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 definite relation between men. This relation becomes conscious and is 
 conceptualised. Because of this the inner logic of the movement of human 
 society can be understood at once as the product of men themselves and 
 of forces that arise from their relations with each other and which have 
 escaped their control. Thus the economic categories become dynamic and 
 dialectical in a double sense. As €pure€ economic categories they are 
 involved in constant interaction with each other, and that enables us to 
 understand any given historical cross-section through the evolution of 
 society. But since they have arisen out of human relations and since 
 they function in the process of the transformation of human relations, 
 the actual process of social evolution becomes visible in their 
 reciprocal relationship with the reality underlying their activity. That 
 is to say, the production and reproduction of a particular economic 
 totality, which science hopes to understand, is necessarily transformed 
 into the process of production and reproduction of a particular social 
 totality; in the course of this transformation, €pure€ economics are 
 naturally transcended, though this does not mean that we must appeal to 
 any transcendental forces. Marx often insisted upon this aspect of 
 dialectics. For instance: [24] 
  
 €Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous 
 connected process or as a process of reproduction produces not only 
 commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces 
 the capitalist relation itself, on the one hand the capitalist and on 
 the other, the labourer.€ 
  
 ** 
  
 4 
  
 To posit oneself, to produce and reproduce oneself € that is reality. 
 Hegel clearly perceived this and expressed it in a way closely similar 
 to that of Marx, albeit cloaked in abstraction and misunderstanding 
 itself and thus opening the way to further misunderstanding. €What is 
 actual is necessary in itself,€ he says in the Philosophy of Right. 
 €Necessity consists in this that the whole is sundered into the 
 different concepts and that this divided whole yields a fixed and 
 permanent determinacy. However, this is not a fossilised determinacy but 
 one which permanently recreates itself in its dissolution.€ [25] The 
 deep affinities between historical materialism and Hegel€s philosophy 
 are clearly manifested here, for both conceive of theory as the 
 self-knowledge of reality. Nevertheless, we must briefly point to the 
 crucial difference between them. This is likewise located in the problem 
 of reality and of the unity of the historical process. 
  
 Marx reproached Hegel (and, in even stronger terms, Hegel€s successors 
 who had reverted to Kant and Fichte) with his failure to overcome the 
 duality of thought and being, of theory and practice, of subject and 
 object. He maintained that Hegel€s dialectic, which purported to be an 
 inner, real dialectic of the historical process, was a mere illusion: in 
 the crucial point he failed to go beyond Kant. His knowledge is no more 
 than knowledge about an essentially alien material. It was not the case 
 that this material, human society, came to now itself. As he remarks in 
 the decisive sentences of his critique, [26] 
  
 €Already with Hegel, the absolute spirit of history has its material in 
 the masses, but only finds adequate expression in philosophy. But the 
 philosopher appears merely as the instrument by which absolute spirit, 
 which makes history, arrives at self-consciousness after the historical 
 movement has been completed. The philosopher€s role in history is thus 
 limited to this subsequent consciousness, for the real movement is 
 executed unconsciously by the absolute spirit. Thus the philosopher 
 arrives post festum.€ 
  
 Hegel, then, permits 
  
 €absolute spirit qua absolute spirit to make history only in appearance. 
 .. For, as absolute spirit does not appear in the mind of the 
 philosopher in the shape of the creative world-spirit until after the 
 event, it follows that it makes history only in the consciousness, the 
 opinions and the ideas of the philosophers, only in the speculative 
 imagination.€ 
  
 Hegel€s conceptual mythology has been definitively eliminated by the 
 critical activity of the young Marx. 
  
 It is, however, not accidental that Marx achieved €self-understanding€ 
 in the course of opposing a reactionary Hegelian movement reverting back 
 to Kant. This movement exploited Hegel€s obscurities and inner 
 uncertainties in order to eradicate the revolutionary elements from his 
 method. It strove to harmonise the reactionary content, the reactionary 
 conceptual mythology, the vestiges of the contemplative dualism of 
 thought and existence with the consistently reactionary philosophy which 
 prevailed in the Germany of the day. 
  
 By adopting the progressive part of the Hegelian method, namely the 
 dialectic, Marx not only cut himself off from Hegel€s successors; he 
 also split Hegel€s philosophy in two. He took the historical tendency in 
 Hegel to its logical extreme: he radically transformed all the phenomena 
 both of society and of socialised man into historical problems: he 
 concretely revealed the real substratum of historical evolution and 
 developed a seminal method in the process. He measured Hegel€s 
 philosophy by the yardstick he had himself discovered and systematically 
 elaborated, and he found it wanting. The mythologising remnants of the 
 €eternal values€ which Marx eliminated from the dialectic belong 
 basically on the same level as the philosophy of reflection which Hegel 
 had fought his whole life long with such energy and bitterness and 
 against which he had pitted his entire philosophical method, with its 
 ideas of process and concrete totality, dialectics and history. In this 
 sense Marx€s critique of Hegel is the direct continuation and extension 
 of the criticism that Hegel himself levelled at Kant and Fichte. [27] So 
 it came about that Marx€s dialectical method continued what Hegel had 
 striven for but had failed to achieve in a concrete form. And, on the 
 other hand, the corpse of the written system remained for the scavenging 
 philologists and system-makers to feast upon. 
  
 It is at reality itself that Hegel and Marx part company. Hegel was 
 unable to penetrate to the real driving forces of history. Partly 
 because these forces were not yet fully visible when he created his 
 system. In consequence he was forced to regard the peoples and their 
 consciousness as the true bearers of historical evolution. (But he did 
 not discern their real nature because of the .heterogeneous composition 
 of that consciousness. So he mythologised it into the €spirit of the 
 people€.) But in part he remained imprisoned in the Platonic and Kantian 
 outlook, in the duality of thought and being, of form and matter, 
 notwithstanding his very energetic efforts to break out. Even though he 
 was the first to discover the meaning of concrete totality, and even 
 though his thought was constantly bent upon overcoming every kind of 
 abstraction, matter still remained tainted for him with the €stain of 
 the specific€ (and here he was very much the Platonist). These 
 contradictory and conflicting tendencies could not be clarified within 
 his system. They are often juxtaposed, unmediated, contradictory and 
 unreconciled. In consequence, the ultimate (apparent) synthesis had 
 perforce to turn to the past rather than the future. [28] It is no 
 wonder that from very early on bourgeois science chose to dwell on these 
  
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  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)