| Home Prev | http://www.etext.info/Politics/AlternativeOrange/ Up | Home Next |
| (v) The Laws of Dialectical Development |  2003-10-29 | Statement of Principles for the Alternative Orange |
| The Alternative Orange (Vol. 4): An Alternative Student Newspaper | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prev | Why Revolutionaries Need Marxism | Next |
Just as earlier materialism was weakened, as we have seen, by metaphysical and mechanical ideas, so the theory of dialectics and its laws of development as conceived by Hegel suffered from one insoluble problem. Hegel was an idealist and hence treats dialectics as a movement in the realm of ideas or as Hegel conceived it, the development of a “World Spirit." Contrary to his theory of dialectics which looks at the world as a process of infinite development, the Hegelian “World Spirit” was assumed to have a “beginning” (the reason for which no one could explain) and “an end” (which quite arbitrarily had come to rest with the creation of the capitalist system!). It is not too difficult for Marxists to see that the earlier materialists were not completely materialist and the earlier dialectical thinkers were not consistently dialectical, because in both cases, the uncritical acceptance of a system of exploitation and the division of society into classes made these philosophers unable and unwilling to see everything, including “human nature” and “private property," class privilege and social inequality, subject to the necessary forces of change.
Marx and Engels were able to bring dialectics and materialism into a fruitful synthesis because they were the first thinkers in history to base their philosophy on the revolutionary needs and aspirations of the working class, the only class in history which has absolutely nothing to lose from change. This is why other sections of society, the peasants, shop-keepers, intelligentsia, small traders and housewives, who will also benefit from revolution need to ally themselves with the working class and its Communist Party and follow the philosophy of the working class, dialectical materialism.
As early as 1845, Marx and Engels commented that the standpoint of the
old materialism is “civil” (or bourgeois) society; the
standpoint of the new is human (or communist)
society...[1]
for the “new” materialism is dialectical materialism
and dialectical materialism is the only philosophy which, in
guiding us in the long and difficult struggle to win a national
democracy, build socialism and enter into the epoch of communism,
will always welcome change.
Continued Next Issue.
| [1] | “Theses on Feuerbach," reprinted as an appendix to The German Ideology. (Lawrence and Wishart. 1965), p.653. |