Outlook: The Productive Fragmentation of the Marxist Tradition
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The development of the Marxist tradition after Marx shows a characteristic fragmentation. Engels tried to systematize dialectics but reduced it to three mechanical “basic laws” - the transformation of quantity into quality, the negation of the negation, the interpenetration of opposites. This systematization made the method teachable but robbed it of its living force. Dialectics became a schema that could be applied to arbitrary content.
Lenin recognized the significance of Hegelian logic late in life. In his “Philosophical Notebooks” (1914-1916) he wrote: “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.”[1] But within the Leninist tradition, this insight remained largely without consequence. “Diamat” - dialectical materialism as official Soviet philosophy - was more worldview than methodological reflection.
The Western Marx renaissance after 1968 rediscovered the methodological proximity to Hegel. Hans-Georg Backhaus and others showed that Marx’s theory of value can only be understood as an application of Hegel’s logic of essence. This interpretation made possible a more systematic reading of Capital - and at the same time a critique of dogmatic Marxisms.
This “New Reading of Marx” (Backhaus, Reichelt, later Heinrich) systematically developed the distinction between form and substance that we introduced above. It distinguishes an “exoteric” Marx (who advocates the labor theory of value as a positive theory) from an “esoteric” Marx (who analyzes the value-form without committing to a substance theory). Michael Heinrich’s Die Wissenschaft vom Wert [The Science of Value] (1991) drew the methodological consequence: what remains is the analysis of the value-form as a critique of reification - the question of the “substance” of value is to be distinguished from this and requires independent treatment.[2]
This development confirms the thesis of this chapter: Marx’s lasting achievement lies in his analysis of form, not in a dogmatically inherited substance theory. The question of which social relations become reified in the value-form - whether only labor, or also law, nature, technology, and knowledge - is thereby posed, but not yet conclusively answered. A contemporary critique of political economy that takes Marx’s methodological insights seriously must take up this question anew.
The processual reconstruction of Hegel developed here opens up a new perspective on Marx. It shows that the structural proximity to Hegel is even greater than most interpreters of Marx assumed. At the same time, it becomes visible that Marx actually makes explicit something that was only latent in Hegel: the constitutive role of social practice. The “materialist inversion” proves to be a productive further development, not a break.
The task of a contemporary integration of Hegel consists in systematically integrating Marx’s legitimate insights. This means: the role of material practice, of social relations, of historical development must be grasped as a constitutive moment of logic itself - not as a subsequent application of an abstract method. The four basic operations (self-application, differentiation, sublation, recognition) make this integration possible, because they grasp practice as the original unity of thought and being.
Marx’s great achievement lies not in “overcoming” Hegel, but in concretizing him with respect to an object that Hegel had treated only in outline. This achievement stands - even though Marx never spelled out the systematic scope of his own Hegelianism. What followed from this for the reception of his work came at a price: distancing oneself from Hegel became the mark of recognition, and what it concealed was lost to the tradition. Systematic truth lies in integration, not in division.
V.I. Lenin: Philosophical Notebooks (1914-1916), in: Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 170. ↩︎
On the “New Reading of Marx,” see Hans-Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur marxschen Ökonomiekritik, Freiburg: ça ira 1997; Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 1991 (expanded 2001). A more detailed treatment of this current follows in Volume III, Ch. 21. ↩︎