As a student, Karl Marx was keen on studying Hegel’s philosophy. He found Hegel’s idea of history as a journey through stages and conflicts compelling. However, unlike other Marxists, he believed that this journey was not just political and economic. Like other left-wing ‘young Hegelians’, Marx rejected the idea of an inevitable progression toward ever greater freedom and prosperity. Instead, he thought that all societies were locked together in a dynamic struggle to create wealth. As a result, he rejected Hegel’s idealism and instead looked at his own society critically. With his newfound admiration for Feuerbach, Marx called this approach ‘materialism’ – seeing reality as it really is – and tried to understand what could be done to improve it famously declaring ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’
By adopting a dialectical approach to understand his ideas, Marx analyzed the history of capitalism in terms of class struggle rather than the spirit. He believed that philosophy could not just analyze history as a series of class struggles, but also offer a view of future progress to a class-free society. Through the application of materialist dialectics to his own ideas, he showed that the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie lead to the synthesis of communism.
