Dialectical Materialism: Marx’s Theory of Revolution
Dialectical Materialism
- Materialism, in pre-revolutionary France, meant a philosophy which held that the mechanical explanations given by natural sciences could be extended to all subject matters: vital, mental, and social.
- Marx was a “materialist” but thought that the method of natural science could not be adopted for social studies. He regarded the dialectic as a logical method uniquely capable of dealing with continuously developing historical facts and of revealing the “necessity” of its development.
- After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, he claimed for his theory of social development an affinity with organic evolution (class struggle/natural selection).
- The dialectic provided an a priori theory of progress.
Materialism implied for Marx a radical rejection of religion, indeed a militant atheism. Since religion is one of the great conservative social forces, materialism should be for Marx radical.
1835: David Strauss’s Life of Jesus: interpretation of the history of the gospels and of Jesus as a mere myth. Marx was convinced about the “leftist” interpretation of Hegel, for being the dialectic the solvent of every supposed absolute truth and every transcendent value, since it shows them to be relative social products of historical evolution.
Religion supplies imaginary or “fantastic” satisfactions that misdirect any rational effort to find real satisfactions. Thus Christianity, with its distinction of soul and body, imparts to men a double life and offers the imaginary joys of heaven as a consolation for the real miseries of this life. It is the “opium for the people.”
The New Revolution
Beyond the freedom of the democratic republic (the highest form of middle-class society), there is a higher form of society in which the state will be superseded, to reach through the social revolution (contrasting the political revolution).
Past revolutions transferred power from one class to another, but this left intact the power to dominate and exploit. Like Christianity, the political revolution leaves men with a double life, of imaginary freedom and real servitude. For the root of servitude is not political: it lies in a system of production which permits one class to monopolize the other economically.
Economic Determinism
Economic determinism: the concrete meaning of dialectical materialism. This theory provided Marx with his program for a new working-class revolution, which is to abolish social inequality and to create a socialist and classless society.
Marx stated that:
- The existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historic phases in the development of production.
- The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
- This dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
Capital
Concept of “institutional history” and interpretation of capitalism as a historical institution:
- Economic origins of existing social classes.
- Economic analysis of the nature of the antagonism between these classes (theory of surplus value).
- New approach to historical studies on capitalism: the formation of a proletariat by the divorce of the peasantry from common rights in the land; the destruction of household industry by the growth of capitalist organization.
- Stress upon the changes in human and social relations that result from industrial and commercial changes, and particularly upon the bad conditions workers face due to the steady advance of the division of labor.
- Stress upon the social repercussion of industrialization, its tendency to weaken primary social groups like the family, and therefore upon the human problems that it created. The contradictory quality of capitalism seemed to him to be its paradoxical union of organization and anarchy.
The major purpose of Capital was to show that capitalism, in destroying itself, must give rise to socialism, its antithesis. Marx accepted the value theory of Ricardo as a scientific theory of capitalism, to show its inner contradictions (“surplus value”).
Marx wanted to show that in an industrial system in which capitalists own the means of production, labor will always be forced to produce more than it receives, and more than is required to keep the system going, which leads to the collapse of the system.
Capital (Continued)
- The other prediction, that capitalism would be followed by a socialized and collective economy, was a speculation that depended on the dialectic. The “anarchy” of privately owned and competitive production will be succeeded by a planned and harmonized economy.
- The first step to this end is to bring production “under the conscious and prearranged control of society,” or public ownership. By reason of this change, the whole class structure supported by privately owned industry will be undermined and ultimately destroyed, leading to a classless society.
“The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the process of production.”
The Social Revolution
Marx always regarded his philosophy as the guide to a successful proletarian revolution.
Two conceptions of political strategy:
- Developed by socialist parties, looked to the evolution of industrialism to produce a class-conscious proletariat which would grow in strength until it could take over a society already politically democratic.
- The other line, which after 1914 marked the strategy of Leninism, interpreted communism as the ideal of an intellectual élite, or of a proletarian minority. For this line, revolution was a present reality and the antecedent of political and economic transformation.