Marx's Reaction Against Hegel

 

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 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, not 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)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Value, Price, and Profit

 

I.  Marx's Labor Theory of Value (from Adam Smith)

 

Value of commodities distinguished from value in exchange (exchangeable value), which is variable.

Analogy to geometry.

 

The common social substance of all commodities is labor.

 

Commodities as values = "crystallized social labor" = the quantity of socially necessary labor = "the quantity of labor necessary for its production in a given state of society, under certain social average conditions of production, with a given social average intensity, and average skill of the labor employed."(895)

 

How is exploitation of the laborer possible?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II.  Marx's Surplus-Value Theory of Profits (and of Capitalist Exploitation of Labor)

 

A.  The mistaken formula for profits:  Profits = Price – Value.

 

B.  Defining the correct formula:

 

        (1) Value of Labor Power = the quantity of labor needed to produce it, including producing children.

 

        (2) Surplus Labor = the quantity of labor performed over and above the value of the labor power that performed it (expressed in social labor time).

 

        (3) Profit = Surplus Value = Value of the surplus labor

 

        (4) Two ways to Define Rate of Profit = Rate of Surplus Value

        (a) Ratio of surplus value to the value of the laboring power (labor capital).  [This is the definition Marx favors.]

        (b) Ratio of surplus value to the total capital (labor, raw materials, machinery, etc.)

        The example of the serf and the wage laborer.

 

        EXPLOITATION ("you must allow me this French word") of Labor.

 

 

 

 

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

 

II.  Scientific Socialism: 

        Replace metaphysical method with dialectic.  Evolutionary process, not static.

        Replace idealism with materialism (dialectical not metaphysical).

        Replace ethics (normative) with positive science of nature and history. Juridical and political institutions as well as religious, philosophical, and other ideas are the superstructure.

 

III.  The History of Exploitation and Its End

 

The state "dies out."  Why?

 

Universal Human Emancipation as a species being.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three elements of Scientific Socialism:

 

(1) materialistic conception of history = governed by "inexorable natural laws" (919)

 

(2) Analysis of profits as surplus value.  No need for justice or other moral notions (i.e., eternal truths).  [Invisible Hand Explanation of the evolution of beliefs about justice and other moral beliefs.]

 

(3) Marx and Engels' Invisible Hand prediction of the end of class struggle and universal human emancipation. 

 

Question:  Is private property necessary for oppression and exploitation?  Answer:  The Marxist regimes of Stalin, Mao, etc. are the most oppressive and exploitative in history.

 

What would Locke say about Marx's solution to capitalist exploitation?

 

In the end, scientific socialism is utopian.