The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Marx and Before

To understand dialectical materialism, one must truly understand what philosophers before Marx had said. Here, I present a simple account based on my own understanding. It is not meant to be rigorous. For an accurate understanding of those philosophical thoughts, one still needs to read books. All of us will at some point think about what is meaningful and what is not. The ancients were no different. Ancient Greek philosophers’ approach to solving this problem was to first study the essence of the world and then discuss what people should do based on the essence of the world.

Unfortunately, in that era, whether it was the atomic theory, the element theory, or other doctrines, none could be verified and convince most people in the absence of research tools. Therefore, the vast majority of people in that era could not comprehend the meaning of life from the objective world. As a social creature, the easiest source of a sense of meaning for people is the collective around them. Thus, except for China, the rest of the world embarked on the path of religion in that era. Religious doctrines became the ultimate standard for most people at that time to judge the value of things. China, on the other hand, took the path of patriarchal clan and family inheritance.

In the Middle Ages when religion was dominant, the continuously perfected theology answered all questions about the world, value, and life. However, fiction is the biggest flaw of all fictional things. There will always be people who realize the contradictions between religious doctrines and the objective world. Therefore, in order to fill the loopholes, theological theories must become more and more complicated, and religious doctrines must become more and more stringent. The increasingly complex theological theories and increasingly strict religious doctrines brought more and more political power to theocracy. Along with it came an increasingly corrupt religious hierarchy. So, in the face of the corrupt rule of the religious hierarchy, people would reflect: Why should the religious hierarchy say whatever it wants? Perhaps what God wants is for each of us to live well. So real people should be the measure of value, not the religious doctrines that even the religious hierarchy itself seems not to believe in.

Then people began to pursue personal freedom as the goal, and realizing personal freedom became the meaning of life. When liberalism had become the consensus of the European people, philosophers realized a problem: After overthrowing feudal rule and realizing personal freedom, what is the meaning of life? So they continued on the path explored by ancient Greek philosophers - first study the essence of the world. Fortunately, at this time, their research tools were far superior to those of ancient Greek predecessors, and they had the logical tools accumulated during the period of theological rule. However, they got stuck at the first step of this path - how to prove that the world is objectively existent?

The key to this problem lies in finding the most primitive “existence.” Without an “existence” as a starting point, it is impossible to prove the existence of other things. Once something is proven to exist, it means that at least this thing exists in this world. Then the world exists, and the existence or non-existence of other things can be discussed calmly. Leibniz believed that the existence of God can be proven: God is “perfect.” If God did not exist, it would violate this characteristic of “perfection.” Therefore, God must exist. Philosophers who do not believe in God scoff at this - whether “existence” can be a property of the connotation of things is debatable for now. This inference obviously replaces proof with definition and is logically incorrect. At this time, Descartes stepped forward and uttered his famous saying: “I think, therefore I am.” - I am thinking about this problem, which means there is something that is engaged in the activity of thinking. This means that this thing must exist (otherwise no activity can be carried out). This became the first widely recognized assertion about the existence of the world at that time. Later philosophers proved and expounded what they believed to be the truth starting from the existence of consciousness, opening up idealist philosophy. Idealist philosophy is full of profound and wonderful assertions and is not as fragile and absurd as described in high school textbooks.

While idealist philosophy was developing, there were also a group of philosophers who thought that Descartes’ assertion had loopholes and could not prove the existence of thought. Hume sealed the deal: No matter what existence is proven, the process must use logical methods, that is, induction and deduction. So we must prove the validity of logic before we prove anything. However, to prove the validity of logic, we must also use logic. How can we use unproven logic to prove logic is valid? Therefore, we cannot prove any proposition completely rigorously. This is skepticism. Since then, philosophers have basically given up the path of strictly proving the existence of the world first and instead mostly start their discussions by assuming the existence of certain things. It is worth mentioning that Kant is an exception. Kant seems to have strictly proven the existence of consciousness. Modern philosophy is built on Kant’s philosophy, but I don’t understand it.

Marx and Engels

Materialism is actually directly assuming that in general, the things we see are objective existences, skipping the proof of the existence of the objective world. So there have always been philosophers who think that materialism is very crude. The reason why Marx chose materialism as the foundation is also simple: He wants to change the world rather than be a philosopher. Let’s go back to the beginning of the question: We discuss what is the most primitive existence because we want to discuss what the essence of the world is and then discuss what is meaningful. The reason we consider what is meaningful is that after overthrowing feudal rule, individuals are free and we need to find the next goal. But are we really free? And is everyone free?

Obviously, Marx didn’t think so. He could see that many workers were living a very miserable life. The only freedom they could choose was to starve to death freely. Even today, we can still feel that we are not free. We have to study subjects we are not interested in, engage in jobs we don’t like, and do things we don’t want to do. It’s just that the hard oppression has turned into situational pressure. But at that time, all theories could not explain the reason for this phenomenon. No one could answer why so many people were still living so miserably after everyone had the right to freedom. Many people attributed this to personal reasons such as the laziness and bad character of those workers and were keen to find examples that fit their imagination as “evidence.” Perhaps because this can bring a sense of superiority to people who live well. This one-sided propaganda was widely accepted, and the idea that everyone’s situation is determined by personal characteristics became a widely recognized consensus. Naturally, people at the bottom had no way to refute. This view is naturally absurd in the eyes of people with good living conditions and empathy. Conscientious entrepreneurs know that the tragic situation of their workers is mainly determined by social conditions as long as they have contact with their workers with kindness. So before Marx, the thought we now call utopian socialism already existed, and many pioneers had already conducted experiments. Unfortunately, these experiments all failed.

Marx believed that the theories of previous socialists must be problematic. He must first study out the correct guiding theory before he could truly change the world. Like most people, his first thought was to reform the political system, so he began to study political philosophy (legal philosophy). But he soon discovered that the political system was only the surface of the problem. Almost all the political philosophy theories at that time could be reflected in the systems of various countries in the world. However, no country had truly solved the problem of the oppression of the bottom people. He realized that the root of the problem did not lie in political philosophy but in the philosophical foundation on which political philosophy was based.

After long-term research, Marx and Engels established dialectical materialism as the philosophical foundation of the Marxist theoretical system. The reason for choosing materialism has been explained earlier. Then why dialectics? Basically, there are only two philosophical methods: formal logic and dialectics. Marx and Engels must choose one of them. In fact, formal logic still dominates the field of philosophy today. Because formal logic is very accurate and clear and very suitable for scientific research. The induction and deduction we are familiar with are part of formal logic. Most of the scientific achievements made by humans since modern times are based on inferences of formal logic. In comparison, dialectics seems very unrigorous. A thesis plus an antithesis finally leads to a synthesis, like a language game. It is easy to make people doubt its ability to explain the world. But with the development of science, especially the rise of systems science and complexity science, scientists and philosophers have gradually realized the limitations of formal logic - formal logic implies the assumption that humans can understand and describe the world in a simple form. It is very weak in dealing with complex problems. Relying too much on formal logic can easily lead researchers to ignore and deny the existence of complexity. Scientific methods based on formal logic focus on reductionism, that is, gradually decomposing complex things into multiple low-level parts until each part can be understood in a simple form. Then, based on the understanding of each part, an understanding of the whole is generated. However, complexity is an objective existence. Reduction will inevitably ignore some things and properties that only appear at a high level. The simplest example is when we disassemble a person into a combination of various organs to understand, we lose the understanding of this person’s thought. In the field of social sciences where extremely complex humans are the basic unit, the deficiencies of formal logic and reductionism are particularly obvious. The comprehensiveness of dialectics in the reasoning process precisely meets the requirements of complex science to treat complex problems as complex problems. Even in Marx and Engels’ time when people did not yet have an understanding of complexity and only a few philosophers had a shallow understanding of the limitations of formal logic, Marx and Engels still firmly chose dialectics. Marx and Engels’ judgment that far surpasses their time is truly astonishing. This is also the reason why Qian Xuesen, the founder of the Chinese school of systems science, highly praises Marxism.

After having a philosophical weapon, Marx began to analyze the causes of social reality problems. Through historical research, he found that what truly promotes the development of political systems and cultural trends is the economic system. The economic system of an era is determined by the production conditions at that time, that is, productive forces determine production relations, and production relations determine other relations. This is historical materialism. After realizing the importance of economic issues, Marx began to invest in economic research (in fact, the philosophical theory part of Marxist theory is mainly written by Engels. Marx had already started historical and economic research at the same time). Marx’s understanding of political economy is different from that of other economists from the very beginning. Traditional and later non-Marxist political economy research focuses on market laws and the operation of national economic systems. Marx starts his research from human value. I once didn’t understand the significance of the “value” concept in Marxist political economy. Adam Smith’s division of value and use value is very intuitive. Classical economics abandoning the concept of value and focusing on the study of price is also very in line with the needs of scientific research. Only Marxist political economy insists on measuring commodity value with socially necessary labor time, like a deliberately left loophole - this definition is very abstract and extremely difficult to prove empirically. From both philosophical and scientific perspectives, this is the most vulnerable target of Marxist theory.

Later, I figured it out: Because labor time is the only relatively fair thing for everyone. Some people are born with beautiful looks, some are born with good talents, some are born with wealthy families, some are born with high power to inherit, and some have all of the above, while some have none of the above. Except for time, using anything to measure value will make people unequal from birth. For people with beautiful appearances, it is easy to gain people’s affection. For people with ugly appearances, they need to make every effort to reverse others’ bad impressions. For people with intelligence, it is natural to obtain fame and fortune through learning. For stupid people, they need to put in a hundred times more effort. For people from wealthy families, taking out a sum of money to buy what they want or invest in themselves is just a drop in the bucket. For poor people, all the good things in the world are out of reach. People born into powerful families can command others since childhood. Being surrounded by stars is just their daily life. For children from ordinary families, it is even a slim hope to become a star. Time is relatively fair. For the vast majority of people today, the next hour is just an hour. No one can take out more than an hour in an hour. Although everyone has a different total amount of time that can be allocated due to different lifespans, living longer also requires more time for consumption. So the length of life has little impact on the fairness of time. Therefore, if everyone can exchange goods produced in the same amount of labor time at an equal price, then inequality can be eliminated at its root.

But we must note that eliminating inequality is not the ultimate goal of Marxism but only a process. To understand Marxism, one must always remember the starting point: Why are many people still not free in reality after the regime has given everyone the right to freedom? Realizing the freedom of all humanity is the ultimate goal of Marxism, and this freedom must be accompanied by comprehensive and developed freedom. When Marx proposed the comprehensive and free development of each person, his vision spanned history. If we only look at the few hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, we will think that the exploitation and oppression of people by people is the main contradiction facing humanity. However, when we look at the long history of humanity, we will realize that natural disasters are the source of human suffering. In order to combat hunger and illness, humans have mastered production technology and medical technology. Thus, there are wealth and poverty, exploitation and being exploited. In order to combat poisonous snakes and beasts, humans invented weapons and created organizational systems. Thus, there is inequality in military power between ethnic groups. Thus, there are relationships of conquest and being conquered, enslavement and being enslaved. Therefore, to achieve true freedom for all humanity, humans must be developed. They must develop to the extent that the suffering of nature no longer requires humans to pay the price of unfreedom. And among developed humans, everyone must be comprehensive. Comprehensive does not mean omnipotent. Comprehensive means that one has the power to choose to develop any aspect. If a person is confined to a certain field, he will never know the situation in other fields. Narrow cognition will make him actually unfree.

A big difference between Marxism and other socialist thoughts lies in the attitude towards violence. Most intellectuals will instinctively dislike the role of violence in politics because violence is often the force that intellectuals are least good at using. But Marx believed that only by using violence can the rule of the bourgeoisie be overthrown. Gentle reform cannot overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie. The rule of the bourgeoisie is different from feudal rule, which clearly divides people into different classes by status. The bourgeoisie uses the appearance of “equality for all” at the political level to cover up the reality of their exploitative rule maintained by capital. They use all means to make people believe that their wealth comes from their own qualities and talents. As long as they work hard, everyone can obtain the same wealth. They never mention the wealth they inherit from birth. Piketty proved with real data in “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” that from a long historical perspective, most of the time, the rate of return on capital is higher than the growth rate of the social economy. Wealth will inevitably become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few people. This is completely consistent with Marx’s inference (in fact, Marx also conducted an empirical analysis with tax return data in “Das Kapital,” but Piketty’s thinking is easier for us today to understand). In the absence of violence, the more wealth one has, the greater the power that can be mobilized. So if violence is not used, the power of the bourgeoisie will inevitably be stronger than that of the proletariat. The proletariat will never have a day when it is stronger than the bourgeoisie to carry out thorough reform. Therefore, the proletariat must use violence to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie. The purpose of violence is to make the wealth of the bourgeoisie able to be converted into less power. The proletariat can do without the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie cannot do without the proletariat (otherwise there will be no one to provide labor for production). The bourgeoisie cannot completely eliminate the proletariat. So as long as the struggle is persisted in, victory will ultimately belong to the proletariat.

Marx lived in the period after the end of the first Industrial Revolution. Naturally, he would think that the development of productive forces under the capitalist system had reached its limit. And he believed that if all humanity shared the fruits of industrial production in his time, it would be enough to make all humanity live a relatively prosperous life. So the main task at present is to overthrow the decadent system left by the old society with insufficient productive forces and enter communist society, and then further promote the development of social productive forces. However, the subsequent rise of the second Industrial Revolution proved that the rule of the bourgeoisie was not over yet. So the future Marx saw was actually a more distant future. From a later perspective, feudalism became mainstream because the development of agricultural tools made land the most important production factor. The rise of capitalism is because the invention of production machines made capital that can purchase machines the most important production factor. Only when something new makes the most important production factor change can institutional change be irresistible. The importance of people had not yet been highlighted in Marx’s time. Therefore, it is bound to be very difficult to establish a communist system at that time. Marx believed that socialism and communism must be realized first in the most developed countries and then expanded to the whole world. In Marx’s theory, the coexistence of socialist countries and capitalist countries is impossible. Even if there is, it is only a short transitional period. Because capitalist countries that have developed into the imperialist stage rely on exploiting colonies to maintain good living conditions for their nationals and keep domestic stability without revolution. And socialist countries cannot be isolated from the world. Otherwise, they will inevitably fall into technological and cultural backwardness in isolation. So they must help other regions of the world gain liberation, which means they must shake the exploitation and rule of capitalist countries over colonies. So socialist countries and capitalist countries are incompatible from the very beginning. Either capitalism temporarily extinguishes the spark of socialism, or socialism will defeat capitalism forever. There is no middle way.