The Escape from Hegel

At least since the publication of Roman Rosdolsky's The Making of Marx's Capital , the Grundrisse has been an essential refer-ence for anyone wishing to demonstrate a significant dependence of Marx's political economy upon Hegelian “logic.” Contrary to Rosdolsky's interpretation, however, the Grundrisse can in fact be read as the drama of Marx's escape from his Hegelian philosophical heritage. Hegel's “dialectical method” is not a method of logi-cal argumentation, but a “method” of paralogical mystification. Marx's own attempts to construct “dialectical derivations” of eco-nomic categories in the Grundrisse lead him into theoretical culs-de-sac , and he is only able to make real progress in his economic inves-tigations by precisely foregoing such adventures. The persistence, nonetheless, of certain characteristically Hegelian formulae - though, n.b., not characteristically Hegelian argumentational struc-tures - in Capital , and especially in the first chapter, is a function of the ontological peculiarity of Marx's initial object of inquiry, viz., money, and does not reflect any “methodological” choice. Marx's arguments in Capital are not “dialectical” but rather “transcenden-tal” in nature, starting from given market phenomena (prices, profit, etc.) and working back to their conditions of possibility.