All the big capitalist powers (the U. S, Russia, China, France, Japan, etc.) and some smaller powers have imperialist foreign policies. That is, they each try to dominate and exploit the workers and the resources of weaker countries. Their competition with other rival powers to do this leads to bigger and bigger wars.
Some people think that these policies could be changed by convincing those in power that they're wrong, or by electing different officials. This series explains why that's not so. It examines the material basis of imperialism and concludes that the only way to end imperialism and its wars is by mobilizing the masses for communism. First, we investigate the relationship between ideas and material reality.

Ideas Have a Material Basis
Thinking doesn't create reality. Thinking affects reality only indirectly, in the goals and plans that are parts of any kind of practical action. When people think about what to do, they have to get their ideas from the material world. Reality kicks back when ideas don't correspond to the way things actually are, and you have to change your thinking or fail.
This is common sense, but it is also a key part of communist philosophy. It's called materialism, the view that reality affects our thinking, but thinking does not—by itself—change reality. One consequence of materialism is that if ideas last for a while or are accepted by many people, there must be something in the material world that causes this, called the material basis of the ideas. Sometimes this basis is obvious. The belief that Las Vegas is hot in July is based on the actual hot weather that anyone who lives there can feel. False beliefs also have material bases. People used to believe that the earth is largely flat because that is the way it looks. The basis of some false ideas can be propaganda in the media and the schools—the bosses' weapons of mass deception— but propaganda is not the most important way that reality affects thinking.
When workers understand they are getting a raw deal at work, the material basis of this thinking is the wage system, which makes the bosses rich from workers' labor. Many workers understand this point, despite the bosses' propaganda. Of course, people believe what they believe because they find convincing reasons for it. But what people find convincing depends on the natural and social reality around them.
If people think that it is "human nature" to be selfish and greedy, the basis of this belief is that capitalist competition requires capitalists to be selfish and greedy. Microsoft must fight off Google and General Motors must outdo Toyota or they won't survive. Capitalists who aren't willing to do whatever it takes to beat their competitors aren't likely to succeed very long.
Capitalism also sets workers in competition with each other for jobs and promotions. Greed can seem to be part of human nature because it is part of the reality of capitalist social relations. This reality forms the material basis of that idea. Before capitalism, different social relations were the basis of different views of human nature. Lakota Chief Sitting Bull, who fought against US capitalism along with other indigenous people in the 1870s, saw the greedy outlook of capitalist culture as a sickness: "the love of possessions is a disease with them."
Not only ideas, but also the plans and policies that people think up must be based on reality, especially if they last a long time and affect many people. Our question, then, is "What is the material basis for imperialist policies and the actions those policies lead to?"
The next article in this series will show that imperialism has its material basis in the nature of capitalism.