Lenin quotes Marx's comments in relation to his use of the dialectic, as a means of elaboration, as opposed to its use by Hegel. For Hegel, the dialectic is the unfolding of The Idea, which determines reality.
“Marx says plainly that his method is the “direct opposite” of Hegel’s method.” (p 167)
For Marx, the starting point is an accurate analysis of reality, and how that reality is changing. It is understanding the nature of this process of change in reality, the laws underpinning it that allows us to see where the result of that change is heading.
“With me, on the contrary,” says Marx, “the ideal is nothing but the reflection of the material.” (p 167)
The role of consciousness, then, is to understand this process of change, to identify the destination, and to facilitate it. Childbirth happens as a consequence of pregnancy; it is facilitated if a midwife is there to assist.
Yet, Lenin points out, Mikhailovsky does not set out any understanding of dialectics, or discuss whether the development of society can be analysed in the same way that the evolution in natural history is analysed. Instead, Mikhailovsky attributes the use of Hegelian triads to Marx, thereby setting up a straw man to knock down. In this, Mikhailovsky echoes Duhring, but without mentioning him. Duhring, like Mikhailovsky, suggests that Marx arrives at his conclusion for Socialism, and the “expropriation of the expropriators”, on the basis of the application of the Hegelian dialectic. But, the opposite is the case, as Marx's comments in Capital III, Chapter 27, set out previously, illustrate. Marx's comments about the expropriation of the expropriators were not a prediction of the future, based upon some manifestation of the Logos. It is a description of what had already happened in reality. When Marx talks about “inevitability”, it is never a prediction of the future, but a statement about what is already reality.
First, the scattered means of production of individual producers are expropriated, and become capital. Then bigger capitals expropriate smaller capitals. Finally, even the biggest private capitals become fetters on accumulation, and so they are expropriated by socialised capital, in the form of cooperatives and joint stock companies/corporations. This was not a prediction, but a reality that already existed by the second half of the 19th century, and, as Engels says in his Supplement to Capital III, after the passing of the Limited Liabilities Act, in 1855, this process of the expropriation of the expropriators accelerated further, with a massive expansion of this socialised capital.
“And the whole matter thus amounts to an “affirmative recognition of the existing state of things and of its inevitable development””. (p 167)
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