Hegelian Dialectic and Marxist Dialectic?

[Hermes]

Sorry again for yet another ignorant question, but could anyone here tell me the difference between these two? All I can seem to find is that Marx's is less idealistic than Hegel's, but I'm slightly confused as to what this means. Are they the same method, just differently applied?

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

I think Hegel saw the synthesis in the dialectic to be the state, while Marx knew that the real synthesis and conciliation of the class antitheses would be communism.

[Zealot]

"My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary."


- Karl Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital, Vol I, 1873 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm)

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

I fail

[ArrowLance]

The basic difference is that Hegelian dialectics are idealistic while Marxist dialectics are materialistic.