Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/359

Rh because they would not recognise real sensuous activity. "Philosophers have done no more than give different interpretations of the world; but what we have to do is to change it." This change could not be effected in accordance with Owen's recipe that men are the products of circumstances and education, for this would imply the division of society into two parts, one of these superior to society. Owen had forgotten that circumstances are modified by men and that the educator must himself be educated. The modification of circumstances, and the alterative activities, can be conceived and rationally explained in no other way than as revolutionary practice.

Marx's terminology is obscure; there is no sociological precision about the way in which he speaks of "circumstances" and of the "world" which is to be "changed"; without further ado the change is identified with a "revolutionary transformation" and with the "practical and critical" activity of revolution. At this early stage he is already conceiving historical evolution in too objective a manner. He represents the individual and the subject as "an abstract individual," who, however, in reality belongs to a specific social form. For Feuerbach and the older materialists, this social form had been "bourgeois" society; the newer materialism of Marx recognised only human society or socialised humanity.

The defects of extreme objectivism are conspicuous in this theory of revolution. Engels extols Marx on the ground that he did not simply brush aside Hegel, but adopted the revolutionary side of the dialectical method, transforming the Hegelian conceptual dialetic into a materialist dialectic. Here, however, our sole concern is with the concept of revolution, which Engels and Marx attempted to deduce in a purely objectivist manner from the alleged dialectic of the world process. As an answer to this attempt it suffices to insist that there is no objective dialectic, that nature does not exhibit dualism or dialectical trialism, that the evolution of the world cannot be conceived either dualistically or trialistically. Marx and Engels merely foisted the subjective on the objective, projecting into the outer world the conceptual and psychological oppositions and contrasts and the solution of these, and then quite uncritically formulating the résult as a sort of metaphysical law of the universe.

In the development of the individual there occur conflicts and crises which manifest themselves in the form of oppositions,