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

Abstract

Caligaris and Starosta argue that in the Logic Hegel managed to discover the simplest form of existence 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, insofar 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 article 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 real more abstract or simple content of the concrete form he is immediately facing.