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Marxian economic theory constitutes a dialectical, not an axiomatic, system. Although some important features of the dialectic have already been discussed elsewhere, a more systematic treatment of the subject, specifically of the Hegelian—Marxian version of the dialectic, may be in order. Of course, many explanations of this type of dialectic are available in Marxist literature, but unfortunately not all of them are dependable. In fact, some of them are more misleading than informative. Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that a dialectic cannot be explained generally, or in the abstract, since it is not a strictly formal (abstract-general) logic but rather a formal-substantive (concrete-synthetic) one. It, in other words, constitutes a teleological rather than a tautological system. In a dialectical exposition we often talk of proceeding from abstract to concrete. This means that we advance from an emptier and less specified concept to a more "enriched" and specified one. Here "concrete" does not mean "concrete-empirical" or "concrete-historical"; it means "concretesynthetic" in the sense of "containing more specifications of the subject".

DOI: 10.1057/9780230583818_15

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