The Myth of Dialectics

Hegel Decoder: A Reply to Smith's 'Reply'

“…113 Furthermore, the 'universal' in question here is not capital, but simply value, which acquires a specific form of existence in money. 114 As I emphasise throughout, the 'inverted world' of value phenomena is a function of commodity production per se, not of specifically capitalist commodity production.…”

Dialectical Conditions. Leadership Structures as Productive Action Generators

“…A famous concept in the social sciences that deals with just this question is the concept of "dialectics". Of course, as with every major concept in the social sciences, there are a lot of controversies about its true meaning (Gurvitch 1965;Ioan 1990;Rosenthal 1998;Kuchler 2005). But the fundamental idea is easy to grasp: contradictory social conditions set in motion forces to overcome the unsatisfactory ones and (normally) the induced social processes lead to an overcoming of the underlying conflict and (hopefully) to social betterment, whereby the new situation ironically will breed new contradictions.…”

On Dialectics and the Basic Contradiction in Capitalism

“…In his opinion, Marx had a taste for "coquetting" with Hegelian phrasing, but did not go any further (see [11] Schumpeter, 1954, p. 9). Authors convinced that Marx gradually ceased his use of dialectics include Rosenthal 1998 [12] and Bidet 1998 ( [13], p. 225), while analytical Marxists look upon dialectical reasoning as altogether misleading and, hence, hardly of any more help than formal logic when it comes to flesh out a social theory (see [14] Meyer,…”

“…At the time he was editing the NeueZeit, he used to emphasise such links, but starting from 1890 ever more often denied them. 12 Engels, for his part, wrote: "Men make their own history, but in a given, conditioning milieu, upon the basis of actual relations" ([81] Engels, 1894, p. 108).…”