Background:

Dialectics: G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and Karl Marx (1818-1883)

The development of human mind is dialectical – a term that has come to be associated
with Marx because his own philosophy has been referred to as ‘dialectical materialism’.
Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of Marxism; it is so called, because its
approach to the phenomena of nature is dialectical, and its interpretation of these
phenomena, its theory, is materialistic.1

The principal features of the Marxist dialectical method are as follows:

a) Nature is Connected and Determined
b) Nature is a State of Continuous Motion and Change
c) Natural Quantitative Change Leads to Qualitative Change
d) Contradictions are Inherent in Nature

This philosophy says that, the whole reality of the world is discoverable objectively and
anything spiritual, ideal or conceptual is merely a reflection of the particular material
reality. They are rather parts of superstructures, which simply reflect the economic
foundation and relation of productions especially serving as tool, which the ruling class
uses to maintain its existing position of power in society and the economy.

Economic foundation alters through history by dialectical leaps and bound. New forces of
productions arise, develop and spread the contradictions with existing relations, increases
and leads to revolutionary change in relations of production, which there in turn, produces
similar alterations in the superstructure. 2

In Hegel’s monism, dialectic is characterized by its complete identification of the process

of consciousness with the process of being. His logic was metaphysics itself: a

1
Pillai N., Vijayamohanan, 'You Cannot Swim Twice in the Same River: The Genesis of Dialectical
Materialism', MPRA Paper 45011, University Library of Munich, Germany, 2013.
2
Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Manika Barua Mass Publications 9/7B
RamanathMazumder Street, Calcutta, India, 1975.

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philosophy of being as revealed through abstract thought. His startingpoint was the
concept of pure, absolute, indeterminate being, conceived as a dynamic process. He
sought to trace the evolution of this dynamic process through three stages:

i) The stage in which it posits itself (as thesis);

ii) The stage of negation, a necessary corollary of the previous stage (antithesis) and
iii) The stage of union of opposites (synthesis).

Hegel starts with the bare notion of existence, or being, and argues that since this bare
notion of being has no content at all, it cannot be anything. Thus it must be nothing, the
antithesis of being. Being and nothing, however, are opposites, constantly moving in and
apart from each other; they require to be brought together under the synthesis, becoming.3

The dialectical elements of Marx’s theory were taken over from Hegel. The progress of
the dialectical development of Mind in Hegel’s philosophy is always progress towards
freedom. ‘The History of the World is none other than the progress of the consciousness
of freedom.

The Phenomenology is thus an immense philosophical epic, tracing the history of Mind
from its first blind groping in a hostile world to the moment when, in recognizing itself as
master of the universe, it finally achieves self-knowledge and freedom. Perhaps the most
celebrated passage in the Phenomenology concerns the relationship of a master to a slave.
It well illustrates what Hegel means by dialectic, and it introduces an idea echoed in
Marx’s view of the relationship between capitalist and worker.4

Suppose we have two independent people, aware of their own independence, but not of
their common nature as aspects of one universal Mind. Each sees the other as a rival, a
limit to his own power over everything else. This situation is therefore unstable. A
struggle ensues, in which one conquers and enslaves the other. The master/ slave
relationship, however, is not stable either. Although it seems at first that the master is
everything and the slave nothing, it is the slave who works and by his work changes the

3
Vijayamohanan (n 1), pp. 17-18.
4
Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford
o x2 6dp, Oxford, New York, 1996, pp. 18-20.

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natural world. In this assertion of his own nature and consciousness over the natural
world, the slave achieves satisfaction and develops his own self-consciousness, while the
master becomes dependent on his slave. The ultimate outcome must therefore be the
liberation of the slave, and the overcoming of the initial conflict between the two
independent beings.5

Marx explicitly claims that his dialectical method is the opposite of Hegel's. To claims
that his realist method of inquiry in Capital sat uneasily with his idealist method of
presentation, Marx riposted that this was an illusion, inevitable given that presentation
involves the unfolding of conceptual abstraction in the attempt to re-construct the
empirical as the concrete.6

Attitudes and Approaches of Marx and Hegel

Hegel is a liberal thinker. He believed in 'rule of law' rather than rule of any man. He
claimed that man's ability and achievement was secured through reason. Reason is
relative. History was the growth of reason by consciousness in itself therefore
constitutional state was culmination of history.

Hegelian idealism claims that consciousness is perceived through idea. Contrarily, Marx
forwarded materialism, which claimed that matter is foundation of all truths hence 'ideas'
depends on it but not by supposition or thinking process.

Hegelian approach was idealistic to understand history and to recognize matter: its
utilization and existence as well as its relation with human. That matter can only be
determined by consciousness e.g. a stone can be god for Hindu but nothing for atheist.
Ideas are personal, conceptual, logical and conditional. Marx vividly canceled such
idealism that nature of matter cannot be changed conceptually as said by Hegel.7

5
Ibid, paras.
6
Michael Williams, 'Marx and Hegel: New Scholarship, Continuing Questions', Science & Society, Vol.
67, No. 4 (Winter, 2003/2004), pp. 489-496, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/40404115, accessed
on July 16,2022.
7
Kamal Raj Thapa, Jurisprudence as Cabbage, Sunrise Offset Link, Kathmandu, Second edition, 2021,
p.482-483.

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Marx versus Hegel views

For Marx, there is no place of Idea. Matter is everything. Hegel emphasizes the concept
of Idea, but Marx talks about matter. This is materialism. In Hegel’s opinion Idea is of
first importance because it arises at first and matter is of secondary importance. Engels,
who is portrayed as the foremost systematizer and disseminator of Marx's thought said
that “The Hegelian system is a colossal miscarriage.” Marx borrowed the concept of
dialectic from Hegel and applied it to the explanation of society. He also said that
dialectic was also the clue to progress but this progress is not history and the culmination
of progress is neither history nor absolute idea.8

Marx also differed from Hegel on another standpoint. Hegel had simply interpreted the
history dialectically but he did not suggest how to change the history as well as society.
In Marx’s view, function of philosophy was not to interpret the world, but to change it.
Marx applied dialectic to “justify” the proletarian revolution and radicalism. Hegel
idealized the state through dialectical method and ultimately it culminated to fascism.
Marx’s application of dialectic led to the proletarian revolution and establishment of
communism. Marx had no interest in metaphysics.

Metaphysics is essentially an abstract way of thinking. Idea and metaphysics failed to

allure Marx. To him matter was of primary importance. Both Marx and Engels had
admitted that Hegelian dialectics had both idealistic and revolutionary aspects. Marx and
Engels accepted the revolutionary aspects. Marx has converted Hegelian dialectics into
materialist dialectics and this is not only a method but also a theory, a theory of
development of the most general laws of development of nature, society and knowledge.
Marxist method is materialist as well as dialectical. In Marxism, dialectics and
materialism are not separate from each other. Marx agreed with the dialectics of Hegel
but disagreed with the mystifying aspect.9

The differences between Marx and Hegel are of two kinds. Firstly, there is their political
differences, and secondly their philosophical differences.
8
Available at https://www.politicalsciencenotes.com/marxism/differences-in-ideas-of-marx-and-hegel/
1237, accessed on July 14, 2022.
9
Ibid, paras.

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 How was Hegel an idealist?

(a) Hegel described himself as an Idealist.

(b) Hegel emphasized the active side rather than passive contemplation.
(c) Hegel took the social elite to be the agents of change.
(d) Hegel believed that institutions tend to be true to their concept.
(e) Hegel minimized the effect of mundane relations on institutions.
(f) Hegel overestimated speculative reason relative to social process itself.

Hegel suffered from the illusion that a theorist could unfold from a conceptual ideal
everything that was implicit within it, Marx consistently held to the view that the logical
development had to follow the development of social practice at every stage, making
intelligible what was manifested in social practice. Like Hegel, Marx took a concrete
simple something as the starting point of his analysis, in the case of Capital, a discrete
artefact-mediated action, rather than an abstract universal like ‘value’.

Marx took the same approach in his study of the workers’ movement in their struggle for
state power, amending the Manifesto of the Communist Party in the light of the actions of
the workers’ movement in the Paris Commune. He never built any socialist castles in the
sky. But writing in the middle third of the 19th century, Marx had material to work with,
material which was not available to Hegel in the first third of the 19th century.10

Marxian rereading of Hegel as well as a rereading of Marx from a Hegelian perspective

complement one another, filling the gaps that the other left open or reinforcing one
another’s insights.

Affinities between Hegel and Marx

 Their critique of abstract liberalism,

 Their view of freedom as communal or social,
10
Andy Blunden, ‘What is the difference between Hegel and Marx?’ available at
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Hegel-and-Marx.pdf, February 2020, accessed on July 15,
2022.

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  Their attentiveness to the concept of need,
 Their interest in the rabble and the proletariat, and
 Their reflections on universalism and species-being.

Differences between Hegel and Marx

Hegel’s idealism is often seen as opposed to Marx’s materialism; the former’s appraisal
of the actual is set against the latter’s merciless criticism of it. The same goes for Hegel’s
social institutionalism and belief in the state, clashing with Marx’s critique of the ‘state
machinery’ and his hope for unmediated communality.

Hegel’s affirmation of personal property conflicts with Marx’s critique of the private
ownership of means of production. And although both thinkers strongly criticize free
markets, Hegel defends a certain kind of market whereas Marx’s critique of market
capitalism is fundamental. Both of them criticize ‘abstract rights’, but they diverge in
their assessment of the proper role and scope of individual rights.11

Hegel absorbs the best insights from Aristotle to Kant. Hegel demonstrates that
philosophy cannot remain purely philosophical; even when dealing with core
philosophical issues, such as reason, knowledge, truth, freedom, and universality,
philosophy has to go beyond itself—into the realm of social theory, broadly conceived.

After Hegel, philosophy must get involved with questions of recognition and human
sociality, social norms and institutions, or power and authority. It is precisely at this point
that Marx draws on Hegel, moving the focus even closer to the question of the conditions
and shapes of social life, by reworking, transforming, criticizing, inverting, and
eventually exceeding Hegel’s thought.

'Dialectics’ and ‘alienation’ are examples that immediately spring to mind when focusing
on Marx’s appropriative use of Hegel, whereas his critique of the state in capitalist
societies, which is largely directed at a Hegelian understanding of it, exemplifies his
conscious detachment from Hegel. Marx’s rejection of Hegel’s idealist metaphysics was

11
Victoria Fareld & Hannes Kuch, 'FROM MARX TO HEGEL AND BACK', Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK, 2020, p.13.

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thus neither a rupture with, nor a rejection of, Hegel’s philosophy, but a critical
realization and transformative completion of it.12

Hegel's idealism is mainly based on following five ideas:13

1. The notion of the Notion

2. The subjective Notion
3. Purpose and logical life
4. The Absolute Idea
5. Unresolved problems
Marx made considerable use of ‘Hegel’s Logic’ in formulating the fundamental
arguments of his critique of political economy, the work which functions as a foundation
for his political and social thought.14

For Marx, Hegel's Logic is 'the money of the spirit', the speculative 'thought-value of man

and nature'. This means that in bourgeois society 'man' and nature, and body and mind,
are separated and reconnected through the relation of private exchange. Their relation is
alienated from the persons who form the relation, which is mediated by value. They
become 'value-subjects', and those who possess enough value also rule the society.
The Logic in fact describes the value-subject abstractly.15

In modern society there is wide-spread acceptance of the legitimacy of one person

controlling the product of another's labor, and the others labor it, in order to appropriate a
surplus product. This approval is founded on the value-relation and the 'form' of the
commodity. Value is abstract and imagined in the mind, and also embodied in money.

Hegel's Logic implicitly ascribes a sort of power to money, and Marx presents it as the

demiurgos of bourgeois society. That is why he characterizes the Logic as 'the money of
the spirit'. His task in the Grundrisse therefore consists in demonstrating that the genesis
12
Ibid, paras.
13
Robert B. Pippin, 'Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self- Consciousness', Cambridge University
Press, 1989.
14
TERRELL CARVER, MARX-AND HEGEL’S LOGIC, Political Studies, Vol. XXIV, No. 1 67-68,
available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1976.tb00093, accessed on July
16 2022.
15
Ibid, paras.

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of value and its development into capital are described in the Logic, albeit in a seemingly
closed system which reproduces itself, and overall his work is directed towards
transcending capitalism in practice.16

Hegel rejects the idea of making a separation between the universal and individual and
giving priority to the universal as Plato did. According to Hegel, the individuals have
particular differences but they are nevertheless subordinated to what they have in
common. They are distinguished in terms of Reason.17

Hegel’s main tenet is that all that can be known about the world is known in language.
Things that cannot be expressed in a form of language cannot actually be known at all.
Language consists of three main components.

1. Logic (the science of the Idea in and for itself), relates to the most fundamental
(structural relationships between) categories in language, i.e. it consists of categories
without which the world would certainly be unintelligible, distinction less white noise
(such as Being, Becoming, the One and its Other) without however considering the
application of these to the world itself.

2. The philosophy of nature (‘the science of the Idea in its otherness’) considers how
the categories in the logic are altered when one applies them to nature, that is, how they
are expressed in the world. Since this involves leaving the sphere of ‘thinking about
thinking’, this transition opens up the possibility of misrepresentation (whose occurrence
is amply illustrated in the history of science, i.e. the possibility that the structure of
language is not entirely isomorphic to the structure of the world (yet).

3. The philosophy of mind, or, in Hegelian terms, the science ‘of the idea that
returns into itself out of its otherness’, the inherent freedom of thought is reconciled

16
Hiroshi Uchida, 'Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic' published by Routledge 1988, available at
https://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/uchida/index.htm#:~:text=For%20Marx%2C%20Hegel's
%20Logic%20is,the%20relation%20of%20private%20exchange, accessed on July 16, 2022.
17
SEVGI DOGAN, Marx and Hegel On the Dialectic of The Individual and the School, Published by
Lexington Books, 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, The Rowman &
Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2018.

8
with the material restrictions of nature by showing how self-conscious humanity can
impact on nature to understand, create and change human society.18

Marx’s representation of Capitalism roughly parallels Hegel’s Logic. The movement

from exchange to value parallels Hegel's Doctrine of Being; the doubling of money and
commodities parallels the Doctrine of Essence; and capital, positing its actualization in
labor and industry, as absolute form claims all the characteristics of Hegel’s Concept.19

In gist, Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from a very gap: a crisis occurs when
reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more
money-this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely; it has to explode in ever more
serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis is for Marx the gap between use- and
exchange-value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own mad dance,
irrespective of the real needs of real people.

It may appear that this analysis is highly relevant today, when the tension between the
virtual universe and the real is reaching almost unbearable proportions: on the one hand,
we have crazy solipsistic speculations about futures, mergers, etc., following their own
inherent logic; on the other hand, reality is catching up in the guise of ecological
catastrophes, poverty, the collapse of social life in the Third World, and the spread of
new diseases.20

Bibliography:

DOGAN, SEVGI, Marx and Hegel On the Dialectic of The Individual and the School,
Published by Lexington Books, 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland
20706, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2018

18
Damsma, D.F., Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis in Systematic Dialectics: Marx vs. Hegel and
Arthur vs. Smith (June 24, 2011), available at
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1975271 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1975271, accessed on July
17, 2022.
19
Ibid, paras.
20
Slavoj Zizek, Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism, Verso UK: 6 Meard
Street, London W1F OEG,2012.

9
Fareld, Victoria & Kuch, Hannes, 'FROM MARX TO HEGEL AND BACK', Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK, 2020, p.13

Pippin, Robert B., 'Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self- Consciousness', Cambridge
University Press, 1989

Stalin, Joseph, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Manika Barua Mass Publications
9/7B Ramanath Mazumder Street, Calcutta, India, 1975

Singer, Peter, Marx: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Great
Clarendon Street, Oxford o x2 6dp, Oxford, New York, 1996, pp. 18-20

Thapa, Kamal Raj, Jurisprudence as Cabbage, Sunrise Offset Link, Kathmandu, Second
edition, 2021, p.482-483

Vijayamohanan, Pillai. N., 'You Cannot Swim Twice in the Same River: The Genesis of
Dialectical Materialism', MPRA Paper 45011, University Library of Munich, Germany,
2013

Zizek, Slavoj, Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism, Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG, 2012

Blunden, Andy, ‘What is the difference between Hegel and Marx?’ available at
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Hegel-and-Marx.pdf, February 2020,
accessed on July 15, 2022

CARVER, TERRELL, 'MARX-AND HEGEL’S LOGIC', Political Studies, Vol. XXIV,

No. 1 67-68, available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-
9248.1976.tb00093, accessed on July 16 2022

D.F.,Damsma, 'Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis in Systematic Dialectics: Marx vs.

Hegel and Arthur vs. Smith' (June 24, 2011), available at
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1975271 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1975271,
accessed on July 17, 2022

Uchida, Hiroshi, 'Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic' published by Routledge 1988,
availableathttps://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/uchida/index.htm#:~:text=For
%20Marx%2C%20Hegel's%20Logic%20is,the%20relation%20of%20private
%20exchange, accessed on July 16, 2022

10
Williams, Michael, 'Marx and Hegel: New Scholarship, Continuing Questions', Science
& Society, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Winter, 2003/2004), pp. 489-496, available at
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40404115, accessed on July 16,2022

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