Materialism and dialectics

The chapter aims to show that a materialist understanding of the method followed by Marx in his critique of political economy requires going beyond both the traditional logical-historical interpretation of dialectics and the logical-systematic interpretation developed within the Neue Marx-Lektüre, since both interpretations ultimately lead to an idealistic reading of Capital, albeit in different ways. The dialectical exposition of the capitalist mode of production should neither be conceived as a conceptual reconstruction of historical development, nor as an independent logical movement of economic categories. Rather, it has to be conceived as an immanent critique of what is empirically given. All economic categories that follow one another in the dialectical development are taken a posteriori by Marx; none of them can be logically deduced from the previous one, but each category expresses some necessary conditions for the existence of the phenomena expressed in the previous category. The forward movement of the categories discloses thus the structural connections between phenomena that are all taken as empirically given but necessarily manifest themselves as if they were independent from each another.