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p For the theory of social development, once a collection of more or less adequate guesses, to become a genuine science there was need considerably to enrich the concept of development and to give it true depth and fullness. Of much importance for this were the conclusions drawn by bourgeois social thinkers in the early 19th century, notably Hegel, who gave a profound critique of the false notions of development as some kind of straightforward process which were characteristic of the 18th century. Fourier had tried to abandon these ideas but having taken a step forward he found himself captive to a cyclical scheme. Dialectics alone provided a notion of social development, with retreats and repetitions of what had been travelled at a higher level.

p Saint-Simon’s metaphysical contrast of destructive and creative epochs was a naive attempt to gain an understanding of the connection between the evolutionary and the revolutionary ways of social development. Hegel’s dialectics indicated the way to a correct formulation of the problem. Development was a ceaseless process in 98 which the new emerged and the old was destroyed, a process of ascent from the lower to the higher. Hegel’s idea that contradictions everywhere generated movement, while gradual quantitative changes led to leaps resulting in a change of quality, was of tremendous importance. He summed up and developed many ideas expressed by prominent minds in the past, and Herzen was right when he said that dialectics was “the algebra of revolution”.

p However, Hegel’s dialectics could not be applied ready-made t6 the problems posed by the theory of social development, for this would not result in a discovery of the main thing, of the source of society’s self-movement. Science had not advanced materially from the fact that the absolute spirit had appeared in place of Fourier’s human passions. The absolute spirit provided no reasonable explanation for the concrete expressions of capitalism, which Fourier, for instance, observed. Saint-Simon’s consideration of the role and prospects for man’s conquest of nature was not to be solved either through an application of the dialectics of ideas.

p Before Marx’s lifetime, many futile attempts had been made to combine Utopian socialism and communism with Hegel’s idealistic philosophy in the hope of producing a new world outlook. Thus, the German journalist Hess, seeking to combine Left-wing Hegelianism and Utopian communism, came to Paris at the end of 1842 in an effort to contact the League of the Just. Hess extolled in every way the idea of action and the “philosophy of action”, but his political conception did not go beyond individual anarchism.  [98•9  The Left-wing Hegelian A. Ruge also came to Paris to spread German idealist philosophy and to “unite” it with some French Left-wing trends. He held that German philosophy “would not become a force until it acted in Paris, merging with the French spirit".  [98•10  Actually, the whole boiled down to obscure idealistic discourses about humanism. It was quite futile to bring about a mechanical merger of Left-wing Hegelianism and Utopian socialism and communism. In their early works, Marx and Engels gave a devastating critique of these attempts.

p In order to produce a coherent and consistent revolutionary world outlook, with dialectical materialism providing the only philosophical basis, there was need for a fundamental creative reformulation of the traditions of French socialism and the basis of German classical philosophy, so as to release dialectics from the fetters of idealism, and to carry the critique of the bourgeois system to its very foundations, to its economic and social relations, instead of a mere moral condemnation of the system.

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p In his Philosophy of History, Hegel himself tried to apply the idea of development to history. He depicted world history as a kind of ladder leading mankind to ever greater spiritual perfection. That was an attempt to explain the past by fitting it into the Procrustean bed of an idealistic scheme. Hegel suffered a severe setback when dealing with mankind’s future and seeking to stop the tide of history by presenting the realities of contemporary Germany as its consummation.

p But Hegel also made some brilliant guesses about the historical process and came close to understanding the fundamental importance of the process of labour in social development. That is where his theory contains the origins of historical materialism. These were discerned by Marx and Engels who developed and enriched them and produced a coherent theory. Summing up Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, Lenin underscored the following important idea: “Man with his requirements behaves in a practical way in relation to external nature; in making it serve for his satisfaction, he wears it away, thereby setting to work as an intermediary. For natural objects are powerful and offer resistance in many different ways. In order to subdue them, man introduces other natural objects, thus turning nature against itself, and he invents tools for this purpose."  [99•11  That was undoubtedly the origin of the right approach to analysing the process of labour, the basis on which society develops. Hegel elaborated the idea in the following words: “IN HIS TOOLS MAN POSSESSES POWER OVER EXTERNAL NATURE, ALTHOUGH AS REGARDS HIS ENDS, HE FREQUENTLY IS SUBJECTED TO IT.”  [99•12  Having quoted Hegel, Lenin added: “In actual fact, men’s ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it,—they find it as something given, present."  [99•13  These ideas of Hegel’s suggested the possibility of applying materialism to an understanding of the key social phenomena, of taking the materialist approach to analysing the basis of man’s whole activity. Having studied Hegel’s ideas, Lenin characterised “HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AS ONE OF THE APPLICATIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS OF THE IDEAS OF GENIUS—SEEDS EXISTING IN EMBRYO IN HEGEL".  [99•14  Thus, dialectics, the fullest doctrine of development, even when fettered by the idealist system, tended to make its way through the system and led to the origination of some correct conclusions concerning the key aspects of social life.

p Hegel also took an idealistic approach to the question of the necessity in the historical process, and of the epochs of world history as necessary stages in development. He opposed the theories which presented the 100 historical process as an agglomeration of accidents, as a sphere of arbitrary development. This was of much importance in the ideological struggle of that period. He raised the question of the alienation of man’s activity under the domination of private-property relations, even if he did so idealistically, thereby paving the way for a critique of the ideology and social relations of bourgeois society.

p The dialectical method combined organically with materialism was vital to the theory of social development because idealism was proving incapable of tackling the fundamental problems in its interpretation of social phenomena. It turned out that the substance of social relations could not be determined in the light of idealism. Hegel, Marx wrote, “puts self-consciousness in the place of man”, so that “the most varied human reality appears only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness”.  [100•15  There was need for a titanic mental effort to produce in place of the guesswork about reality a scientific theory of social development explaining actual processes, showing their objective laws and indicating how these processes were reflected in the minds of men.

But for scientific communism, based on a genuinely scientific theory of social development and the fullest and most profound comprehension of man’s social activity, to emerge there was need for great advances not only in philosophy but also in the study of production, a special sphere of men’s social activity. It was impossible to understand man as a social being without analysing material production, as otherwise thought was doomed to confine itself to Feuerbach’s abstract man. Social thought as expressed in the writings of the Utopian socialists, notably Saint-Simon, had arrived at the question of the role this sphere had to play in mankind’s future. Hegel tried to obtain a philosophical understanding of the meaning of labour in the historical process, but he was prevented from doing so by idealism.