ABSTRACT
The dialectic is the most obscure aspect of Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' writings. G. W. F. Hegel's dialectic served a specific philosophical purpose—namely, to reconcile religion, specifically Christianity, with science as it was rapidly developing. Accordingly, most readers of Marx have described Hegel's dialectic as "idealist" and Marx's as "materialist". But Marx's thinking about history and historical explanation owes a great deal to Hegel. But Marx, rejecting religion, is a "materialist"; he believes that ultimately reality is made of matter, inanimate and animate. In the voluminous notebooks for Capital that were published in the 1930s under the name of Grundrisse, he entered some sketchy comments about his method. He points out that in ordinary commercial transactions, the value of a commodity appears as an intrinsic characteristic of the commodity. He sees the freedom and equality as one aspect of the institutions peculiar to capitalism—a system of producing and exchanging commodities.
