THE DEVIL THEORY OF THE DIALECTIC
87
the bourgeoisie in 1914, it was because that they were drugged by the
opium of the Dialectic, which assured them that socialism would come
of its own accord. Similarly, Mr. Wilson ascribes the waning militancy
of the Third International to its faith in the Dialectic.
All
this
sounds
like a doctrine of original sin; yet Mr. Wilson would give no quarter
to the alleged idealism of Marx. Certainly Mr. Wilson endows the
Dialectic with far greater historical power than its most orthodox ad–
vocates do.
Mr. Wilson's difficulties, I believe, arise from his unhistorical ap–
proach to a theory of history that w¥ created in a specific epoch and
later adapted by organizations and individuals to their own political
and cultural needs. Hence Mr. Wilson draws no distinction between its
original meaning and its subsequent distortions. For example, it has
been frequently pointed out that the theoreticians of the Second Inter–
national perverted Marxism into an anemic and respectable method
of bargaining with the bourgeoisie. They would not themselves under–
take the responsibilities of a social revolution, and so they preached the
benevolence of history as proof that socialism was inevitable. Nor is
Mr. Wilson justified in laying the sins of Stalin at the bier of Marx,
for Stalinism must be divided into two phases neither of which Marx
was responsible for. At first the Third International created a leftist
caricature of Marxism in its attempt to prove its own orthodoxy as
against the ostensible heresies of its opponents; while more recently
Stalinists have concerned themselves very little about either the spirit
or the letter of Marx's writing. Even the Dialectic is sponsored today,
for the most part, not by official spokesmen but by those academic sup–
porters of the Communist Party, who, having learned one trade, are
now too old to learn another.
Similarly, we cannot hope to understand Marx's philosophy with–
out investigating how he used the available intellectual tools of his
time for his revolutionary purposes. Obviously this would take an ex–
tended study, but the relation can be seen in two of the very questions
e have been discussing: the Dialectic and the 'inevitability' of
ialism.
Marx, above all, was concerned with the principle of
change
in
· tory as opposed to those traditional theories which, erected on the
pparent realities of the moment, were largely indifferent to the pro–
which constantly dissolved the present into the past. In this re-
ct, Hegel, despite his inability to see beyond the Prussian state and
· belief in spirit as the prime mover of history, was one of the most
ical of Marx's forerunners, for Hegel recognized the organic trans-
