The determinations of reality: the logical plane and the temporal plane in Marx's Capital

Abstract

In the 20th century, interpretations were consolidated that distanced Marx from Hegel, above all through the contrast between the young and the mature Marx. The problem is that there is an affiliation between Marxism and Hegelian thought, an affiliation that has not always been well understood. Althusser, for example, reserved abstraction and universality only for thought that focused on a singular reality, without realizing, as Giannotti has shown, that concrete universals, such as value, abstract labor, etc., structure an order of reality that philosophical consciousness reflects, not produces. Despite this, this project of reversing the speculative dialectic still poses a problem, since this order that reflects abstract reality is distinguished from another, that of natural reality. Marx states that the first, the correct order of exposition, concerns the relationship between categories that form a concrete totality, while the second, the impractical and false order, concerns the sequence in which they were historically determinant. This statement has led some interpreters to condemn historical dialectics, or historical materialism itself (the combination of history and logic proposed by Engels), and to defend systematic dialectics, posing the problem of the relationship between them. Considering this debate, my hypothesis is that, insofar as this difference no longer refers to the difference between thought and reality, but to determinations of reality itself, they depend on each other.