MARX’S INVERSION OF HEGEL’S DIALECTIC

Followup to the Hegel piece below.

Marx is greatly influenced by Hegel’s dialectical theory. Yet, at the same time he is bothered by Hegel’s mystification of the dialectic: “with him it [the dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”(1) The rational kernel being the conception of the self creation of man as a process, labor as the essence of man, humanity’s alienation (estrangement) from their social world and the dialectic of negativity as the motor of social change:

The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labor and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labor.(2)

Thus, while Hegel grasps these concepts he mystifies them by locating them within the mind, a product independent of material experience: “Hegel’s Encyclopaedia …is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind.”(3) The result of situating self-objectification within the mind is that alienation becomes that of thought – the alienation of consciousness. Alienation fails to be grounded in the social relations between material practice and the corporeal body:

Logic…is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and the real man: abstract thinking…the whole history of the alienation process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e.) absolute thought.(4)

Subsequently, alienation - the objectification of the powers of humans – is merely the loss of power over thought and the objects of thought. Alienation is not grounded in material processes and is therefore not alienation of the worker from the product of their labor, from the act of production, from their species being and from other men. (5) For Hegel,

the appropriation of man’s essential powers, which have become objects— indeed, alien objects—is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought, i.e., in abstraction: it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and movements of thought.(6)

Since man only alienates thought, all that he can reclaim is his thought. Hegel’s confinement of alienation to consciousness results in man being unable to reclaim power over the commodities that are alienated during the course of capitalist production. Under Hegel’s scenario, dealienation is merely the supersession of an alienated abstract man and his alienated abstract thought. Subsequently, alienation not grounded in material reality and the relations of men and nature is one ‘torn from real mind and from real nature.’ While the Phenomenology of the Spirit ‘grasps steadily man’s estrangement’ it fails to escape the realm of consciousness and place man in his material world. For that reason, Hegel’s man appears not in his corporeal form but merely as mind.

Despite Marx’s critique of Hegel for constructing concepts that reside solely in consciousness and therefore in abstraction from nature and material man, Marx praises Hegel for realizing the importance of these concepts. Foremost is Hegel’s conception of labor as the essence of man. Even though Hegel’s labor is only that of ‘abstractly mental labor’, he conceives of the process of abstract mental labor as one of alienation, as the objectification of thought and eventually its dealienation through the realignment of reality with thought – the unification of what is and what ought to be.(7) Moreover, Hegel formulates supersession as a process of transcendence involving the recombination of the self and their alienated objects. Through supersession the individual reappropriates the object of their estrangement by ending the alienating nature of reality: “supersession as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self…the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world.”(8) The culmination of which is that Hegel posits a process of alienation/disalienation as the nodal point around which the concept of labor fluctuates.(9) Hegel’s formulation of the process of alienation/disalienation is itself an example of another concept central to his theory, the negation of the negation. Through his creation of each concept he conceives “of each of them first as negation—that is, as an alienation of human thought—and then as negation of the negation—that is, as a superseding of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought.”(10) Following Hegel, Marx perceives this negativity to be the positive and creative force in history. Nonetheless, Marx flips this principle on its head and places the negation of the negation in the material world, positing the advent of communism and the death of capitalism as the material realization of the negation of the negation.

Marx therefore adopts from Hegel a certain conceptual framework that seeks to relate appearance and essence within a social totality where concepts are always in motion.(11) For instance, Marx separates value into its form of appearance, exchange value, and its essence, abstract labor.(12) Moreover, concepts can only be understood through their reciprocal relation to one another and their connection within the totality, which for Marx was the totality of capital. Subsequently, concepts form a unity through the contradiction of opposites, e.g. commodity as use-vale and exchange-value, mode of production as relations of production and forces of production.(13) In addition, the movement of phenomena, including the totality, is based upon the ongoing contradiction between the reciprocally related phenomena, e.g. capital and labor, use value and exchange value, wages and profits, relations of production and forces of production.(14) All of these presuppositions form the basis of dialectical theory and method.

1) Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (New York: Penguin Books, 1976[1990]), p. 103.
2) Karl Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York: International Publishers, 1964[1988]), p. 177.
3) Ibid., p. 174.
4) Ibid., p. 175.
5) Ibid., p. 178.
6) Ibid., p. 175.
7) Ibid., p. 177.
8) Ibid., p. 187.
9) Ibid., p. 188.
10) Ibid., p. 190.
11) Marx, Capital Volume I, p. 18.
12) Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (San Francisco: AK Press, 1979[2000]), p. 111.
13) Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1973[1993]), p. 39, 41.
14) Marx, Capital Volume I, p. 18.