I criticized the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of “the Idea,” is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. So before we take a look at his letters, let’s glance at the relevant passage from the postface again: A proper timeline will help clear things up a great deal. Plenty of clues exist which verify Marx’s favorable opinion of Hegel, not just in the 1873 postface itself (though here also) but in letters Marx sent to colleagues around the same time, corroborating his annoyance with “ill-humored” anti-Hegelian boors. Instead, my intention is to elucidate Marx’s rationalization and demystification of Hegel’s dialectic, placing it on terra firma rather than high up in the clouds. He would doubtless have been appalled by the verdict, since he understood his vocation to be non-philosophical. There’s doubtless cruel irony in the fact that Marx was overwhelmingly voted the “greatest philosopher” of all time in a 2005 BBC poll. My aim here is hardly to “re-mystify” Marx’s thought, or to turn him into some harmless figure whose books can be found in the philosophy section of Barnes and Noble.Karl Korsch’s outstanding essay “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923), makes the strongest case for this exercise. Which isn’t to say that it’s not useful to retrace the steps by which Marx and Engels took their leave of philosophy. Joseph Dietzgen probably came closest to providing a philosophical account of Marx’s theory Marx and Engels affectionately called him “the philosopher of socialism.” Generally speaking, however, the notion of founding a Marxist “philosophy” is absurd - something Althusser failed to recognize. Engels himself reaffirmed in 1886 that “with Hegel philosophy comes to an end.” Any attempt to travel back down that road was bound to lead to a dead end. Hegel had completed it, and all that was left to do was to realize what philosophy had merely declared, ideologically, at the level of the Idea.

Philosophy was, for all intents and purposes, finished by then. He and Engels had settled that score back in the 1840s, with a number of searing polemics against the Young Hegelians.

None of this should be taken to mean that Marx was still wasting his time with philosophy as he sat down to write Capital.

It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Marx, on the other hand, started with the real world. “With ,” Marx wrote, “ is standing on its head. Hegel was an idealist, after all, and started with the Idea.

As Marx saw it, the principal difference between his own theoretical framework and that of Hegel consisted in their respective points of departure. Even further, I will show that Marx understood his own dialectical method as a critical application or “inversion” of Hegel’s. In this post, I will adduce clearly that Marx still held Hegel in high regard up to and beyond the publication of his “mature” works (if one still insists, following Althusser and Colletti, upon drawing a rigid distinction between the Young Marx and Old Marx). Marx certainly had no patience for those “the ill-humored, arrogant, and mediocre epigones” who treated Hegel a “dead dog,” much in the same way that the Leibnizian philosopher Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza like a “dead dog.” This is amply evident both in the 1873 postface to his masterpiece, Capital, as well as in private letters written to friends and colleagues between 18. By now it should be obvious to anyone who has looked at Karl Marx’s entire corpus, both published and unpublished works, that the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was an abiding influence on his thought.

Hegel dialectic quotes