ABSTRACT
Hegel's, and is even its direct opposite. For Hegel it is the process of thought, which (under the name Idea) he even converts into an independent Subject, the Demiurgos of the actual world, which is only its outward manifestation. For me, on the contrary, ideas are only the material facts turned up and down in the human head. The mystifying look of the Hegelian dialectic was criticised by me nearly thirty years ago, when it was still in vogue. But at the time I was finishing the first volume of Kapital, these dreary pretentious mediocrities the Epigoni, who now have the ear of lettered circles in Germany, were treating Hegel as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing's time, 'like a dead dog.', I therefore openly avowed myself a disciple of that great thinker, and even coquetted here and there (in the chapter on Value) 1 with his peculiar phraseology. Dialectic certainly underwent mystification in Hegel's hands ; but, for all that, it was he who first comprehensively and deliberately expounded its general movements. With him it is upside down. We have to turn it over if we would discover the rational kernel in the mystical shell. In its mystical form it became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to explain the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a terror to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, for it not only gives explanation, positively, of the existing state of things, but also of its negation, its necessary decay ; it views every form of existence in its actual process of movement, and therefore on its perishable side ; it lets nothing impose on it ; it is essentially critical and revolutionary."
