XI

[XI.2.]
(6) This is perhaps the place at which, by way of explanation and justification, we might offer some considerations with regard to the Hegelian dialectic in general and especially its exposition in the Phanomenologie and Logik and also, lastly, the relation [to it] of the modern critical movement.

So preoccupied was modern German criticism with the old world--and its development so enamoured with its subject matter--that it led to an entirely uncritical attitude to the method of criticising, and the contemporary aversion to the apparently formal, but really vital question: where do we now stand with regard to the Hegelian dialectic? This unconsciousness of the modern critique about the Hegelian philosophy as a whole, and to the dialectic in particular, has been so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer still remain within the confines of the Hegelian logic; the former completely so and the latter at least implicitly so in his Synoptiker (where, in opposition to Strauss, he replaces the substance of "abstract nature" by the "self-consciousness" of abstract man), and even in Das entdeckte Christenthum. Thus in Das entdeckte Christenthum, for example, you get:

"As though in positing the world, self-consciousness does not posit that which is different [from itself] and in what it is creating it does not create itself, since it in turn annuls the difference between what it has created and itself, since it itself has being only in creating and in the movement - as though its purpose were not this movement?" etc.; or again: "They" (the French materialists) "have not yet been able to see that it is only as the movement of self-consciousness that the movement of the universe has actually come to be for itself, and achieved unity with itself." [Pp. 113, 114-15.]

Such expressions do not even show any verbal divergence from the Hegelian approach, but on the contrary a great many literary terms are simply repeated, word for word.
[XII.2.]

[XI.1.]
then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don't think, don't ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?

You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.

But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour - nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man--a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man--has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensual consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man's positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man's positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as 'the negation of the negation', and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.
[XII.1.]