Which ‘Rational Kernel’? «Which ‘Mystical Shell’? A Contribution to the Debate on the Connection between Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital

Publicado en: En colaboración con Guido Starosta, en Fred Moseley y Tony Smith (eds.), Hegel´s Logic and Marx´s Capital. A Reexamination, Brill Academic Publishers, 2014, pp. 89-112
2014
The chapter argues that in the Logic Hegel managed to discover the simplest form of existence of the real: the movement of affirmation through self-negation. As a consequence, he correctly presents the method of science as the systematic unfolding of the immanent life of the subject-matter. However, in so far as Hegel´s systematic dialectic begins with the simplest thought-form, his subsequent derivation of form-determinations unfolds a whole series of redundant categories which, from a materialist standpoint, correspond to the immanent necessity of pure thought only and do not express the inner movement of the simpler determinations of ´real material being´. The chapter further submits that an immediate reason behind that spurious starting point resides in his methodological procedure of ´extreme´ abstraction, which arbitrarily casts aside all particular determination until reaching a wholly empty universal. By contrast the chapter argues that Marx finds a materialist alternative to Hegel´s abstraction in dialectical analysis, which moves by searching for the more abstract or simple content of the concrete form he is immediately facing.