Hegel and Marx

Marx's thought shows the influence of Hegel's dialectical philosophy in many ways. He first became acquainted with it during his student days in Berlin, adopting in the first place a republican interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of history such as was represented by, for example, Eduard Gans. Like Hegel, Marx interprets world history as a dialectical progression, but. following Feuerbach's materialist reinterpretation of Hegel, Marx comprehends 'material labour as the essence, as the self-validating essence, of humanity' (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). Marx's critical reformulation of Hegel's philosophy of history consists in the elimination of the fictitious subject of world history, the so called 'world spirit', and in the prolongation of the dialectical process of historical development into the future. That realm of freedom which Hegel asserted to be fully realized here and now, lies for Marx in the future as a real possibility of the present. The dialectic of productive forces and productive relations which effects historical progress offers in contrast to Hegel's dialectic of world spirit no guarantee that the realm of freedom (see EMANCIPATION) will be realized; it presents only the objective possibility of such a development. Should the historically. possible revolutionizing of society not come about, then a relapse into barbarism (Luxemburg) or the 'common ruin of the contending classes' (Marx) is also possible.

In place of the constitutional bourgeois state, which for Hegel constituted the end point of historical development, Marx puts forward the concept of'the free association of producers'. This is a social order which dispenses with any kind of coercive force standing over and above it, and whose members manage their own affairs through consensus. For Hegel, the process through which an individual liberates himself from his natural existence, from external coercion, is a process of 'spiritualization'; through philosophical insight into his objective situation, the individual comes to see that what appea7ed to be external constraints upon his will are in fact necessary conditions of his existence as a thinking being with a will of its own, and with this insight comes reconciliation with the objective reality. Hegel and conservative Hegelians held that such insight, reconcliation and liberation could only be perfectly attained by philosophically educated state officials, while the YOUNG HEGELIANS, generalizing this idea, identified the process of'spiritualizadon' with that of the individual's maturation to citizenship. Nonetheless, in both interpretations the individual is left with a certain 'double identity': on the one hand, he is a natural individual feeling himself to be subject to external and coercive forces; on the other hand, he is a 'spiritual being' possessed of the knowledge that that which apparently denies him his freedom is in fact his freedom and reality itself. Liberation is reconciliation. For

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Marx, however, liberation is only possible when this duplication of human identity into human being and citizen, into natural individual and spiritualized being, is no longer necessary, has been overcome; when human beings no longer have to objectify their own social constraints in an 'alien essence standing over and above them' - the state (later also capital). Despite all his criticisms of Hegel Marx nevertheless retains the Hegelian conviction that humanity makes PROGRESS in the course of history. He also adopts - indeed as a matter of course - Hegel's Eurocentrism; and his own Eurocentrism is at its most obvious in his writings on India and China.

In Marx's work on the 'critique of political economy' a second influence of Hegel makes itself felt. The comprehension of this influence is particularly essential for an adequate understanding of Marx's main work, Capital, for it concerns the method which underlies his analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Here Marx makes use of Hegel's dialectical method, which he claims to have put (back) on its feet, in order to present the internal dynamic and systematic structure of capitalist production. The capitalist system of production relations constitutes a totality, that is to say, an all-inclusive unity which for this very reason must be examined and presented as an interconnected whole. However, empirical research and the processing of specific empirical data must precede the presentation of the totality. The dialectical sell-movement of the at once subjective and objective categories, value, money and capital, must be a feature of the object under investigation, not the result of an externally imposed methodological scheme. Marx stresses the difference between his way of handling empirical relationships and facts and that of Hegel who, as Marx maintained in his early Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State, develops a scheme of categories first - in his Logic - and then presents social institutions such as the family, civil society, the state and their internal structures in abstract conformity with his scheme. According to Marx the only adequate dialectical exposition of an object of investigation is one which is sensitive to the dynamic and structural individuality of the

object. The self-moving 'subject' of the capitalist mode of production, that for the sake of which capitalist production takes place at all, is capital itself, which is, however, not something independently real, but rather something which arises out of the unconscious interaction and collaboration of individuals and classes, and which will therefore disappear once capitalist society has been transcended. It is not a real subject of production but a 'pseudo-subject'. For this reason it is at best misleading to assert that Marx's category of 'capital' plays the same role in his thought as does the category of 'spirit' in Hegel's thought and system.

Whereas the (World) spirit according to Hegel's idealist philosophy actually produces history, capital is only the seemingly real subject of the capitalist mode of production. The acttral 'subjectlessness' of this mode of production (Althusser) is by no means only a methodological achievement of Marx; the idea that capital on the one hand objectively appears as the independently real subject of production yet on the other is not 'really real', is not really an independent subject at all, contains an implicit criticism of the mode of production which constitutes it. The free association of producers, according to Marx, is destined to take the place of capitalism, a social order which ruthlessly and short-sightedly exploits nature, in which individuals and classes are determined by the structural laws of the mode of production to serve the 'pseudo-subject', capital. The free association of producers, so Marx maintains, will regulate the metabolic interchange between society and nature rationally and, in contrast to capitalist society - where production is subservient and responsive only to the interests of capital - its production will be directed towards satisfying the producers' material requirements and their needs for (social) activity, social life and individual development. It will, as the real subject of production, take the place of the 'pseudo-subject', capital, the mere objectively existing 'appearance' of a subject of production. Only in this not yet realized subject will the Hegelian World Spirit find its empirical embodiment.

Marx only used Hegel's dialectic method-

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ologically and tacitly to ground his belief in historical progress. Engels, however, in Anti-Duhring, attempted to go beyond this, to draft a kind of materialist dialectical ontology and theory of development (see MATERIALISM). Out of this attempt, which owed indeed more to Darwin and nineteenth-century natural science and scientific world-views than to Hegel, so called 'dialectical matenalism' arose, to whose further development and elaboration Plekhanov, Lenin, Stalin and a series of Soviet thinkers contributed. IF

Reading
Colletti, Lucio 1969 (1973): Marxism and Hegel.

Fetscher, Iring 1967 (1970):'The Relation of Marxism to Hegel'. In Karl Marx and Marxism.

Hyppolite, Jean 1955 (1969): Studies on Marx and Hegel.

Korsch, Karl 1923 (1970): Marxism and Philosophy.

Lichtheim, George 1971: From Marx to Hegel and Other Essays.

Marcuse, Herbert 1941: Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory.

Negt, Oskar, ed. 1970: Aktualitiit und Folge der Philosophie Hegels.

Riedel, Manfred 1974: 'Hegel und Marx'. In System und Geschichte.

Wolf, Dieter 1979: Hegel und Marx.