Cohen vs. Trotsky: Is Marxism Without Dialectics Really Like a Clock Without a Spring?

Is something called "the dialectical method" central to Marxism? If not, is dialectics just Hegelian mumbo-jumbo that Marxism is better off without? Or are both of these unhelpful oversimplifications?

I just finished teaching a class on two books—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty and Karl Marx’s acid-tipped rejoinder The Poverty of Philosophy. During the final session of the course, we spend some time talking about Marx’s accusation that Proudhon misunderstood Hegel’s “dialectical” approach and that this partly explained how Proudhon…