Criterios de selección de las unidades de la muestra y reclutamiento de los

Marx’s critical comments about Hegel’s “dialectical method” complicates the

interpretation of his own. It is well known that Marx took issue with the way in which Hegel attributed a kind of mystical agency to the “Idea,” treating it as a form of alienation whereby rational thought is attributed to the “Concept” existing independently from the minds of human

172 Engels described this as “the Hegelian ‘inner purpose’—i.e., a purpose which is not imported into Nature by some third party acting purposively, such as the wisdom of providence, but lies in the necessity of the thing itself”

(Engels 1934, 78).

173 Hegel 1991, 60.

174 Sayers 1978, 158; Fraser 1997, 99.

175 Marx 1973, 415. Cf. his claim in the third volume of Capital that in “a general analysis of the present kind, it is assumed throughout that actual conditions correspond to their concept, or, and this amounts to the same thing, actual conditions are depicted only in so far as they express their own general type” (Marx 1981, 242).

individuals. Commentators on Marx’s work generally agree that it was this move, according to Marx, which resulted in the mystification of the “dialectical method.” For example, Hegel claimed that the

“Concept, which is initially only subjective proceeds to objectify itself by virtue of its own activity and without the help of an external material or stuff. And likewise the object is not rigid and without process; instead, its process consists in its proving itself to be that which is at the same time subjective, and this forms the advance to the Idea.”¹⁷⁶

This is indeed a key issue that prompted Marx’s divergence from Hegel’s Idealism.¹⁷⁷ In 1873 Marx articulated his criticism as follows:

“My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external,

phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”¹⁷⁸

176 Hegel 1991b, 273.

177 Engels claimed that “in its Hegelian form,” the “dialectical method” was “unusable” because for Hegel

“dialectics is the self-development of the concept,” whereby “the dialectical development apparent in nature and history…is only a copy of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with” (Engels 1958, 43-44).

178 Marx 1976, 102.

Hegel did in fact write that the “developed, authentic actuality” of the Idea “is to be as subject and so as spirit.”¹⁷⁹ However, insofar as it is “subject” as “spirit,” it is arguable that humanity is the “subject” within which Hegel’s “Idea” is realized. According to Hegel, the

“Idea” is the unity of the “Concept” and objectivity¹⁸⁰—hence his assertion that we must “base science…on the development of thought and the concept”—but from the perspective of his philosophy this unity is only achieved in the thinking mind, the “Spirit,” of humanity.¹⁸¹ Hegel’s identification of the human being with “Reason” means that we are a real subject to the extent that “self-conscious Reason” has developed. After all, he wrote that overcoming the “alien character of the objective world that confronts us” requires “tracing…what is objective back to the Concept, which is our innermost self” (my emphasis).¹⁸² The point at which mysticism appears to arise most strongly, however, is with the Absolute Idea: “the Idea that thinks itself”

and “is [present] as thinking”—the “Idea” which, according to Engels, “is only absolute insofar as [Hegel] has absolutely nothing to say about it.”¹⁸³

At the end of his Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel wrote that “Up to this point the Idea in its development through its various stages has been our ob-ject; but from now on, the Idea is its own ob-ject.”¹⁸⁴ He associated the “Absolute Idea” with the “νοήσεως νόησις” of Aristotle, i.e., ‘the thought of thought’ (“God”¹⁸⁵ conceived as pure contemplative activity), and yet for Hegel this could also be a comment on the ‘divine’ nature of rational thought itself—and of humanity as the

179 Hegel 1991b, 287.

180 “The Idea is what is true in and for itself, the absolute unity of Concept and Objectivity…. The Idea is the Truth;

for this means that objectivity corresponds with the Concept” (Hegel 1991b, 286).

181 Hegel 1991, 15; Hegel 1991b, 286.

182 Hegel 1991b, 273.

183 Ibid., 303; Engels 1958, 13.

184 Hegel 1991b, 303.

185 According to Hegel “God alone is the genuine agreement between Concept and reality” (Hegel 1991b, 60).

self-consciously rational being—rather than the “Absolute Idea” per se.¹⁸⁶ In fact, Hegel’s definition of “God” as “Unity of the Universal and Individual” is consistent with the way he describes fully developed humanity, i.e., self-consciously rational individuals.¹⁸⁷

Even though Marx was adamant that his “dialectical method” was the “direct opposite” of Hegel’s, textual evidence indicates that Marx’s “method” was essentially Hegelian insofar as he sublated the ontological idea that “Reason directs the world,” adopted a phenomenological orientation, and conveyed the activity of “speculative” thought in his writing. Marx’s disparaging remarks about Hegel’s “speculative” philosophy¹⁸⁸ are misleading for interpreters of his self-proclaimed ‘materialist’ inversion of Hegel’s method.¹⁸⁹ Abundant textual evidence indicates that Marx thought “speculatively.” In the manuscript that became the third volume of Capital, he wrote that uncovering “the real, inner connections of the capitalist production process is a very intricate thing and a work of great detail; it is one of the tasks of science to reduce the visible and merely apparent movement to the actual inner movement.”¹⁹⁰ Marx’s recognition of the “inner connections” of the capitalist mode of production is “dialectical” (“negatively rational”) in

186 As Geraets et al. claim, “Hegel…is clearly claiming that our thinking has at this stage become ‘divine’” (Ibid., 335).

187 Hegel 1956, 50.Cf. Husserl’s claim that “Along with [our] growing, more and more perfect cognitive power over the universe, [we] also [gain] an ever more perfect mastery over [our] practical surrounding world, one which expands in an unending progression. This also involves a mastery over humankind as belonging to the real surrounding world, i.e., mastery over [ourselves] and [each other], an ever greater power over [our] fate, and thus an ever fuller ‘happiness’—‘happiness’ as rationally conceivable for [us]. For [we] can also know what is true in itself about values and goods. All this lies within the horizon of this rationalism as its obvious consequence for humanity. Humanity is thus truly an image of God. In a sense analogous to that in which mathematics speaks of infinitely distant points, straight lines, etc., one can say metaphorically that God is the ‘infinitely distant human’”

(Husserl 1970, 66).

188 E.g., Marx 1964, 170-193; Marx 1973, 102.

189The fact that Marx charged Hegel with mysticism has encouraged readers who are sympathetic to his thought to write off Hegel as an Idealist whose “speculative” philosophy was of no importance for Marx’s method because it is dissociated from consideration of the ‘material’ world. Norman Levine, for instance, claims that “Marx retained many forms of the Hegelian Method after they were shed of their Speculative content” and that he

“confined the Hegelian System within the Speculative, which he rejected” (Levine 2012, 12, 72).

190 Marx 1981, 428.

Hegel’s sense of the “dialectic” as “the immanent transcending” which overcomes the “one-sidedness and restrictedness of the determinations of the understanding.”¹⁹¹ However, the manner in which Marx comprehended what he believed to be the “actual” movement of the social life-process of capitalism in Capital also involved “speculative” thought because in that text he “apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and in their transition.”¹⁹² It is more accurate to describe Marx’s method as “speculative” because the “dialectical” moment is sublated within the “positive”

moment. If Marx’s cognition had stopped at the “negatively rational” moment he would be stuck positing the mere transience of capitalism.

The significance of “speculative” thought for Marx’s revolutionary social theory is evident, for example, in his recognition of the “inner connection” between economic conditions of “rent (landed property), profit (capital) and wages (wage labour),” which he thought are “conditions of struggle and antagonism” that contain the potential for revolutionary social transformation.¹⁹³ The activity of the “critic” that he described in his letter to Ruge, presented in Capital and elsewhere, displays the birth process of “communist society” as “the true reality.”¹⁹⁴ Thus while his analysis of the capitalist mode of production and criticism of the way it appears to classical and “vulgar” political economists operates in accordance with the principle of “dialectical”

191 Hegel 1991b, 128. This is why “the dialectical,” according to Hegel, “constitutes the moving soul of scientific progression” and “is the principle through which alone immanent coherence and necessity enter into the content of science” (Hegel 1991b, 128).

192 Ibid., 131. Cf. Hegel’s claim that “the essential character of the rational” is “just to bring together what is separated” (Hegel 1971, 49).

193 1975c, 64. Cf. Marx’s critical remark about ‘utopian socialists’ in The Poverty of Philosophy who “see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society”

(Marx and Engels 1976, 177).

194 Hence Engels claim that the “task of economic science” is to indicate the “imminent dissolution” of the capitalist system “and to reveal, within the already dissolving economic development, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange” (Engels 1934, 168).

negativity, his thought is “speculative” nonetheless. We see this, for instance, in a letter to Engels:

“At last we have arrived at the forms of manifestation which serve as the starting point in the vulgar conception: rent…; profit…from capital; wages, from labour. But from our standpoint things now look different. The apparent movement is explained.

Furthermore, A. Smith’s nonsense, which has become the main pillar of all political economy hitherto…is overthrown. The entire movement in this apparent form.

Finally, since those 3 items (wages, rent, profit (interest)) constitute the sources of income of the 3 classes of landowners, capitalists and wage labourers, we have the class struggle, as the conclusion in which the movement and disintegration of the whole shit resolves itself.”¹⁹⁵

This kind of “speculative” thinking is present in the infamous passage on the “negation of the negation” in chapter thirty-two of the first volume of Capital.¹⁹⁶