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ABSTRACT
We can best understand Marx’s economic thought by seeing it as implicitly relying upon and reworking a Hegelian philosophy of history, which was deeply salvific and soteriological in its basic structure. Hegel’s philosophy of history reworked the Christian narrative of man’s fall, his redemption through Christ’s atonement, and his return to a state of reconciliation with God in the life of the Christian church. Thus, the loss of the organic form of community found in the Greek polis was a fall that was atoned for in the religious alienation found in both Judaism and Christianity, where man is treated as separated from a transcendent God. The reconciliation between man and God is found, finally, in the reconciliation of the modern, rational state. Early on Marx adopted Hegel’s philosophy of history, but its basic structure remains even in his mature economic work. There he envisions the loss of the organic unity of primitive communism, and the alienation of individuals from the larger social totality of feudalism and capitalism. Under communism, however, individuals are reconciled with the larger social whole through the collective mastery of the products of labor.
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Notes
1 This is an entirely different matter than man’s coming into his stature as man, which does happen in the classical polis.
2 There is no interpretation of the LPR that I am aware of that can avoid a merging together of the doctrines of the Resurrected Christ and the Holy Spirit, and I will assume this merging together here.
3 Hegel argues in the Philosophy of Right both for toleration and for the value for the modern state of religious pluralism. See Hegel Citation1820 [Citation1991], 294-302. But a plurality of traditional, vorstellende forms of religion is compatible with the state establishment of a single begriffliche religion, the religion of Hegelianism.
4 From the 1960s onward Marx scholars have conducted a debate as to the degree of continuity between the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the Marx of Capital, with the Althusserians arguing for a substantial break and scholars such as Shlomo Avineri, Iring Fetscher, and Leszek Kolakowski arguing for continuity. My position here belongs to the “continuity” camp, but I also think it is useful to divide Marx’s career into three periods: an overtly “anthropological” period going up to 1845, a middle period where he attempted to develop “historical materialism” as a deterministic theory of history based on the expansion of the forces of-production (the period that was the basis for Engel’s understanding of Marx), and a final period from the Grundrisse onward that was focused on understanding the uniqueness of capitalism. See the discussion in Cohen Citation1982, 24 and 134-49; much of my analysis of Marx is indebted to Cohen Citation1982.
5 “The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed according to the laws of political economy in the following way: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more worthless he becomes; the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful his work, the more powerless the worker; the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature” (Marx Citation1975, 325).
6 Hegel’s description of the Prussian bureaucracy as a universal estate was replaced by the idea of the proletariat as a universal class. See Marx Citation1975, 256. See also (Yack Citation1986, 284 ff.) On the elitist outlook that Hegel shared with the neohumanists see Pinkard Citation2000, 268-75 and 321.
7 “For Hegel human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. All estrangement of human nature is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. Hegel regards the estrangement of self-consciousness not as the expression, reflected in knowledge and in thought, of the real estrangement of human nature. On the contrary, actual estrangement, estrangement which appears real, is in its innermost nature—which philosophy first brings to light—nothing more than the appearance of the estrangement of real human nature, of self-consciousness” (Marx Citation1975, 387).
8 Yack Citation1986, 285 writes “ … it is the acceptance of a particular interpretation of the quality of life rather than sheer economic need, which leads to the overthrow of capitalism. Such an interpretation would have to rely on an idea of humanity that would enable us to distinguish a truly human from a dehumanized life. But then everything would turn again on the correctness of ones conception of humanity, the left Hegelian position that Marx scorns and tries to escape. Marx could no longer represent his social criticism as the expression of working class needs and experience. The need for a total revolution, he would have to admit, does not arise necessarily out of the social experience of workers; workers must view their experience from a particular philosophical perspective, they must have a particular understanding of man’s humanity and the obstacles to its realization, before they will even long for a total revolution in the mode of production, let alone actually revolt.”
9 On Bauer, see Brudney Citation1998, 114-17; on Arnold Ruge and Moses Hess, see Lobkowicz Citation1967, 207-35.
10 Karl Löwith (Citation1970, 44-45) comes very close to this idea of “pseudo-secularization” with his concept of pseudormorphosis.
11 Yack (Citation1986, 292) writes that “Marx’s indignation at labour’s being reduced to a means of securing the wherewithal to satisfy his physical needs registers his residual Kantianism. ‘Certainly eating, drinking, procreating etc. are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and exclusive ends, they are animal functions.’ Consequently when productive labour ‘appears to man primarily as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain physical existence’ then ‘what is animal behavior becomes human and what is human becomes animal.’” (Yack is quoting from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; the emphases are his own.)
12 On the complexity of the institution of “private” property, see the essays in Brewer and Staves 1994.
13 Adorno has summarized Marx’s theory as follows: “The meaning of Marx’s economics is much rather that he starts out from just that element in bourgeois political economy which is more than descriptive (fair exchange). And that he shows that the society which develops on the basis of such principles contradicts these principles, whilst the realization of these principles would supersede [aufheben] the form of society itself. Marx . . . takes from bourgeois society the measures of legality which it has itself constituted, shows that bourgeois society cannot fulfill them, and retains this measure at the same time as a negative expression of a right constitution of society” (quoted in Jarvis Citation1998, 50).
14 As G. A. Cohen (Citation1995, 16) puts it, “the standard Marxist critique of capitalist exploitation works only against capitalisms with dirty histories.”
15 On the “Ricardian socialists” (the appropriateness of the name is disputed), see McNally Citation1993 and Claeys Citation1987. My argument for the importance of Marx’s opposition to the Ricardian socialists and Proudhon in the shaping of Marx’s thought owes much to McNally’s book.
16 McNally Citation1993 dedicates an entire chapter to Marx’s critique of Proudhon.
17 Marx was aware that the northern United States was primarily a petty commodity production economy but thought of the United States as only a colony of European capitalism and hence as inevitably fated to become capitalist itself: ‘‘If within one society the modern relations of production i.e. capital, are developed to its totality, and this society then seizes hold of a new territory, as e.g. the colonies, then it finds or rather its representative, the capitalist, finds that his capital ceases to be capital without wage labour, and that one of the presuppositions of the latter is not only landed property in general but modern landed property; landed property which as capitalized rent, is expensive, and which, as such, excludes the direct use of the soil by individuals. Hence Wakefield’s theory of colonies, followed in practice by the English government in Australia. Landed property is here artificially made more expensive in order to transform the workers into wage workers, to make capital act as capital, and thus to make the new colony productive; to develop wealth in it, instead of using it, as in America, for the momentary deliverance of the wage labourers” (Marx Citation1858 [Citation1973], 278).
18 See C.B. MacPherson (Citation1962, 3) on “possessive individualism”: “The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is the proprietor of his person and capacities.”
19 The most powerful account of the idea that bourgeois society presents a self-enclosed false reality in its “surface appearance” is Georg Lukács’s theory of “reified consciousness” (Lukács Citation1972).