Critical Realist Arguments in Marx’s Capital

labour. Later on, a long section of the first chapter derives various ‘forms of value’ as surface expressions of this congealed abstract labour. These expressions have ‘defects’ which lead, in a dialectical development, to more satisfactory forms. Some Marx scholars try to ignore these Hegelianisms, others consider them an important part of Marx’s argument. Lenin belonged to the latter camp; he wrote in his Philosophical Notebooks: Aphorism: It is impossible to completely understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx! [Len61, p. 180] Eighty years after Lenin it is doubtful whether even an extensive knowledge of Hegel can make it possible to ‘completely’ understand Marx’s Capital. Those Marx and Hegel scholars who went this route have not achieved the hoped-for breakthroughs. Hegel’s system was presumably the best framework available at Marx’s time to represent the structure of modern society. But it is not a perfect fit for the purposes for which Marx put it to work. Many arguments which Marx makes in the Hegelian paradigm are metaphorical