Hegel, Lenin And Marx

499 Words2 Pages
The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx both believed that objective and rational principles governed the historical process. Hegel’s idea is that each of the stages or ideas that have been overcome to reach a “totality” are true. “The totality is the product of that process which preserves all of its “moments” as elements in a structure, rather than as stages or phases”. For Hegel, it was the dialectical clash of opposing ideas that moved history into the next stage. Marx believed Hegel’s view was too abstract and metaphysical in nature and did not address the problems of the real world. Marx reinterpreted Hegel’s view into his own philosophy of “dialectical materialism”. Instead of simply ideas creating change, he believed it was the clash of different economic classes that caused progress and change in history. Both Hegel and Marx believed the methods of reaching the “totality” are not important because it is only the outcome that is true. In other words, ‘the end justifies the means’. During the 1917 Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin would use Marx’s philosophy of “dialectical materialism” as the basis of his creation of the Bolshevik party. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party split apart creating two factions called the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks, a minority of moderates, were open to all who wished to join them. They supported the idea of a socialistic party that would be ruled and organized in a democratic manner. Lenin created and led the radical majority Bolshevik party. His was a closed party of professional revolutionaries who believed the transition to socialism would best be achieved by a dictatorship and whose followers were mostly peasants, soldiers and people from the working classes. Because of his earlier, disruptive, revolutionary tactics, Lenin was exiled to Europe in the
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