Fifth Observation
For Hegel, the dialectic is an unfolding of The Idea. The result of this unfolding is neither good nor bad, it is simply what it is, and the role of the philosopher is simply to uncover it, and reveal it. As Marx put it, the philosophers have only sought to understand the world; the point is to change it. This statement, of itself, might be interpreted as Idealist, as meaning that its possible to simply change the world on the basis of pure will, to establish the idea of a good society, and proceed to construct it. However, its clear that is not what Marx means either, because he railed against such Idealist and Utopian thinking, as that, indeed, presented by Proudhon.
Marx's dialectic, also, is a process of unfolding via the continual posing and resolution of contradictions, but the contradictions are ones that exist in the material world of phenomena itself, and are simply reflected in the realm of ideas. Marx understands that there are limits upon which not only can the world be interpreted, but also to which it can be changed. As he puts it,
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”
(The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)
Man does not create history by establishing some morally good society he seeks to create, and then go about manufacturing it, but, rather, acts more like the midwife of history, creating the best conditions for, and facilitating the speedy birth of the new society, whatever that new society might be. Had Marx lived 500 years earlier, and been able to apply his theory of historical materialism, he would have sought to change the world not by the creation of Socialism, which his theory shows would have been impossible, but by creating the best possible conditions, and most speedy development of capitalism. Its why he could proclaim the progressive role of British colonialism in India, for example, in bringing about such a social revolution.
Of course, as Marx and Engels, and more specifically Lenin and Trotsky, were able to explain, was that the difference between the development of capitalism in Europe, from the 15th century onwards, to the development of capitalism in other parts of the world, in the 19th and 20th centuries, is that, by this later period, the productive forces have developed, globally, (though by no means within any individual state), a large working-class has been created, along with its organisations, and so has the idea of scientific socialism, so that, fast on the heels of this bourgeois revolution, follows the possibility of the proletarian revolution via the process of permanent revolution. As Marx put it,
“Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future...
One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement — and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society — it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs. ”
(Preface To The First German Edition of Capital Vol. I)
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