Marx On Dialectics

I really like this, taken from Marx’s Capital.

“My dialectic 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 (Supreme Architect) 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…”

Obviously the notion of contradictions is problematic, and the concept of dialectics is most vulnerable in that the human understanding itself proposes whatever contradictions it wishes to.  In the end it seems that even Marx endorses an imaginative psychological approach…

“In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”

By envisioning a society of an entirely different ilk and method of operation, we have already begun to move towards the balance that  nature seeks to fulfill.

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