Marx’s Theoretical Process II: Historicizing the Dialectic

Abstract

Marx never wrote a treatise on method; he left no formal or systematic discussion of his dialectic. Marx’s most sustained exploration of method is found in the introduction to the Grundrisse, a work intended for self-clarification and not for publication. Louis Althusser has argued that Marx would have written a “Dialectics,” had he found the time (Althusser 1969, 174). We know from Marx’s biography that “the dull compulsion of economic necessity” left him in a constant struggle to find the time for his own work. The fact that in none of his writings Marx found a place for a discussion of his dialectic suggests that there could have been other reasons why Marx did not give priority to such a project. One reason may be that Marx’s concern with philosophy, and with what we today call theory, was in its relationship to revolutionary political activity. It is not appropriate to speak of method in the context of Marx’s work as something isolatable, or as something in or for itself: Marx’s method of analysis exists in a relationship of mutual determination with its object of analysis—the two cannot be separated except in abstraction. The form of Marx’s method evolves out of the contingencies of the “content” he is attempting to elucidate, and it would be a reification to represent his method as something that can be identified a priori and applied to various contents.