******’s Reviews > Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx's Capital > Status Update

Anything you’d rec reading beforehand? Don’t think I have the motivation for Althusser but if it’s necessary…

Ben wrote: "Anything you’d rec reading beforehand? Don’t think I have the motivation for Althusser but if it’s necessary…"

I wrote a whole different response, you might have seen it, but decided it was bad. If youve read capital (I see that you have, but for any other wayward reader of the comment I suggest having worked through at least the first 3 chapters, ideally as much of it as possible) then you should have everything you need to read Ilyenkov. Capital obviously is the finest example of the method in use and the focus of the piece here, but the more youve studied the merrier when it comes to logic since you have more material to apply it to. I found it helpful to try and apply what Ilyenkov was describing to various other things I was studying to better grasp his points. I was only drawing a through line between Ilyenkov and Althusser because they come to many of the same conclusions regarding the dialectic and the "concrete definition of man" or "real humanism" despite writing pretty different works coming from different angles in different contexts. But this is only tangentially related to Ilyenkov, its more explicit in Althusser. I personally find it interesting since what theyre polemicizing against is still quite common, especially in the student movement. So just considering demographics on here, you might find that interesting too.

For supplementary reading I would just look at the third section of chapter 1 of the Grundrisse titled "The Method of Political Economy", since its an example of Marx describing the dialectical method quite explicitly. Referencing it throughout as a "big picture" view of what Ilyenkov was discussing was definitely helpful. Otherwise, everything you might need is pretty evident in the text itself, besides maybe reading more of the sections Ilyenkov quotes from Lenin's Conspectus of Hegel's Logic, and Hegel himself as it comes up, just to more deeply understand the points being made and to be able to distinguish between how Marx and Hegel differ. The transcription on Marxists.org for Ilyenkov has links at the end of each quote (from Ilyenkov to the Conspectus, and from the Conspectus to Hegel) which makes flipping back and forth pretty easy, so I'd suggest it, though it does have some typing errors.

E: One additional thing I thought of was Lenin's "On the Question of Dialectics" from the collected works. It's also on Marxists.org. It's brilliant, but I found it especially helpful for when Ilyenkov discusses the history of the ideas, and how those historical uses factor into the theory. Particularly this passage:
"Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade)—here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with “metaphysical” materialism, the fundamental misfortune of which is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie[5], to the process and development of knowledge.
Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, überschwengliches (Dietzgen)[6] development (inflation, distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But philosophical idealism is (“more correctly” and “in addition”) a road to clerical obscurantism through one of the shades of the infinitely complex knowledge (dialectical) of man."