Social-Democracy," "regenerators of science," so carelessly repeat the mistake of a schoolgirl?
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1906/12/x01.htm
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