askchapo

Every single thing is the product of its contradictions; as a consequence, everything is in a constant state of change due to the contradictions within it which come to define new states of being. The only thing that is constant is change. In this sense, even the most rotten person, the worst criminals in history, have in their essence a conflict between what they actually are and what they could be instead. It's much like how the present world is in contradiction with the future world it's pregnant with.

I think the standard leftist response to this kind of question involves talking about how individuals are only that, individual, and their morality should be assessed not just as a question of how they behave in absolute terms, but how they function within the system in which they live. And I think this is true, but it does run the risk of erasing an important feature of dialectical analysis: what drives a thing to radically change is not the presence of some external force or its external contradictions, but always its internal contradictions, even when external forces are conditional for a change. No amount of heat will ever turn a rock into a chicken, but heat will help an egg hatch into a chicken. Similarly, people actually have the potential to change regardless of the external forces that they are interacting with, it's only that their environment may enable them to change, or they may need a different environment to do so.