CRITICISM IN MARXIST METHOD 5 on philosophy and mumbling a few irritable and banal phrases. For, in a word, "you cannot transcend (aufheben) philosophy without realizing {verwirklichen) it."6 This is no place to go into the conclusions that emerge from Marx's criticism of Hegel. Suffice it to mention here that Marx discovers in Hegel's thought the inevitable transformation of the empirical into the speculative and the speculative into the empirical. Hegel is criticized for his "uncritical idealism^as well as his "equally uncritical positivism"7. Given this understanding, is Marx's criticism completed? No^ he must criticize the "modern German criticism": the "critical criticism", for its "uncritical attitude to the method of criticism." The task is to secure freedom from the Hegelian dialectic. Marx's criticism of the critical school is that, "it has not once voiced so much as a suspicion of the need for a critical debate with its progenitor, the Hegelian dialectic."8 Feuerbach is hailed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as the ( true conqueror of the old philosophy", as the only person with a serious and critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic.9 But, in 1845, Marx is already critical of Feuerbach. In his Theses on Feuerbach, notes hurriedly scribbled down by him for later elaboration, Marx clearly notes, The chief defect of...Feuerbach...is that . he does not conceive human activity itself as objective (gegenstaendliche) activity. .Hence . he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary^', of ^practical-critical", activity.10 Through this discovery, Engels admitted more than forty years later, the "intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception" was severed,11 The Economic and Philosophical Manuscriptsoperate at more than one level and with more than one aspect of the problematic. It touches on the interconnection of political economy and the state, law, morals, civil life, and soon, in so far as political economy itself particularly touches on these subjects. Marx starts out from the premises of political economy. He accepts its language and its laws. He presupposes private property. From political economy itself, using its own words, he shows that in the capitalist world the worker sinks to the level of a commodity. However, Marx clearly demonstrates that, though political economy proceeds from the fact of private property, it does not explain it. It grasps the material process of private property, the process through which it actually passes, in general and abstract formulae which it then takes as laws. It docs not "comprehend these laws", that is it does not show how they arise from the nature of private property.12 Marx's criticism of Hegel and of the political economist is not without internal connections. Colletti has perceptively pointed out that the true importance of Marx's early criticism of Hegel lies in the key that