During the resolution of a real contradiction, the relationship between the contradictory sides has to change. Marx called this process that leads to resolution “development.” Development involves at least four kinds of changes:
(1) Development involves a contradiction becoming simpler and more clearly defined. For example, the transformation of landowners into capitalists is a “movement of reality” that “will simplify the opposition [between labor and capital], drive it to a peak and therefore accelerate its resolution.”
(2) In development a contradiction becomes more obvious. For example in a crisis in the world market like the present one, “the “contradictions and oppositions of bourgeois production become striking.”
(3) In development a contradiction becomes sharper, more intense, or being “driven to a peak.” For example, Marx wrote that England in 1848 was “the country in which the oppositions of modern bourgeois society, the class struggles between bourgeoisie and proletariat, are developed most fully and driven to the highest peak.”
(4) In development a contradiction causes motion of some kind. Marx wrote that the process of exchange of commodities “includes relations that contradict and exclude one another. The development of the commodity does not cancel these contradictions, but creates a form within which they can move. This is in general the method through which real contradictions are solved.” He also said in Capital, Volume I, that the elliptical motion of a planet around the Sun is caused by contradictory factors.
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