On the Subject of the Dialectic by Bruno Bosteels

The fundamental question, of course, remains: Which Marx? At first, the answer to this question may appear to be fairly straightforward in the case of Revueltas. Dialéctica de la conciencia would thus simply present us with one more variation on the theme of humanism in the so-called "young Marx," the one associated principally with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, for whom the alienation and reappropriation of our human essence would constitute the core principle of communism. Rather than seeking to locate the source of the dialectic in the objectivity of nature, as Engels would later attempt somewhat desperately in his Anti-Dühring, Marx in his Manuscripts of 1844 starts out from, and ultimately promises what it would mean to return to, the human subject as a generic being, or species-being. Such would also be the beginning and end of the dialectic adopted by Revueltas. In fact, as Jorge Fuentes Morúa amply demonstrates in his recent intellectual biography, José Revueltas: una biografía intelectual, the author of Dialéctica de la conciencia was one of the very first intellectuals in any part of the world to study and appreciate the critical importance of Marx's Manuscripts, which were already published in Mexico by the end of 1937, in a Spanish version that is now impossible to find, under the title Economía política y filosofía, translated by two exiles from Nazi Germany:

Revueltas used Economía política y filosofía; we have been able to study his annotations to this book. These glosses give us insight into the questions that attracted the author's attention with greatest intensity. These interests of a philosophical nature, which were developed in his literary, political, and theoretical texts, refer in substance to different perspectives on alienation and the situation of the human being when confronted with the development of capitalism and technology.6