Marxism and the Engels Paradox

Abstract

For Marxist philosophy, in so far as it still forms an independent reflection upon the concepts that inform a Marxist practice, dialectics involves the conscious interception of the object in its process of development where the object is man's production of history. The ultimate possibility of human self-liberation is grounded in the postulate that man is a world-producing being. For Hegel, from whom Marx derived the dialectic, philosophy remained a speculative affair, a set of ideas remote from human praxis. Marx sought to actualize the philosophical interception as a practical interception, to abolish concretely the historical alienation of man from his species nature, an alienation viewed speculatively by the Hegelians. In the practical abolition of historical alienation, philosophy as the expression of abstract propositions pertaining to the human condition would also be abolished.