Marx is, and always has been, saying that it is philosophy that will transform society. But, what does he think philosophy is?
In many, if not all, of his early philosophical writings, he speaks of philosophy as
the practice (praxis) of exposing
theoretical contradictions. And, yes, he holds that thought leads to action.
From his 1841 doctoral dissertation:
Inasmuch as philosophy as will turns toward the world of appearances, the [philosophical] system is reduced to an abstract totality and thus becomes one side of the world confronted by another side. Its relation to the world is a reflexive relation. Caught up in the drive to realise itself it comes into tension with everything else. Its inner self-sufficiency and rounded completeness is destroyed. What was an inner light becomes a consuming flame, turned outward. We thus arrive at the consequence that the world’s becoming philosophical is at the same time philosophy’s becoming worldly, that the realisation of philosophy is at the same time its loss, that what it struggles against outside is its own inner defect, that it is precisely in this struggle that it falls into the defects which it fights in its opponents, and that it can transcend these defects only by falling victim to them. That which opposes philosophy and that which philosophy struggles against is always the same thing as philosophy, only with the factors reversed.
So, how does one transform a society if the majority of it is kept in the philosophical dark by virtue of the internal contradictions within a theoretical system, as is the case with a uneducated proletariat in the system of capital (questions of “will” and “intent” notwithstanding), and does not to stand its ground? Such a thing is impossibly, of course! One has to conclude that the idea is not, indeed, to transform this society at all. And, again, the implication of this is what, if not that man is himself inherently dumb, or evil? Largely unconscious, I, of course, accept. What else could speak accurately to the existing state of affairs?
This question, investigated thoroughly, and a Marx read accordingly, I think reveals all there is to know about him.
He points with this to the internal contradiction of capitalist thought against an actual state of affairs (and precisely to what he means by socialism)—the contradiction exposed by way of incongruence between the rational (true) and the existing (material) state of affairs. In that way he is a materialist. And, here too, is where one must be reminded not to be confused by the fact that where he speaks in all his writings in specific socio-political terms, he speaks of a particular mid-late 1800s Germany. One hint of this would be his paper, a response to Bruno Bauer, “On the Jewish Question.” This question is, of course, a different question today.
In this way, the materialist and the idealist must become one—the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie the proletariat. Once this occurs, you will not, necessarily and by definition, have class, a "bourgeoisie," but socialism itself.
Only in that way can
society transform; but never under capitalism because capitalism literally, theoretically, actually,
needs a proletariat.
