Marx’s Struggle against Defamation: 150th Anniv. tribute to “Herr Vogt”

by Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A refutation of the myth of inconsistency

[Editors' note, Oct. 8, 2011: Readers may also be interested in the related WSS article, concerning libel against the author: "Condemn Libelous Attack on Marx Scholar."] ,

The following text is the revised and corrected version of Dec. 29, 2010. For the original version of Dec. 23, click here.

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Brief Comments on the Relationship between Marxism and the Hegelian Dialectic

By C. S.

This article originally appeared in May of 2008 in Marxist-Humanism Today, the online publication of the now-defunct Marxist-Humanist Committee.

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!”

– V. I. Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic [1]

Marx says in his Postface to the second edition of Volume 1 of Capital [2] that his method is none other than the dialectic. It is not, however, a direct application of the Hegelian dialectic. On the contrary, Marx tells us that the dialectic in Hegel-based on the journey and self-development of the Idea, of which the world is a result or “external appearance”-is exactly the opposite of his own. With Marx we have a materialist dialectic wherein the Idea is a “reflection” of the real world rather than its creator [3]. And yet Marx also goes on to call himself a “pupil of that mighty thinker [Hegel],” and says that the “mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner,” calling the “rational kernel” inherent in Hegel’s dialectic “critical and revolutionary” [4]. Read More