Gramsci distinguishes Marx’s rational dialectic from a merely materialist inversion of Hegel

Evidence

See Marx’s Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital , where he argues that in Hegel the dialectic stood on its head and that in order to make it stand properly on its feet it is necessary to extract the rational kernel from the mystic shell. The rational dialectic, therefore, is defined in specific opposition to the way it was developed by Hegel, but this is not tantamount to saying that from “idealist” it should become “materialist”, which is a Feuerbachian rather than a Marxist conception. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2774

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the precise meaning of Marx’s ‘turning Hegel on his head’ — a correction of the common reading that Marx simply replaced idealism with materialism.
• XREF: Connects to how Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis later gets defined against both crude materialism and idealism; useful framing for understanding how Islamophobia analyses avoid economic reductionism. — connects to: Marx’s faith in productive forces echoes the Hegelian World Spirit — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1575; The form-content dialectic succeeds for Marx precisely because it is aesthetic in origin — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 671; Idealist and orthodox-Marxist critics alike denied Marx’s Hegelian dialectical lineage — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 715 (+1 more)