It is the success of this presentation, he explains, that has given readers the impression of “an a priori construction” in the Hegelian fashion, while in fact the method employed is “exactly opposite” to such a procedure (Marx 1976a, 102).
Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. Nonetheless, it is of interest to examine Marx’s conception of the dialectic in Capital, with an eye both to the ideegeschichtliche question of Marx’s use of the Hegelian logic and to a clarification of Marx’s methodological procedure for its own sake.Ĭommenting in the Postface on the criticism of his book as overly “German-dialectical,” Marx distinguished the “method of presentation of theoretical material from the “method of inquiry.” “The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Even if Marx’s analysis of capital has, as he suggests, the form of an inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, its means and method should be discoverable in that analysis itself. It may even be seen as at loggerheads with Hegel’s own conception of dialectic as not an external form, but the soul and concept of the content,” for “it can only be the nature of the content itself which spontaneously develops itself in a scientific manner of knowing” (Hegel 1892, 378 1969b, 27) -an opinion certainly shared by Marx, though with a somewhat different meaning. The thought that mastery of Hegel’s Logic is, as Lenin was one of the first to declare, a sine qua non for the comprehension of Capital is an alarming one, given the obscurities of the former work. Roman Rosdolsky’s book, The Making of Marx’s “Capital,” similarly claimed that the Grundrisse, a key to the understanding of Capital, was a “massive reference” to Hegel’s Logic, so that “academic critics of Marx will no longer be able to write without having first studied his method and its relation to Hegel” (Rosdolsky 1977, xiii). The rediscovery of the Grundrisse has led to a flood of interpretations of Marx’s work as a materialist use of Hegel’s dialectical logic, exemplified by Hans-Jurgen Krahl’s declaration: “The basic concept of the Marxian critique of political economy, the commodity form of the product in its general validity for the capitalist social formation, can not be explained without Hegel’s dialectic of Essence and Appearance” (Krahl 1970, 113- 45). The question remains, however, what significance is to be attached to this. In addition, his recourse to Hegel for inspiration in the treatment of the transformation of money into capital is both obvious in the Grundrisse and to be inferred from the existence of notes made on Hegel’s “Doctrine of Being” between 18, that is, in the period between the publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and that of the first volume of Capital. 1 That this influence lasted, at least on some level, to the writing of Capital can be seen in the corresponding section of that book, the analysis of money as the form of value in the first chapter of Volume 1, where the verbal flirtation with Hegelian categories is, as Marx said, apparent. The service rendered by Marx’s reading of the Logic is evident in the rough draft of his critique of political economy now generally referred to as the Grundrisse, notably in the chapter on money. If there should ever be time for such work again, I would greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer’s sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism.
In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel’s Logic has been of great service to me. The remarks in a letter to Engels of 16 January 1858 are well known: And, more to our point, his engagement in the project of a critique of political economy in 1857 involved a second phase of attention to Hegel, with a new appreciation of the “mighty thinker.” To begin with, his initial writings are largely dominated by a determined struggle with Hegelian idealism. It is evident that this verbal coquetry cannot be the measure of Marx’s pupilship.
Replying, in the Postface to the second edition of Capital, to the accusation of Hegelianism leveled at him by critics of his publication, Marx insisted that his “dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but the exact opposite of it.” At the same time he avowed himself “the pupil of that mighty thinker,” acknowledging that he had “even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him” (Marx 1976a, 102-3).
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