THE MYTH OF THE MARXIST DIALECTIC
67
Marx and Engels took this principle over, and they projected
its action into the future as Hegel had not done. For them, the thesis
was bourgeois society, which had originally been a unification out
of the disintegrating feudal regime; the antithesis was the proletariat,
who had originally been produced by the development of modem in–
dustry, but who had then been split off through specialization and
debasement from the main body of modem society and who must
eventually be turned against it; and the synthesis would be the com–
munist society which would result from the conflict of the working
class
with the owning and employing classes and the taking-over of
the industrial plant by the working class, and which would represent
a higher unity because it would harmonize the interests of all man–
kind.
Let us pass now to the materialistic aspect of the Dialectical
Materialism of Marxism. Hegel had been a philosophical idealist: he
had regarded historical changes as the steps by which something called
the Absolute Idea achieved progressive self-realization in the medium
of the material world. Marx and Engels turned Hegel upside down,
as they said, and so set him for the first time right side up. "For
Hegel," writes Marx in "Capital," "the process of thought, which,
under the name of the Idea, he even transforms into an independent
subject, is the demiurge of the real world, while the real world is
only its external appearance. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is
nothing other than the material after it has been transposed and trans–
lated
inside the human head." Marx and Engels had declared that
all
ideas were human and that every idea was bound up with some
specific social situation, which had been produced in the first instance,
in
turn, by man's relation to specific material conditions.
But what did
this
mean precisely? To many simple-minded per–
IODS
who have just heard about Marxism, it means something ex–
tremely simple: it means that people always act from motives of
economic interest and that everything·mankind has thought or done
is
susceptible of being explained in those terms. It appears to such
persons that they have discovered in Marxism a key to all the com–
plexities of human affairs and that they are in a position-what is
even more gratifying-to belittle the achievement of others by point–
ing
out the money motivation behind it.
If
such people were pressed
to
justify their assumptions and if they were capable of philosophical
argument, they could only fall back on some variety of "mechanism,"
which
would represent the phenomena of consciousness, with its ac–
companiment of the illusion of will, as something in the nature of a
phosphorescence generated by mechanistic activity, or perhaps run-
