An outline of philosophy
Source: Victorian Labor College lecture, circa 1970
First published: Labor College Review, 1990-94
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
Hegel’s philosophy, revolutionary in character, delivered the death-blow to metaphysics, that is to the reasoning of things and their mental images, ideas in isolation, to be considered apart from each other; rigid, fixed objects of investigation given once for all. Not that this method of reasoning was not necessary for its time, but for Hegel everything was in continual motion and change from its lowest to its highest form.
Consequently truth — the business of philosophy — in Hegel’s hands was no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, but lay in the process of apprehending the long historical development of the universe as a whole: not only knowledge of philosophy but every kind of knowledge, inclusive of practical affairs.
Thus, the highest and most complex existences can be traced back to the lowest and simplest. The highest form of religion, for example, is nothing more than the refined reproductions of the crude superstitions of the savages. As also with the history of humans as they first emerged from the animal world to make their entry into history: still half-animal, brutal, helpless before the forces of nature and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive — a situation whereby a certain equality in the conditions of existence prevailed.
With the process of time the natural division of labour within the family developed the process of production so that the power of humanity could now produce more than was necessary for its mere maintenance. As surplus production grew, the first division of labour — slavery — was made possible. Brutal and savage as it may seem, due no doubt to the fact that humans sprang from the beasts, nonetheless it was progressive in that without slavery there would have been no Greek state, no Greek art and science: without slavery no Roman Empire and without these as a basis, no modern Europe.
“We should never forget,” writes Frederick Engels in Anti-Duhring,“that our whole economic, political and intellectual development has as its presupposition a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism.” So we see that for Hegel all historical systems are transitory stages in an endless course of development of human society from the lowest to the highest, each stage necessary and therefore justified for the time as well as conditions to which it owes its origin.
However, in the face of higher conditions developing gradually within the womb of the old society it loses its validity and justification, giving way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish.
This, dialectical philosophy, by virtue of viewing everything in motion and change, dissolves all conceptions of final and absolute truths, as also of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For dialectics, nothing is final, absolute or sacred. Everything has its transitory character in an uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher.
And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the reflection of this process in the thinking brain. Of course, the special sciences were correct in keeping to their own special principles; but, in the last resort when we attempt — as is the business of philosophy to attempt — to see all these spheres of existence in their relation to one another, we must regard nature as revealing its secret meaning only to and in humans.
We must find the “key to the secret of man’s nature in the highest energies of his moral and intellectual life” In this statement Hegel reveals his philosophy as idealist. That is, on the basic question of all philosophy, the relation of thinking to being, Hegel placed thought as primary and being secondary.
Consequently, for Hegel the real world is its thought content, which makes the world a gradual realisation of the absolute idea existing somewhere from eternity independent of the world and before the world’s existence. Thus the Hegelian system through its idealist standpoint contains the dogmatic content of absolute truth, which places it in contradiction to its dialectical process, dissolving all conceptions of final absolute truths.
“However much Hegel, especially in his Logic emphasised that this eternal truth is nothing but the logical, that is, the historical process itself.”, writes Engels, “he nevertheless finds himself compelled to supply the process with an end, just because he has to bring his system to a termination at some point or other. In his Logic he can make this end a beginning again, since here, the point of conclusion, the absolute ideal — which is only absolute in so far as he has absolutely nothing to say about it — ‘alienates’, that is, transforms itself into nature and comes to it again later in the mind, that is in thought and history.” (Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy)
And so we find the revolutionary side of Hegel’s philosophy smothered by his absolute idea. This did not detract, however, from developing out of the system a wealth of thought that astounds to this present day.
Hegel’s philosophy influenced the minds of leading thinkers of the nineteenth century, including those of Marx and Engels. During his lifetime he enjoyed immense fame and for almost thirty years after his death his philosophy received universal acknowledgement. Bertrand Russell noted: at “the end of the nineteenth century leading philosophers in America and Britain were Hegelian”. Then came a quick reaction, which is noted by Karl Marx in the Afterword to the Second German edition of Capital:
The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticised thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre, who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, ie as a dead dog. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectics suffers in Hegel’s hand, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”
The explanation for this boycott attitude to Hegel can be sought in the revolutionary struggles of the working in France and central Europe commencing in 1848 and culminating in the first working class quest for power in the Paris Commune (1871). Since then the development of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class — its successes as well as defeats — is developing within the womb of capitalism the challenging force of socialism, forcing society to lose its validity and justification and so make way for this higher stage. This will undoubtedly revive interest in Hegel’s philosophy among workers’ leaders, as also among the educated. But as regards the latter, their interests will be, as Hegel explains, in the process of change turned to its opposite, from that of keen interest to that of blasting it for their own protection.
Hegel’s philosophy is by no means simple, yet on the face of it there is much that is obvious and should be readily grasped. His great importance to the social sciences is in what has already been stated, his consideration of their phenomena as being in constant motion and change. That is, in their appearance and disappearance, their coming into being and passing away: their birth as well as death.
All this appears perfectly obvious and hardly deserving of any importance. After all, how is it possible to observe such phenomena in any other light? Yet the importance of this standpoint even at the height of Hegel’s popularity was far from realisation by those interested in sociology; economists and socialists alike.
Socialists considered the bourgeois system very harmful to humankind, they described it as an accidental product of human error, nevertheless one that could be corrected and made to function through appeals to human nature against the excesses of exploitation; or made to serve humanity per medium of the social experiments of utopian socialists. Thus they were in no way removed from the metaphysical method of reasoning despite the popular interest Hegel had created in the dialectic. As for the economists, they had nothing but praise for the bourgeois system. One, J.B. Say, a firm admirer of Adam Smith, considered it unnecessary to study economics before Smith because of the erroneous nature of previous theories.
It will be seen then that not a single thought among the educated — the scientific socialists excepted — grasped the importance of Hegel’s analysis of social phenomena. Or if they did, their class position dictated their silence. The utopians, who would be expected to know better, were as much in the dark regarding its importance as the labour leaders of today. But the ignorance of economist Say’s remark on the needlessness to study the errors of the past showed that here too, Hegel’s remark that the most recent philosophy is the result of preceding philosophies and therefore must contain the principles of them all, went unheeded.
True, Hegel’s reasoning was to show progressive development toward the “absolute idea”, but the most consistent materialist could hardly disagree that each philosophical system is no more than the intellectual expression of its time. And if it was a choice in political economy between Say and Hegel, materialists would find themselves nearer to Hegel than to Say.
The dialectic was known and expressed before Hegel, but he succeeded in making use of it as none of his predecessors had. In the hands of this idealist, dialectics became a most powerful weapon for the cognisance of everything that exists. “Therefore,” writes Hegel, “The dialectical constitutes … the motive soul of the scientific process and is the principle by which alone the content of science acquires immanent connection and necessity … Diversion from abstract rational definitions seems to our ordinary consciousness a profession of simple prudence according to the rule: live and let live, whereby everything seems equally good. But the essence of the matter is that what is definite is not only limited from without, but is bound to be destroyed and to pass over into its opposite by virtue of its own inherent nature.
We say all things (ie all that is finite as such) must be submitted to the judgment of dialectics and by this very fact we define it as a universal invincible force which must destroy everything no matter how lasting it may seem.”
As long as Hegel remains true to the dialectical method he is a highly progressive thinker. He called metaphysical the point of view that considered things static and in isolation whether from the standpoint of idealism or materialism. To metaphysics he opposed the dialectic, the method in which phenomena are studied in their development and consequently, in their interconnection. To Hegel, dialectics is the principle of all life.
We say, “Man is mortal” as though death is quite alien to the nature of living man. Thus, for us it follows that man has two qualities: first of life and second of being mortal. But on closer investigation it turns out that life bears within itself the germ of death, so that in general phenomena are contradictory in the sense that they develops out of themselves elements that, sooner or later, will put an end to their existence and transform them into their opposite. Everything flows, everything changes. There is no force capable of holding back this constant flux or arresting this eternal movement. There is no force capable of resisting the dialectics of phenomena.
At a particular moment, a moving body is at a particular spot, but at the same time it is outside it as well, because, if it were only in that spot it would, at least for that moment become motionless. Every motion is a dialectical process, a living contradiction. It is inconceivable that there be matter without motion, consequently we have to agree with Hegel when he states: dialectics is the soul of any scientific cognition.
This is so not only for nature but for all phases of existence. Take, for instance, political economy. It is improbable that Hegel busied himself with this phenomenon; yet, here too his genius enabled him to grasp its most essential characteristics, displaying an understanding clearer than the economists of his time, even that of Ricado.
He indicates this clearly, says Plekhanov, in his Philosophie der Geschichte and particularly in Philosophie des Rechts. “To use his words, this dialectics, meaning a lowering of the living standard of the majority of the population as a result of which they can no longer satisfy their requirements adequately, and which concentrates wealth in comparatively few hands, must necessarily lead to a situation in which civil society, despite the surplus of wealth, is not rich enough, ie, has no sufficient means to do away with the excess of poverty and the dregs of the population.”
Dialectical reasoning is not simple and requires constant practice. Let us again look at political economy and ask ourselves what is the logical conclusion in economics of “free competition”? Every capitalist strives to beat his competitors and to remain master of the market. There are frequent cases where this actually is the result. But this indicates that so-called free competition leads to monopoly, that is to the negation of free competition: in other words to the transformation to the Hegelian opposite.
Say I use money to hire a labourer; that is I buy somebody’s labour power. By this I turn out to be the owner of value considerably greater than the value I spent on the purchase. On the one hand, this is very just because it has already been recognised that the law gives me the right to use what I have secured by exchange to my best advantage. On the other hand it is most unjust, because I am exploiting the labour of another and thereby negating the principle that lies at the foundation my conception of justice. So every phenomenon by the action of those same forces that condition its existence, sooner or later, but inevitably, is transformed into its opposite.
Metaphysics asserts that neither in nature nor history are there any leaps. Speaking of the origin of some phenomenon or social institution, they represent it as tiny, almost unnoticeable in its early stage and then through a gradual process, growing up. To the question of its destruction, they view its gradual diminution continuing to the point when it becomes invisible on account of its microscopic dimensions.
Evolution conceived of in this way explains absolutely nothing. It presupposes the existence of the phenomena that it has to explain and reckons only with qualitative changes taking place within them. Hegel ridiculed this metaphysical approach by demonstrating irrefutably that both in nature and human society leaps constituted stages of evolution that were as essential as gradual qualitative changes.
“Changes in being,” he said, “consist not only in the fact that one quantity passes into another quantity, but also that quality passes into quantity and vice versa. Each transition of the latter kind represents an interruption in gradualness from the previous one. Thus water, when it is cooled grows hard, not gradually … but all at once. Having been cooled to freezing point it remains a liquid only if it preserves a tranquil condition and then the slightest shock is sufficient for it suddenly to become hard … In the world of moral phenomena … there take place the same changes of quantitative differences. Thus a little less, a little more, constitutes that limit beyond which frivolity ceases and there appears something quite different, … Thus also, states — other conditions being equal — acquire a different qualitative character merely in consequence of differences in their size. Particular laws and a particular constitution acquire quite a different significance with the extension of the territory of a state and of the number of its citizens.” (Wissenschaft der Logik).
Modern naturalists know how frequently changes of quantity lead to changes in quality. In chemistry also, numerous examples of this process are observed. The student would be well advised in this connection to read Engels’s Dialectics of Nature.
Again, if we turn once more to economics and Marx’s analysis of value in his work Capital, volume 1, we find the qualitative aspect “use value” having to be changed into its quantitative aspect “exchange value” before it becomes serviceable for the bourgeois economy.
We have seen how Hegel viewed philosophy, religion, art, technology, etc, as being natural products of their time: “Only with a particular religion can a particular form of state exist, as also in that particular state a particular philosophy and a particular art,” he states. This interrelationship of phenomena, exceedingly important in any dialectical analysis, is completely misunderstood by the educated.
Unable to grasp the common source from which this interrelationship arises, they treat it as something trivial and so deprive it of any foundation. To the question: what determines the historical development of religion, philosophy, right, art etc? They reply, the flow of philosophy from Kant to Hegel. And in the same manner explain away the successions of schools of art, etc. All of which, while containing a measure of truth explains nothing at all.
However, for want of any basic understanding, this “profoundness” in thought is satisfactory to the educated. Hegel, however, was far from such profoundness: “The defect of the method which consists in considering phenomena from the standpoint of interaction lies in the fact that the relation of interaction, instead of serving as an equivalent of the concept must itself be understood; this is achieved by both interacting aspects being acknowledged as moments in some third, higher one, and not taken as immediately given.”. (Enzyklopadie).
This means that the interpenetration of phenomena cannot be satisfied with the bare statement but finds its interaction process in “some third, higher force”. This higher was for Hegel found in the developing qualities of the people’s spirit. But for the materialist it is in economic development, the foundation of the materialist conception of history.
We now know that world history is not the embodiment of the universal spirit. This does not however, pitch us into disagreement with the theme that the political structure of every given society influences its morals, and their morals are the constitution etc. We must agree with Hegel that both morals and political constitution proceed from a common source. That source being the modern materialist explanation of history through its economic development. Just so long as history does not contradict the laws of development of Hegel’s universal spirit, Hegel remains on historical empirical ground. When, however, history departs from the track of that supposed development of the spirit, it becomes something unforeseen in Hegel’s logic and receives no attention. This does not prevent him from being contradictory in some aspects of his excursions into history.
Hegel’s views on world history are of course expressed in pure idealist terms. This has led to those incapable of any consistent thinking to scornfully shrug their shoulders and ignore this aspect of his investigation. However, it is because of this idealist nature — a circumstance that places narrow limits in movement to his genius — that one should pay special attention to Hegel’s thoughts on this subject, for it is precisely here that his philosophy is most instructive. I is here that Hegel’s references to history provides us with irrefutable proof of the inconsistency of the idealist approach.
His contradictory approach to history is seen in his characterisation of the animal worship of the people of India as a consequence of the low stage of these people in advance to the universal spirit. The Persians, who deified light and the sun, the moon and five other heavenly bodies, are placed by Hegel closer to the universal spirit than India. But of animal worship among the Egyptians Hegel states: “The cult consists mainly of animal worship … Zoolatry is repulsive to us; we can accustom ourselves to praying to heaven, but to worship the sun and other heavenly bodies are in no way higher than those who worship animals; on the contrary, for in the animal world the Egyptians saw the interior and incomprehensible (Philosophie de Geschichte)
Here we find the same animal worship given a completely different significance in Hegel’s reasoning according as he deals with the Indians or the Egyptians. Why? Can the Indians have worshipped animals in a different way to the Egyptians? No, it is simply that the “spirit” of the Egyptian people is a transition to that of the Greeks, and because of his high regard for the Greek people, Greece occupies a higher stage in Hegel’s classification. Thus, for the sake of an arbitrary logical construction Hegel is obliged to attribute a completely different significance to analogous phenomena of social life.
For Hegel, Greece was a country of beauty and “splendid morality”: excellent people, profoundly devoted to the country and capable of all kinds of self-sacrifice.
Only later, with sophist introduction of principles, did there appear subjective reflections, moral self-consciousness, the teaching that each must act according to their convictions. Then it was that the internal decay of “the splendid morality” of the Greeks began. “The self-liberation of the interior world” led to the decline of Greece.
But the question of where this “self-liberation of the internal world” came from remained open. Hegel answered from the standpoint of the idealist, saying that “the spirit” could only for a short time remain on the stand of “splendid moral reality”. This, however, is not an answer, merely an expression of Hegel’s idealism.
Hegel himself acts as though he feels this, for he hastily adds that “the principle of decay revealed itself first of all in external political development, both in the wars of the Greek states among themselves and in the struggles of the different factions within the cities”. In other words, the struggle between the political parties, in Hegel’s own words, was but the expression of the economic contradictions that had arisen in the Greek cities.
If it is remembered that the Peloponnesian War (the war between the slaveholding democracy of Athens and the slaveholding oligarchy of Sparta) too, was as seen by Thucydides as nothing but a class struggle that spread to the whole of Greece, we shall conclude without difficulty that the cause for the decline of Greece is to be found in her economic history. Thus, Hegel puts us on the way to the materialist conception of history, although to him the class struggle in Greece appears only as a manifestation of the “principles of decay” And so the greatest idealist appears to have set himself the task of clearing the road for materialism.
Writing of the Middle Ages, Hegel pays tribute to idealism, but considers their struggle of the burghers against the nobility and clergy as also a struggle between different sections of citizens, the “rich citizens and the common people”. When he speaks about the Reformation, he again reveals to us the secrets of the “universal spirit” and then adds the following remark completely unexpected from the lips of an idealist:
In Austria, in Bohemia and in Bavaria, the Reformation had already achieved great success, and although it is said: when truth has once permeated minds it can never be torn away from them, it was nevertheless suppressed here by force of arms, by cunning or persuasion. The Slav nations were agrarian peoples. But this condition carries with it the relationship of master and slave. In agriculture, the impulse of nature is overwhelming, human industry and subjective activity are less to be found in this work. That is why the Slavs were slower and had great difficulty in arriving at the basic feeling of the subjective ego, to consciousness of what is universal … and they were unable to take part in the rising freedom.
By these words Hegel is explicit that the explanation of the religious views and all the emancipation movements that arise among a particular society must be sought in that people’s economic activity.
Much has been written before and after Hegel about the significance of the geographical environment in human historical development. But before and after him, scientists made the mistake of emphasising the psychological or physiological influence of surrounding nature on many, and so forgetting its influence conditioning the social productive forces, and through them all the social relations between people in general, along with their ideological superstructures. Hegel avoided falling into this error, if not in detail at least in the general setting of the question. According to him, there were three different varieties of geographical environment:
1) A waterless high plateau, with great steppes and plains.
2) Lowlands intersected by great rivers.
3) Coastal lands having direct communication with the sea.
Cattle rearing, Hegel said, was the dominant feature in the first; agriculture in the second and trade and crafts in the third. The social relations of the inhabitants assumed various characteristics according to their environment. The people inhabiting the high plateaus, the Mongols for instance, led a patriarchal nomadic life and had no history in the proper sense of the word. Only occasionally, they assembled in great numbers and swooped like a storm on the civilised communities, leaving desolation and destruction in their wake. Cultural life began with the second, in the lowlands that owed their fertility to the rivers. Such lowlands were to be found in China, India … Babylon … and Egypt. Great empires arose in these lands and great states were formed there. Agriculture, which dominated here as the first source of substance for its individuals was bound by the regularity of the seasons, by the regular occupations corresponding to them: here, landed property and the relationships of right corresponding to them had their beginning. But these agricultural people in the lowlands distinguished themselves by sluggishness, immobility and segregation. They were unable to use for their mutual relationships the means that nature placed at their disposal. This defect did not exist in the third group, peoples in a coastal country. The sea did not separate peoples but united them. That was why, precisely in the coastal countries, culture and with it the development of human consciousness, reached its highest development. There was no need to look for examples, it was sufficient to point to ancient Greece. (Philosophie der Geschichte)
In this analysis there is very little that a materialist could disagree with. As an idealist, Hegel was unable to regard history otherwise. He made use of all the powers of his genius, all the gigantic resources of his dialectics, to give at least some scientific character to the idealist conception of history. His attempt proved vain. He himself seemed dissatisfied with the results and often he was obliged to come down from the misty heights of idealism to the concrete ground of economic relationships. According to Plekhanov — whose writings on Hegel provide the basic points in this lesson — “Every time (Hegel) turned to it, economics freed him from the shallows into which his idealism had led him. Economic development turned out to be the prius determining the whole course of history.”
It is sometimes reasoned that dialectics is identical to evolution, and that they have points of contact cannot be denied. Nonetheless, there is a profound and important difference that is far from favourable to evolution. Evolutionists desire to prove that there are no leaps either in nature or in history. Dialectics, on the other hand know full well that both in nature and history as well as human thought, leaps are inevitable. Dialectics make clear the series of conditions under which gradual change must of necessity lead to leaps.
The statement of Hegel: “All that is rational is real, all that is real is rational,” perplexed many of his supporters at the time as well as giving credence to reactionary regimes, but as Engels remarks, if a state is reactionary and despite this continues to exist:
The evil character of the government is justified and explained by the corresponding character of its subjects. The Prussians of that day had the government they deserved.”
Likewise today, if idealists can take advantage of the dualism existing within our society: that is, the clash of spirit and matter, and build up ideals that completely destroy the existence of classes and the class struggle and at the same time defend the class state in its reality, that is how Hegel’s proposition is completely misunderstood.
Applied to history — particularly the first part of the proposition — it can mean nothing else than an unshakable conviction that everything rational must become reality. Without such conviction changes in development would lose all practical significance.
As is already known, Hegel’s dialectic was progress over the universal spirit, but how would this be possible without the continual superseding of social forms? How could it be possible without the law of opposites, which would make reformism and idealism comply with development in which “reason becomes madness and blessing an evil”?
True, Hegel’s idealism prevented him from completing historical analysis, but the importance of his proposition is that he took particular note of the aggregate of phenomena in the process of its development, thus creating out of its very self the forces leading to its negation.
Thus, if one adopts a negative attitude to a particular system, that negation is rational so long as it coincides with the objective process of negation proceeding within that very system itself. That is, if the system is losing its historical meaning and entering into contradiction with the social needs to which it owes its appearance. “Socialists” who claim adherence to the dialectic may well take note of this when they ceremoniously provide a role for reformers and idealists with their slogans: “Labor to power pledged to socialist policies”. A situation that shows complete lack of understanding of the great importance of the dialectic, Hegel’s proposition on rationality and reality provides as well as ignoring his advice that “one must not be ceremonious with reason which is well on the way to its opposite, madness.”
As a further example of the use of Hegel’s proposition we have Engels saying: “The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire that superseded it.” The question arises: why did the empire supersede the republic? That there was a cause cannot be denied, the problem is where to seek the cause or causes underlying this historic event. Was it because of extra skill on the part of Caesar, or the military talent of Pompey? Hegel would give a decisive negative to such reasoning. For him, the cause would lie in the change in social phenomena built up by all preceding events in Roman society.
An additional force to Hegel’s dialectic is evident in his remarks: “One believes that one is saying something great if one says that “man is naturally good’. But one forgets that one says something far greater when one says ‘man is naturally evil’.” With Hegel, evil is the motive force of historical development.
It contains the twofold meaning that, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against conditions, although old and outmoded yet sanctified by custom; and that, on the other hand, through the wicked passions of humans, which since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development: a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie constitutes a single continual proof.
We have seen how Hegel succeeded in making use of the dialectic as none of his predecessors had. In the hands of this idealist genius, dialectics became the most powerful weapon for the cognisance (understanding) of everything that exists. For Hegel:
The essence of the matter is that what is definite is not only limited from without, but is bound to be destroyed and to pass over into its opposite by virtue of its own inherent nature.
As long as Hegel remains true to the dialectical method, he is a highly progressive thinker. “We say that all things must be submitted to the judgment of dialectics and by the very fact we define it as a universal, invincible force, which must destroy everything, no matter how lasting it may seem.” Thus, Hegel is perfectly correct when he says serious mastery and clear comprehension of dialectics is a matter of extraordinary importance. But materialism in its explanation of history presupposes the dialectical method of thought and as a consequence could not make use of the dialectic in its idealist form.
Karl Marx, the greatest of materialists, a man in no way inferior to Hegel in genius, the true successor of this great philosopher, rightly said of himself that his method is completely opposite of Hegel’s method.
To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, ie, the process of thinking, which, under the name of the idea, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the external, the phenomenal form of the idea. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” (Capital, afterword to second German edition)
In the hands of Marx, materialist philosophy has been elevated to an integrated, harmonious and consistent world outlook. Before him, materialism remained idealist in the realm of history. It was Marx who drove idealism out of this its last refuge. Like Hegel, he saw human history as a process conforming to laws and independent of human arbitrariness; like Hegel, he considered all phenomena in the process of their appearance and their disappearance; like Hegel he was not satisfied with barren metaphysical explanations of historical phenomena, and, like Hegel, he endeavoured to trace to a universal and single source all the acting and interacting forces of social life. He found that source, not in the absolute spirit, but in the economic development to which Hegel was forced to have recourse when his idealism, even in his powerful hands, was a powerless and useless instrument.
Modern dialectical materialism had made clear the truth that people make history unconsciously: from its standpoint the course of history is determined in the final analysis not by human will, but by the development of the productive forces. So long as the motive forces of historical development worked behind the backs of humankind, people had to make history unconsciously. The service rendered by Marx consisted in discovering these laws and through a rigorous study of their scientific workings make it possible for people to take them in their own hands and submit them to their own reason. Where Hegel saw the working class as a mob, Marx saw the workers as a majestic force, the bearer of the future. Only the working class is capable of mastering the teaching of Marx, this is a fact becoming more and more recognised today.
Marx made clear the truth that people made history unconsciously, it being determined in the final analysis by the development of the productive forces. Materialism was predominantly mechanistic and, as a consequence idealist in outlook. True, both idealist and materialist recognised change, they could do nothing else: night follows day, the seasons succeed one another, life is born, grows old and dies etc. For the idealist, this change was seen as the intention of some divine authority, something outside matter not being subject to the laws of the material world itself. Nevertheless, while they sought material reasons for change they also sought, like the idealist, for something fixed, something changeless. This they found in a material particle “the eternal and indestructible atom”. Thus all changes to these materialists were produced by the movement and interaction of unchanging atoms.
The world, to the mechanical materialist, consisted of nothing but particles of matter in interaction, each particle being in an isolated existence distinct from another. In their totality they formed the world and in their interactions the totality of everything that happened in the world. In this manner the materialists of the day looked upon physical processes, plant and animal life, even humans as machines. The philosopher Rene Descarte, in the seventeenth century, said all animals were complicated machines; man excepted since he had a soul; but his eighteenth century followers considered men also as machines, although very complicated. And so, the question uppermost in the minds of mechanical materialists was: “What is its mechanism? How does it work? Newton’s discoveries about the solar system, for example, demonstrated its mechanism in terms of gravity and mechanical forces. But as to how this originated or developed he simply was not interested.
This was also the attitude of other scientists of that time. For all they cared, the originating aspect of their discoveries could be the result of creation by God. Voltaire and Thomas Paine postulated a supreme being and so kept the door open to idealism.
Like metaphysical thought, mechanistic materialism was progress for its time. It waged a fight against idealism and the church in a mechanistic manner, taking nature to bits as one would a machine, seeing how each part functioned and suggesting improvements to correspond with human requirements. This suited bourgeois productive methods, their conception of the rights of man, as well as their revolutionary slogan of equality for all in the face of the law and parliamentary democracy. But such abstract reasoning ignored the fact that human nature is determined by changing economic forces and the society built from such. Humans are not what they are by nature, but become what they are as a result of their social activity. Nor are all humans by nature equal. This bourgeois conception of abstract equality was ridiculed by Engels in the following:
The real content of the demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes. Any demand for equality which goes beyond that of necessity passes into absurdity. (Anti-Duhring)
Most of the leading utopian socialists based their theory on mechanical materialism. Their socialism was an ideal society: something possible of realisation if human nature had the will to achieve it. They relied on conviction that socialism only became possible if society could be won over as just and best suited to human nature, Robert Owen was inspired to appeal to Queen Victoria and the Archbishop of Canterbury to support his socialist program.
Karl Marx replied to this utopian theory that the character and activity of man was determined by environment and education in the following from his Theses on Feuerbach:
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, changed men are produced by changed circumstances and upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed precisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated.
In these few words Marx shows that changes in society are not a result of mechanical results from changed circumstances, but arise from human activity in changing their circumstances. As to the real causes at work in human society that determine new ideas and new activities; mechanical materialism had no answer. It was unable to explain the laws of social development and consequent changes in society.
The same mechanistic materialism pervades the minds of workers’ leaders today, with the result that things should, in the Hegelian sense, have long ago passed away by becoming unreal still remain as a monument to futility. In this sense bourgeois parliamentary democracy still occupies pride of place on the stage of mediocrity, playing its capricious game of ins and outs while capitalism loads increasing suffering on humankind to maintain its survival.
The limitations of the mechanistic approach — now becoming more obvious to the modern world —must yield place to dialectical materialism. Outmoded mechanistic thought can no longer serve as a guide to the struggle for socialism.
Dialectical materialism, the development of which was the stupendous work of Marx and Engels, must take its place. The comparison of dialectics with mechanistic thought that follows will show why.
The first dogmatic assumption of mechanical materialists is its basis of permanent stability of things, their fixed properties: “the indestructible atom”.
Engels disposes of this with a definition of dialectical materialism in his work: Ludwig Feuerbach:
The world is not to be comprehended as a complex of readymade things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.
Today, science is completely in accord with this. The atom, once considered eternal and indivisible, is now known to consist of electrons, protons and neutrons, and these are not eternal and indestructible any more than the atom. Science shows that they, too, come into being, pass away and go through many transformations.
The idealist philosopher C.E.M. Joad wrote: “Fifty years ago scientific materialism was dominant; matter was composed of little hard bullets called atoms; it was something infinitely attenuated and elusive; it was a hump in space time, a mush of electricity, a wave of probability undulating into nothingness —” Joad’s remarks were leveled at mechanical materialists. He either didn’t know about dialectics or preferred to ignore them. Wrote Lenin: “The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite.” (Materialism and empirio-criticism).
The next dogmatic assumption of mechanistic materialism is the assumption that change can only take place through the action of some external cause. Nothing ever moves unless something else propels it, it never changes unless interfered with. Is it any wonder that his type of materialism relied on belief in a prime mover, a supreme being, to provide the initial impulse?
Showing that matter cannot be separated from motion, Engels in Anti-Duhring completely refutes the mechanists’ dead theory of matter:
Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be. Motion in cosmic space, mechanical motion of smaller masses on the various celestial bodies, the motion of molecules as heat or as electrical or magnetic currents, chemical combination or disintegration, organic life — at each moment each individual atom of matter in the world is in one or other of these forms of motion. A body, for example, may be on the ground in mechanical equilibrium, may be mechanically at rest: but this in no way prevents it from participating in the motion of the earth and in that of the whole solar system, just as little as it prevents its most minute parts from carrying out the oscillations determined by its temperature, or its atoms from passing through a chemical process. Matter without motion is just as unthinkable as motion without matter.
Apart from Kant’s nebula theory of the earth’s existence, the discovery of the inseparableness of matter and motion eliminated the need for any prime mover or supreme being as creator. Matter in motion has no origin, no beginning. We will not find the cause of social development in the actions of great men but through the development of internal forces of society, that is, in changes in the social forces of production.
The last error of mechanistic theory we wish to touch on is the theory known as economic determinism. According to this theory any change in society is explained entirely by changes in economic forces. Here we witness the mechanical device of reducing a complex motion to a single, simple form — the process of social change, including all the political, cultural and ideological developments, to one simple economic factor, namely the productive forces. But the task of explaining social development by reducing it to an economic process is incorrect. The task is to show how, on the basis of changes in the economic forces all the various forms of social forces arise and play their part in complex movements in society.
Insofar as we have discussed history it has been from the idealist standpoint, that spirit is primary and matter secondary. We have examined the greatest exponent of this idealism, Hegel, and showed how his arguments could never be conclusive because of their identity with the primacy of spirit over matter.
Karl Marx reversed this. He studied historical development on the basis of matter being primary and spirit secondary. Because Marx did not leave any basic philosophical work on this aspect of history, many would-be experts and critics of Marxism deny that he was a philosopher at all. This viewpoint also existed among Marxist opportunists such as Karl Kautsky and revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein. It is also disputed by many contemporary Marxists, who through lack of study of Marx’s works contend that they are out of date.
True, Marxist philosophy is not set out according to traditional philosophical disciplines. There are no such things as Marx’s ontology, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics and so on. Marx’s philosophical thought is so deeply melded with his sociological, economic and political analysis that one is not able to tell where one ends and another begins.
In fact, Marx reproached philosophers for having only interpreted the world, whereas the point was to change it. Marx’s is a philosophy of action, a philosophy of practice from the standpoint that it is not just theory but a factor in changing the world.
Engels regarded the great basic question of all philosophy as the relationship of thinking to being. To the question which is primary, spirit or nature, de divided philosophers into two camps: idealists who insisted that the spirit was primary, and materialists who regarded nature as primary. Lenin considered there were two more basic questions of philosophy: did nature exist before humans, and does man think by means of the brain? To both these questions Lenin answered in the affirmative. To this question Plekhanov replied:
Idealism says, without a subject there is no object. The history of the earth shows that the object existed long before the subject appeared, ie, long before any organism appeared which had any perceptible degree of consciousness. The idealist says: reason dictates its laws to nature. The history of the organic world shows that reason appears only on a high rung of the ladder of development. And as this development can be explained only by the laws of nature, it follows that nature dictated its laws to reason. The theory of development reveals the truth of materialism.
In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx states the first premise of all human history to be the existence of living humans. From this premise the materialist conception unfolds accordingly:
(a) As soon as humans distinguish themselves from animals, which they do as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, they indirectly produce their material life.
(b) Humans produce their means of subsistence based on the means of subsistence they find in existence, which leads to social production.
(c) Producing their subsistence, humans indirectly produce their material Life.
(d) The nature of individuals depends on material conditions determining their productive activity.
Let us look more closely at this historical philosophy of Karl Marx. Our anthropoid ancestors, like all other animals, were in complete subjection to nature. All their development was completely unconscious, conditioned by adaptation to their environment by means of natural selection in the struggle for existence.
This was the dark kingdom of physical necessity. At that time even the dawn of consciousness, and therefore of freedom, was not breaking. But physical necessity brought humans to a stage of development at which they began, little by little, to separate themselves from the rest of the animal world.
Humans became tool-making animals. The tool is an organ with the help of which humans act on nature to achieve their ends. It subjects necessity to the human consciousness, although at first only to a very small degree, by fits and starts. The degree of development of the productive forces determines the measure of the authority of humans over nature.
To return to Marx's point on the nature of individuals, this concerns the economy of a given society. On what does this depend? The utopian socialists, mechanical materialists and Hegel could not satisfactorily answer this question. All of them, directly or indirectly, referred to human nature. The great scientific service rendered by Marx lies in his approaching the question from the diametrically opposite side. He regarded human nature itself as the eternally changing result of historical progress, the cause of which lies outside of humanity. To exist, humans must support their organism, borrowing the determinism". According to this theory any change in society is explained entirely by changes in economic forces. Here we witness the mechanical device of reducing a complex motion to a single, simple form — the process of social change, including all the political, cultural and ideological developments, to one simple economic factor, namely the productive forces. But the task of explaining social development by reducing it to an economic process is incorrect. The task is to show how, on the basis of changes in the economic forces all the various forms of social forces arise and play their part in complex movements in society.
Insofar as we have discussed history it has been from the idealist standpoint, that spirit is primary and matter secondary. We have examined the greatest exponent of this idealism, Hegel, and showed how his arguments could never be conclusive because of their identity with the primacy of spirit over matter.
Karl Marx reversed this. He studied historical development on the basis of matter being primary and spirit secondary. Because Marx did not leave any basic philosophical work on this aspect of history, many would-be experts and critics of Marxism deny that he was a philosopher at all. This viewpoint also existed among Marxist opportunists such as Karl Kautsky and revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein. It is also disputed by many contemporary Marxists, who through lack of study of Marx’s works contend that they are out of date.
True, Marxist philosophy is not set out according to traditional philosophical disciplines. There are no such things as Marx’s ontology, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics and so on. Marx’s philosophical thought is so deeply melded with his sociological, economic and political analysis that one is not able to tell where one ends and another begins.
In fact, Marx reproached philosophers for having only interpreted the world, whereas the point was to change it. Marx’s is a philosophy of action, a philosophy of practice from the standpoint that it is not just theory but a factor in changing the world.
Engels regarded the great basic question of all philosophy as the relationship of thinking to being. To the question which is primary, spirit or nature, de divided philosophers into two camps: idealists who insisted that the spirit was primary, and materialists who regarded nature as primary. Lenin considered there were two more basic questions of philosophy: did nature exist before humans, and does man think by means of the brain? To both these questions Lenin answered in the affirmative. To this question Plekhanov replied:
Idealism says, without a subject there is no object. The history of the earth shows that the object existed long before the subject appeared, ie, long before any organism appeared which had any perceptible degree of consciousness. The idealist says: reason dictates its laws to nature. The history of the organic world shows that reason appears only on a high rung of the ladder of development. And as this development can be explained only by the laws of nature, it follows that nature dictated its laws to reason. The theory of development reveals the truth of materialism.
In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx states the first premise of all human history to be the existence of living humans. From this premise the materialist conception unfolds accordingly:
(a) As soon as humans distinguish themselves from animals, which they do as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, they indirectly produce their material life.
(b) Humans produce their means of subsistence based on the means of subsistence they find in existence, which leads to social production.
(c) Producing their subsistence, humans indirectly produce their material Life.
(d) The nature of individuals depends on material conditions determining their productive activity.
Let us look closer at this historical philosophy of Karl Marx. Our anthropoid ancestors, like all other animals, were in complete subjection to nature. All their development was completely unconscious, conditioned by adaptation to their environment by means of natural selection in the struggle for existence.
This was the dark kingdom of physical necessity. At that time even the dawn of consciousness, and therefore of freedom, was not breaking. But physical necessity brought humans to a stage of development at which they began, little by little, to separate themselves from the rest of the animal world.
Humans became tool-making animals. The tool is an organ with the help of which humans act on nature to achieve their ends. It subjects necessity to the human consciousness, although at first only to a very small degree, by fits and starts. The degree of development of the productive forces determines the measure of the authority of humans over nature.
To return to Marx's point on the nature of individuals, this concerns the economy of a given society. On what does this depend? The utopian socialists, mechanical materialists and Hegel could not satisfactorily answer this question. All of them, directly or indirectly, referred to human nature. The great scientific service rendered by Marx lies in his approaching the question from the diametrically opposite side. He regarded human nature itself as the eternally changing result of historical progress, the cause of which lies outside of humanity. To exist, humans must support their organism, borrowing the substance required from the surrounding external nature. This borrowing presupposes a certain action of humans on that external nature. But, “acting on the external world, he changes his own nature”.
Darwin contests the opinion that only humans are capable of using tools and gives many examples to show that in an embryonic form their use is characteristic for many mammals. He is quite correct from his point of view. In notorious “human nature” there is not a single feature not to be found in some other variety of animal, and therefore there is absolutely no foundation for considering humans to be some special being and separated into a special kingdom.
But it must not be forgotten that quantitative changes pass into qualitative. What exists as an embryo in one species of animal can become the distinguishing feature of another species. This particularly applies to the use of tools. An elephant breaks off branches and uses them to brush away flies. This is interesting and instructive. But in the history of the evolution of the elephant the use of branches in the fight against flies probably played no essential part; elephants did not become elephants because their more or less elephant-like ancestors brushed off flies with branches.
It is quite otherwise with humans: as Engels notes in The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man:
It is just here that one sees how great is the distance between the undeveloped hand of even the most anthropoid of apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by the labour of hundreds of thousand of years. The number and general arrangement of the bones and muscles are the same in both; but the hand of the lowest savage can perform hundreds of operations that no ape’s hand can imitate. No simian hand has ever fashioned even the crudest of stone knives.
The boomerang was important to the existence of the Australian aborigines, just as machines are vital to the modern world. Take away from the boomerang and make the Aborigine a tiller of the soil, and he will of necessity change all his mode of life, all his habits, all his manner of thinking, all his so-called nature.
From this example of agriculture it can be seen that the productive action of humans on nature presupposes not only implements of labour, but more generally the development of the means of production — the productive forces, as Marx would emphasise.
Not until there is a surplus of means of subsistence is it possible to arrive at the division of labour. The pastoral form of life was characterised by great migrations of peoples. Great and prolonged journeys were undertaken by people accompanied by their herds, which provided them with food on the way. Furthermore, cattle breeding itself impelled this mode of life in search of new pastures.
But with the settled mode of life and agriculture there immediately appears the striving to make use of the labour of slaves. Slavery leads sooner or later to tyranny, since those with the largest numbers of slaves can with their help subject the weakest to their will. The division into free persons and slaves is the beginning of the division of society into estates.
In his chapter on The theory of force in Anti-Duhring, Engels says:
It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and give vent to high moral indignation against such infamies. But it does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they have played in history. When we examine these questions we are compelled to say — however contradictory and heretical it may sound — that the introduction of slavery under the conditions of that time was a great step forward. For it is a fact that man sprang from the beasts, and had consequently to use barbaric and almost bestial means to extricate himself from barbarism. The ancient communes, where they continued to exist, have for thousands of years formed the basis of the most barbarous form of state, oriental despotism, from India to Russia. It was only when these communities dissolved that the peoples made progress of themselves, and their first economic advance consisted in the increase and development of production by means of slave labour. It is clear that so long as human labour was still so little productive that it provided but a small surplus over and above the necessary means of subsistence, and increase in the productive forces, extension of trade, development of the state and of law, or beginning of art and science, was only possible by means of a greater division of labour. And the necessary basis for this was the great division of labour between the masses discharging simple manual labour and the few privileged persons directing labour, conducting trade and public affairs, and at a later stage occupying themselves with art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this division of labour was in fact slavery. In the historical conditions of the ancient world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based on class antagonisms could only be accomplished in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass of the slaves were recruited, now at least kept their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier period.
This lengthy quotation from Engels emphasises the foundation of society on the mode of production — the state of the productive forces. In this lies the explanation of the history of law as well as the whole organisation of society.
Says Marx:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure …" (Preface to A contribution to the critique of political economy).
The French materialists came to the conclusion that humans, with all their thoughts, feelings and aspirations were the product of their social environment. On what conditions the structure of social environment rested the French materialists were unable to reply. They were, as a consequence, forced to return to their idealist standpoint that environment was created by the “opinion” of humans.
Writing on this in ../../../archive/plekhanov/1895/monist/The development of the monist view of history, Plekhanov says:
Dissatisfied with this superficial reply, the French historians of the restoration set themselves the task of analysing the social environment. The result of their analysis was the conclusion, extremely important for science, that political constitutions are rooted in social relations, while social relations are determined by the state of property.”
Thus a new problem arose, writes Plekhanov: what then determines the state of property? An answer to this was beyond the powers of the French historians and they dismissed it with remarks on the qualities of human nature that explained absolutely nothing at all.
Hegel viewed as most unsatisfactory the reliance on human nature. Humanity’s advance must be sought outside human nature. But to be fruitful for science it was necessary to show where precisely the key should be sought. For Hegel it lay in the qualities of the spirit, in the logical laws of development of the absolute idea.
Marx corrected this radical error of the idealists, which could only return them in a roundabout way to the point of view of human nature, since the absolute idea is nothing but the personification of our logical process of thought. Said Marx:
The state of property and with it all the qualities of social environment are determined, not by the qualities of the absolute spirit and not by the character of human nature, but by those mutual relations into which men of necessity enter one with another in the social production of life ie, in their struggle for existence.” (Plekhanov, The development of the monist view of history)
The materialist conception of history is summed up in the following words of Marx:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
In his Selected Philosophical Works and The Role of the Individual in History, Georgi Plekhanov wrote fluently from the materialist dialectical point of view of the role played by the individual in history.
Unlike subjectivism, dialectical materialism does not limit the rights of human reason. It knows that the rights of reason are as boundless and unlimited as its powers. It says that all that is reasonable in the human head, ie all that represents not an illusion but the true knowledge of reality, will unquestionably pass into that reality, and will unquestionably bring into its own share of reason.
From this one can see what constitutes, in the opinion of dialectical materialist, the role of the individual in history. Far from reducing the role to zero, they put before the individual a task which — to make use of the customary though incorrect term — one must recognise as completely and exceptionally idealistic. As human reason can triumph over blind necessity only by becoming aware of the latter’s peculiar inner laws, only by beating it with its own strength, the development of knowledge, the development of human consciousness, is the greatest and most noble task of the thinking personality. (The development of the monist view of history
It has long been observed that great talents appear everywhere, whenever the social conditions favourable to their development exist. This means that every man of talent who actually appears, every man of talent who becomes a social force, is the product of social relations. Since this is the case, it is clear why talented people can, as we have said, change only individual features of events, but not their general trend: they are themselves the product of this trend; were it not for that trend they would never have crossed the threshold that divides the potential from the real. (Role of the individual in history)
If owning to certain mechanical or physiological causes unconnected with the general course of the social-political and intellectual development of Italy, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci had died in their infancy, Italian art would have been less perfect, but the general trend of its development in the period of the Renaissance would have remained the same. Raphael, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo did not create this trend: they were merely its best representatives. True, usually a whole school springs up around a man of genius, and his pupils try to copy his methods to the minutest details; that is why the gap that would have been left in Italian art in the period of the Renaissance by the early death of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci would have strongly influenced many of the secondary features of its subsequent history. But in essence, there would have been no change in this history, provided there were no important change in the general course of the intellectual development of Italy due to general causes. (ibid)
At the present time, human nature can no longer be regarded as the final and most general cause of historical progress: if it is constant, then it cannot explain the extremely changeable course of history; if it is changeable, then obviously its changes are themselves determined by historical progress. (ibid)
Dialectics knows full well that in nature and also in human thought and history leaps are inevitable. But it does not overlook the undeniable fact that the same uninterrupted process is at work in all phases of change. It only endeavours to make clear to itself the series of conditions under which gradual change must necessarily lead to leaps.
From Hegel’s standpoint, utopias have a symptomatic importance in history: they display contradictions characteristic of the epoch in question. Dialectical materialism gives the same appraisal of them. It is not the utopian plans of various reformers, but the laws of production and exchange that determine the now continually growing working class movement. That is why, contrary to what happened in past centuries, not only the reformers are at present utopians, but so are all those public figures who want to stop the wheel of history.
Looking back to dialectics in antiquity we have Heraclitus saying: “The fairest harmony is born of things different, and discord is what produces all things.” Even the most harmonious and integrated unit cannot exist as such indefinitely because of the incessant movement of its opposites, the unbalancing of its contending forces. “Strife is the father of all things, the king of all things, and has made gods and men, free men and slaves.”
Modern dialectics cannot improve on a single word of this — it must content with developing it. This development must at first grasp the fundamental law of dialectics: its unity as well as the clash of opposites. This was expressed concerning the social structure by Marx in the opening sentence of his Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”
Capitalism, the last of the exploiting societies, owes its existence to this unity of opposites of private property exploiters, the bourgeoisie, with the propertyless working class. Without this unity it faces its doom; hence its emphasis on parliamentary democracy, arbitration and conciliation, the equality of all in law, etc. All of this, however helpful in prolonging capitalism’s life, will prove utterly fruitless in the long run to stay the clash of opposites, which will bring the triumph of the class struggle to the working class, to socialism.
Hegel’s idealism limited his view of human historical progress to something outside this world, which he termed the absolute idea. It was no accident that he saw the working class as “the mob”. Marx, however, changed Hegel’s;s dialectic to a materialist method of thought, in which the working class was “a majestic force”: that part in the unity of opposites that constituted its negative aspect destined in the final clash to open the road to socialism.
A dialectical analysis clearly distinguishes the worthwhile role of activists in the labour movement regardless of what they may think of themselves. If they pay lip-service to arbitration and conciliation, they are nothing more than partisans of an outmoded metaphysical thought that existed in the Middle Ages. All their expressed militancy will be of no avail. With such a conservative outlook, strengthened by an affluent existence within the system, all their objectives amount to nothing less than peaceful co-existence with capitalism. Their mouthings of “fair” wages and “fair” profits assists like nothing else can to cover up the basis of bourgeois society, which is nothing more or less than exploitation. There is no other way to characterise this attitude than betrayal of the socialist objective.
On the other hand, the militant armed with a materialist dialectical analysis understands the transient nature of all things, their coming into being and passing away. With the knowledge that nothing exists without its antithesis comes understanding of the unity and clash of opposites. The whole of history is witness to this process, right from antiquity: “The fairest harmony is born of things different, and discord is what produces all things … Strife is the father of all things, the king of all things, and has made gods and men, free men and slaves.” The whole of history from the time when these words were spoken by Heraclitus has taken this form. Militants who base their activity on dialectical materialism become integrated into the class struggle. The whole of history is there to back them. All they require is courage to state what is.
Selected philosophical works, Georgi Plekhanov
On the role of the individual in history, Plekhanov
The development of the monist view of history, Plekhanov
The materialist conception of history, Plekhanov
Anti-Duhring, Frederick Engels
Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Socialism utopian and scientific, Engels
A contribution to the critique of political economy, Karl Marx
The German ideology, Marx