THE MYTH OF THE MARXIST DIALECTIC
73
(Marx: "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," 1852); or
that "men make their own h"istory, but not until now with a collective
will according to a collective plan" (Engels' letter to Hans Starken–
burg, 1894)?
Engels' fullest attempt to state the point of view is in his essay,
written in 1886, on "Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of German
Classical Philosophy." "Men make their own history," he writes,
"whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own
consciously desired end; and it is precisely tJ!e resultant of these
many wills operating in different directions ahd of their manifold
effects upon the outer world that constitutes history. Thus it is also
a question of what the many individuals desire. The will is deter–
mined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately
determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. Partly
they may be external objects, partly ideal motives, ambition, 'enthu–
siasm for truth and justice,' personal hatred or even purely individual
whims of all sorts. But, on the one hand, we have seen that, for the
most part, the many individual wills active in history produce quite
different results from those they intended-results often, in fact,
quite the opposite; so that in relation to the total result, their motives
are also of only secondary significance. On the other hand, the further
question arises: what driving forces,
in'
turn, stand behind these mo–
tives? What are the historical causes which, in the brains of the actors,
transform themselves into these motives? The old materialism never
put itself this question."
Engels answers with "class struggle for economic emancipation."
But
he
never puts himself the question of precisely how the "ideal mo–
tives" can in turn affect the progress of the class struggle.
The point is that Marx and Engels from the beginning had had
something which had prevented them from putting these questions in
the terms in which we have been discussing them above: they had the
Hegelian Dialectic. From the moment that they had admitted the
Dialectic into their semi-materialistic system, they had admitted an
element of mysticism.
Marx and Engels had both begun as idealists. They imagined
they had brought Hegel down to earth; and certainly nobody had
ever labored more deliberately and energetically than they had to
discredit men's futile illusions, to rub men's noses in their human
miseries, to hold men's minds to their practical problems. And yet
the very fact of their insistent effort-which an Englishman or a
Frenchman would never have ·found necessary-betrays their con–
trary predisposition. They had actually carried along with them a
