ABSTRACT
Marx wrote that he used a dialectical method he had extracted from Hegel. Arguing the impossibility of divorcing Hegel's dialectic from his idealism, Althusser proposed overdetermination as an alternative materialist framework. This chapter begins with Hegel's dialectic before turning to Marx's use of it and then to overdetermination as it was proposed by Althusser and developed further, later, by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff. Hegel laid out the "dialectical" logic necessary for his system in his Logic: Part I is the Objective Logic; Part II is the Subjective Logic. Hegel's dialectic has been summarized with a few fundamental laws. When thinking of Hegel's influence in Capital, contradiction comes to mind most readily. In fact, Marx starts by highlighting the dual nature of the commodity so as later to be able to theorize all the potential contradictions of that duality. To place overdetermination within Marxism, Althusser had to theorize, again and differently, certain specific parts of the theory.
