Practice, Writing, Dialectical Materialism

Marx is not the first modern Philosopher to privilege Practice over Theory--he is preceded in this regard by Kant's Practical Reason, by Spinoza's Adequate Cause and his concept of Mind as a tool-maker, and even by Descartes' Discourse on Method, i. e. Method is inherently Practical, even if its content is intellectual. Instead, his novelty in the tradition is his explicit affirmation of his task as essentially Practical. Still, he stops short of recognizing the Materiality of the writing that constitutes both his work and that of each of his predecessors, including Hegel, whose 'Idealism' is actually only an abstraction from the book Phenomenology of Mind. He, thus, also misses an opportunity to recognize an immediate example of Dialectical Materialism--his collaboration with Engels. From that process, he might have derived a concept of Dialectic as entailing Complementary moments, rather than antagonistic ones, which is what he does derive via a secondary abstract operation on the Phenomenology of Mind, i. e. via an "inversion" of Hegelian Idealism.