Conclusions

Jean Wahl

pp. 179-181

in: Robert Albritton, Dialectics and deconstruction in political economy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Marxist theorists interested in developing the Hegel-Marx nexus have usually done so to bolster the ethical-revolutionary praxis side of Marxism in opposition to a mechanical or scientistic interpretation. Lukács is perhaps the paradigm case of this kind of appropriation of Hegel, an appropriation that combines Weber's culturalist "rationalisation", Hegel's "alienation" and Marx's "fetishism of commodities' to form the concept "reification". I call this type of Marx-Hegel synthesis "Hegelian Marxism". This book is the most extensive attempt so far to appropriate Hegel in a way that is completely different from Hegelian Marxism. In doing so it leaves behind the stale opposition between scientific socialism and revolutionary socialism.