Progressive Politics

Hegelian phenomenology is dialectics but dialectics isn't phenomenology.

Thanks for the article, It does a good job of describing Hegelian historical analysis, via Marx's materialist dialectics, but isn't more than a superficial understanding of either. I'm no Hegel scholar, but "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" isn't Hegel, its Ficte's description of Hegel's dialectic, and its an over simplification. The author isnt an expert but superficially on Marx and Hegel. Read Karl Marx and Human Self Creation by Cyril Smith you can skip to the bit about Hegel and Marx, but the pre history is interesting.

Marxist historical materialism is scientific, but most importantly, and what the author doesn't seem to get, probably due to my superficial reading of the article, is that in historical materialist analysis, the subject and object are united into a single system. His dualist presuppositions in the Implications section (and likely those of his readers) are exactly what prevent access to understanding dialectics.

the appearance of pairs of diametric opposites, united by their contradictions toward one another isn't too difficult to grapple with as an abstract concept. But in order to apply this consistently we have to radically alter our perspective, we have to unite the subject and object, the ego and the other, the body and the mind. Uniting subject and object is actually extremely difficult within even an abstract conception of post enlightenment rationality. But its one of the only way to connect understanding to truth, humanity to justice and production.

Also a better quick primer on Marxist Hegelianism might be Thesis on Feuerbach by the man himself. Also Plekhanov's the Materialist Conception of History but that's way out of the scope of what we are discussing.