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 aspects of Hegel. As a result the revolutionary core of his thought 
 became almost totally obscure even for Marxists. 
  
 A conceptual mythology always points to the failure to understand a 
 fundamental condition of human existence, one whose effects cannot be 
 warded off. This failure to penetrate the object is expressed 
 intellectually in terms of transcendental forces which construct and 
 shape reality, the relations between objects, our relations with them 
 and their transformations in the course of history in a mythological 
 fashion. By recognising that €the production and reproduction of real 
 life (is) in the last resort the decisive factor in history€, [29] Marx 
 and Engels gained a vantage-point from which they could settle accounts 
 with all mythologies. Hegel€s absolute spirit was the last of these 
 grandiose mythological schemes. It already contained the totality and 
 its movement, even though it was unaware of its real character. Thus in 
 historical materialism reason €which has always existed though not 
 always in a rational form€, [30] achieved that €rational€ form by 
 discovering its real substratum, the basis from which human life will 
 really be able to become conscious of itself. This completed the 
 programme of Hegel€s philosophy of history, even though at the cost of 
 the destruction of his system. In contrast to nature in which, as Hegel 
 emphasises, [31] €change goes in a circle, repeating the same thing€, 
 change in history takes place €in the concept as well as on the surface. 
 It is the concept itself which is corrected.€ 
  
 ** 
  
 5 
  
 The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: €It is not men€s 
 consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, 
 their social existence that determines their consciousness.€ Only in the 
 context sketched above can this premise point beyond mere theory and 
 become a question of praxis. Only when the core of existence stands 
 revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, 
 albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity. This 
 activity will be seen in its turn as the element crucial for the 
 transformation of existence. Man finds himself confronted by purely 
 natural relations or social forms mystified into natural relations. They 
 appear to be fixed, complete and immutable entities which can be 
 manipulated and even comprehended, but never overthrown. But also this 
 situation creates the possibility of praxis in the individual 
 consciousness. Praxis becomes the form of action appropriate to the 
 isolated individual, it becomes his ethics. Feuerbach€s attempt to 
 supersede Hegel foundered on this reef: like the German idealists, and 
 to a much greater extent than Hegel, he stopped short at the isolated 
 individual of €civil society€. 
  
 Marx urged us to understand €the sensuous world€, the object, reality, 
 as human sensuous activity. [32] This means that man must become 
 conscious of himself as a social being, as simultaneously the subject 
 and object of the socio-historical process. In feudal society man could 
 not yet see himself as a social being because his social relations were 
 still mainly natural. Society was far too unorganised and had far too 
 little control over the totality of relations between men for it to 
 appear to consciousness as the reality of man. (The question of the 
 structure and unity of feudal society cannot be considered in any detail 
 here.) Bourgeois society carried out the process of socialising society. 
 Capitalism destroyed both the spatio-temporal barriers between different 
 lands and territories and also the legal partitions between the different 
 €estates€ (St€nde). In its universe there is a formal equality for all 
 men; the economic relations that directly determined the metabolic 
 exchange between men and nature progressively disappear. Man becomes, 
 in the true sense of the word, a social being. Society. becomes the 
 reality for man. 
  
 Thus the recognition that society is reality becomes possible only under 
 capitalism, in bourgeois society. But the class which carried out this 
 revolution did so without consciousness of its function; the social 
 forces it unleashed, the very forces that carried it to supremacy seemed 
 to be opposed to it like a second nature, but a more soulless, 
 impenetrable nature than feudalism ever was. [33] It was necessary for 
 the proletariat to be born for social reality to become fully conscious. 
 The reason for this is that the discovery of the class-outlook of the 
 proletariat provided a vantage point from which to survey the whole of 
 society. With the emergence of historical materialism there arose the 
 theory of the €conditions for the liberation of the proletariat€ and the 
 doctrine of reality understood as the total process of social evolution. 
 This was only possible because for the proletariat the total knowledge 
 of its class-situation was a vital necessity, a matter of life and death; 
 because its class situation becomes comprehensible only if the whole of 
 society can be understood; and because this understanding is the 
 inescapable precondition of its actions. Thus the unity of theory and 
 practice is only the reverse side of the social and historical position 
 of the proletariat. 
  
  From its own point of view self-knowledge coincides with knowledge of 
 the whole so that the proletariat is at one and the same time the 
 subject and object of its own knowledge. 
  
 The mission of raising humanity to a higher level is based, as Hegel 
 rightly observed [34] (although he was still concerned with nations), on 
 the fact that these €stages of evolution exist as immediate, natural, 
 principles€ and it devolves upon every nation (i.e. class) €endowed with 
 such a natural principle to put it into practice.€ Marx concretises this 
 idea with great clarity by applying it to social development: [35] 
  
 €If socialist writers attribute this world-historical role to the 
 proletariat it is not because they believe ... that the proletariat are 
 gods. Far from it. The proletariat can and must liberate itself because 
 when the proletariat is fully developed, its humanity and even the 
 appearance of its humanity has become totally abstract; because in the 
 conditions of its life all the conditions of life of contemporary 
 society find their most inhuman consummation; because in the proletariat 
 man is lost to himself but at the same time he has acquired a 
 theoretical consciousness of this loss, and is driven by the absolutely 
 imperious dictates of his misery € the practical expression of this 
 necessity € which can no longer be ignored or whitewashed, to rebel 
 against this inhumanity. However, the proletariat cannot liberate itself 
 without destroying the conditions of its own life. But it cannot do that 
 without destroying all the inhuman conditions of life in contemporary 
 society which exist in the proletariat in a concentrated form.€ 
  
 Thus the essence of the method of historical materialism is inseparable 
 from the €practical and critical€ activity of the proletariat: both are 
 aspects of the same process of social evolution. So, too, the knowledge 
 of reality provided by the dialectical method is likewise inseparable 
 from the class standpoint of the proletariat. The question raised by the 
 Austrian Marxists of the methodological separation of the €pure€ science 
 of Marxism from socialism is a pseudo-problem. [36] For, the Marxist 
 method, the dialectical materialist knowledge of reality, can arise only 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)