Does Marx’s idealism speak to our “post-truth” world?

Marx’s “idealism” still generates impassioned discussions, as, for example, during the current close reading of Chapter One of Capital at the Marxist Library. Chapter One has had a stormy history among post-Marx-Marxists. For Lenin its comprehension demanded studying the whole of Hegel’s Logic. For Lukacs it anchored his concept of totality. Both Sartre and Derrida were drawn to Chapter One’s “theo­ry of fetishism” but each recoiled in their own way from what Sartre called its “Hegelian idealism.” Althusser demanded ignoring it “to drive this phantom [of Hegel] back into the night.” In Stalin’s Russia it was ordered to be dropped from the teach­ing of Capital and the law of value was baptized as an attribute of “socialism.”

Can this intense ongoing divide within Marxist discourse on Chapter One—traced by Raya Dunayevskaya from her own unique perspective on Hegel—reveal the absolute opposite to our post-truth world with its multiple crises facing humanity?