Marx's Reaction Against Hegel
Reversal of Hegel's
Two Levels of Reality
RationalIZATION: mind,
universal, objective, ethical, essential, LAW, SUPERSTRUCTURE, freedom AS AN
IDEA IS AN ILLUSION
Natural: body, particular, subjective, inclination,
causation, accidental/contingent, MODES OF PRODUCTION AND ECONOMIC
RELATIONS, SUBSTRUCTURE, FREEDOM AS A CONCRETE RELATION OF SPECIES BEINGS IS AN
INEVITABLE REALITY.
Marx's Dialectical Materialism: History is a process of development through
conflict; not a conflict of ideas, but real conflict between economic classes.
Marx claims to have turned
Hegel on his head, in the following way:
1. The Individual and Particular Have Priority Over the Universal (Materialism replaces Idealism). Start from the individual and
particular. Basic Empirical Facts: modes of production and relations of
production and exchange. History is the
history of the development of the division of labor. Forms of property are a symptom of the
underlying facts.
2. Basic empirical facts have priority over ideas
(e.g., laws and philosophical theories.
Laws and all religious, moral, and philosophical speculation is part of
a superstructure that is determined by the sub-structure of basic empirical
facts.
3. Purely descriptive has priority over the
Ethical (Normative). There are no
ethical relations independent of the basic relations of production and
exchange.
4. Invisible Hand Explanation of History. History is the product of causal relations
and class conflict, not dialectical conflict between ideas.
Marx's Latent Hegelianism
1. Although Marx denies objective moral truths,
his account is an account of the elimination of alienation, oppression and
exploitation. Marx claims to be able to
explain them purely descriptively. But
in this he fails. His account seems to
make use of universal ethical categories.
2. Surprisingly, according to Marx, history has a teleology. Its goal
is human emancipation (Hegel's goal).
3. Emancipation is understood anti-individualistically. Emancipation as a species
being.
4. History progresses dialectically by resolving
conflict.
Note, however, that Marx's
description of the process is not Hegelian:
a. History progresses not as a result of conflicts (contradictions) of ideas, but
by class conflict: free man and slave,
patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, bourgeoisie
and proletariat (870).
b. The
Final Stage of the Process is specified:
The abolition of bourgeois private property, that is, private property
in the means of production, and the abolition of bourgeois individualism in
favor of life as a species being, ultimately to include the withering away of
the state.
"Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts"
Key ideas: Capitalist economy based on division between
capital and labor and on competition.
(1) Wage laborers are
literally alienated from their labor, because they sell it to capitalists.
"[W]ages and private property are identical."(847)
Private property represents the commodification
of laborers and their alienation from the product of their labor and from the
activity of labor.
Private property "is the product of alienated
labor, and . . . it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization
of this alienation."(847)
"Spontaneous, free activity is degraded to a means of
individual subsistence (846).
(2) Wage laborers are also
alienated from other laborers, because they are competitors in the labor
market: the "estrangement of man
from man."
Individualistic man replaces man as a species being.
(3) The solution:
The emancipation of society from wages = emancipation from private
property = the emancipation of the workers (which itself implies) universal
human emancipation (848).
Note how much the early Marx
is influenced by Hegel:
(1) Individualism is a
problem to be overcome.
(2) Emancipation is the goal,
but of a species-being not as an individual.
Freedom is identified with the universal (844).
The German Ideology
The Reversal of Hegelian
Philosophy: Empirical facts: the modes of production and productive
relations are the substructure. The
philosophical and the normative are the superstructure, which simply reflects
the sub-structure.
History is not understood as
a rational process of becoming aware of universal mind, but an empirical
process driven by developments in the modes of production (primarily
innovations in technology) and productive (especially class) relations
(primarily innovations in the division of labor, including the division between
capital and labor). Ownership rights are
symptoms of the underlying modes of production and productive relations.
First premise of all human
existence: the production of material
life itself
Five Stages of ownership:
(1) Tribal ownership
(2) Communal and State
ownership in the City
(3) feudal
or estate property and guilds
(4) bourgeois
property = capitalism (private ownership of the means of production and wage
labor)
(5) communism
(the dictatorship of the proletariat with communal ownership of the means of
production): solution to the problem of alienation
of labor and to conflicting individual interests (competition).
Manifesto of the Communist Party
"The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."(870)
The last stage: Bourgeois (capitalist) vs. proletariat (wage
laborers)
What was the bourgeoisie
revolution?
Capitalism "creates a
world after its own image." How?
But it also contains the
seeds of its own destruction. Why?
What does Marx mean by an
"epidemic of overproduction"?
How are the proletarians
exploited?
What is the next stage?
"Their mission is to
destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property
[i.e., private ownership of the means of production]."(876)
Abolition
of private property.
Abolition of freedom,
understood how?
Abolition
of individuality.
Abolition
of the family.
Abolition
of nationality.
Abolition of all classes will
eliminate oppressor and oppressed.
Abolition of all eternal
truths (e.g., justice), all religion, all morality
The Ten
Elements of the Communist Platform (882).
The Final Result: A realization of the Golden Rule (882)