DIALECTICS OF LABOUR: MARX AND

HIS RELATION TO HEGEL (1986)

by C. J. Arthur
first published, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986

Contents
Introduction →
1. Acknowledgements
2. Abbreviations
3. Introduction
4. PART ONE Marx’s Theory of Alienation
5. Chapter 1
6. Chapter 2
7. Chapter 3
8. PART TWO The Critique of Hegel
9. Chapter 4
10. Chapter 5
11. Chapter 6
12. Chapter 7
13. Chapter 8
14. PART THREE 1844 The Turning Point
15. Chapter 9
16. Chapter 10
17. Chapter 11
18. APPENDIX Problems of Translation
19. Bibliography
Introduction →

DIALECTICS OF LABOUR: MARX AND

HIS RELATION TO HEGEL (1986)
by C. J. Arthur
first published, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986

Introduction
← Contents | Chapter 1 →
In V.I. Lenin’s little article ‘The three sources and three component parts of Marxism’
the said sources are identified as ‘German philosophy, English political economy and
French socialism’.[1] There is widespread agreement that this is indeed the case.
[2] But what is the thread that links these disparate intellectual sources together? The
answer is that Karl Marx effected this synthesis once he grasped the importance of
human labour in the history of society. The idealist dialectic of the German philosopher
G.W.F. Hegel, presented in his Phenomenology of Spirit as the self-movement and self-
estrangement of spirit, Marx re-read in terms of human practice – centrally in terms of
the alienation of labour; English political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo), he
discovered, based itself on the labour theory of value; French socialism protested
against the exploitation of the labourer and counterposed to the division of labour the
principle of ‘association’.
It was in Paris in the year 1844 that the young Marx first drew these threads together
and put material labour at the centre of his research programme. In his manuscripts of
that year we can see this new synthesis taking shape. [3] They begin as a simple set of
notes on his reading of economic texts; then he breaks off to write the section (now
justly celebrated) on estranged labour; he goes on to reflect on the meaning of
communist doctrines in this light; along the way he conducts a running debate with the
shade of Hegel, especially around the central question of our time – that of alienation. It
should be noted that most works on Marx’s theory of alienation are defective because
they do not recognize that all the sections of the manuscripts are equally essential and
inform each other.
For Marx, from 1844, the problem of alienation in modern society is understood to
gravitate around the estrangement of labour. All other spheres of estrangement are to
be related to this. [4]
What we find, then, in the 1844 Manuscripts is the emergence of a new theory of
extraordinary scope and fertility.[5] As such it is one of the most exciting texts in the
history of modern philosophy. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult, partly
because of its fragmentary character; even more, because of the complexity and
originality of Marx’s new ideas. Indeed the vast scope of the project sketched out in
these manuscripts defeated Marx himself. Only a part of the programme he outlined for
himself was undertaken, namely the researching and writing of Capital – and even that
project remained incomplete at his death. The critique of Hegel, by contrast, was never
taken up; although Marx continually promised himself that he would write some sheets
on what is rational in Hegel’s dialectic.
This book sets out an interpretation of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. It will attempt to clarify
what is obscure and to complete thoughts Marx left incomplete. A special effort is made
to assess Marx’s relationship to Hegel, which is one of extraordinary complexity; the
influence of Hegel on Marx is enormous, yet Marx’s embrace of materialism sets him
poles apart from Hegel. Not surprisingly, the matter is a controversial one. The
evidence offered by the 1844 Manuscripts of Marx’s own understanding of his relation to
Hegel has been insufficiently studied (except by Georg Lukács in his masterly work The
Young Hegel), and never properly explicated. The question is not without its importance;
for the central role played by labour in Marx’s thought, and its character as ‘the activity
of alienation, the alienation of activity’, is much illuminated by tracing Marx’s route out
of Hegel. Above all, this book aims to bring out fully the dialectical aspects of Marx’s
thought at this important turning point. The book ends by indicating the continuing
importance of the themes of 1844 in Marx’s later work.
Although an enormous literature exists on Marx’s theory of alienation, and although
certain remarks of his about Hegel’s philosophy are frequently quoted, there has been
no thorough study of the 1844 Manuscripts themselves, and certainly no detailed
exegesis of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s dialectic therein. That is why it is worthwhile to
devote a whole book to the study of this important turning point in the birth of Marxism.

1 VI. Lenin, ‘The three sources and component parts of Marxism’ (1913), in Selected
Works, London, 1969, P. 20. This idea is not original to Lenin. Indeed, a tripartite
division of this sort was elaborated as early as 1840 by M. Hess. In Die europäische
Triarchie he said England would produce a revolutionary combination of German theory
and French practice. Engels, in an article of 1846, puts in the mouths of the so-called
‘true socialists’ the following: ‘Did we not assign to the Germans the sphere of theory,
to the French that of politics, and to the English that of civil society?’ C.W.6, 3.
2 Pierre Naville rightly points out that the matter is somewhat complex because the
sources are already ‘mixed’ (De L’Aliénation à la Jouissance, Paris, 1957, p. 11); just one
example: Marx could read political economy in Hegel through Hegel’s own
appropriation of it.
3 David McLellan in Marx Before Marxism, London, 1970, says these elements appear
in the Paris manuscripts ‘together, if not yet united’ (p. 206). I hope to show that there
is more unity than is apparent.
4 1844 Mss: C.W.3, 297; Werke Eb., 537.
5 ‘A synthesis in statu nascendi‘ says István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation,
London, 1970, p. 15.

Introduction
In 1844 a turning point occurs in Marx’s philosophical development. For the first time
he attributes fundamental ontological [1] significance to productive activity.[2] Through
material production humanity comes to be what it is. Through the process of production
the worker realizes his potential and becomes objective to himself in his product. He
develops his productive powers and knows himself in and through his activity and its
result. It is important to observe that this is possible only because there exists raw
material with which to work. Marx says that ‘the worker can create nothing
without nature, without the sensuous external world’. [3] It is the material in which his
activity realizes itself, and, in the absence of any distortion of the relationship, this
material production is the ‘mediation‘ in which the unity of man with nature is
established.
The category of ‘mediation’ Marx takes from Hegel, and it is as central to his work as it
is to Hegel’s. It is to be contrasted with ‘immediacy’. In the present case, someone who
argues that man is nothing but a part of nature, a natural being subject to natural laws,
is taking the position that man is in immediate unity with nature. By contrast, someone
who takes a dualistic position, representing man as separate from the natural realm,
developing himself spiritually, and struggling against the power of nature latent in
himself as well as the influence of external determinants, is taking man to
be immediately opposed to nature.
Marx’s position is much more complex. On the one hand, he speaks of nature as
‘man’s inorganic body’ and says that ‘he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if
he is not to die … for man is a part of nature’. [4] On the other hand, he says that ‘it is
in his fashioning of the objective world that man really proves himself; through such
productive activity ‘nature appears as his work and his reality . . . and he can therefore
contemplate himself in a world he himself created’; [5] this process is characterized
as ‘objectification’ (Vergegenständlichung) – another important category Marx employs.
In truth, man is neither passively dependent upon nature, nor is he able to create his
world from nothing. It is rather the case that through industry, productive activity, a
dynamic relationship between man and nature is established in which both poles are
transformed. In a discussion of this problem in the German Ideology (1846) Marx and
Engels explain that ‘the celebrated “unity of man with nature” has always existed in
industry … and so has the “struggle” of man with nature …’. [6] In summing up Marx’s
position we may therefore refer to the relationship of man and nature as mediated in that
it is not immediately given, and forever untransformed, but is one in which productive
activity, interposed as a third ‘moment’, provides a principle of development,
transformation and self-transformation. On the objective side there is the development
of productive powers, which enable society to appropriate natural materials to human
use with decreasing effort. On the subjective side, Marx elaborates the idea of the
constitution of a ‘wealth of human needs’, [7] and the development of ‘the richness of . .
. human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable
of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man)’. [8]
The mediation of productive activity (objectification) Marx views as ontologically
fundamental to the whole social and historical development of mankind (see figure 1).

Where idealist social ontologies try to purge social categories of the natural, and
biological reductionists evacuate the social mediations, the strength of Marx’s category
of ‘productive activity’ lies precisely in its double determination as the linking element
between the human and the natural, the ideal and the material, teleology and causality.
Productive activity is at the same time both a material interchange (the combination and
transformation of raw materials into goods for human consumption) and a human social
process – whereby the cunning of human practice realizes its aims within the context of
definite, historically determined and transformed, socio-economic relationships.
The perspective just outlined is admittedly very general, but it underpins Marx’s theory
of alienation as it is sketched in the well-known chapter of the 1844 Manuscripts –
‘Estranged Labour’ – to which we now turn. (For notes on the German terms for
alienation/estrangement see the Appendix, pp. 147-9.)

Estranged Labour
Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts are justly famous for conceptualizing the situation of the wage-
labourer as one of alienation. Because the worker has no property in the means of
production his labour-power is excluded from the instrument and object of production
owned by another; his labour realizes itself therefore only through the wage-contract
whereby it is alienated to the master and works in his behalf. The labourer treats his
labour as a commodity; as a consequence he has no interest in the work itself but only
in the wage; labour does not belong to itself but to private property. Marx comments
trenchantly on the situation endured by the worker: he executes plans he does not
form; he objectifies himself in his product only to have it taken from him; he produces
palaces but lives in hovels; his labour creates beauty but deforms himself; the more
intelligence is embodied in the design of the factory system the more machine-like and
stupefying the routine of work, so much so that the labourer faces machinery as a
competitor for his place; at work he does not feel at home; he feels himself only when
he is not working; his work is not voluntary therefore, but is forced labour; in it the
worker belongs not to himself but to another.[9]
Marx’s diagnosis of ‘estranged labour’ is a complex shifting one in which he continually
comes back to elaborate themes initiated earlier. Because we have before us a first
draft, the presentation is not clearly organized. However, the underlying structure of
Marx’s thought articulates the different moments of the system of estranged
relationships by mapping the alienating mediations on to the ontologically fundamental
relationships already outlined.
Marx’s frame of reference is the relationship man – activity – nature. In his production
man works upon the naturally given object of his activity and develops himself and his
powers on a corresponding basis. Marx thematizes alienation in the same dimensions.
 Alienating activity estranges man from the object of production and his essential human
qualities. Although the active moment is the central one, in his exposition Marx finds it
convenient to deepen the analysis in the sequence object – activity – man. Let me
elaborate these moments (see figure 2).

1. The worker is confronted by the product of his labour ‘as an alien object exercising
power over him’ says Marx; not only does he lose the product to the capitalist, but its sale by
the latter reinforces the power of wealth over the labourer; and, likewise, nature, the basis of
production, is monopolized by the propertied class and appears as ‘an alien world inimically
opposed to him’. [10] ‘The product of labour’, says Marx, ‘is the objectification
{Vergegenständlichung} of labour’, but, given that labour is separated from its objective
conditions of realization (namely the material and the instruments of production) by their
status as private property, the objectification of labour is at the same time its alienation, and
the outcome is the estrangement of the worker from the material basis of his existence and
life activity. [11]
2. ‘The relation of labour to the act of production within the labour process’, Marx says,
‘is the relation of the worker to his own activity as alien . . .’ Marx derives this aspect from
the first by means of the argument that, if estrangement is manifest in the result of
production, this means that production itself must be alienating, ‘the activity of alienation,
the alienation of activity’. The wage-labourer has no satisfaction in his work and only
endures it for the sake of the wage, subordinating his activity to an alien power. ‘His life-
activity’, says Marx, ‘does not belong to him.’ Since, for Marx, activity is the central
determinant of human being (for as men express their life so they are), the alienation of
labour is at the same time self-estrangement. Marx concludes: ‘Here we have self-
estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing.’ [12]
3. ‘Estranged labour’, Marx says, ‘turns man’s species being . . . into a being alien to him,
into a means for his individual existence.’ [13] What does Marx mean by ‘species
being‘? [14] He explains that ‘man is a species being . . . because he looks upon himself as
a universal and therefore free being.’ [15] The most important species activity is ‘productive
life’. [16] It is worth quoting an extended passage in which this is thematized:

The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic

nature, is the proof that man is a conscious species being . . . It is true that
animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver,
the ant, etc. But an animal produces only what is immediately needed for itself
or its young; it produces one-sidedly, while man produces universally; it
produces only under the pressure of immediate physical need, while man
produces even when he is free from physical need arid truly produces only in
freedom therefrom; it produces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of
nature; its product belongs immediately to its physical body, while man freely
confronts his product. An animal forms things only according to the standard
and need of the species to which it belongs, while man knows how to produce
in accordance with the standard of every species and knows how to apply to
each object its inherent standard, hence man forms things in accordance with
the laws of beauty.
 In fashioning the objective world, therefore, man proves himself really to be
a species being. This production is his active species life. Through it nature
appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore
the objectification of the species-life of man: for he duplicates himself not
only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and
therefore he sees himself in the world he has created. [17]
The characteristic of human productive activity that marks it off from a merely animal mode
of subsistence is its universal and creative power. A man can ‘put his hand to anything’. But
the labourer subordinated to the division of labour obtains no satisfaction in his work
because the universal power of the species is realized in capitalism as the annexation of the
individual to a particular set routine. The work is a mere means towards a living wage. ‘In
degrading spontaneous free activity to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a
means to his physical existence’, [18] complains Marx. In this light, Marx argues that an
increase in wages ‘would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would
not win either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.’ [19]
At the same time, the social character of production takes on an asocial quality in so far as
the worker and the capitalist both depend on each other, yet are thrown into confrontation
over the destiny of the product. Thus man is estranged from man. [20]
So this, in schematic outline, is Marx’s account of estranged labour. We are not
concerned here with thematizing other spheres of estrangement; but there is one
corollary worth noting. Marx writes a special section on the estrangement involved in
capitalist consumption. The significance Marx attaches to the development of ‘the wealth
of human needs’ was noted briefly above. In principle, Marx regards each new product
as ‘a new enrichment of human nature’. Under private property, however, this relation
of production to consumption reverses its significance; for the former now dominates
the latter in an alienating way, he argues. The capitalist ‘speculates on creating
a new need in another so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new
dependence’. In this context ‘every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual
swindling.’ [21] In a remarkably prescient passage, Marx diagnoses the essence of
advertising:
Subjectively . . . the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and
ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and
imaginary appetites. . . No eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more
despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure than does the
industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak a few pieces of silver . . .
out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at
the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and
his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses
– all so that he can then demand the cash for this service. [22]
As for the purchaser of these goodies, he is incapable of truly enjoying anything for
itself because all the senses have been estranged by private property in favour of ‘the
sense of having’. [23]
Marx is struck above all by the quasi-magical power of money seemingly to acquire for
its possessor every human power he lacks. It is ‘the alienated ability of mankind’; ‘it
makes contradictions embrace’. [24]
Of course, one could say that such a criticism of capitalist priorities and perversions is
not difficult to mount: Charles Fourier, with his theory of the passions, had already
connected the richness of need and enjoyment with ‘association’ of labour, and
inveighed against production for the sake of production; the work of M. Hess on the
category of ‘having’ is explicitly cited in Marx’s text; furthermore, Marx is able to draw
on the resources of literature [25]in so far as it depicts the system of estrangement – in
the final pages of his notebook he quotes passages from Goethe and Shakespeare in
his critique of money. [26]
What is new in Marx, as we shall see, is the way in which such insights are situated in
a comprehensive theory of capitalism which grounds the necessity of communism in a
real historical transition.

Let us now try to get an overview of our progress so far. At the beginning I showed that
the category of ‘productive activity’ has general ontological significance for Marx.
Already in 1844, therefore, we have the first glimpses of the science of historical
materialism, because this mediation provides the possibility of a historical dimension to
human existence in so far as men’s relationships to nature and to each other are
transformed through it.

The actual development of this activity, however, has become subsumed under a
further set of mediations; in the present economic conditions we find that productive
activity itself is mediated through the division of labour, private property, exchange,
wages, in sum a system of estrangement in which productive activity loses itself and
falls under the sway of an alien power. Istávan Mészáros has termed this ‘a set
of second-order mediations . . . i.e. a historically specific mediation of the ontologically
fundamental self-mediation of man with nature.`[27] The most important distinction
between the two orders is that initially it is presupposed that productive activity is in
immediate unity with its object, whereas with the imposition of the estranging second-
order mediations labour is immediately confronted by its object as something separate
from it. This immediate opposition is not ontologically given in the nature of things but is
the result of historically determinate mediations. (It is necessary to note that the
categories immediate/mediate do not divide elements into two different classes; rather,
the same relation may be mediated from one point of view and immediate from
another.)
For Marx, what requires historical explanation is not the unity but the separation of
these moments, through a process whereby ‘man alienates the mediating activity itself’,
and hence becomes the slave of an ‘alien mediator’. [28]
It is important to understand that the emergence of the second-order mediation does
not substitute itself for the first – it further mediates the mediation itself. This means
that it would not be correct to erect a dichotomy between them such that everything
true of one side is untrue of the other (a strategy typical of analytical thought); this, in
turn, would facilitate a faulty diagnosis of the problem of alienation in terms of an
opposition of the ideal and the real.

Let us note in particular that, if through productive activity man objectifies himself and
lives in a world he has himself made, this is no less true when he alienates himself and
fails to recognize himself in the system of estrangement brought about through
alienated objectification. It is this conceptual inflection rather than mutual exclusion of
the categories ‘objectification’ and ‘alienation’ that permits theoretical space for
grasping the objective necessity of a historical supersession, which would otherwise be
a utopian ‘demand’. Equally, the possibility of historical supersession depends on a
refusal to identify the second-order mediation with the first (easy to do because in
recorded history the rule of private property bulks large), thus building into the theory
the inevitability of alienation, whatever philosophy may endeavour to reconcile us to it.
In order to overcome estrangement, the alienating mediations must be overcome. But
this does not mean that Marx rejects all mediation, for the ‘first-order mediation’ –
productive activity as such – is an absolute ontological dimension of social life; Marx
opposes only its specific alienated form, imposed through second-order mediations
which are historically surpassable. If this distinction is not drawn, and social philosophy
collapses the two levels into one, such that private property and exchange are taken to
be as absolute as productive activity itself, then it is not possible for such a philosophy
to grasp the conditions of a positive supersession of estrangement; it must descend to
apologetics and pseudo-solutions.

The Concept of ‘Labour’

Confusion is evident on this last point in some of the secondary literature on
Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. One reason for this is that Marx’s terminology is not always
understood. To make further progress in elucidating his thought, it is necessary to deal
with a point on this avoided so far.
This is that the second-order alienating activity is often identified by Marx as ‘labour’ –
not ‘wage-labour’ or ‘alienated labour’ but ‘labour’ pure and simple. If this category
‘labour’ (Arbeit) is identified in reading the text with the productive activity as such that
is ontologically fundamental, hopeless misunderstanding can arise, It need not arise if
a commentator is sufficiently sensitive to the context to discount such a ‘literal’ reading.
However, this point on terminology needs to be grasped, not only for pedantic
exactness, but also because an important conceptual point hangs on it, as will be
shown below.
To begin with, let us attend to the textual problem. This problem is a special case of the
difficulty of reading Marx’s early work through spectacles acquired by a knowledge of
the later work, thus imposing anachronistically the meanings of Capital on the young
Marx. The category ‘labour’ (Arbeit) had settled its meaning by the time Marx
wrote Capital, as one of his fundamental ahistorical categories. Thus, the chapter
in Capital on the labour-process starts with the assertion that this can be examined
without reference to the social form within which it is carried on. He goes on:
Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which
man, of his own accord, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism
between himself and nature , . . Through this movement he acts on external
nature, changing it, and simultaneously changes his own nature. [29]
Another quotation from Capital shows that at this time Marx equates ‘labour’ with
productive activity in the sense of our first-order mediation:
Labour as such, in its simple character as purposive activity, is related to the
means of production not in their determinate social form, but rather in their
concrete substance . . ., the earth as non-produced means of labour, the others as
produced. [30]
The usage of the term ‘labour’ is different in the early writings. In such texts as the 1844
Manuscripts and the German Ideology (1846-7) Marx restricts the term to productive
activity carried on under the rule of private property. It is not the term he uses when he
wishes to thematize that activity which is the universal ontological ground of social life.
Still less does it apply to future unalienated free activity.
It is a testimony to the incapacity of people to read what is written in the 1844 text that
when Lukács takes from it the appropriate distinction he does not use Marx’s own
terminology. Instead, he elevates the term ‘Arbeit‘ to an ahistorical universal, as in the
following diagnosis:
In his discussion of economics Marx, drawing on his knowledge of empirical
evidence, distinguishes sharply between objectification in labour in general and
the estrangement of subject and object in the capitalist form of labour. [31]
If Lukács can overlook the point, it is not surprising that lesser thinkers do so. Thus
Herbert Marcuse (in his 1932 review of the 1844 Manuscripts) speaks of ‘Marx’s positive
definition of labour’, and (in his Reason and Revolution of 1941) he states that in the 1844
Manuscripts Marx holds that ‘labour in its true form is a medium for man’s true self-
fulfilment’. [32] T.I. Oizerman says in his paraphrase of the 1844 Manuscripts: ‘To
analyse private property, one has above all to analyse the form of labour which creates
it . . . Marx . . . explains that private property and everything that springs from it is not
created by labour in general, but by alienated labour, a historically definite form of
human activity.’ [33] These are examples of ‘positive’ readings, which would conform
with Marx’s usage only if the phrase ‘labour in general’ were to be ‘productive activity’
instead.
Let us now turn to some examples of ‘negative’ readings. Raya Dunayevskaya, without
citing exact references, says:

So hostile was Marx to labour under capitalism, that at first he called, not for the
’emancipation’ of labour, but for its ‘abolition’. That is why, at first, he termed
man’s function not ‘labour’, but ‘self-activity’ . . . No matter how the language
changed, the point remained that labour, in a new society, would in no manner
whatever be the type of activity it is under capitalism where man’s labour is
limited to the exercise of his physical labour-power. [34]
Erich Fromm follows Dunayevskaya closely. [35] Robert Tucker sums up the matter
correctly as follows:
By ‘labour’ or ‘alienated labour’ – terms that he employs interchangeably –
Marx means productive activity performed by man in the state of alienation from
himself. He declares that all human activity up to now has been labour . . .
Consequently, man has never been fully himself in his creative activity. This
activity has never been ‘self-activity’, by which Marx means free creativity in
which a person feels thoroughly at home with himself, enjoys a sense of
voluntary self-determination to action, and experiences his energies as his
own. [36]
Mészáros detects some ambiguity:

In the Manuscripts of 1844 labour is considered both in general – as ‘productive

activity’: the fundamental ontological determination of ‘humanness’ – and in
particular, as having the form of capitalistic ‘division of labour’. It is in this
latter form capitalistically structured activity – that ‘labour’ is the ground of all
alienation. [37]
G. Petrović detects a similar inconsistency:

In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx as a rule opposes

‘labour’ to ‘praxis’ and explicitly describes ‘labour’ as ‘the act of alienation of
practical human activity’, but he is sometimes inconsistent, using ‘labour’
synonymously with ‘praxis’. [38]
I would not claim that Marx is absolutely consistent, but I would say that his normal
usage of ‘labour’ refers it to the more specific meaning and that examples that look like
the more universal sense are often simply aspects of the former because, as we have
already explained, labour is, at the same time, productive activity.

Let us now establish the textual evidence for Marx’s early ‘negative’ definition of
‘labour’ and his anticipation of its ‘abolition’. In the first three sections of the first
manuscript it has not yet occurred to Marx to organize the material under the rubric of
estrangement. His main critical category is ‘abstraction’. Capital, landed property and
labour are separated from each other and this ‘abstraction’ is ‘fatal for the
worker’. [39] Marx shows that the evidence of the political economists themselves
proves this; but they do not recognize ‘that labour itself . . . is harmful and pernicious’ –
even though it follows from their own arguments. [40] This is partly because the
political economist does not consider the human being of the worker but merely his
function as a labourer – one who lives ‘by a one-sided abstract labour’ – hence ‘in
political economy labour occurs only in the shape of the activity of earning a
living. [41] This might leave open the possibility of some other ‘shape’ of labour, but in
the following discussion of estrangement Marx says more conclusively that ‘political
economy conceals the estrangement inherent on the nature of labour‘. [42]
In the following pages there is a summarizing passage in which ‘labour’ is equated with
‘the act of estranging practical human activity’ [43] and in which ‘the act of production’ is
said to become ‘an alien activity’ turned against the worker, within
‘the labour process’. [44]
In the second manuscript a very important passage includes the following definition:
‘Within the private property relationship there is contained latently . . . the production of
human activity as labour – that is, as an activity quite alien to itself, to man, and to
nature.’ [45] In this passage ‘labour’ is defined as productive activity transformed by the
private property system into an activity alien to itself. Were it not that this is simply
ignored by political economy, simply not understood, then ‘alienated labour’ would be a
pleonasm. In this sense of ‘labour’, human activity as such is distinguished from it as
free activity which harmoniously relates man and nature, the producer and his object.
In the third manuscript Marx says that the history of industry presents – albeit ‘in the
form of estrangement’ – an ‘open book of man’s essential powers’. ‘This was not
conceived in its connection with man’s essential being but only in the external relation
of utility’, he goes on, because ‘all human activity hitherto has been labour’, that is
‘activity estranged from itself.’ [46] Here there is a clear distinction between the positive
side of the history of production, in so far as it mobilized ‘mans essential powers’, and
the negative side, constituted by the forms of estrangement within which it has
developed. ‘Labour’ is clearly assigned to the latter as ‘activity estranged from itself’.
Later, in a fragment on the division of labour in civil society, the same negative
definition of ‘labour’ appears again; since ‘labour is only an expression of human
activity within alienation’ then the division of labour is ‘the estranged and alienated form
of human activity as an activity of the species’. [47]
A couple of years later Marx worked with Engels on another manuscript, known to us
as the German Ideology, in which even more striking formulations occur. He proposes
not only the end of the division of labour (for which ‘private property’ is an ‘identical
expression’ [48]) but also the abolition of labour. For example: ‘In all previous
revolutions the mode of activity always remained unchanged and it was only a question
of . . . a new distribution of labour . . . whilst the communist revolution is directed
against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour . . . ‘ [49] There
followed the beginnings of a further amplification: ‘the modern form of activity under the
rule of. . .’ – but this was crossed out; nevertheless it is clear that ‘labour’ is understood
as an activity which is not free and falls together with private property.
The ‘abolition of labour’ (‘Aufhebung der Arbeit‘) is spoken of on several occasions later
in this text, [50] of which the most interesting states:
Labour, the only connection which still links them with the productive forces and
with their own existence, has lost all semblance of self-activity and . . . while in
earlier periods . . . the production of material life was considered a subordinate
mode of self-activity, they now diverge to such an extent that material life
appears as the end, and what produces this material life, labour (which is now
the only possible but, as we see, negative form of self-activity) as the
means.’ [51]
All these passages show that ‘labour’ is defined as alienating activity, to be
distinguished from self-activity, free activity, human activity. In all these passages, also,
the context makes it clear that the labour defined negatively is not productive activity
itself (the manifestation of ‘essential power’) but only that carried on within the division
of labour and private property. Equally, abolition of labour does not do away with work
itself (not even manual work) but sets it in the framework of ‘free’ and ‘universal’
activity. If we want to know the immediate source of this way of talking about ‘labour’,
we need look no further than Marx’s own acknowledgement of the influence of M. Hess
on his thought. In the Preface to the 1844 Manuscripts Marx says that ‘the
only original German works of substance in this science’ include ‘the essays
by Hess published in Einundzwanzig Bogen‘. [52]
This refers the reader to some essays by Hess, in a book published abroad in 1843 to
defeat the German censorship. The first of these is a review of a book by Lorenz von
Stein on French socialism and communism, which made a big impact on radical circles
in Germany. At the time he wrote the review, Hess was already in Paris and so had
first-hand knowledge of the Fourierists and other socialist currents. In his review Hess
declares that in communism ‘the opposition of enjoyment and labour disappears’. This
is because ‘every man has an inclination to some kind of activity, even to very different
sorts of activity, and out of the multiplicity of free human inclinations and activities
arises the free, living and ever-youthful organism of free, human society, free, human
occupations that cease to be ‘work’ and become identical with ‘pleasure’.’ [53]
There is no doubt, therefore, that in his 1844 Manuscripts Marx is writing under the
immediate influence of such views.
Two of the commentators we cited earlier as failing to notice that in the 1844
Manuscripts ‘labour’ is the term construed as a ‘negative’ form of self-activity, as
alienation, are yet struck by the fact that Marx calls for the ‘abolition of labour’ in
the German Ideology; and they provide similar solutions to the problem – which will
serve to introduce our own reflections on the matter.
Marcuse (in his Reason and Revolution) makes the following comment:
These amazing formulations in Marx’s earliest writings all contain the Hegelian
term ‘Aufhebung‘, so abolition also carries the meaning that a content is
restored to its true form. Marx, however, envisioned the future mode of labour to
be so different from the prevailing one that he hesitated to use the same term
‘labour’ to designate alike the material process of capitalist and of communist
society. He uses the term ‘labour’ to mean what capitalism actually understands
by it in the last analysis, that activity which creates surplus value in commodity
production, or, which ‘produces capital’. [54]
Oizerman permits himself to express the view that in speaking of the abolition of labour
Marx adopts ‘a form of expression which is not very apt terminologically’;[55] and he
excuses it with much the same reasons as Marcuse, namely that Marx is simply
borrowing the category of the political economists and that, in any case, ‘Aufhebung‘
does not quite mean ‘abolition’. [56]
The problem is clear – in some sense the alienated form of activity seems to demand a
distinct concept which is correlative with the other moments of the bourgeois totality,
notably capital, that is a concept which is historically specific; in another sense there is
a continuity of reference when we discuss productive activity under the rule of private
property, and under socialism.

Curiously enough, a similar terminological problem was addressed by Engels in his

editorial work on Marx’s Capital. In a footnote in Capital, [57] Marx already noted that
English writers of the seventeenth century liked to use an Anglo-Saxon word for the
actual thing, and a Latin word for ‘its reflection’. In a later note inserted in the fourth
German edition such a case arises, when Engels over-enthusiastically claims that
where German just has ‘die Arbeit‘ English has the advantage of two separate words for
two different aspects of it: that which ‘creates use-values . . . is called “work”, as
opposed to “labour”; that which ‘creates value . . . is called “labour”, as opposed to
“work”,’ says Engels. [58] English usage does not accord with Engels’ distinction – as
expressions such as ‘look for work’ show – but the important point is that it would be
useful to have two such separate expressions.
There is a conceptual difference that needs to be marked between the material process
of working and the inflection given to this activity when it is socially specified within
exchange as value-producing labour. It is no longer just work but has a determinate
social form which marks it out within the generic activity.

Earlier I mentioned that there is a conceptual problem underlying the sense in which
‘labour’ is used. This is because, throughout the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx continually
relates labour to private property in a very intimate way, as ‘the subjective essence of
private property’. Since private property is understood by Marx as a historically specific
system, to be superseded, it must surely follow that its essence cannot be a first-order
mediation but must be equally determined within the framework of second-order
mediations. Either Marx should have said that the essence of private property is
‘alienated labour’, reserving the term ‘labour’ for the ontologically prior level; or, if
‘labour’ as such is to be ‘the subjective essence’, then we need some other term for the
relevant first-order mediation. If we take the second alternative, then a reading of
Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts and the German Ideology readily gives us a candidate, namely
‘activity’ or, more precisely, ‘productive activity’; ‘labour’ may then be defined as
‘alienated productive activity’, or, if that is to beg the question, as ‘activity within the
relationships of private property’. The next chapter investigates these private property
relations.

Summary
Marx’s ontology comprises the complex totality man – activity – nature. In the history of
human society the mediating moment is productive activity. But imposed on this first-
order mediation is a set of second-order mediations, principally private property, estranging
man from himself, his powers, his activity and his object. Objectification is then at the
same time alienation. Within the system of second-order mediations, productive activity,
now an alienating activity, is redefined as (alienated) labour.
Marx’s project is to conceptualize the positive supersession of this system of
estrangement.

1 I use ‘ontology’ to indicate that set of fundamental categories through which the
character of the social sphere is delimited and the general framework for theory
construction established. I do not mean that a priori arguments establish the necessity
of these categories, but I think that every research programme presupposes a
commitment to some ontology. For Marx’s ontology see Georg Lukács, Ontology of
Social Being: Marx (1972), trans. D. Fernbach, London 1978; Carol C. Gould, Marx’s
Social Ontology, Cambridge, Mass., London, 1978; Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the
Thought of Karl Marx, London, 1985.
2 I deliberately choose this phrase rather than ‘labour’ because the latter is open to
some ambiguity of interpretation, as will be seen later an this chapter.
3 Werke Eb., 512; C.W.3, 273; E.W., 325.
4 Werke Eb., 516; C.W.3, 276; E.W., 328.
5 Werke Eb., 517; C.W.3, 277; E.W., 929.
6 C.W. 5, 40.
7 Werke Eb., 546; C.W.3, 306.
8 Werke Eb., 541; C.W.3, 301.
9 Werke Eb., 512-14; C.W.3, 272-4; E.W., 322-6.
10 Werke Eb., 515; C.W.3, 275.
11 Werke Eb., 511-12; C.W.3, 272; E.W., 324.
12 Werke Eb., 514-15; C.W.3, 274-5.
13 Werke Eb., 517; C.W.3, 277; E. W., 329.
14 One should not be disturbed by Marx’s borrowing the term ‘species being’
(Gattungswesen) from Feuerbach. The content is different (see Part Three below).
15 Werke Eb., 515; C.W.3, 275; E.W., 327.
16 Werke Eb., 516; C.W.3, 276; E.W., 328.
17 Werke Eb., 516-17; C.W.3, 276-7; E.W., 328-9.
18 Werke Eb., 517; C.W.3, 277; E.W., 329.
19 Werke Eb., 520-1; C.W.3, 280; E.W., 332.
20 Werke Eb., 517-18; C.W.3, 277-8.
21 Werke Eb., 546-7; C.W.3, 306; E.W., 359. Hegel already explained thus in bourgeois
society ‘the system of needs’ multiplies indefinitely. He observes thus the need for
greater comfort . . . is suggested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its
creation’: P.R. (Knox), p. 269.
22 Werke Eb., 547; C.W.3, 307.
23 Werke Eb., 540; C.W.3, 300. But it is wrong to speak of Marx’s ‘producer’s morality’
(Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism London, 1962, p. 149) for he also
values here ‘human use’.
24 Werke Eb, 565-7; C.W.3, 325-6.
25 See S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford, 1976, pp. 76-85.
26 XLI – XLIII: New MEGA 1,2, 318-22; Werke Eb., 563-4; C.W.3, 323-4.
27 István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, London, 1970, p. 79.
28 ‘Comment on James Mill’ (1844): Werke Eb., 446; C.W.3, 312. Also: ‘is is not the
unity of living and active humanity with the natural inorganic conditions of their
metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which
requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather
the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active
existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour
and capital.’ (Marx, Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 489).
29 Werke Band 23, Das Kapital, Berlin, 1962, p. 192; C.l (Penguin), 283; C.1 (Moscow),
177.
30 C.3 (Penguin), 964; C.3 (Moscow). 804.
31 Georg Lukács: ‘In seinem oekonomischen Betrachtungen zieht Marx an der Hand
der Tatsachen des wirklichen Lebens scharf dis Grenze zwischen
Vergegenständlichung in der Arbeit an sich und Entfremdung von Subjekt und Objekt
in der kapitalistischen Form der Arbeit.’ Werke 8, 674; also The Young Hegel, trans.
Rodney Livingstone, London 1975, pp. 551-2.
32 ‘The foundations of historical materialism’ (1932), quoted from Herbert
Marcuse, From Luther to Popper, essays trans. Joris de Bres, London, 1983, p.
13; Reason and Revolution (194l), 2nd ed. London, 1954, p. 277. To cite a more recent
account: Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble, in their book From Alienation so Surplus
Value, London, 1972, put forward the view that Marx’s ‘ontological position’ is grounded
in ‘the dialectics of labour’ and they quote freely from all periods of Marx’s work to
establish this without noting any problems about the early terminology.
33 T.I. Oizerman, The Making of the Marxist Philosophy (1977), English trans., Moscow,
1981, p. 230.
34 Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, New York,1958, p. 61.
35 Erich Fromm Marx’s Concept of Man (196l), New York, 1971, p. 40. Despite the fact
that this book appears under Fromm’s name, it consists mostly of Bottomore’s
translation of Marx’s 1844 Mss; Fromm’s Preface attempts to popularize Marx by
characterizing him as an ‘existentialist’ and a ‘Zen Buddhist’.
36 Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1961 p. 134.
37 Mészáros, Theory of Alienation, p. 78.
38 Article on ‘praxis’ in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. T.B. Bottomore, Oxford,
1983, p. 386.
39 Werke Eb., 471; C.W.3, 235.
40 Werke Eb., 476; C.W.3. 240; E.W., 288.
41 Werke Eb., 477; C.W.3, 241; E.W., 289.
42 Werke Eb., 513; C.W.3, 273.
43 ‘Wir haben den Akt der Entfremdung der praktischen menslichen Tätigkeit, die
Arbeit . . . ‘: Werke Eb., 515; C.W.3, 275; E.W., 327 gives a misleading translation of this
sentence.
44 Werke Eb., 515; C.W.3, 275.
45 Werke Eb., 524; C.W.3, 285; E.W., 336.
46 Werke Eb., 542-3; C.W.3, 302-3.
47 Werke Eb., 557; C.W.3, 317; E.W., 369.
48 C.W.5, 46.
49 Ibid., 52.
50 Ibid., 77, 80, 87, 88, 205.
51 Ibid., 87.
52 Werke Eb., 468; C. W. 3, 232; Marx also gives credit to W. Weitling and to Engels.
53 Quoted from David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, London, 1969, pp.
148-9.
54 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 293. For ‘Aufhebung‘, see Appendix.
55 Oizerman, Making of the Marxist Philosophy, p. 392.
56 The editors of the current English edition of the Collected Works simply ignore the
problem and write in their Preface: ‘Labour will be transformed from an activity people
perform under compulsion into genuine self-activity of free people.’ C.W.5, xxii.
57 C.1 (Penguin), 126 n.4, Das Kapital, p. 50 n.4.
58 C.1 (Penguin), 138 n.16; Das Kapital, pp. 61-2, n.16.

2 – Private Property
← Chapter 1 | Chapter 3 →

Introduction
The first chapter brought out the character of estranged labour by showing how the
fundamental mediatedness of social development, articulated through the complex
man – activity – nature, becomes transformed in all its dimensions: man is specified
socially as labourer or exploiter; productive activity becomes alienated labour; and the
object is constituted within the sphere of private property as an independent power, as
capital.

This chapter will take a closer took at this set of second-order mediations. In particular,
it will discuss the way in which Marx conceives of the relation between alienated labour
and private property; the dialectic of the movement of private property; and the
contradictions that require resolution.
The Movement of Private Property
At first sight it appears that the worker’s alienation in his labour is due to the
subordination of labour to private property. His estrangement follows from the
separation between labour and private property, and the power of private property over
the immediate producer. The only certainty in the worker’s life is that his destiny
depends upon private property – on whether it has any use for the labour he offers.
The immediate precondition of alienated labour thus appears to be private property in
the means of production which excludes the worker.
Unwary readers of the section on ‘estranged labour’ in the 1844 Manuscripts – assuming
that what is being claimed is that the worker is alienated because he works under the
sway of the property owner – are then astonished when Marx suddenly turns round and
says that private property is not so much the cause as the consequence of alienation.
Here is the passage in question:
Private property is . . . the product, result, and necessary consequence,
of  alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself .
. . It is true that we took the concept of  alienated labour . . . from political
economy as a result of the  movement of private property. But it is clear from an
analysis of this concept that if private property appears as the ground, the basis
of alienated labour, it is much more its consequence, just as the gods
were  originally not the cause but the effect of the confusion in men’s minds.
Later, however, this relationship becomes reciprocal. [1]
It is of the first importance to understand what Marx is saying here, and the significance
of his view of private property as the product of alienated labour. [2] A clue to the
direction of his thought is given a few tines later, when he comments: ‘In speaking
of private property one imagines that one is dealing with something external to man. In
speaking of labour one is immediately dealing with man himself.’ [3] This reminds us
that private property is a social institution. It is simply a way of organizing human
relationships in the production and distribution of material goods. Ultimately it has to be
grasped as a human creation. Otherwise one would be
illegitimately naturalizing (treating as a given basis of human existence) what is
produced and reproduced in and through human history.
None the less, as we shall see in a moment, in the case of pre-capitalist society one is
not going too far from the truth in seeing property, e.g. landed property, as a
prior condition of labour’s realization: but developed private property, held as capital, is
different. Capital, as a store of value, is internally related to value-creating labour.
In the first part of the 1844 Manuscripts Marx stays close to his sources in political
economy and shows from facts admitted by political economy itself that the more the
worker produces the less he can call his own and ‘the more he falls under the
domination of his product, of capital’. [4]
In its theory political economy says that labour is the basis of production and exchange;
Adam Smith is quite clear that the real ‘wealth of nations’ lies in the labour force and in
improvements in productivity brought about by the division of labour. The economy
appears to be founded on the movement of private property, on buying, selling,
investing, profiting; but behind these relationships lies labour and its relations and
development. Marx says that there is therefore a paradox in that ‘political economy
starts out from labour as the real soul of production, and yet gives nothing to labour
and everything to private property’! ‘Proudhon has dealt with this contradiction’, Marx
continues, ‘by deciding for labour and against private property’; but that is insufficiently
dialectical; what we are faced with is ‘the contradiction of estranged labour with
itself. [5] Today, private property is, paradigmatically, capital, which is nothing but a
store of value. What is the origin of value? What is its substance? Why – labour! Every
time the worker labours, therefore, he creates a value which, when realized on the
market by the employer, adds to his capital. The worker produces and reproduces that
which dominates him – capital.
The relation of cause and consequence is grasped here from the point of view of the
self-reproduction process of the totality rather than an external conjunction of
antecedent and consequent. Abstract alienated labour, and capital, stand in an internal
relation which structures the whole of capitalist society in such a way that its
reproduction depends on the constant reflection of these moments into each other (for
‘moment’, see Appendix). To prioritize labour is not to overlook the power of capital; but
capital’s effectivity as the proximate moment in the worker’s estrangement does not
prevent Marx from grasping it as the mediating moment in labour’s self-alienation,
established by labour itself as its own otherness. In grasping this dialectical relation of
reflection in otherness we are dealing not with the constant conjunction of otherwise
unrelated elements but with a polar relation in which, although one can follow the
movement of private property as its current principal aspect, the ultimately overriding
moment must be labour, which alienates itself in the capital to which it is subordinated.

Marx says:

The labourer produces capital and capital produces him, which means that he
produces himself; man as a labourer, as a commodity, is the product of this
entire cycle. [6]
In relating labour in its alienation to fully developed private property, that is, capitalist
property, in this way, Marx is well aware that relationships were different in previous
social formations. When he gives priority to labour over property he is not posing it as
historically antecedent but rather as ontologically more fundamental in the social totality
established by their dialectic. However, this dialectical relationship between labour and
private property is itself a historically developed result. Hence, it had not merely to be
discovered, but to be created. If one looks, as Marx does in the first manuscript, at
precapitalist formations, there is no internal economic dialectic between labour and
property as there is between labour as the substance of value and capital as ‘stored up
labour’ – as Marx defines it (following Adam Smith). [7]
In the main form of pre-capitalist property, namely landed property worked by serfs, or
yielding tithes, there is certainly an opposition between labour and property in that, in
virtue of the political ties of lordship and bondage, the exploitation of the propertyless
mass of labourers is effected. But this process of exploitation does not sustain the
property relation itself in purely economic fashion. Romanticism views this state of
affairs as the absence of alienation – for the market is very marginal to life and the land
is inalienable. But, despite the absence of the activity of huckstering in the daily round,
estrangement is still present as a permanent condition. ‘Feudal landed property is
already by its very nature’, Marx says, ‘huckstered land, which is estranged from man
and hence confronts him in the shape of a few great lords.’ Thus, the basic condition of
labour, the earth, appears as ‘an alien power over man’. Hence ‘the rule of private
property begins with property in land; that is its basis’. [8] However, it does not yet
appear as an economic power, because it is politically enforced and reproduced. From
an economic point of view feudal property is an externally enforced condition
determining one’s place in production and the possibility of gaining wealth; for example,
the serf is condemned to be an appurtenance of the land, the land itself is inalienably
linked to the system of primogeniture.
But when private property is fully developed it is free from all such restrictions and is
universally alienable. Along with the development of markets in all kinds of
commodities goes the reduction of land and labour themselves to alienable
commodities. Possession now depends no longer on political mediation, but on the
effect of the purely economic movement. It becomes inevitable, Marx says,
that the rule of the property owner should appear as the naked rule of private
property, of capital, divested of all political tincture; that the relationship
between property owner and worker should be reduced to the economic
relationship of exploiter and exploited; that the personal relationship between
the property owner and his property should come to an end, and that property
itself should become merely  objective material wealth . . . [9]
It is noteworthy, moreover, that Marx commonly speaks of the power of property or of
capital rather than the domination of the property owner or the capitalist. Much more is
involved here than a rhetorical figure. This usage represents Marx’s insight into the real
conditions of social relationships in bourgeois society. This is: that the nature of the
relationship between persons follows from their relationships to things. If one asks of
two persons going into a factory why it is that one can boss the other around, the
answer cannot be given in terms of the personal qualities of the individuals concerned
but only in terms of their differing relation to capital. The one who owns (or acts on
behalf of) capital is thereby the master of the other. Marx says:

Capital is the  power to command labour and its products. The capitalist possesses
this power not on account of his personal or human properties but in so far as he
is the  owner of capital. His power is the  purchasing power of his capital, which
nothing can withstand. [10]
Throughout his work Marx never tires of contrasting the relationships of personal
dependency in pre-capitalist society with the liberation from personal dependence
established by the bourgeois revolution; but then there comes the common
dependence on impersonal relations; through the mediation of money and capital new
social dependencies arise.

In feudalism there is the appearance of a meaningful unity between the individual and
the means of production in that land is individuated with its lord and its serfs – just this
particular estate is his and they belong to it. Hence the proverb: ‘No land without its
lord.’ [11] Developed private property, by contrast, has an abstractly universal form:
value. One can put one’s wealth ‘into anything – factories, land, works of art – without
ceasing to be ‘worth’ so much. Money dissolves all feudal fixity and we find the modern
saying ‘Money has no master’ expressing the absolute contingency of the relationship
between property and personality. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels
(following Carlyle [12]) will declare that there remains ‘no other nexus between man
and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash-payment”.’ [13] We no longer bow
the knee to princes, but now, says Marx, ‘an impersonal power rules over
everything’. [14]
What Marx traces in his treatment of pre-capitalist forms is a movement from a
situation where property is a politically enforced condition of labour (for example, one
just finds that one is obliged to work as a serf for the propertied) to that in which
property rests on the exploitation of the ‘free’ labourer in the capital relation. There is a
shift from a state of estrangement between labour and its conditions of actualization
(appearing over against it as another’s property) to the constitution of a process of
alienation sustaining the system of estrangement of labour from its object and itself.
The first relation (politically effected estrangement) is a historically prior condition of the
second complex; but in the movement of the economic totality that is now constituted
by the relations of labour and capital, labour establishes private property as its
estranged self. Marx says: ‘It is only at the culminating point of the development of
private property that this its secret re-emerges, namely, that on the one hand it is
the product of alienated labour, and on the other it is the means through which labour
alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.’ [15]
The relation of immediate exclusion between labour and its object remains in the new
dynamic, not now as a precondition, but as a mediated result, as the recurring moment
at which the worker is forced to sell his labour-power because he has no other
property. The whole system, including the reproduction of this very moment, is
sustained by labour’s continual self-alienation. [16]
Private property, originally other than labour, becomes in practice labour’s own other,
private property as alienated labour. Private property is unmasked as itself a structure of
alienation, rather than the (apparently external) cause of estrangement.
Let us now summarize the position we have reached – in so doing, perhaps,
elaborating it rather more sharply than it is explicitly articulated in the text.

It is necessary first to recognize the fact that we have now seen two senses in which
private property is less fundamental than productive activity. In the first place the
general level of discussion of these issues has led us to emphasize the importance of
conceptualizing the system of private property as a historically specific form of
organizing the material life of society. In principle it is possible to envisage material
production going on without it, and it is possible to discuss the work-process in
abstraction from it (as Marx does in the first section of the chapter on ‘the labour-
process’ in Capital). The question of the origins of the alienating second-order
mediations is something Marx does not attempt to tackle in the 1844 Manuscripts. (In
the German Ideology he links back private property to the development of the social
division of labour.) But this question is not relevant to his purposes in any case,
because what counts from the point of view of the dynamic of the supersession of the
private property system is its present articulation and contradictions. This in turn leads
us to the second striking aspect of Marx’s theory of alienation. As we have seen, even
if we take it that private property, and hence the estrangement of labour from its object,
is historically given, study of the movement of private property itself leads Marx to
conclude that in its reciprocal relationship with labour it is ultimately best understood as
the consequence rather than the cause of alienated labour. The state of estrangement
between labour and private property is developed, historically and conceptually, to a
process of active alienation of labour from itself.
At the level of first-order mediation Marx puts at the centre productive activity. At the
level of second-order mediation he puts at the centre, correspondingly, alienated
labour.

The Contradictions of Private Property

In the 1844 Manuscripts ‘labour’ is understood fairly broadly as activity enforced on the
immediate producers by external constraints, such as the social division of labour and
the rule of private property. It is understood also, more narrowly, when related to capital
(‘stored up labour’) as ‘the subjective essence of private property‘. Important consequences
follow from such a conceptualization.
The point is developed best in the second manuscript (which is passed over in silence
by most commentators, but which is crucial to Marx’s whole argument), and in a couple
of closely related comments on it from the beginning of the third
manuscript. [17] Consider first the following highly dialectical exposition of the private
property relationship:
The relationship {Das Verhältnis] of private property contains latently within
itself the relationship of private property as  labour, the relationship of private
property as  capital, and the connection {Beziehung} of these two terms to each
other. On the one hand we have the production of human activity as  labour, that
is as an activity wholly alien to itself, to man, and to nature . . . the abstract
existence of man as a mere work-man {Arbeitsmenschen} . . . on the other hand,
the production of the object of human activity as  capital – wherein all the natural
and social specificity of the object is  extinguished . . . in which the  same capital
stays the  same in the most diverse natural and social instantiarions {Dasein},
totally indifferent to its actual content. This contradiction, driven to the limit, is
necessarily the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole system. [18]
In considering this passage we need first to attend to the term ‘Verhältnis‘ (relationship),
Bertell Ollman (in his book Alienation) has already drawn our attention to the central
role of this term in Marx’s work, He claims that within such a relationship each ‘factor’
internalizes the relationship itself such that if the latter alters ‘the factor itself alters; it
becomes something else’. On this view, Oilman continues, interaction is, more properly
speaking, ‘inneraction’ because the factors form an organic whole. [19]
Ollman also explains that in discussion of such a system of ‘internal relations’ it is
possible for any term to extend its reference beyond its ‘core’ to related moments and
even the whole. With our passage in mind he says: ‘Perhaps the major service
performed by Marx’s conception of private property is as a meeting-place for various
strands in his thinking’; it is a relation ‘which contains many others’. [20]
It is also interesting to note the Hegelian origins of this term ‘Verhältnis‘. M.J. Petry
explains that Hegel employs the cognate term Verhalten ‘to refer to a
relationship, one factor of which tends to be predominate or to take the
initiative’. [21] Gillian Rose goes further. She says that for Hegel something in the
condition of relation (Verhältnis) subordinates its object to itself. [22]
Of course, we cannot be sure that Marx used this common term [23] in the same way
as Hegel. None the less, when Marx speaks of ‘Das Verhältnis des Privateigentums‘ (the
private property relation), he may well have in mind the sort of relationship in which
each side develops itself only through the subordination of its ‘other’, which always
remains in some sense a ‘barrier’ it must set itself to incorporate.
Let us see how Marx explains in the passage above the transformation of productive
activity brought about through ‘the relationship of private property’.

At the level of first-order mediation we are concerned with ‘human activity’ and its
‘object’, but these are now related within the second-order mediations, summarized as
the private property system, such that the first is constituted ‘as labour’, an activity
‘wholly alien to itself’, while the second is now held ‘as capital’ over against the
labourer. Their participation in the relationship of private property changes the
nature both of activity and its object. Furthermore, they now stand in a relation of mutual
opposition; but this opposition is itself a relationship, in which each defines itself
through exclusion from its other.
Marx goes on to explain that this contradiction emerges in all its purity only with the full
development of the private property system. Earlier, historically specific distinctions
existed both in forms of property-holding and in the sites of labour. Labour had ‘not yet
reached the stage of indifference to its content’; [24] but now it is merely a ‘source of
livelihood’ and as such the worker has no genuine identification with the work as it
is determinate, a specific job. Liberated from all traditional ties to. a foreordained
occupation, the ‘free worker’ of the industrial revoluton is a labour-power machine to be
slotted into any job as required, subject to the needs only of capital accumulation.
Likewise, while landed property still existed apart from industrial capital, it was still
‘afflicted with local and political prejudices’. [25] Marx gives a graphic description of the
ideological battles fought by the representatives of movable property and immovable
property (‘this distinction is not rooted in the nature of things’, he says, ‘it is
a historical distinction’ [26]); and the subsequent development ‘results in the necessary
victory of the capitalist over the landowner – that is to say, of developed over
underdeveloped, immature private property – just as in general, movement must
triumph over immobility, open selfconscious baseness over hidden unconscious
baseness, cupidity over self-indulgence, the avowedly restless, adroit self-interest
of enlightenment over the parochial wordly-wise respectable, idle and fantastic self-
interest of superstition, and money over the other forms of private property.’ [27]
At all events, the upshot of the development of the system of private property is a pure
contradiction between two poles: Labour (‘indifferent to its content’) and capital
(likewise ‘indifferent to its real content’). The two terms (opposed and united) of the
property relationship, labour and its object, the propertyless and the propertied, were
previously chained together in particularized fixed units. Now, each side has become
free to move and has attained abstractly universal form; both enter into a systematic
totality, and become posited by the private property relationship itself.
Marx notices that the real history of private property is paralleled by the development of
the theory of political economy. He says that the real process ‘repeats itself in the
scientific analysis of the subjective essence of private property, labour. Labour appears
at first only as agricultural labour, but then asserts itself as labour in general’. [28] Marx
draws two conclusions. It is only with the victory of industrial capital ‘that private
property can complete its domination over man and become, in its most general form, a
world historical power’; [29] and ‘only when labour is grasped as the essence of private
property can this economic process be analysed in its actual specificity’. [30]
This contradictory unity of labour and its other is important for Marx’s dialectical
development of the downfall of the whole private property system as it is drawn out in
this and other passages. For example, the communist movement has the historic task
of overthrowing private property assigned to it by Marx: but what is the ground of this
necessity? If it were simply a matter of a discrepancy between wealth and poverty, an
opposition between those who own property and those who have nothing, this might
lead to a ‘call for’ the rectification of this antithesis based on some criterion of social
justice applied externally to the existing situation. Marx, however, is able to root the
necessity of the communist movement in the contradiction internal to the development
of modern private property. In so doing he has to reinterpret the antithesis of property
and propertylessness as that of capital and labour, because only in the latter form does
the possibility arise of understanding the relation in a suitably dynamic fashion. It is true
that throughout the 1844 Manuscripts Marx more often speaks of private property than of
capital, but it is perfectly clear that his reading of political economy had allowed him to
grasp the central importance of the capital – labour contradiction. The following
passage puts the matter beyond all doubt:
The antithesis {Gegensatz} between  propertylessness and  property, so long as it is
not comprehended as the antithesis of  labour and  capital, still remains an
indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its  active connection, in its  internal relation,
not yet grasped as a  contradiction {Widerspruch}. It can find expression in
this  first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in
ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet  appear as having been established by
private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as
exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour,
constitute  private property as its developed state of contradiction hence a
dynamic relationship driving towards resolution {Auflösung}. [31]
Private property in ‘its developed state of contradiction’ is characterized by the
simultaneous identity and exclusion of two poles, labour and capital. Hence there can
be no harmonious synthesis – only a drive towards dissolution. This important feature
of the dialectic of second-order mediation (private property and exchange)
distinguishes it markedly from that of the first-order mediation.

In working on the object of production a reciprocal transformation occurs, at the level of

first-order mediation. On the one hand the object becomes adapted to some specific
human use, as means either of consumption or production. On the other hand, human
productive power is extended and developed. Over time there results an ever-growing
mediatedness of the relationship between social man and the rest of nature. Within
this, the recalcitrance of the objective world to human use is actively overcome on the
basis of theoretical knowledge and practical experience of its determinate potentials.
The manner in which the object is appropriated depends upon the specificity of its
relation to the relevant mode of affirmation of human power and enjoyment. [32]
But all this is perverted in the context of estranging second-order mediation. Private
property constitutes a determinate mode of externality of man to himself and to the
conditions of his activity. If nature is man’s ‘inorganic body’ because it is posited in his
activity as its essential object, then to separate human productive power from its
conditions of realization through constituting the latter as private property (whether or
not the means of production are in fact monopolized in consequence) is already to
constitute the object as external both to itself and to productive power. The latter is now
thrown back (because of the contingency of this external relationship to the means of
production) into an abstract ‘subjectivity’ estranged from its objective realm of
expression. If the potentially monopolizable means of production are then in fact
monopolized by a particular class of non-producers, the subjective moment too has to
become external to itself since labour-power can now actualize itself in objective
activity only in so far as it is alienated through the wage contract, becoming a
commodity like any other. The aspiring producer thrown back into ‘subjectivity’ faces
the purely objective conditions of his activity as absolutely recalcitrant to his
appropriation because they are held as the private property of another. Hence this
estrangement of the factors of production from each other makes necessary the active
alienation of his powers to the other if he is to work at all. The ‘unity’ established
through the wages system of the estranged moments is achieved through a ‘second
alienation’ so to speak. This ‘negation of the negation’ makes possible the positive
development of productive activity not by abolishing the property determinations
excluding labour-power from its possession of the means of production but by re-
establishing this unity within the private property relationship itself.
The important thing about the dialectic of private property is that the affirmative
mediating process of objectification is now undercut by the estrangement of each side
from the other; subject and object are condensed out as abstractly opposed spheres.
The attempt to mediate these pure extremes, labour and capital, which ‘mutually
exclude each other’, results, says Marx, in ‘hostile reciprocal opposition’ which reflects
their contradictory unity in the ‘opposition of each to itself’. [33] On the side of capitalist:
he cannot accumulate capital except through appropriating labour, yet the wages paid
out represent a sacrifice of his capital. On the other side: the labourer cannot gain a
livelihood except by treating his labour-power as his ‘capital’, a resource to be alienated
through commodity exchange to the owner of the means of production (see figure 3).

What precisely is the reason for this? Each side is posited purely negatively against the
other as everything which it is not. There is no mutually supportive interpenetration of
opposites (as in the positive sense the difference between the sexes has in the need of
each for the other): there is mutual repulsion within the exploitative relationship of
private property. The mediations that give room for this relation to develop itself
(wages, profit, etc.) establish the identity of each with its other only because each
moment internalizes the contradictory unity in itself. To use the language of Capital: the
private property relation as capital appears in the distinction between constant capital
and variable capital; the private property relation as labour appears in the oppression of
living labour by dead labour. In the language of 1844 Marx defines labour as ‘the
subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property’ and capital as
‘objective labour as exclusion of labour’. No matter how highly mediated the
relationship of private property becomes, at bottom labour and capital remain as
untransformed extremes. Hence Marx’s prediction of a clash of mutual contradictions
precipitating a collapse of the system.
This takes him way beyond his sources in classical political economy (even that which
reflects the full development of modern industry in prioritizing productive labour)
because such political economy mirrors the process of objectification in alienated form.
When Smith traces wealth to labour, he traces the bourgeois form of wealth to its origin
in value-producing labour. The first-order mediations are grasped through the prism of
the estranging second-order mediation (private property).
In a very suggestive comparison, Marx, following Engels, says of Smith that he was
‘the Luther of political economy’. [34] Just as Luther attacked external religiosity in the
form of fetish-worshipping, priests, ritual, churches etc., in order to implant God all the
more firmly in the hearts of the religious, so Smith mocked the mercantilists’ illusions
about gold and other external forms of property, in order to put labour as such all the
more firmly under the category of property as the inner essence of wealth, that is, of
value. However, this political economy cannot conceptualize the matter in a critical way
because it takes property in all factors of production for granted. It therefore sees the
social synthesis achieved only through money, wages and the market.
In spite of its advance from the ‘being’ of wealth to its ‘becoming’, the standpoint of
classical political economy is thus not that of productive activity as such, but of this
activity only as it is determined within the private property system as
productive labour (‘an activity alien to itself’).
On the one hand political economy has the merit of turning the spotlight from the
merely objective form of wealth to the human subject creating it. Thus Marx says that
only ‘the political economy which acknowledged labour as its principle – Adam Smith –
and which therefore no longer looked upon private property as a
mere condition external to man . . . has to be regarded . . . as a product . . . of the
real movement of private property – as a product of modern industry . . .’. [35] On the
other hand political economy, in conceptualizing labour as the subjective essence of
wealth, at the same time absolutizes these alienating mediations. But as a result man
is brought within the orbit of private property, just as with Luther he is brought within the
orbit of religion’, Marx points out.
Under the semblance of recognizing man, the political economy whose principle
is labour rather carries to its logical conclusion the denial of man since man
himself no longer stands in an external relation of tension to the external
substance of private property, but has himself become this tense essence of
private property. [36]
The meaning of the shift from external tension to tense essence in political economy is
easily comprehended if we remember that we developed above the real dialectic of (a)
‘mutual exclusion’; (b) ‘opposition of each to itself’; and (c) ‘hostile reciprocal
opposition’.

Political economy makes labour its principle, but since this labour is itself a
determination of private property it is not productive activity organically united with its
object and recognizing itself in its product, at home with itself in its activity; it is labour
as the ‘tense essence’ of private property, it is an alienating mediator producing the
product as loss of the object, activity as hateful, not as self-fulfilment but merely a
source of livelihood.
Political economy capitulates to this reality because it does not problematize the private
property system itself. For political economy, productive activity is necessarily labour, a
determination of private property itself; hence the benefits of productive activity
naturally accrue to private property. Political economy endorses this contradiction. Its
principle (labour) is a category which refers us implicitly to productive activity itself, but
this activity is estranged from itself, in contradiction with itself. Its principle, says Marx,
is ‘the principle of this rupture’, hence a contradictory principle, the consequences of
which ramify throughout the system. [37]
By contrast, Marx grasps the situation as one of labour’s self-alienation in and through
private property. Only if labour is grasped as the overriding moment in the alienated
labour/private property complex can the conditions of a real transcendence of
estrangement be established. Grounded in the alienation of labour, the immanent
movement of private property necessarily produces ‘its own grave diggers’ (in the
famous phrase of the Communist Manifesto). But in the dialectical opposition of private
property and alienated labour the principal aspect of the contradiction then becomes
the latter; hence Marx says that the fall of wage-labour and private property –
‘identical’ [38] expressions of estrangement – takes place ‘in the political form of the
emancipation of the workers‘. [39]
Later in the year 1844 Marx supplements this analysis of the contradictions while
composing The Holy Family (a critique mounted against the Young Hegelian Bruno
Bauer). He argues as follows:
Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain  itself,
and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in  existence . . . The proletariat, on the
contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite,
private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat.
It is the  negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self,
dissolved and self-dissolving private property . . . Indeed private property drives
itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a
development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes
place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only
inasmuch as it produces the proletariat  as proletariat . . . [40]
The proletarian revolution is itself necessarily only a moment of transition. The content
of the movement reveals itself as the transformation of the whole society. When the
proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is
victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as
well as the opposite which determines it, private property. [41]
The next chapter will investigate the significance of this victory, that is to say, Marx’s
understanding of communism.

Summary
In and through the private property system labour is separated from its object. This state
of estrangement develops into a process of active alienation of labour from itself, when
private property becomes posited as capital, as the product of alienated labour. The
condition (private property as the ground of estrangement) becomes the conditioned
(private property as the result of alienated labour). The presupposition (mutual
exclusion of labour and its object) of the private property relationship
becomes posited by the dialectic of the system itself (as a contradictory unity).
Classical political economy grasps labour as the subjective essence of private property;
but since it absolutizes the system of second-order mediation (conflating it with the
first-order level) it identifies itself with the standpoint of alienating mediation (labour).
In Marx’s view, the project of superseding alienation is grounded in the contradictory
development of private property itself. It takes political form as the revolt of the
proletariat against private property; but the proletariat overcomes this its other only by
abolishing itself as proletariat at the same time.

1 Werke Eb., 520; C.W.3, 279-80; E.W., 331-2.

2 Dirk Struik, in the introduction to his edition of the 1844 Mss (The Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York, 1964), states: ‘But the whole tenor leads to
Man’s conclusion of the priority of property’ (p. 45). In a private communication he says
that this was a slip. The text meant is ‘the priority of alienated labour’.
3 Werke Eb., 521; C.W.3, 281; E.W., 333.
4 Werke Eb., 512; C.W.3, 272; E.W., 324.
5 Werke Eb., 520; C.W.3, 280; E.W., 332. Proudhon in What is Property? (1841) says
‘Property is Theft’.
6 Werke Eb., 523; C.W.3, 283; E.W., 335.
7 Werke Eb., 484, 529; C.W.3,, 247, 289; E.W., 295, 341. See Adam Smith, The Wealth of
Nations (1776), ed. 8, Cannan, Chicago, 1976, vol. 1, p. 351.
8 Werke Eb., 505; C.W.3, 266; E.W., 318.
9 Werke Eb., 506; C.W.3, 267; E.W., 319.
10 Werke Eb., 484; C.W.3, 247; E.W., 295.
11 Werke Eb., 506; C.W.3, 266; E.W., 318.
12 We have forgotten… that cash-payment is not the sole relationship of human
beings. . Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, London, 1843, p. 198. This passage is
quoted by Engels in his review of Past and Present published by A. Ruge and Marx in
their Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, 1844 (see C.W.3, 451). Evidently it was
well known to Marx and Engels.
13 C.W.6, 487.
14 Werke Eb., 554; C.W.3, 314; E.W., 366.
15 Werke Eb., 528; C.W.3, 280; E.W., 392.
16 It is not surprising that commentators of an analytical rather than dialectical turn of
mind prove unable to comprehend the interchanges of these determinations. The
crucial passage is actually misquoted by Richard Schacht, Alienation, London, 1971,
when he says that Marx ‘contends that the dominance of the institution of private
property “is the basis and cause of alienated labour”, and thus also of the alienation of
the product’ (p. 108). In a private communication he admits that ‘is’ should have
been outside the quotation from Marx. However, he defends his interpretation against
the translation provided by Bottomore who gives: ‘although private property appears to
be the basis and cause of alienated labour, it is rather a consequence of the latter’
(Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore, London, 1963, p. 131). The German
is: ‘wenn das Privateigentum als Grund, als Ursache der entäusserten Arbeit ersheint,
er vielmehr eine Konsequenz derselben ist … ‘ Schacht suggests an accurate reading
is: ‘if private property appears as the ground, the basis of alienated labour, it is much
more a consequence . . . ‘ In his book Schacht has to face the fact that just before the
contested paragraph Marx writes: ‘Private property is therefore the product, the
necessary result, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and
to himself. In a footnote (n. 17 on p. 108) Schacht comments on this: ‘But here he is
thinking of the accumulation of possessions and capital, rather than of the institution of
private property.’ But Marx clearly sees the institution itself as coming to depend upon
alienated labour. To view the capital relation as working within a pre-existing institution
reifies the living social relation, instead of seeing it as reproduced by social practice, as
the conditioned rather than the condition.
17 All we have of the second manuscript is pp. 40-3. The first two passages (pp. 1-3) of
the third manuscript are further notes by Marx to pp. 36 and 39 of the second
manuscript. All these passages are therefore closely related. Werke Eb., 523-33; C.W.3,
283-94.
18 Werke Eb., 524-5; C.W.3, 285; E.W., 336. NB: ‘object of activity’ is mistakenly
rendered in E.W. as ‘object of labour’.
19 Bertell Ollman, Alienation, Cambridge, 1971, pp. 15, 17.
20 Ibid., pp. 164, 292 n.21.
21 See the introduction to Petry’s translation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols,
London, 1970, vol. 1, p. 169.
22 G. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, London, 1981, p. 83. Hegel says that when the will
is truly free it ‘is released from every tie {Verhältnis} of dependence on anything else’.
‘Its object is itself and so not an “other” or a barrier to he overcome.’ (P.R., para. 22-23).
Later he says: ‘The moral point of view is that of relation { }, of ought-to-be {Sollen}, or
demand (P.R., para. 108).
23 Adelung notes that it is often ‘nothing more than the factotum of classroom
philosophers, who employ it in the purveyance of turgid and confused concepts’ quoted
by Petry, Philosophy of Nature, p. 170. Incidentally, in Das Kapital Marx speaks of ‘das
Kapitalverhältnis’ (Werke Band 23, p. 601.
24 Werke Eb., 526; C.W.3, 286; E.W., 337.
25 Werke Eb., 528-9; C.W.3, 288.
26 Werke Eb., 525; C.W.3, 285.
27 Werke Eb., 528; C.W.3, 288. Reading such lines one can hardly forbear thinking of
Hegel’s Phenomenology, where, in the chapter on ‘Self-Estranged Spirit’, the struggle of
the noble and base consciousness, of enlightenment and superstition, is played out.
Marx does not refer here to this material, although he does later on, and his sources
are drawn not from the evidence of literature – Hegel uses Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew –
but of economists, jurists and historians.
28 Werke Eb., 533; C.W.3, 293; E.W., 344. Marx’s discussion, in the Introduction of 1857
to his Grundrisse, of labour as ‘indifferent’ and as ‘labour in general’ is well known
(Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 104); here we see three
ideas are present already in his first economic studies.
29 Werke Eb., 533, C.W.3, 293; E.W., 344.
30 Werke Eb., 557; C.W.3, 317; E.W., 369.
31 Werke Eb., 533; C.W.3, 292-4; E.W., 345.
32 Werke Eb., 541, 562-3; C.W.3, 301, 322; E.W., 352-3, 375.
33 Werke Eb., 529; C.W.3, 289; E.W., 341. This recalls a figure of Hegelian dialectic,
whose abstract character is attacked by Marx in Poverty of Philosophy (1847), chapter 2,
section 1: ‘The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and
no, the no becoming both no and yes . . .’; see C.W.6, 164.
34 Werke Eb., 530; C.W.3, 290; E.W., 342.
35 Werke Eb., 530; C.W.3, 290; E.W., 341.
36 Werke Eb., 530-1; C.W.3, 291.
37 Werke Eb., 531; C.W.3, 292.
38 Werke Eb., 520; C.W.3, 280; E.W., 332.
39 Werke Eb., 521; C.W.3, 280; E.W., 333.
40 C.W.4, 35-6.
41 C.W.4, 36.

Chapter 3 – Communism
← Chapter 2 | Chapter 4 →
Introduction
We have seen that Marx puts productive activity at the centre of his ontology. Man
produces himself in and through this mediator; he develops new powers and new
needs in the dialectic of this practice. Under the rule of private property this whole
development takes place under the guise of estrangement. So, far from gaining
confidence in himself and enjoying himself in his object and his activity, the producer
cannot identify himself in the world he has made, his labour is the activity of alienation.
It is in this light that Marx reinterprets communism. For him it is no narrowly political
and juridical adjustment of existing powers and privileges. It has fundamental
ontological significance as the gateway to the reappropriation by the community of the
human essence, the recovery of a human meaning to production, consumption and
society. This chapter is concerned with exploring Marx’s concept of communism, as it
is outlined at the beginning of the third manuscript.

Marx begins with the objective power of private property over the immediate producer.
His investigation discloses that this alien power is the product of labour itself in its
alienation. Abolition of estrangement requires the abolition of private property. But it is
important to understand that Marx does not adopt a purely negative attitude to property
and that he attributes a positive meaning to his call for the supersession of the private
property system. A mere ‘abstract negation’ of private property would mean, he says,
the negation ‘of culture and civilization, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of
the poor, crude man without needs, who has not only failed to go beyond private
property, but has not even reached it’. [1]
Marx believes that there are good reasons why the private property system was a
historically necessary stage in the development of wealth. It took the pressure of capital
to awaken the slumbering powers of humanity and promote ‘general industriousness’.
Although this means that human productive power has taken the shape of
estrangement, Marx clearly distinguishes the ontological necessity of objectification
from the historical fact that it presently constitutes a world of estrangement founded on
alienated labour. Overcoming estrangement through communism means the
reappropriation of the ‘ontological essence’ of humanity which has constituted itself
‘through developed industry, that is, through the mediation of private property’,
objectively as an external alien power. [2] This means that there is something positive in
property, disguised by its alien form as the power of capital, namely the wealth of
human self-development. Marx says: ‘The meaning of private property, freed from its
estrangement, is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of
enjoyment and of activity’. [3] Previous communist doctrine, he claims, had not
‘grasped the positive essence of private property’. [4] It is not a question for Marx of
annulling private property and all its works, then, but of taking possession of the
immensely powerful modern productive forces by society for the satisfaction on this
basis of rich human needs.

Stages of Communism
When Marx considers the communist movement thrown up in opposition to the rule of
the propertied classes, he distinguishes various stages in its development. The only
two he treats at any length are (a) crude egalitarian communism and (b) ‘communism
as the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and
therefore as the actual appropriation of the human essence . . . ‘. [5]
The first stage, ‘raw communism’ (‘der rohe Kommunismus‘) is based on ‘envy’ of the
propertied rather than any critical understanding of the essence of the property
relationship. Its programme involves a levelling down and an attempt to impose
equality through the negation of individual differences of any kind: [6] ‘the category
of worker is not done away with but extended to all men; the relationship of private
property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things.’ [7] Equal
wages are to be paid out by the community as a kind of ‘abstract
capitalist’. [8] Property is therefore not so much transcended as universalized. An
expression of the ‘vileness of private property trying to set itself up as
the positive community system’ [9] is the counterposing to marriage (‘certainly a form of
exclusive private property’) of ‘the community of women, where the woman becomes a
piece of communal and common property’. [10] This leads Marx to the following
reflections: ‘The relation of man to woman reveals the extent to which need has
become human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other, as human, has become a
need, the extent to which in his individual existence he is at the same time a communal
being.’ It follows that ‘from this relationship one can therefore judge the whole level of
development of mankind’. [11] This statement of Marx’s is often cited nowadays, but it
is by no means original to him. Fourier argued strongly that ‘the progress women make
towards freedom . . . is the general principle of all social progress’. [12] In fact, Marx
was reading Fourier at the time and cites a similar passage from the latter’s work:
The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women’s progress
towards freedom, because, here, in the relationship of woman to man, of the
weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident.
The degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of general
emancipation. [13]
Communism in its true form may be contrasted with crude equalitarianism by its
attitude to private property. The ‘abstract negation’ of private property, mentioned
above, treats it as ‘the enemy’, a malevolent power disrupting human fraternity and
setting men at odds with each other. Grasped as the contradiction of alienated labour
with itself, private property requires a determinate negation which preserves in some
form the human wealth created in its history. This ‘negation of the negation’ takes us
forwards not backwards. As Marx puts it, very generally:
Communism is the  positive supersession of  private property as  human self-
estrangement, and hence the true  appropriation of the  human essence through and
for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself . . . which takes place
within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. [14]
It is obvious, Marx points out, that communism understood in a historical light does not
amount to a revulsion from the achievements of the epoch of private property, ‘an
impoverished regression to primitive simplicity’, as he puts it, [15] but the
reappropriation of mankind’s historically developed essential powers through the
destruction of the estranged character of this reified world in which they are embodied.
In contrast to this picture of communism as a result immanent in history, crude
communist ideology seeks an empirical proof for itself in isolated examples of
cooperation torn from their historical context. As Marx observes, ‘all it succeeds in
showing is that by far the greater part of this development contradicts its assertions and
that if it (communism) did once exist then the very fact that it existed in the past refutes
its claim to essential being {Wesen}’. [16] Marx is confident that communist revolution is
the outcome of the movement of private property itself; it is ‘the riddle of history
solved’, [17] he says. However, this does not mean it has the status of an ‘Absolute’ in
his philosophy. At the end of this section he equates ‘the position’ of communism with
‘the negation of the negation’; in so far as private property – the negation of human
freedom – must itself be negated, this is a ‘real phase’, necessary to the liberation and
recovery of mankind. But this is not the whole story. Note Marx’s conclusion:
‘Communism is the necessary shape and the dynamic principle of the immediate
future, but communism itself is not as such the goal of human development – the
shape of human society.’ [18]
Complete failure to understand this dialectic is exhibited in the identification by certain
commentators of ‘communism as such’ with equalitarian communisms discussed
earlier in Marx’s chapter. [19] But those are ideological stages in the development of
communist ideas, whereas here we are speaking of a ‘real phase’. [20] By ‘communism
as such’ Marx clearly understands ‘communism as the opposite of private property’.
The communist movement develops in opposition to private property. Thus, in some
sense it is even the creation of the movement of private property. But in a higher phase
of development socialism stands on its own feet so to speak and ‘no longer needs such
mediation’. [21]
Marx illustrates the point with the example of atheism. This is a peculiar kind of
humanism because it depends for its sense on first of all positing what it denies. It
asserts the autonomy of man, only through the negation of god. First man is negated
through being reduced to a creature of god; but then the negation of the negation
reasserts the essentiality of man. This humanism is thoroughly infected by the opposite
through which it developed its position. This is very clear in the Sartrean man who says
to himself: ‘God is dead; I am abandoned; I am alone; there is no commandment; I
must take complete responsibility for my destiny.’ This kind of consciousness is that of
the man who first believed in god and then lost his faith. It is quite different from a
humanism that never knew god in the first plate and hence could never feel lost without
him!

In the same way socialism as ‘positive humanism’ stands on the ground of the
essential relations of man to himself and to nature. It does not require to be perpetually
mediated through its understanding of itself as the opposite of private property,
although this is a historically necessary stage. Marx says that ‘atheism is humanism
mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is
humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property’. He
continues: ‘only through the supersession of this mediation – which itself, however, is a
necessary premise – does positive humanism come into being’. [22]
If ‘communism as such’ is not the goal, what then is the aim of human development?
Erich Fromm has the merit of addressing this question: ‘Quite clearly the aim of
socialism is man’, he says, ‘it is to creates a form of production and an organization of
society . . . in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers,
thus becoming one with the world.’ [23] Fromm’s answer is not far off the mark, as the
following passage from Marx’s Grundrisse (1857-78) shows:
The old view, where man, in spite of his various limitations . . ., still appears as
the aim of production, seems very superior to the modern world where
production appears as the aim of man and wealth as the aim of production. In
fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been cast off, what is wealth
other than the universality of needs, capacities and enjoyments, productive
forces, etc. of individuals . . .? The full development of human mastery over
natural forces, those of his own nature as well as those of socalled ‘Nature’? The
absolute working out of his creative dispositions, without any presupposition
other than previous historical development . . .? Where he does not produce
himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Seeks not to remain
something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? [24]
Marx’s Standpoint
Let us try to identify the various levels of discussion of the problem of alienation as we
have clarified them. Then we can explain Marx’s standpoint with regard to the
possibility of overcoming alienation.

If private property appears as the immediate cause of estrangement, two qualifications

are necessary: (a) ontologically, productive activity is basic; private property is a
second-order mediation socially relating activity, especially by specifying labourers and
non-labourers; (b) in the movement of private property itself it comes to posit its
essence as labour, the conditioned becomes the condition, and its reproduction
depends on its other. Correspondingly, we can distinguish two levels of alienation; (a)
the state of estrangement signified by the imposition on activity, and its object, of the
determinations of private property, namely labour and capital; (b) the process of
alienation whereby this labour reproduces private property, that is, its object as capital
and itself as alienated labour. Finally, there are two levels of necessity for the
overthrow of private property: (a) abstractly, there is the need to restore man to himself
subsequent to the supersession of the system of estrangement; (b) concretely, there is
the process whereby capital in its own development leaves the proletariat with no other
option than to take the struggle against alienation to its conclusion through identifying
the problem as capital, itself the product, expression and mediation of alienated labour.
The demonstration in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts of the necessary relationship of
proletarian politics to the dialectics of alienation is sufficient to refute those
interpretations which see in this work only a general human predicament and project, to
be contrasted with Marx’s later stress on class war. At the same time, it must be
emphasized that this does not mean that only the liberation of the proletariat is at
stake, nor that only they are victims of estrangement. [25]
I have said little so far about the capitalist because I wanted to stress the impersonal
character of ‘the movement of private property’, but of course Marx knows that the
alienation of labour ‘creates the relation to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses
to call the lord of labour’. [26] With regard to the latter, Marx makes the interesting
observation that ‘everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of
estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of
estrangement’. [27] Unfortunately, the first manuscript breaks off at this point. The idea
later turns up in Marx’s first draft of Capital Volume One. The capitalist is defined as the
personification of capital, his rule over the worker ‘is the rule of things over man, of
dead labour over the living, of the product over the producer’. This ‘inversion of subject
and object’ is ‘the alienation {Entfremdung} of man from his own labour’. The capitalist
finds his satisfaction in this alienation, it seems, because he accomplishes his purpose
of appropriating surplus value. But Marx characterizes this as ‘a highly impoverished
and abstract content’ of his activity ‘which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as
enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in
quite a different manner’. [28]
To return to the 1844 Manuscripts: others before Marx had observed social antagonisms
and pointed to the problem of alienation; what marks his solution is the new standpoint
adopted with regard to the supersession of these problems. As Mészáros says: ‘If there
is an ultimately “irreducible” element in a philosophical discourse, it is the philosopher’s
“prise de position” to the supersession of the contradictions he perceives’. [29]
As is obvious by now, the touchstone is ‘labour‘ – but in what sense? In spite of his
praise of Hess, Marx has already gone (as he will more decisively go in the German
Ideology) beyond the standpoint of ‘true socialism’, the standpoint of ‘Man’ rather than
the proletarian struggle. (Hess, in the review mentioned earlier, objected vigorously to
Stein’s identification of socialism with the proletariat.) Instead of opposing capitalist
estrangement, including ‘labour’, in the name of an ideal human society, Marx grasps
socialism as a result immanent in the present contradiction between labour and capital.
He takes the standpoint of labour, but not in the sense that classical political economy
does when it makes labour its positive principle, identifying it with productive activity as
such; nor in the sense that Proudhon and other egalitarians take the standpoint of
labour as against capital when they demand such things as equal wages, in effect
thereby staying within the determinations of private property; [30] Marx works from a
critically adopted standpoint of labour. [31] This grasps the contradictions of private
property as alienated labour’s contradiction with itself, grasps the significance of
alienating objectification and thus the meaning of ‘the positive supersession of private
property’, and grasps labour as ‘the negative’, ‘dissolved and self-dissolving private
property’, hence superseding itself towards ‘the abolition of labour’.
Only Marx’s position, taking man and his labour as the basis, can envisage as
a practical task the overcoming of alienation. Some communists conceive of the
transition to socialism as an externally structured ‘final crisis’ of an economic character
where the working-class and its struggle is put in a secondary place. With others, as
the obverse face of this, transition is the result of ‘intervention’ by individuals or self-
proclaimed vanguards, who are mysteriously exempt from the one-dimensionality of
capitalism’s social consciousness. Marx himself grasps the dialectical process of self-
alienation and reappropriation in the movement of living labour as the basis for a self-
transcending historical practice.

Summary
The ‘positive essence of private property’ is its embodiment of the objectification of
human productive activity. Communism is hence given the significance of a ‘positive
supersession of private property’, that is, the reappropriation of the human essence
presently estranged in it.
Hence communism is ‘the riddle of history solved’, but it is not as such ‘the goal’
because its position is that of ‘the negation of the negation‘, still determined by its
opposite.
Marx’s investigation of the private property system discloses that the estrangement of
the worker from the object and the product of his activity is the presupposition and the
result of alienated labour. Hence Marx takes the critically adopted standpoint of labour in
conceptualizing the supersession of estrangement.

1 Werke Eb., 535; C.W.3, 295; E.W., 346.

2 Werke Eb., 563; C.W.3, 322; E.W., 375.
3 Ibid. Kostas Axelos, in Alienation, Praxis and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx (1961),
London, 1976, objects that Marx’s project does not ‘get beyond the horizon of
appropriation’ to ‘play’ (p. 278)
4 Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 296; E.W., 348.
5 Ibid.
6 Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddat in the introduction to their translation of the 1844 Mss
(Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Garden City, NY, 1967) are quite
wrong to give Proudhon and Fourier as Man’s examples (p. 18). These names occur is
his discussion under a distinctly different heading. It is a particularly gross libel on
Fourier to associate him with ‘crude communism’, as Marx would have known. To what
is the reference then? The editors of C.W.3 (p. 602) draw our attention to Engels’
remarks on the French secret societies in his 1843 article ‘Progress of social reform on
the Continent’ (see C.W.3, 396-7). Robert C. Tucker, in Philosophy and Myth in Karl
Marx, Cambridge, 1961, suggests (pp. 154-5) that the source for Marx’s
characterization was Lorenz von Stein who coined the phrase ‘raw commnnism’ in his
treatise Der Sozialismus uod Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs (Leipzig, 1842).
7 Werke Eb., 534; C.W.3, 294, E.W., 346.
8 Werke Eb., 521, 534; C.W.3, 280, 294; E.W., 333, 347.
9 Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 296; E.W., 347.
10 Werke Eb., 534; C.W.3, 294; E.W., 346.
11 Werke Eb., 535; C.W.3, 296; E.W., 347.
12 Fourier (1808) Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, 1966-8, Tome 1, pp. 130-3.
13 Marx mentions Fourier on the same page as he discusses ‘community of women’;
but this (unreferenced) quotation from Fourier on women is used by Marx in The Holy
Family, written later in the year 1844 in collaboration with Engels and published in 1845
(see C.W.4, 196).
14 Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 296; E.W., 348.
15 Werke Eb., 583; C.W.3, 342; E.W., 395.
16 Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 297; E.W., 348.
17 Ibid.
18 Werke Eb., 546; C.W.3, 306; E.W., 358.
19 For example: T.I. Oizerman. The Making of Marxist Philosophy (1977), Moscow, 1981,
p. 246.
20 A solemn attempt to read ‘crude communism’ as a ‘real phase’, with truly bizarre
results, is to be found in Tucker, Philosophy and Myth, pp. 154-6. Shlomo Avineri in The
Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1968. pp. 223ff, also takes ‘crude
communism’ an a stage of future society and equates it with ‘the first phase of
communist society’ of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) (in M.E.S.W.).
21 Werke Eb., 544-6; C.W.3, 304-6; E.W., 356-7.
22 Werke Eb., 583; C.W.3, 341-2.
23 Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, New York, 1971, pp. 58-9.
24 New MEGA, 11, 1.2, 392; Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, 1973, p.
488.
25 Werke Eb., 521; C.W.3, 280.
26 Werke Eb., 520; C.W.3, 279.
27 Werke Eb., 522; C.W.3, 282.
28 ‘Results of the immediate process of production’, Ms. 466-7; C.1 (Penguin),
Appendix, p. 990.
29 Istvan Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, London, 1970, p. 17.
30 When Proudhon demands ‘equal possessions’ he fails to transcend the estranged
character of the object; he ‘abolishes economic estrangement within economic
estrangement’, says Marx in The Holy Family, (C.W.4, 43).
31 As Mészáros observes, p. 64. His Marx’s Theory of Alienation is the best on the
subject.

Chapter 4 – Marx and Hegel

← Chapter 3 | Chapter 5 →

Introduction
The 1844 Manuscripts is intended by Marx as a work in the field of political economy,
taking its object critically, from a socialist point of view. This is explained in the Preface;
but then, abruptly, Marx states that he considers it ‘absolutely necessary’ to include ‘a
critical discussion of Hegelian dialectic and philosophy as a whole’. [1] This seems an
odd ambition for a critical work on economics; certainly he does not explain why he
considers it necessary to undertake this here. One is left to suppose that he thought it
necessary to engage with the methodological concerns of his contemporaries, the
Young Hegelians, who thought their philosophical inheritance allowed them to criticize
anything under the sun without knowing anything about it. Marx observes pointedly that
his is ‘a wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political
economy’. [2] Nevertheless, Marx had very good reason to give an important place to
‘discussion of Hegelian dialectic’. We can understand why if we trace the course of his
thought in the manuscripts themselves. In fart, the unhelpful ‘Preface’ was one of the
last passages to be written; it was drafted after all the material on Hegel.

Why Hegel?
If we look at the manuscripts in their original order of composition, it becomes obvious
that initially Marx had no intention of bringing in Hegel. There is no mention of him in
the first two manuscripts. It is only in the third manuscript, in which Marx embarks on a
series of discrete reflections on the topic of communism, that ‘point six’ begins with the
remark that ‘this is perhaps the place to offer, by way of explanation and justification,
some considerations on Hegelian dialectic generally and especially its exposition in
the Phenomenology and Logic, and also, lastly, the relation [to it] of the modern critical
movement’. [3]
At first it seems there will just be a short digression, but in the remaining pages he
returns twice to the question, linking the passages with his own cross-references, so
that in the end we have a substantial set of notes. At this point he decides that he will
pull all this material together in a ‘concluding chapter’ and, as we saw, he announces
this when he goes on to write the Preface. [4]
The crucial question to investigate is this: what forced Marx to feel under an obligation
to offer ‘by way of explanation and justification’ his critical discussion of Hegelian
dialectic under the original sixth point? Not surprisingly, the problem is solved as soon
as we refer to the last paragraph of the fifth point. [5] This begins with an important
statement of Marx’s view of genesis: ‘since for socialist man the whole of so-called world
history is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the
emergence of nature for man, so has he palpable, incontrovertible proof of
his birth through himself, of his genesis.’ [6]
Several problems of interpretation arise from this remarkable statement (even if one
neglects Marx’s belief that he therewith disposes of the religious theory of creation). It
is fairly clear that Marx is not saying that man creates himself entire out of nothing. On
the contrary, we have seen earlier that Marx stresses that human activity requires an
object, and that labour cannot create anything, not even man himself, without nature.
What Marx is summarizing here is the process whereby man, originally nothing but a
part of nature, takes himself and nature as his object. At first he is ‘at one’ with nature,
but then nature becomes ‘for‘ man, something he can work with, and transform. At first
again this must appear as a dependence on natural conditions, but in so far as these
conditions of his existence pass more and more under his own control, with the
development of his productive powers, so in his existence he depends more and more
on himself and his productive activity. He becomes his own product, so to speak.
Speaking thus, we inevitably recall Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which absolute
spirit grasps itself as its own product. Its being is self-mediated. In his Preface Hegel
emphasizes that spirit mediates itself with itself only through ‘the labour of the
negative’, in alienation and transcendence of alienation. [7] This refers us back to Marx
again; for the paragraph under discussion concludes (in an argument we considered
earlier) with a definition of communism as the phase of ‘negation of the negation’,
ushering in ‘socialism as socialism’, ‘real life . . . no longer mediated through the
abolition of private property, through communism’. [8] We can understand now that
 Marx ‘by way of explanation and justification’ has to undertake a discussion of Hegel,
because friends and enemies of Hegel alike could not fail to notice these parallels and
interpret the text accordingly, probably with unfortunate consequences. For example,
Marx needs to show how his ‘positive supersession of private property’ differs from
Hegelian positing through negativity.
Another problem of interpretation arising from Marx’s account of human genesis is the
use of the term ‘labour’ in ‘the creation of man through human labour’. Remembering
that we earlier distinguished two possible connotations of the term in the 1844
Manuscripts, which interpretation should be adopted here? In truth, both interpretations
are possible. This could well be a case where Marx draws attention to the ultimate
consequences of the (first-order) mediatory activity constituting man for himself, and
nature for man; thus ‘labour’ would here refer to that (ontologically
fundamental) productive activity in and through which man becomes who he is.
However, this does not exclude a narrower reading of ‘labour’ as ‘alienated activity’
along the lines of the interpretation offered earlier, if it is accepted that, in history to the
present, productive activity has been identical with ‘labour’ defined in terms of the
determinations of the ruling property systems. This means that human genesis
proceeds by way of alienated activity. This is undoubtedly what Marx believed, and it
constitutes an almost exact parallel with Hegel’s view. Marx indeed gives Hegel credit
for this: ‘the great thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology‘, he says, ‘is that Hegel conceives the
self-creation of man as . . . alienation and as transcendence of this alienation, that he
thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man . . . as the result of
his own labour‘. [9] He goes on to repeat the point – this time critically noting a direct
connection between Hegel’s Phenomenology and political economy. He claims that
‘Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy’. This is because he
‘grasps labour as the essence . . .’ In his work, just as in political economy, ‘labour is
man’s coming-to-be-for-himself {Fürsichwerden} within alienation or
as alienated man’, [10] (This last statement makes particularly clear the sense of
‘labour’ employed.)
Marx also give notice (in his first passage on Hegel) that he will show that Hegel’s
standpoint does not go beyond that of ‘negation of the negation’ and that this ‘is not yet
the real history of man as a previously posited subject, but simply the act of creation,
the history of the genesis, of man’. [11]
The above remarks and quotations are enough to show that a number of questions
arise about Mare’s understanding of his relationship to Hegel. The answers will help us
at the same time to judge the significance of the claims he advances in his theory of
alienation.

The problems to be investigated in the following chapters are as follows:

1. How could Marx find in Hegel’s idealist philosophy an account of man’s genesis in his

own labour?
2. What are the similarities and differences in Marx’s and Hegel’s concepts of alienation?
3. What is Marx’s opinion of Hegel’s dialectic and why is it said to be relevant, if at all,
only to the question of genesis but not to the real history of man?
4. Why does Marx equate the standpoint of Hegel’s Phenomenology with that of modern
political economy?

Summary
In evolving his theory of alienation, Marx realizes that, since the pattern whereby labour
grasps its other (private property) as its own self, estranged from itself, and negates
this negation, has obvious parallels with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, he must
explain and justify his position in relation to Hegel’s dialectic. He finds both strengths
and weaknesses in it, as we shall see.

1 Werke Eb., 468; C.W.3, 232.

2 Werke Eb., 467; C.W.3, 231.
3 Werke Eb., 568; C.W.3, 326; E.W., 379.
4 Werke Eb., 468; C.W.3, 232. Following Marx’s intentions therefore, most editions of
the 1844 Manuscripts bring together at the end the reflections on Hegel.
5 New MEGA 1, 2, 275, shows the transition mid-way down p. XI of the notebook. The
Hegel material is on XI-XIII, XVII-XVIII, XXII-XXXIV. The Preface is on XXXIX-XL.
(C.W.3, 602, misprints then as XXIX-XL).
6 Werke Eb., 546; C.W.3, 305; E.W., 357. E.W. gives ‘his self-mediated birth’ for ‘seiner
Geburt durch sich selbst‘: this rendering (and a similar one on the previous page) is over
free.
7 Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V, Miller, Oxford, 1977, para. 19.
8 Werke Eb., 546; C.W.3, 306.
9 Werke Eb., 574; C.W.3, 332-3.
10 Werke Eb, 574; C.W.3, 333.
11 Werke Eb., 570; C.W.3, 329; E.W., 382.

Chapter 5 – Hegel’s Phenomenology

← Chapter 4 | Chapter 6 →

Introduction
In his 1844 Manuscripts, although he promises a critique of Hegel’s dialectic as a whole,
Marx pays most attention to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) on the ground that it
is ‘the true birthplace and secret of Hegelian philosophy’. [1] Marx is most interested
here in trying to situate Hegel’s achievement in relation to his own concept of alienated
labour. Hegel’s strengths and weaknesses are evaluated in this light. Hegel’s strength
is precisely that he gives full recognition to the problem of estrangement. His weakness
is that, in spite of the wealth of social and historical material treated, he considers it
ultimately as a problem of consciousness.
After Marx, whose labours remained unknown for nearly a hundred years, it is not until
Georg Lukács that the problem of Hegel’s Phenomenology is considered, first and
foremost, as alienation and its overcoming. [2] It is hard for us now to realize how
original Lukécs was in taking up, as long ago as 1938, the question of Hegel’s concept
of ‘Entäusserung‘ (alienation), [3] albeit with he benefit of Marx’s recently discovered
manuscripts in front of him. The last chapter of his masterly work The Young Hegel is
entitled ‘Entäusserung as the central philosophical concept of the Phenomenology of
Spirit‘.
A point of terminology to bear in mind is that the translators of Hegel, and of Marx, do
not agree on the rendering of ‘Entäusserung‘ – some give ‘alienation’ and others give
‘externalization’. I prefer, and give here, ‘alienation’. Lukács notes that there is nothing
novel about the terms Entäusserung and Entfremdung in themselves. ‘They are’, he says.
‘simply German translations of the English word “alienation”. [4] The alternative to
‘alienation’, namely ‘externalization’ (the closest rendering of Entäusserung from a purely
etymological point of view), is liable to be confused with ‘objectification’. It is important
to notice this because Marx explicitly distinguishes objectification (Vergegenständlichung)
from alienation (Entäusserung). The difference, broadly, is that,
while Entäusserung carries the sense of ‘posited as objective’, it also connotes
relinquishment, such that an objectivity is set up from which the subject is
estranged. Entfremdung is quite unambiguous, and may be tendered as ‘estrangement’.
(For further philological information, and a comparison of translations, see Appendix.)
Before embarking (in the next chapter) on Marx’s critical analysis of The Phenomenology
of Spirit, let us recall here some of the salient points about its method and results.

Phenomenological Method
In his Introduction (not to be confused with the more famous Preface), Hegel argues
that traditional epistemology, worrying itself about the criterion of true knowledge, gets
caught up in insoluble contradictions. It itself is making a claim to knowledge, and
hence must either appeal to that same criterion (circularity) or to some other criterion
(regress). This problem has been called ‘the dilemma of epistemology’. [5] Hegel
considers the possibility that we could spare ourselves the trouble of engaging in the
epistemological problematic and go straight to scientific work confident that the science
itself will provide its own proof of itself; but he rejects this too, because such a claim to
positive knowledge, facing other claims to knowledge, as well as commonsensical
views, seems helpless to prevail. It asserts itself as true – but so do they. ‘One bare
assurance is worth just as much as another’, [6] Hegel comments.
But it is in just such phenomena that Hegel sees the possibility of a way forward. He
undertakes ‘an exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance’. This is what he
understands by a phenomenology. The exposition of claims to knowledge in this form
seems ‘not to be science’ yet Hegel believes that ‘the series of configurations
{Gestaltungen} which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the
detailed history of the education {Bildung} of consciousness itself to the standpoint of
science’.[7] In his Preface Hegel likewise speaks of ‘the spirit that educates itself (‘der
sich bildende Geist‘). [8] ‘Education’ is too narrow a translation of Bildung if it suggests
only formal training, of course; one could even speak here of ‘the spirit that builds itself
up’. It is apposite here also to recall the popularity in Hegel’s time of the
‘Bildungsroman‘. A Bildungsroman is a novel that presents the educative effect of the
hero’s experience. [9] Thus the Phenomenology, in a similar way, may be understood as
the story of the Bildung of spirit. [10] Indeed, Royce argues that
the Bildungsroman model certainly influenced Hegel’s procedure in the Phenomenology;
he cites Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.[11] Hyppolite says the same, but draws
attention to Hegel’s study of Rousseau’s Émile. [12] Lukács prefers the epithet: ‘an
odyssey of spirit’, but also calls attention to Goethe’s work. [13]
There are some very peculiar characteristics of this Bildungsroman of spirit. One relates
to method: Hegel’s method depends, he explains, on the dialectical point that when a
given claim to knowledge is to be rejected as untrue ‘the exposition of the untrue
consciousness in its untruth is not merely a negative procedure’, because if the result of
the argument is properly understood as a determinate negation of the original thesis, ‘a
new form has thereby immediately arisen’. [14] That is to say, to refute is not simply to
deny, but to find relevant grounds for such rejection. Every claim to knowledge has its
specific refutation, and this involves consciousness in a new set of commitments.
Making progress in this way we generate a complete series of forms of knowledge.
Validity appears here not in relation to an external measure but in accordance with
what consciousness provides ‘from within itself’ at each stage. As Hyppolite points out,
the condition of this method is the assumption that knowledge is a whole. Indeed the
whole is immanent throughout the development. ‘Negation is creative’, he argues,
‘because the posited term has been isolated and thus was itself a kind of negation.’ It
follows that its negation is in turn a step towards the restoration of the whole. According
to Hyppolite, ‘were it not for the immanence of the whole in consciousness, we should
be unable to understand how negation can truly engender a content’. [15]
Hegel’s goal is to reach ‘the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond
itself’. [16] Under what conditions could such an absolute resting place arrive? He
answers that, ‘in pressing forward to its true existence, consciousness will arrive at a
point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien’.
Thus, at the point where consciousness grasps its own essence, this will signify ‘the
nature of absolute knowledge itself’. [17]
Hegel presents this progression as immanent in the phenomena themselves: for ‘the
necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness
will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series’. [18] Consequently, ‘we do not
need to import criteria, or to make use of our own bright ideas and thoughts during the
course of the inquiry’, he says; ‘it is precisely when we leave these aside that we
succeed in contemplating the matter in hand as it is in and for itself.’ [19] Hegel takes
this so seriously that he says: ‘all that is left for us to do is simply to look on’. [20] The
book therefore takes the form, not of Hegel’s refutations and proofs, but, as we said, of
a Bildungsroman of spirit in which it develops a more and more comprehensive
consciousness of itself and its world.
In the Phenomenology the crucial problem is that of objectivity. However, this is a
problem primarily because of the way Hegel construes the relationship of knowledge to
its object. More particularly, the problem is: how can consciousness claim to know its
object (Gegenstand) when the latter is posited as other than it? Interesting, in view of
Hegel’s Swabian origins, is the information M.J. Petry provides: that in the Swabian
dialect of Hegel’s day ‘Gegenstand‘ was also synonymous with ‘impediment, opposition,
obstacle, resistance’. [21] Any reader of the Phenomenology cannot fail to be struck by
the stress laid on the developing activity of consciousness in knowing, and the
presentation of the independence of the object as an obstacle to its free movement.
Nothing could be further from Locke’s tabula rasa. As the phenomenological dialectic
proceeds, the solution to the antinomy of subjectivity and objectivity emerges:
consciousness becomes more and more aware that it is its own activity that constitutes
the object as an object of knowledge. The very distinction between knowledge and its
object is drawn from the point of view of consciousness and is hence to be construed
as a distinction falling within consciousness itself. [22]
So, if Hegel begins with a situation in which the knowing self takes it that what stands
over against it is objectivity, he overcomes this opposition through showing that every
higher shape of consciousness posits the form of knowledge, and the object as it is
now known, as more and more adequate to each other. The upshot is Absolute
Knowing, in which knowing knows that what appears to it as its object is only itself.

Since the activity of consciousness itself in knowing becomes more and more
prominent in the development, it is clear that self-consciousness becomes centrally
involved. Equally, if the self is to make itself an object of consciousness, it can only do
so (i.e. become known to itself as what it really is) through its own activity, its self-
realization. Thus Hegel’s discussion imperceptibly slides into terrain unknown to
epistemology. The progress of critical reflection upon the adequacy of knowledge to its
object becomes a progress in the history of Geist (spirit or mind). Spirit learns what it
truly is (and its relationship to the world of objectivity) at the same time, and in exact
proportion, as it becomes what it truly is through manifesting itself in objective form (in
morality, in bourgeois life, in the state, in religion), and in so doing it eventually ends its
estrangement from its world through identifying itself in it. The relationship of this
history to real history is an extremely difficult and controversial topic in Hegelian
scholarship; nevertheless, it is clear from the wealth of obvious allusions that Hegel
wishes us to bear this connection in mind.
Engels characterizes the Phenomenology of Spirit as ‘the embryology and paleontology
of the mind, a development of individual consciousness through its different stages, set
in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the
consciousness of man has passed in the course of history’. [23] In answer to those
readers who find the historical points of reference appear in a jumble, Lukács points
out that these moments occur in their correct historical sequence, but that this
sequence is traversed three times. [24] Hegel’s point of departure is the natural
consciousness existing as an individual to which objective reality presents itself as
given even where socio-historical determinations underly the developing shapes of
consciousness. The acquisition of reason makes possible the perception of society and
history as the product of activity. With this, the conscious individual enters the second
cycle and must traverse the whole path again, understood now in the shape of
explicitly social forms of experience. In the ‘absolute’ stage consciousness looks back
over the panorama of the whole history of its experience, and by recognizing,
recollecting and ordering those moments, spirit grasps the significance of the whole.
However, this knowledge too is not just an abstract truth, but is acquired in the dialectic
of a specific domain. Thus the third stage once again recapitulates the past in its
entirety but on this occasion we no longer find the actual series of moments, but a
summary of mankind’s efforts to comprehend reality. The last chapter, on absolute
knowing, contains a compressed history of modern philosophy, for example. In it Hegel
equates his own philosophy with fully developed absolute knowledge – knowledge as
science.

Alienation
Absolute knowledge comprehends that ‘objectivity’, standing over against the
‘subjectivity’ estranged from it, is brought forth only within the self-alienating movement
of spirit. Lukács is quite correct, therefore, to see Entäusserung (alienation) as the
central philosophical concept of the Phenomenology. Marx points us to the following
crucial passage from Hegel’s last chapter in which he employs this term in
summarizing his conclusions:
Surmounting the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly to mean
that the object showed itself as returning into the self . . . but rather that it is the
alienation {Entäusserung} of self-consciousness that posits thinghood {die
Dingheit} and that this alienation has not merely a negative but a positive
meaning . . . for self-consciousness . . . for in this alienation it posits  itself as
object, or the object as itself. . . This positing at the same time contains the other
moment, that self-consciousness has equally sublated {aufgehoben} this
alienation and objectivity too and taken it back into itself so that it is at home
with itself in  its otherness as such {in seinem  Andersseyn als solchem bey sich
ist}. [25]
Of great service to Hegel in preserving, while supposedly overcoming, objectivity as a
moment in the absolute, is his dialectical category of ‘Aufhebung‘ (sublation). In
his Logic Hegel tells us that in ordinary language Aufheben means not only to abolish
but also to preserve, and that he intends to take advantage of this double meaning. In
his criticism of Hegel Marx comments that ‘Aufheben‘ plays ‘a peculiar role’ in Hegel’s
system. In it, affirmation and negation are brought together; thus, in spite of their
‘sublation’ in the course of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, property, the family, civil society,
etc. ‘continue to exist’, he points out, ‘but have become moments . . . which mutually
dissolve and engender one another, moments of movement’. [26] In the Phenomenology,
likewise, ‘Aufhebung‘ preserves alienation in the very moment of retracting it.
How does self-consciousness ‘surmount the object of consciousness’ and ‘take it back
into itself’? Very schematically, one could say that, in collecting together the various
determinations taken on by the object of consciousness as it is experienced throughout
the path traversed by spirit, the totality of these determinations is grasped by spirit as
its own self-determination. This comprehension Hegel characterizes as a recollection
(Erinnerung). Here we must return to our philological apparatus again, because the
second time this term occurs in the final paragraph of the Phenomenology Hegel rakes
the opportunity to bring out the etymological possibility of characterizing this as an Er-
Innerung, an inwardizing movement – the appropriate counter-movement to an
‘externalization’ (one of the meanings of ‘Entäusserung‘). He says: ‘die Er-Innerung hat
sie aufbewahrt . . .’ – ‘the internalization has preserved it’. [27]
Lukács thinks this passage is so important that he quotes it three times. [28] For
example: if spirit has created the real objects of the world in the process of
‘Entäusserung‘, ‘it is only logical’, he says, ‘for the reverse process of “Er-lnnerung” to be
nothing other than the sublation of the forms of objective reality so created, and their
reintegration into the subject’. [29] He points out that, consistently with this, the
standpoint of absolute knowledge does not give us any new content: ‘all the contents
available’, he says, ‘arise not from philosophy itself, but from . . . the historical process
of the self-positing of spirit . . . now . . . illuminated by the light of absolute
knowledge’. [30]
It follows from this that the estranged forms taken on by spirit when it posits itself as
objective remain as they are. The novelty consists solely in the reconciliation
philosophy affords, whereby spirit can feel at home, notwithstanding this estrangement,
because, in it, it is in its own other. Indeed, the alienation of self-consciousness is given
a positive significance above in that it posits the self as objective. Accordingly Hegel
stresses, in another crucial passage, that there is no need to be afraid of such
objectification.
‘Spirit’, he recalls, ‘has shown itself to us to be neither merely the withdrawal of self-
consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere submergence of self-
consciousness into substance.’ Using the language of ‘subject’ and ‘substance’, he
explains that ‘spirit is this movement of the self which empties {entäussert} itself of itself
and sinks into its substance, and also, as subject, has gone our of that substance into
itself. He goes on: ‘that first reflection out of immediacy is the subject’s differentiation of
itself from its substance . . . the withdrawal into itself and the becoming of the pure “I” . .
.’. But – and this is the important point – ‘neither has the “I” to cling to itself in
the form of self-consciousness as against the form of substantiality and objectivity, as if it
were afraid of its alienation; the power of spirit lies rather in remaining the self-same
spirit in its alienation and, as that which is both in itself and for itself, in making its being-
for-itself no less merely a moment than its in itself . . .’. [31]
Thus, because spirit must posit itself in objective form, the objectivity consciousness
opposes to itself cannot merely be subsumed away through the inwardizing movement
of recollection; its problematical character must be resolved by comprehending it in all
the immediacy of its otherness at the same time. Therefore, one must understand the
phenomenological odyssey not merely as spirit’s struggle to negate an alien objectivity,
but also as the story of its gaining an objective existence, a story understood as such
by spirit itself only in recollection when it achieves absolute knowledge, but a story
whose meaning is understood from the outset by Hegel and ourselves who ‘look
on’ [32] this development precisely from that standpoint. In the middle part of
the Phenomenology masses of concrete historical material, including actual estranged
spheres of existence (religion, the state, bourgeois life and so forth) are brought within
this framework.
The objective shapes given in consciousness as it moves towards self-consciousness
and absolute knowing are to be understood as shapes of the existence of spirit itself
and hence its positive achievement. This explains why Hegel says that alienation has a
positive meaning for self-consciousness in so far as it posits itself as objective, and
becomes being-for-itself. It explains also why, whether one looks at
the Phenomenology or the Encyclopaedia, one finds that Objective Spirit always occupies
a higher place than Subjective Spirit. In both these systematic works the creation of a
wealth of spiritual forms, for example, the state, religion and so on, is seen as a
positive achievement of spirit as well as entangling it in estrangement. The ‘sublation’
of estrangement consists in stripping the spiritual forms of their ‘external’ character, not
abolishing them outright, that is to say, in recognizing them precisely as spirit’s own
work.
Spirit in the form of substance gives us the phase of consciousness as consciousness
of an objectivity standing over against it; consciousness turned inwards achieves
certainty of self and becomes subject; then in the final dialectic the self recognizes that
its negative attitude towards objectivity must in turn be superseded through a
recognition of the necessity of this self-alienation. In this way we have a positing through
negating. Hegel explains this movement thus: if ‘self-consciousness enriches itself
till . . . it has absorbed into itself the entire structure of the essentialities of substance’,
then ‘since this negative attitude to objectivity is just as much positive, it is a positing’. It
has both ‘produced them out of itself’, and in so doing ‘has at the same time restored
them for consciousness’. He goes on to explain that ‘in the concept that knows itself as
concept, the moments thus appear earlier than the whole in its fulfilment; the
movement of these moments is the process by which the whole comes to be’. In
consciousness, by contrast, ‘the whole, though uncomprehended, is prior to the
moments’. [33]
In his Preface Hegel explains that the exposition will show that truth is not only
‘substance’ – something ‘out there’ to appropriated by the consciousness of the subject
– but it is equally ‘subject’ – the activity that produces the true. There follows the famous
passage:
Further, the living substance is being which is in truth subject, or, which is the
same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or
the mediation of its becoming-other with its own self. As subject it is pure
simple  negativity and thus the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which
sets up opposition, and then again the negation of. . . opposition. Only this self-
restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself – not
an  original or  immediate unity as such – is the true. It is the process of its own
becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also for
its beginning and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. [34]
‘Thus’, he goes on, ‘the life of God and divine cognition can be spoken of as love
playing with itself,’ But he immediately qualifies this edifying notion: if, in itself, the
divine life is one of untroubled unity with itself in itself, ‘for which otherness and
estrangement and the overcoming of estrangement are not serious matters’, this
leaves out the fact that its actualization in developed form is necessarily marked by ‘the
seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labour of the negative’. [35]
In the last chapter he explains that spirit needs time to do this: hence ‘the movement of
carrying forward the form of its self-knowledge is the labour which it accomplishes as
actual history’. [36] The conclusion of the Phenomenology is that ‘comprehended history’
is the realm of absolute spirit, ‘the actuality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without
which it would be lifeless and alone’. [37]
If ‘the immediate existence of spirit, consciousness, contains the two moments of
knowing and the objectivity negative to knowing’, [38] in the absolute these are united
and their difference is mediated in the act of ‘pure negativity’. [39] ‘Our own act here’,
says Hegel, ‘has been simply to gather together the separate moments . . .’[40]
However, there may be more to it than this, as far as Hegel’s ‘own act’ is concerned.
For in the final chapter of the Phenomenology there is a merger between the standpoint
that ‘looks on’ and grasps the nature of the necessity in the transitions as it is known ‘to
us’ (rather than in the experience of consciousness itself at that stage) and the
standpoint of self-consciousness itself at each stage. This may well mean that Hegel’s
‘absolute’ philosophy represents an arrogant claim, not merely to the discovery of truth,
but to the instantiation of it. From Feuerbach [41] onwards critics have charged Hegel
with representing his philosophy as ‘the absolute’. A recent example is Peter Singer
who says that, in Hegel’s view, spirit comes to its final resting-place when he, Hegel,
understands the nature of reality. The momentous conclusion follows that ‘the closing
pages of the Phenomenology . . . are no mere description of the culmination of all human
history: they are that culmination’. [42]
This point, among others, will be taken up in the consideration of Marx’s critique in the
following chapters.

Summary
Hegel’s Phenomenology undertakes an exposition of how knowledge makes its
appearance, through a sequence of determinate negations. Absolute knowing knows
that what appears as its object is itself. But this requires spirit to know itself through
producing itself as alienation (Entäusserung) and then sublating this alienation, such that
‘it is at home with itself in its otherness as such’. Thus the truth of spirit is actual when
posited through the negation of the negation. This labour of the negative is at work in
the movement of history.

1 Werke Eb., 571; C.W.3, 329; E.W., 383.

2 Hyppolite puts some stress on it in his Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology
of Spirit’ (1946), Evanston, 1974. Lukács published his Young Hegel in 1948 but he did
not know of Hyppolite when he drafted it in 1938, and he was not able to take account
of him when publication became possible after the war. In his Preface (1954) (to a new
edition of his study, Lukács dismisses Hyppolite’s reading as ‘irrationalist’ and says it
had not given him cause to rework his arguments (p. xi), For Hyppolite’s view of
Lukács’ book see his Studies on Marx and Hegel (1955), New York, 1969.
3 For example, H. Glockner did not even list ‘Entäusserung‘, or ‘Entfremdung‘, in
his Hegel-Lexikon of 1935-39, a supplement to his jubilee edition of Hegel’s works
(1927-30); the terms are still not present in the 2nd revised edition of the Lexikon,
Stuttgart, 1957; nor does J. Hoffmneister include them in the index to his 1952 edition
of the Phenomenology.
4 Werke 8, 658;, The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Landau, 1975, p. 538.
5 Richard Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Brighton, 1976, p. 12.
6 Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, 1977, para. 76.
7 Ibid., para. 78.
8 G.W.9, 14; Phenomenology (Miller), para. II: ‘the spirit in its formation’.
9 Georg Lukács in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1958), London, 1963, quotes
(p. 112) Hegel on the social purpose of such educative experience: ‘During his years of
apprenticeship the hero is permitted to sow his wild oats; he learns to subordinate his
wishes and views to the interests of the society; he then enters that society’s hierarchic
scheme and finds in it a comfortable niche.’ Unfortunately Lukács gives no source for
this remarkably cynical passage, so it is difficult to assess its relevance for the present
discussion.
10 See the note in Hegel: Texts and Commentary, trans. and ed. W, Kaufmann, Garden
City, NY, 1966, p. 21.
11 Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, New Haven, Conn., 1919, pp. 147-9.
12 Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 11.
13 Young Hegel, p. 566.
14 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 79.
15 Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 15.
16 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 80.
17 Ibid., para. 89.
18 Ibid., para. 79.
19 Ibid., para. 54.
20 Ibid., para. 85.
21 See the Introduction to his translation of Hegels Philosophy of Nature, Vol. I, London,
1970, p. 164. It is amusing to see that Vincent Descombes, Modern French
Philosophy (1979). Cambridge, 1982, characterizes Kojève’s anthropological reading of
absolute knowledge as ‘the end of adversity the term which adequately translates
Hegel’s Gegenständlichkeit’, p. 28.
22 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 36.
23 Frederick Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German
philosophy, M.E.C.W., . 600.
24 Werke 8, 577; Young Hegel, p. 470.
25 G.W.9, 422; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 788; Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B.
Baillie, London 1949, pp. 789-90.
26 Werke Eb., 581-2; C.W.3, 340; E.W., 393. For Hegel’s Logic see Wissenschaft der Logik,
Erster Teil, Hamburg, 1975, pp. 93-5; English trans. A.V. Miller, Hegel’s Science of Logic.
London, 1969, pp. 106-8.
27 G.W.9, 433; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 808.
28 Werke 8, 624, 632, 667; Young Hegel, pp. 508. 515, 546.
29 Werke 8, 632; Young Hegel, p. 515.
30 Werke 8, 624; Young Hegel, p. 508.
31 G.W.9, 431; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 804; Phenomenology (Baillie), 803-4.
32 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 85. The text itself can actually be divided according to
the point of view in question – see the Appendix to Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel (1947), ed. A. Bloom, trans. J. H. Nichols, New York, 1969.
33 G.W.9, 428; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 801; Phenomenology (Baillie), pp. 799-800.
Compare this with Man’s account of scientific knowing in the Introduction (1857) to
his Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, 1973.
34 G.W.9, 18; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 18.
35 G.W.9, 18; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 19; Phenomenology (Baillie), p. 81.
36 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 803.
37 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 85. Judith Shklar explains the inevitability of this
conclusion by arguing that for Hegel retrospection was the only certain knowledge
‘because it alone could reveal that men had made their knowledge and that it was the
work of their own minds, and not an object to be seized’ – ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology: an
Elegy for Hellas’; in Hegel’s Political Philosophy, Z.A. Pelczynski rd., Cambridge, 1971,
p. 73.
38 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 36.
39 Ibid., para. 21.
40 Ibid., para. 797.
41 F.B., 55-8.
42 Peter Singer, Hegel, Oxford, 1983, p. 71.

Chapter 6 – Marx’s Criticism

← Chapter 5 | Chapter 7 →
Introduction
It is useful in interpreting Marx’s commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology, both when it
finds cause for praise and when it damns, to remember that it is composed under the
influence of Ludwig Feuerbach; it is a continuation, therefore, of a certain tradition of
critical appropriation of Hegel by the Young Hegelian movement. This tradition refuses
to take Hegel at face value, so to speak, and instead claims to find truth in Hegel in
disguised form. In the present case the most important single influence on Marx is
Feuerbach’s ‘inversion’ of the terms of Hegel’s philosophy. Of course, as with
Feuerbach, Marx’s claim is that Hegel is guilty of ‘inversion’; so it is a question of putting
him right side up. [1] Feuerbach, according to Marx, resolved Hegel’s ‘absolute spirit’
into ‘real man on the basis of nature‘. [2] What Marx has in mind in his own work,
therefore, is the possibility of reading in the Phenomenology not
a Bildungsroman of spirit but of man. Thus he says at one point that we must ‘abstract
from Hegel’s abstraction . . . and talk . . . instead . . . of man’. [3] Correspondingly,
spiritual activity he reads as material activity, primarily labour. Thus, although he
complains that in the Phenomenology ‘man appears only in the form of spirit’, he also
finds that in this form ‘it grasps the estrangement of man’. [4]
What really excited Marx was the ‘producing principle’ in Hegel’s work, He says:

The great thing in Hegel’s  Phenomenology and its final result – the dialectic of
negativity as the moving and producing principle – is that Hegel conceives the
self-creation of man as a process, objectification {Vergegenständlichung} as loss
of object {Entgegenständlichung}, as alienation {Entëusserung} and as sublation of
this alienation; that he therefore grasps the nature of  labour and conceives
objective man as the result of his  own labour. [5]
As far as the ‘producing principle’ is concerned, Marx is impressed by the dialectic of
spirit’s actualization of itself through positing itself in the form of objectivity as the
negative of itself and then negating this negation. Marx sees in this the philosophical
reflection of the material process whereby man produces himself through his own
labour. Marx amplifies his ‘humanist’ reading of Hegel as follows: ‘the real active relation
of man to himself’, he says, ‘is only possible if he really employs all his species powers –
which again is only possible through the cooperation of mankind and as a result of
history – and treats them as objects, which is at first only possible in the form of
estrangement’. [6]
Be it noted that both in Hegel and Marx ‘the producing principle’ involves the moment
of estrangement and its overcoming. Nevertheless, in Hegel, a heavy price is exacted
by the mystified form of his insight. Thus Marx immediately embarks on a multi-layered
critique of the Phenomenology even at its strongest points, namely, the ‘producing
principle’ and the acknowledgement of estrangement. His most detailed discussion is
on the closing chapter, ‘Absolute Knowledge’, which, he says, ‘contains the
concentrated essence of the Phenomenology, its relation to the dialectic, and
Hegel’s consciousness of both and their interrelations’. [7] (We shall follow Marx in this,
reserving discussion of other parts of the Phenomenology to the next chapter.)
Marx’s notes, being unrevised, are thus not organized in any way. Here we shall
distinguish four threads in his criticism and discuss them separately before relating
them. To give the reader advance notice, these are the four mistakes Marx finds in
Hegel: (a) the reduction of man to self-consciousness and activity to spiritual labour; (b)
the identification of objectivity with estrangement; (c) the claim that spirit (read ‘man’) is
‘at home in its other-being as such’; (d) the failure to go beyond ‘negation of the
negation’ to the self-sustaining positive.
Labour: Material and Spiritual
Marx praises Hegel for grasping the nature of labour, and, more particularly, for
conceiving man as the result of his own labour. As we have seen, Marx can say this
sort of thing only by reading into the labour of spirit, at work in the Phenomenology, the
work of man, that is to say, primarily material labour. We must not, therefore, take
Marx’s praise too literally. The activity of Hegel’s ‘spirit’ is, naturally, primarily ideal in
character, because it is the activity of consciousness and self-
consciousness. [8] Consequently, Marx immediately adds to the above-mentioned
praise of Hegel, for grasping the nature of labour, the qualification that he knows only
‘abstract spiritual labour’. [9] In fact, Hegel reverses the terms of the real relations
within his philosophical reflection on the problem of estrangement. Consistently with his
idealism, he identifies the human essence with self-consciousness, according to Marx,
and this has the result that, in his work, ‘all estrangement of human nature is
therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness‘. Furthermore, this means that the
estrangement of self-consciousness ‘is not regarded as the expression . . .
of real estrangement’, but, instead, actual estrangement ‘is in its innermost essence –
which philosophy first brings to light – nothing more than the appearance of the
estrangement of . . . self-consciousness’. Marx finds it entirely appropriate that the
science comprehending this is thus called ‘phenomenology’. [10]
Despite the wealth of content in the Phenomenology everything is treated under the form
of consciousness or self-consciousness. This makes a big difference to the manner in
which estrangement is to be superseded. To begin with, Marx points out that a natural
being endowed with material powers works upon real objects and in its alienation
produces in this process a real world of estrangement; but, he goes on, ‘ a self-
consciousness, through its alienation, can posit only ‘thinghood’ {“die Dingheit“}, [11] an
abstraction, a mere postulate of self-consciousness. We saw that in his final chapter
Hegel declares that ‘it is the alienation of self-consciousness that posits thinghood’, but
then it ‘takes it back into itself’. It is clear ‘thinghood’ has no independent being and as
a postulate of self-consciousness is at the mercy of a retraction by the self-
consciousness that postulated it. Hence a change in attitude abolishes the
consciousness of estrangement because estrangement itself is understood only as an
attitude to the world adopted by consciousness. This ‘reconciliation’, as Hegel calls it,
leaves things as they are. As Lukács points out, this reverse movement of ‘Er-Innerung‘,
this supersession of ‘externalization’, is ‘not an internal movement of objective reality at
all, but merely something he has invented in order to bring his philosophy to a
conclusion’. [12] This means that no radical critique of the real world of estrangement
can be undertaken, much less a practical objective transformation.
Marx complains that when ‘Hegel conceives wealth, the power of the state, etc., as
entities estranged from the being of man, he conceives them only in their thought form’;
with the consequence that ‘the appropriation of man’s objectified and estranged
essential powers is therefore only an appropriation which takes place in
consciousness, in pure thought, i.e. in abstraction’. That overcoming estrangement is
achieved, for Hegel, by a change in consciousness alone is at the root of his
conservatism, Marx believes. He sums up the matter thus:

In the  Phenomenology, therefore, despite the thoroughly negative and critical

appearance and despite the fact that its criticism is genuine and often well ahead
of its time, the uncritical positivism and equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s
later works, the philosophical dissolution and restoration of the empirical world,
is already to be found in latent form. [13]
In a part of the manuscript that has been damaged it is possible to reconstruct an
argument whereby Marx compares a real historical solution to the problem of
estrangement with the typically idealist Hegelian solution. If one wanted to overcome
private property in the manner of Hegel’s Phenomenology, he apparently argues, one
might be satisfied with the consciousness that private property is the estranged essence
of social man and believe that thereby it is finished as a ‘conquered moment’. But in
fact ‘real estrangement remains and remains all the more, the more one is conscious of
it as such’; hence the abolition of estrangement requires a practical solution. Marx
concludes: ‘in order to abolish the idea of private property the idea of communism is
quite sufficient; it takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property.’ [14]
In Hegel, estrangement is posited as overcome, not through historical practice but
through a philosophical reinterpretation of this world which can only result in the
sublation of its otherness through the recognition of this otherness as spirit’s own other,
and hence its reconciliation with private property, the state, religion and so forth. In
Marx, revolutionary practice, not speculative reconciliation, reconstitutes reality through
objective reappropriation of the estranged object, thereby producing a new objectivity
free of estrangement from its producers.

Objectivity and Estrangement

According to Lukács, Marx finds two errors in Hegel’s theory of estrangement: ‘on the
subjective side, there is the mistaken identification of man and self-consciousness’;
while ‘on the objective side, there is the equation of estrangement {Entfremdung} and
objectivity {Gegenständlichkeit} in general’. [15]
I dealt just now with the point about the reduction of the problem to the phenomenology
of consciousness. What are the consequences for the status of objectivity? Marx
argues that Hegel interprets the standpoint of absolute knowledge to be that the object
is comprehended only as an objectified self-consciousness; that it is therefore a matter
for Hegel of sublating objectivity as such in so far as the relationship to objectivity on
the part of a consciousness can only be to view it as other than itself; ‘consciousness is
offended not by estranged objectivity but by objectivity as such’, [16] he says. Thus,
since ‘objectivity as such is seen as an estranged human relationship’, it follows that ‘the
reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement
as something alien, therefore means sublating not only estrangement but
also objectivity‘; [17] for it is precisely ‘its objective character which constitutes the
offence and the estrangement as far as self-consciousness is concerned’, [18] Marx
claims.
In illustrating this criticism, Marx relies on the passage (quoted earlier) from the
beginning of the last chapter of the Phenomenology. We saw that Hegel there speaks of
self-consciousness sublating ‘this alienation and objectivity too‘ (my emphasis). For
Marx, objectivity as such is unproblematic; it is only an objectivity established through
reification or pervaded by alienation that requires supersession; whereas, if Hegel’s
‘spirit’ requires the sublation of a relationship of estrangement between consciousness
and the objectivity posited by it as its other, in effect it requires the sublation in self-
consciousness of objectivity as such.
Marx then takes up the Feuerbachian theme that objectivity is an essential framework
for the existence arid activity of a natural being, and, however much Hegel might go on
about self-consciousness, man is a natural being; that is to say, an objective being.
Such a being takes natural objects ‘as the object of his being’ and expresses his life in
such objects, in acting on them. Marx brings home his polemic against Hegel by
arguing, in the light of this, that without objective relationships to objects outside itself a
being has no objective existence; hence to construe the surmounting of estrangement
as the sublation of objectivity implies the lack of objective being of consciousness itself,
and a ‘non-objective being is a non-being’. [19] As I shall argue shortly, Hegel
recognizes that absolute spirit must become objective to itself if it is to actualize its
idea. It is because there can be nothing outside such an absolute that there is a
problem about this. Spirit requires another in which to find itself reflected, while at the
same time requiring that there is nothing that is not it; that it is a self-identical totality.
Hence the ambiguousness, in this absolute science, towards objectivity and objective
relationships. Spirit mediates itself with itself. As we saw earlier (in the passage on
substance as subject) in the movement of the Phenomenology we see spirit playing with
itself, so to speak, not objective human intercourse with nature. [20]

Objectification and Alienation

The identification, within the totality of spirit, of objectivity as a problem implies that for
Hegel estrangement arises from objectification as such rather than from a particular
alienating mode of objectification. Marx complains of Hegel: ‘it is not that the human
essence objectifies itself inhumanly, in opposition to itself, but that it objectifies itself
in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thought, which constitutes [for him] the
essence of estrangement’. [21]
In other words, the charge now is that Hegel identifies objectification with alienation. It
is necessary to distinguish this charge from the error of identifying objectivity and
estrangement. Unfortunately previous commentators have not done so – not even
Lukács. It is very striking in The Young Hegel that, immediately after the paragraph
quoted earlier, pointing to the equation of estrangement and objectivity, Lukács goes
on to say that Marx distinguishes ‘objectification in work in general and the
estrangement of subject and object in the capitalist form of work’; and, thus armed, ‘he
can expose Hegel’s erroneous equation’. [22] Likewise, when he says that Marx’s
theory of alienated labour implies ‘a fundamental critique of Hegel’s philosophy’ this is
said to be because in Marx’s work ‘estrangement is sharply distinguished from
objectivity itself, from objectification in the act of labour’ [23] (as if these were the same
thing).
Lukács goes on to explain that objectification is ‘a characteristic of work in general and
of the relation of human practice to the objects of the external world’, whereas
estrangement is a ‘consequence of the social division of labour under capitalism’. By
contrast, Hegel fails to make such distinctions: [24] he equates objectification and
alienation. This is the charge Lukács brings, [25] and which he says is to be found its
Marx (utilizing the passage quoted above).
Why cannot this charge be reduced to the one treated in the previous section above,
namely that Hegel equates objectivity and estrangement? The answer is that the latter
equation is simply a mistake, from Marx’s point of view. It can never be the case that
estrangement is due to the presence of objectivity (albeit that for Marx estrangement
is objectively present in our experience). The former equation, the identification of
objectification with alienation, is not such a simple error and requires a much more
demanding analysis to identify exactly what goes wrong, as we shall see.
To begin with, let us note that Marx begins by praising Hegel for grasping objectification
as ‘alienation and sublation of this alienation’! As we saw in the passage quoted above,
this is part of ‘the great thing’ in Hegel’s work. Why should Marx say this? There are
two reasons for it. One is that Hegel reflects the historical experience of humanity here.
It has really been the case that up to now the process of objectification has resulted in
estrangement. Thus Marx says that the Phenomenology ‘grasps the estrangement of
man’, and that ‘all the elements of criticism are concealed within it’: it contains ‘the
critical elements – but still in estranged form – of entire spheres, such as religion, the
state, bourgeois life and so forth’.[26]
As matter of fact, it is quite difficult to find a statement by Marx saying that Hegel
wrongly sees in objectification nothing but alienation. What Marx does say is that Hegel
quite rightly sees that alienation has the positive significance of objectification. [27] This
is the second reason for his praise. It will be recalled that Hegel in his Preface
emphasizes that within spirit’s self-mediation there remains the moment of ‘the labour
of the negative’.
This means, as Marx understands, that Hegel is not opposed to objectification on the
grounds that it leads to estrangement. He certainly thinks that it does lead to
estrangement; but this does not mean that he thinks spirit should rest content in itself
and avoid the misfortune of estrangement from itself in its objectification, because he
sees it as necessary to spirit’s actualization of itself that it embark on the ‘labour of the
negative’.
This is what Marx seizes on as ‘the positive moment of the Hegelian dialectic’. This
insight of Hegel’s ‘into the appropriation of objective being through the supersession of
its estrangement’ is important because, though in mystified form, it models ‘the real
objectification of man . . . the real appropriation of his objective essence through the
annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world’. In this way ‘Hegel grasps
man’s self-estrangement . . . as self-discovery, objectification and realization’,
concludes Marx. [28]
The difference between these thinkers, and the necessity for Marx to criticize Hegel on
alienation, lies in their diagnoses and prognoses. Marx, rooting his understanding of
the problematic of alienation in wage-labour, envisages a historical stage beyond
estrangement. Hegel sublates estrangement by declaring it nothing other than spirit’s
interior diremption; it is necessary that this moment of estrangement be preserved as
such because spirit does not inhabit an objective world; thus to become objective it
must posit itself as such on its own account, which can be done only in and through its
self-alienation. In order to know itself as what it is spirit must express itself in a medium
other than itself hence it must posit itself in the form of otherness. This negation of itself
is subsequently negated in its turn, when spirit recognizes itself in these objective
shapes, but this cycle of negations is eternally necessary. Spirit can come to itself
only as the negation of the negation. Hegel, therefore, has no solution to offer other
than this pseudo-movement which preserves the realm of estrangement as a moment.
As he puts it, spirit is ‘at home with itself in its otherness as such’. Simultaneously, spirit
overcomes its estrangement from its world through knowing it as its own work, while
preserving that world of estrangement in all the immediacy of its otherness.
Marx is pretty bitter about this neat trick: ‘so reason is at home in unreason as
unreason’, he says. It seems that man ‘leads his true human life in this alienated life as
such’. Therefore, Marx concludes, this amounts to a substantial compromise on
Hegel’s part with religion, the state and so forth. [29] In Hegel, estrangement is posited
as overcome, not through historical practice, but through a philosophical
reinterpretation of this world, which can only result in the sublation of its otherness
through the recognition of this otherness as spirit’s own other, and its reconciliation with
private property, the state and religion.
Nowadays it is commonplace to assert that Hegel equates alienation and
objectification. [30] Accepting that Marx’s commentary on
Hegel’s Phenomenology revolves around these concepts, as we have seen, we none the
less find ourselves with a problem: despite Herbert Marcuse, and others, speaking of
‘Hegel’s category of objectification’, [31] in not one line of one page of
the Phenomenology does Hegel use the term ‘objectification’ [32] (Vergegenständlichung).
What we do find in a central place in the text, as we have seen, is the term
‘Entäusserung‘. To say that objectification is conceived by Hegel only as alienation is to
point to the absence of Marx’s category of ‘objectification’ (in the affirmative sense of
the establishment by an objective being of its essential relationships in, and through,
labour upon the objective world) and its replacement in Hegel’s problematic by a
significantly different term, Entäusserung. This, like Vergegenständlichung, has
connotations of ‘positing as objective’ but also carries a sense of relinquishment,
renunciation, of what is manifested, thus constituting the latter’s actualization as an
alienation. As Marx says, ‘estrangement {Entfremdung} constitutes the real interest of
this alienation/externalization {Entäusserung}’.[33]
If we do not find the term ‘objectification’, we do find the term ‘objectivity’
(Gegenständlichkeit), Now Hegel cannot conceive of objectivity as such except as
estrangement; hence the replacement of the category of ‘objectification’ with that of
‘alienation’, Moreover, this identification (of objectivity with estrangement) allows Hegel
to interpret actual estrangement as arising exclusively from objectification in general and
not a particular historically conditioned mode of objectification. Consequently, instead of
real historical solutions Hegel displaces the problem into general philosophical
reflection issuing in a solution posed exclusively within philosophy, as we saw earlier.
For Marx the realization of the human essence involves objective appropriation of the
‘other’, namely the object of labour, through working it up and making it part of a
humanized world. This dialectic of objectification passes through a phase of alienation,
but Marx’s analysis culminates in the call for the practical overthrow of estrangement
and the reappropriation of the estranged essence.

For Hegel the human essence is self-consciousness and Marx argues that, since
something comes to exist for consciousness in so far as it knows that something, its
only objective relationship is knowing. What absolute knowing realizes is that its ‘other’
is posited as such only through self-alienation, and is reappropriated through an
inwardizing movement of thought, which is forced, in so far as consciousness
must have an object, to preserve estrangement as a moment of consciousness (and, of
course, the consciousness of estrangement is all this problematic knows!). In the middle
part of the Phenomenology masses of concrete historical material, involving actual
estranged spheres of existence, are brought within this framework, and the practical
problems are provided with a pseudo-solution when philosophy reconciles itself, both
with objectivity in general and with historically created objective estrangement in
particular. Hegel appears as a radical critic of all objectivity, charging it with being
estrangement; but he ends by accepting uncritically both the genuine and reified
objectivities, in so far as their character as objective is granted the necessity of a
moment in spirit’s self-positing movement in its other as its estranged self. To the
extent that Hegel accepts the necessity for such alienating objectification he becomes
uncritical of the sphere of estrangement brought to life within spirit’s self-actualization.
In this way the positive achievement of history hidden within estrangement is equated
with that estrangement itself. Objectification and alienation are one. Marx speaks,
therefore, of ‘Hegel’s false positivism’ or ‘his merely apparent criticism’.[34]
Hegel’s greatness as a philosopher is that he is sensitive to the complexities of the
system of alienation in which we live, and, although in a mystified way, he understands
that it must be the result of the manner in which human self-objectification has been
actualized. His misfortune is that he is unable to see the possibility of a historical
reappropriation by man of his alienated powers. Instead, the historically conditioned
problem is interpreted by him as a general ontological problem of existence. Hence, to
posit the possibility of a solution the fatal option of idealism was taken up, whereby the
world of real objective estrangement was grasped only from the point of view of the
consciousness of it as other than consciousness, that is objectivity, and thus a solution
could be posited at that level in so far as reason could penetrate objectivity.
Historically, Hegel cannot see beyond the horizon of capitalism. What happens,
therefore, is that real alienation is conceptualized in such a thinned-out manner that
this ‘Entäusserung‘ can be overcome in the recollection of its origins. He is too realistic
to opt for utopianism in his social theory. But, in the words of Lukács, ‘the idealist
dialectic transforms the entire history of man into a great philosophical utopia; into the
philosophical dream that “alienation” can be overcome in the subject, that substance
can be transformed into subject’. [35]
Hegel’s tragedy is that, though objectification and alienation are conceptually distinct,
and are distinguished brilliantly by Marx, Hegel cannot grasp this possibility, for it
depends upon a historical potential beyond the limits of his bourgeois standpoint. Thus
he collapses them together so that the necessity of spirit’s odyssey of self-
objectification becomes at the same time its self-estrangement, and scientific criticism
is powerless to do more than point to the content hidden behind the forms of
estrangement and pass off this insight as their sublation. But as Marx mercilessly
demonstrates, this still leaves real objective estrangement intact.

The Standpoint of Political Economy

As we know, Marx is interested in seeing how far Hegel’s category of alienating
objectification models his own category of labour. We saw that he finds the great thing
in the Phenomenology to be precisely that Hegel conceives man as the result of his own
labour. Nevertheless, Marx immediately goes on to say that Hegel’s account is ‘one-
sided’ and ‘limited’. Before devoting himself to detailed analysis of the closing chapter
of the Phenomenology to demonstrate this, Marx makes two preliminary general points.
These stand right next to each other, without the least transition, in the same
paragraph.
For the moment, let us say this much in advance: Hegel adopts the standpoint of
modern political economy. He grasps  labour as the  essence, as the self-
confirming essence, of man; he sees only the positive side of labour, not its
negative side. Labour is man’s  coming to be for himself within  alienation or
as  alienated man. The only labour Hegel knows and recognizes is  abstract
mental labour. [36]
What should be noticed particularly is that the first three sentences constitute a
criticism of Hegel parallel to Marx’s diagnosis of the failings of political economy. Then
Marx switches abruptly to a different criticism to do with Hegel’s idealism (which we
have already covered). In truth, these criticisms are related; but the reader must not be
tempted to seize gratefully on the second criticism recognizing in it the familiar battle
between materialism and idealism, and neglecting thereby the first criticism. The first
criticism qualifies the previous paragraph in praise of Hegel in just as important a way
as the more obvious second criticism does. What Marx says here is that Hegel, when
he sees ‘man’ (‘spirit’ in Hegel) as the result of his own labour, shares in this
perspective the limited one-sided view of political economy: he sees only the positive
and not the negative side of labour. Just as spirit comes to know its own power in the
shapes of its substance, so modern political economy has seen through the reified
world of mercantilism and understood the enormous productive power of labour, truly
the source of ‘the wealth of nations’. What political economy avoids is ‘the negative
side of labour’. As Marx earlier pointedly remarks: ‘political economy conceals the
estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by ignoring the immediate relationship
between the worker (labour) and production‘. The truth is, he claims, that ‘labour
produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker; it produces
palaces, but hovels for the worker; it produces beauty, but deformity for the worker’.
And so on. Machinery does not lighten labour but turns the workers themselves into
cogs in the machine. There is intelligence in machines, but cretinism in labour. [37]
So the man who results from his own labour is the victim of his own self-estrangement,
the wealth he creates stands over against him as an alien power. ‘Labour is man’s
coming to be for himself within alienation or as alienated man’, Marx reminds us. Thus
to attribute to Hegel the standpoint of political economy is a damaging criticism indeed.
It is to charge Hegel with concealing the estrangement inherent in ‘labour’ and
identifying this alienating mediator with productive activity itself.
This seems unfair because, after all, Hegel is rightly credited by Marx with having
understood that man objectifies himself in and through ‘alienation and the supersession
of alienation’. But we have also seen that, just because Hegel follows the labour
of spirit in this dialectic, reappropriation takes place only within self-consciousness. We
have argued that this leaves real objective estrangement intact. If such labour is
posited as the essence, then, just as with political economy, the estrangement inherent
in labour is overlooked or even endorsed as ontologically necessary to human
existence.
In truth, Hegel’s equation of objectification and alienation makes him uncritical of the
estrangement brought to life in spirit’s self-actualization. Hegel, in common with
modern political economy, grasps labour (spiritual labour in his case) as the essence of
human achievement; he even grasps it as alienating activity; but if (like Hegel and
Smith) one is unable to identify a genuine historical supersession of estrangement, the
existing conditions become the horizon that blocks off access to a critically
adopted standpoint of labour. It is rather the case that these conditions that twist and
distort the objectification of man in and through productive activity are endorsed as the
necessary framework within which the becoming of man for himself must occur. Thus
Marx can conclude that ‘Hegel sees . . . self-objectification in the form of self-alienation
and self-estrangement as the absolute, and hence final, expression of human life,
which . . . has attained its own essential nature’. [38]
The standpoint of Hegel is that of modern political economy, namely, the uncritically
adopted standpoint of labour, labour that is a determination of the private property
system, an alienating mediator, falsely absolutized.
An important parallel here is that Hegel’s account of subjectivity, thrown back into itself
in the face of alien objectivity, maps philosophically the experience of labour-power as
a subjectivity thrown back into itself in the face of the determination of its object as
alien private property. Furthermore, the activity of Hegel’s spirit, in overcoming the
dichotomy in such a manner that it takes objectivity (= estrangement) back into itself
while yet preserving its otherness, maps the standpoint of political economy when it
proves that productive labour is the source of wealth, but ‘gives everything to private
property’ (in Marx’s words). In both cases an alienating mediator reproduces the
totality, preserving rather than abolishing the estrangement of subject and object.

The Dialectic of Negativity

We have seen that Hegel’s mediator is the negating action of consciousness. We found
that Marx praises ‘the great thing’ in Hegel’s book, namely, ‘the dialectic of negativity
as the moving and producing principle’. But there are certain problems with Hegel’s
dialectic: it is abstract; it is conservative; and it is stuck at the stage of negation of
negation.

In presenting the activity of spirit as pure negativity Hegel abstracts from all determinate
content. Real alienation is subsumed in the logical category of ‘the negative’ and its
supersession is naturally another logical operation, ‘the negation of the negation’. Marx
complains that ‘the inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete activity of self-
objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity, an
abstraction which is then given permanent form as such and conceived as . . . activity
itself’. [39]
Furthermore, the incorporation of the problematic of estrangement within the
conceptual framework of absolute negativity means that Hegel’s critical apparatus is
unable to identify the specific historical origins of alienation, or the concrete historical
conditions of its supersession. In effect, he endorses the moment of estrangement as
an ontological necessity, instead of grasping it as brought about through specific
material processes in the history of mankind’s emergence, and as subject to radical
abolition, through a revolution which is the outcome of changed historical conditions.
So, while Marx allows that ‘in grasping the positive significance of the negation which
has reference to itself’ [40] Hegel grasps self-alienation as self-objectification, at the
same time, ‘since this negation of the negation is itself still trapped in estrangement,
what this amounts to is a fibre to move beyond the final stage, the stage of self-
reference in alienation’. [41] Spirit knows itself in its negation, but posits itself only in
the negation of the negation. Thus, this negation of the negation does not give rise, in a
practical transformation of the entire structure of labour, to the ‘self-sustaining positive’.
As we have seen, for Marx communism is the positive supersession of private property
as human self-estrangement. We have seen also that he characterizes communist
revolution (because of its character as the negation of the negation, as the
reappropriation of the human essence through the negation of private property) ‘as
being not yet the true, self-originating position but rather a position originating from
private property’. [42] He concludes that ‘only when we have superseded this mediation
– which, however, is a necessary precondition – will positive humanism, positively
originating in itself, come into being’. [43]
This is the crucial difference between Hegel and Marx: Hegel stays within the circle of
circles of his absolute, while Marx wants to open out a new historical perspective
subsequent to the supersession of alienation. Marx sums up the relation of Hegel’s
philosophy to real history in two propositions: (a) ‘Hegel has merely discovered
the abstract, logical, speculative expression of the movement of history’; (b) ‘This
movement of history is not yet the real history of man . . . it is simply the process of his
creation, the history of his emergence‘. [44]
The first point is that the abstract expression of the process of man’s creation of
himself, through labour and its alienation, is given in Hegel under the concept of
‘absolute negativity’, an abstract speculative version of activity which is empty of
content and can be supplied with any content accordingly. The other point is that in the
cycle of negation, and the negation of the negation, Hegel states as an absolute what
is in real history relative only to the process of emergence which culminates in
communist revolution; but ‘communism as such is not the goal of human development’.
The point here is that, though Hegel’s treatment of positing through double negation is
abstract, this abstraction is taken from real history, namely the genesis of objective
powers of production in the shape of estrangement from the immediate producer, and
the potential to reappropriate this estranged essence. But in Hegel, precisely because
of his ambivalent attitude to objectivity in the dialectic of spirit, the abstract treatment is
subject to the further limitation that self-recognition in estrangement is preserved as a
moment within the absolute. A radical transcendence, a positive supersession, of
estranged objectivity cannot be thought.

Conclusion
For an idealist to take offence at objective reality and to deny its independence would
not in itself have any interest. What strikes Marx as very interesting, and serves as the
point of departure for both his praise and his criticism of Hegel, is that Hegel’s definition
of alienation has a positive connotation just in so far as it posits objectivity. Hegel
clearly distinguishes his position from that of subjective idealism in so far as the
moment of objectivity is granted its necessity; consciousness must be conscious
of something. At the same time, the identification of objectivity with estrangement poses
a problem. Again, unlike Stoicism for example, Hegel’s philosophy does not attempt a
solution through a retreat into the inner life and a denial of the effectivity of objective
reality in the subject’s freedom of thought. Rather, Hegel insists that estrangement can
be overcome precisely when self-consciousness appropriates objectivity and finds itself
at home in this its other. This is achieved when spirit understands that the object is
nothing but its own self-alienation.
Marx’s objections to Hegel’s idealist construction he sums up for himself at the
beginning of a notebook started in November 1844 (the 1844 Manuscripts themselves
are dated April to August). He makes the following four points. First: Hegel puts ‘self-
consciousness instead of man’; second: ‘the differences of things are unimportant,
because substance is conceived as self-distinction’, although it is granted that Hegel
makes distinctions that ‘grasp the vital point’; third: ‘abolition of estrangement is identified
with abolition of objectivity‘; fourth: supersession of ‘the object as object of
consciousness is identified with real abolition’ of alienation. [45]
These points are connected in the following way: given that Hegel expounds the
phenomenology of knowing subjectivity, all human relations are brought within this
framework; distinctions between man and the objects of his activity are hence rendered
as self-distinctions produced in the negating action of consciousness; objectivity equals
estrangement for such a subjectivity until the estrangement is overcome in the final
revolution of spirit’s progressive self-realization as a self-identical totality; this is
confused with real objective abolition because of the treatment of objects as objects of
consciousness simply.

It might be objected that to say nothing is really changed when absolute knowledge
recollects and recognizes the determinations of substance as spirit’s self-determination
fails to notice that this itself counts as a change given the framework of Hegel’s
speculative problematic. A new shape of consciousness is born.

The answer to this would be that, although earlier stages of self-development of spirit
are associated by Hegel with objective historical transformations, the development after
the culmination of this in the stage of ‘self-estranged spirit’ leaves the ground of
objective social relationships and moves in increasingly interiorized shapes of spirit: art,
revealed religion and philosophy. In this way philosophy reconciles itself with the forms
of social objectivity (the economy, the state) previously experienced as alienated. Marx
can legitimately complain that the underlying objective relationships remain
untransformed and preserve their effectivity in everyday experience. After all, the mass
of people cannot become Hegelian dialecticians! In any case, it is not that his
philosophy abolishes estrangement – it merely abstracts from it.

It is interesting that in the November summary there is no praise of Hegel’s ‘dialectic of

negativity as the producing principle’. Perhaps Marx by this time had decided that the
abstract character of this negativity rendered it so vacuous that there was no point in
discussing it. None the less, it was precisely on that issue that Marx earlier felt it
necessary to comment in order to distinguish his own position on ‘communism as the
negation of the negation’ from any confusion with Hegelian positing through double
negation. In spite of the work already produced by Feuerbach in criticism of this
Hegelian dialectic – work extravagantly praised by Marx – he found when working
through his critique that it would be necessary to put together a special chapter on
Hegel in which the ‘positive moments’ (clearly stimulating Marx’s own thought) could be
noted along with the reproduction of the Feuerbachian critique. This, in turn, raises
questions about Marx’s relation to Feuerbach at this date. Such a discussion is
postponed in this book to Part Three, until after we have completed our study of the
relationship of Marx and Hegel by looking at some especially significant sections of
Hegel’s Phenomenology.
The Appendix to this chapter is concerned with relevant recent secondary literature on
the reading of Hegel.
Summary
Although Marx criticizes Hegel for reducing man to self-consciousness and activity to
spiritual labour, he nevertheless finds that in this guise Hegel ‘grasps the nature of
labour’ and sees man ‘as the result of his own labour’. Yet Hegel shares with political
economy the uncritically adopted standpoint of labour, in conflating objectification and
alienation, hence absolutizing estrangement. Marx protests against Hegel’s claim that
spirit is at home in its otherness once it recollects that the latter is its own alienating
objectification. Marx accepts that the negation of the negation is the pattern of human
genesis through alienation and its supersession. But where Hegel idealizes and
absolutizes ‘the labour of the negative’, Marx looks to a radical objective supersession
of estrangement through practical, material, and historical, revolution.

Appendix

Is Marx Fair to Hegel?

My concern with Hegel in this book is primarily with Hegel as the dialectically
surpassed predecessor of Marx. From this point of view what is important is Marx’s
reading of Hegel; what he saw, or thought he saw, that was useful to him, and what he
saw, or thought he saw, a need to depart from. It would be possible to challenge that
reading of course, This has indeed happened. [46] I do not intend here to defend
Marx’s reading of Hegel. I believe that its general thrust is correct, despite the fact that
Hegel is somewhat caricatured on occasion in the heat of the polemic.
At this point, nevertheless, for the benefit of those interested, I indicate the most
interesting possible criticism. Gillian Rose, in her novel reading of Hegel, complains in
passing that the Phenomenology has ‘frequently been misread in Fichtean terms
according to which the “experience” of consciousness is . . . understood . . . as a
change in perspective which sees the non-ego as the ego’s own alienated
exteriorization, recaptures it by an act of will, and becomes absolute’. [47] Marx, and
the Marxist tradition, are cited in this connection. Likewise, later on she complains that
‘Marx produces a Fichtean reading of Hegel’s system as the unconditioned absolute
idea which pours forth nature, which does not recognize but creates
determination’. [48]
If we turn to Marx’s own account of Hegel’s relation to his predecessors we find that he
sees three elements in Hegel: Spinoza’s substance; Fichte’s self-consciousness; ‘and
Hegel’s necessarily antagonistic unity of the two, the Absolute Spirit‘. [49] This view of
Hegel sees him trying to have it both ways. Spirit both recognizes and creates
determination. An interpreter of Hegel as sympathetic as Richard Norman concedes
that absolute spirit looks pretty much like God, as traditionally conceived, in certain
passages, particularly in the Preface. (Then again, one should bear in mind that Hegel
later remarked that in the Preface the abstract absolute dominates.) [50] M. Rosen goes
so far as to say that the way the self-movement of the notion produces its content out
of itself corresponds to the theological problematic of creatio ex nihilo. [51] As for Marx:
he finds in Hegel ‘a mystical subject – object’. [52]
A curious feature of Rose’s subsequent argument is the use she makes of the following
statement by Marx:

For this third object I am thus an  other actuality than it, that is,  its object. To
assume a being which is not the object of another is thus to suppose
that  no objective being exists. [53]
This is said by Rose to be a place where Marx’s thought does not rely on abstract
dichotomies, but ‘captures what Hegel means by actuality or spirit’. [54] The curious
thing about this is that Marx’s intention in the passage at issue is to criticize Hegel’s
absolute spirit. It forms part of a discussion of Hegel’s statement that it is the alienation
of self-consciousness which posits thinghood. At the same time, leaving aside Marx’s
intention, it could be argued that when he says that a being with no object would exist
‘solitary and alone’ (‘einsam und allein‘) [55] this reminds us immediately of the end of
the Phenomenology where comprehended history is the actuality of absolute spirit
without which it would be ‘lifeless and alone’ (‘das leblose Einsam‘ in Hegel’s curious
phrase). [56]
None the less, Marx’s point is that where the absolute is concerned, the relation to the
object is grasped by Hegel ultimately as not a really objective relation. Likewise, in
his Logic, Hegel defines being determinate as being for another; but again, in parallel
with the Phenomenology, the absolute idea absorbs all available content, it
‘contemplates its contents as its own self’. [57]
In truth, Marx’s argument at this point does bear traces of the presence of Fichte.
Thinghood (Dingheit) is said by Marx to be something posited by the Hegelian self-
consciousness. ‘And what is posited, instead of confirming itself, is but the confirmation
of the act of positing which for a moment fixes its energy as the product, and gives it
the semblance – but only for a moment – of an independent, real substance.’ Marx goes
on to argue against this that man ‘creates or posits objects’ because he is himself
objectively posited. ‘In the act of positing, therefore, this objective being does not fall
from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary,
his objective product only confirms his objective activity.’ [58] (This is equally so in
alienating objectification of course.)
Hegel, however, does not talk of ‘pure activity’ on the relevant pages, but this
phrase is very reminiscent of Fichte. [59] In Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (1794), it is
argued that ‘the pure activity of the self’ is presupposed by ‘objective activity’; it is a
‘condition of any activity that posits an object’ even though ‘pure activity originally
relates to no object at all’. [60] (Earlier, where ‘the act of positing’ is shown to entail ‘the
activity of alienation’, there is also a nice definition of the object created: ‘the activity of
alienation’, he says, ‘must have a passivity opposed to it; and such there is, indeed, in
that a portion of absolute totality is alienated; is posited as not posited.’ [61])
A related point brought forward by Rose is the role of alienation in
Hegel’s Phenomenology. She argues that the Phenomenology is not ‘the experience of
consciousness recapturing its alienated existence’ and that the experience of alienation
is restricted to a historically specific period, namely pre-bourgeois society. [62] As we
earlier said, there are two German terms used by Hegel that translate as ‘alienation’,
namely ‘Entäusserung‘ and ‘Entfremdung‘. There is no doubt at all that the former plays
the role attributed to it by Marx at the level of the upshot of the whole Phenomenology.
This may be confirmed by examining the last chapter. [63] Rose’s reference to a
historically specific period (i.e. the period covered in ‘Der sich Entfremdete Geist‘),
suggests that she may wish to restrict the reference to the term ‘Entfremdung‘, However,
Hegel’s Preface employs this expression in several places: for example, the experience
of consciousness is said to be a movement ‘in which the immediate, the
unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous being, or only thought of as
simple becomes alienated {entfremdet} from itself and then returns to itself from this
alienation {Entfremdung} . . .’ [64]

1 The Holy Family: C.W.4, 192. As is well known, this theme recurs in Marx’s Afterward
to the 2nd edition of Capital.
2 Ibid; C.W.4. 139.
3 Werke Eb., 580; C.W.3, 339; E.W., 392.
4 Werke Eb., 573; C.W.3, 332; E.W., 385.
5 Werke Eb., 574; C.W.3, 332-3; E.W. 385-6.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 The role of material labour as such in Hegel’s Phenomenology is discussed in chapter
7.
9 Whether this is fair to Hegel is discussed in the following chapters.
10 Werke Eb., 575-6; C.W.3, 334; E.W., 387.
11 Werke Eb., 577; C.W.3, 305; E.W., 389.
12 The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London, 1975, p. 516.
13 Werke Eb., 573; C.W.3, 332; E.W., 384-5. For a brief discussion of Hegel’s later work,
see chapter 8.
14 Werke Eb., 553; C.W.3, 313; E.W., 365.
15 Werke 8, 673-4; Young Hegel, p. 551. Livingstone’s translation gives ‘alienation and
objectification in general’. This appears to be a mistake. For ‘objectification’ see the
discussion below. Note that although Lukács’ chapter heading refers to ‘Entäusserung’,
this point is made with reference to ‘Entfremdung’. For a Hegelian response to Lukács
see Errol Harris’s 1978 discussion ‘Marxist interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit‘, in Method and Speculation in Hegel’s Phenomenology ed. M. Westphal, Atlantic
Highlands, NJ, and Brighton, 1982.
16 Werke Eb., 580; C.W.3, 339; E.W., 392.
17 Werke Eb., 575; C.W.3, 333-4; E.W., 386-7.
18 Werke Eb., 580; C.W.3, 338; E.W., 391.
19 Werke Eb., 577-8; C.W.3, 336-7; E.W., 389-90.
20 See also the Appendix to this chapter.
21 Werke Eb., 572; C.W.3, 331; E.W., 384.
22 Young Hegel, pp. 551-2.
23 Werke 8, 671; Young Hegel, p. 549. Livingstone gives ‘alienation is sharply
distinguished from objective reality … ‘, allowing the impression that alienation might be
unreal.
24 For a defence of Hegel’s equation of objectification and alienation see Hyppolite’s
review of Lukács’ The Young Hegel in Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, trans. J.
O’Neill, New York, 1955, pp. 87 ff. For a counter-attack on Hyppolite, see István
Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, London, 1970. pp. 244-5.
25 Besides The Young Hegel compare Lukács’ 1967 Preface to Volume 2 of his
collected works, pp. 24-6, reprinted in the English translation of History and Class-
Consciousness (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone, London, 1971, pp. xxii-xxiv.
Livingstone translates both ‘Entfremdung‘ and ‘Entäusserung‘ here as ‘alienation’ – in
truth, Lukács seems to equate them.
26 Werke Eb., 573; C.W.3, 332; E.W., 385.
27 Joachim Ritter, in Hegel und die französische Revolution, Köln and Opladen, 1957,
says that Hegel’s treatment of the dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity (the central
problem of Hegelian philosophy) is now treated, under the influence of Marx, as a
problem of estrangement. He adds (p. 61): ‘what is important . . . is that one does not
lose sight of the positive meaning of the dichotomy presupposed in estrangement’
(Hegel and the French Revolution, trans. RD. Winfield, Cambridge. Mass., 1982, p. 118).
Dupré says that in 1844 Marx, for the first time, realized on re-reading Hegel that
alienation is ‘highly positive’: it is ‘the forward march of self creation’ (The Philosophical
Foundations of Marxism, New York, 1966, p. 122). Nathan Rotenstreich says ‘Hegel set
a positive value on alienation … ‘ (Basic Principles of Marx’s Philosophy, Indianapolis,
1965, p. 156). Rotenstreich’s chapter ‘Concept of alienation and its metamorphoses’ is
interesting on the changing senses of ‘alienation’ in the history of thought.
Unfortunately, there is a slip on p.158 arising from a misreading of a critical gloss by
Marx on Hegel as Marx’s own view. Rotenstreich says: ‘Having asserted that to abolish
alienation is ipso facto to abolish the status of the object qua object, Marx said, in a
marginal comment, that this follows from Feuerbach’s line of reasoning. What
Feuerbach sought to abolish was obviously not . . . objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) but
the fictitious status of pseudo-objects. Purporting to be based on Feuerbach’s
premises, Marx’s conclusion – at least with regard to the existence of products of
labour – is that the status of object qua object itself is to be abolished, since latent in its
very existence is not the enrichment but the distortion of the creative subject.’ The
reference is not clear but it is probably the following passage: ‘Abolition
of estrangement is identified with abolition of objectivity (an aspect evolved by
Feuerbach in particular)’ (.C.W.4, 665). This occurs under the head ‘Hegel’s
Construction of the Phenomenology.’. It is meant as a criticism of Hegel, first made by
Feuerbach, and endorsed by Marx. The present discussion shows how absurd it would
be to say that Marx wants to abolish the object ‘qua object’. (It would be equally absurd
in Feuerbach’s case). Marx wants to abolish the object qua alienated. Rotenstreich
rightly goes on to a discussion of Capital‘s characterization of the commodity form of
the produce of labour as a fetish; but this refers to its status, not as a natural object, but
as a value (which ‘has a purely social reality’ and ‘contains not an atom of matter’). It is
interesting that in his 1844 notes on James Mill Marx says that ‘value is
an alienated designation of [the product] itself, different from its immediate existence,
external to its specific nature, a merely relative mode of existence of this’ (C.W.3, 219).
28 Werke Eb., 583-4; C.W.3, 341-2; E.W., 395.
29 Werke Eb., 581; C.W.3, 339; E.W., 393.
30 For example: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Problem of Method (1960), London, 1963, p. 13;
Mészáros, Theory of Alienation, p. 84.
31 ‘The foundation of historical materialism’ (1932), in Herbert Marcuse, From Luther to
Popper, essays trans. Joris de Bres, London, 1983, pp. 13, 45.
32 ‘Vergegenständlichung’ is absent from J. Gauvin’s Wortindex zu Hegels Phänomenologie
des Geistes, Bonn, 1977. (P. Slater drew my attention to this point.) It is tear that J.B.
Baillie’s translation (Phenomenology of Mind, London, 1949) uses the term, once (p. 86)
in the Preface (but he is excessively free in his translation at that point) and again (p.
790) at the beginning of the last chapter (but this is a mistake for ‘objectivity’
– Gegenständlichkeit).
33 Werke Eb., 572; C.W.3, 331; E.W., 384.
34 Werke Eb., 581; C.W.3, 339; E.W., 393.
35 Werke 8, 415-16; Young Hegel, p. 333.
36 Werke Eb., 574; C.W.3, 333; E.W., 386.
37 Werke Eb., 513; C.W.3, 273; E.W., 325.
38 Werke Eb., 584; C.W.3, 342; E.W., 396.
39 Ibid.
40 Werke Eb., 583; C.W.3, 342; E.W., 395.
41 Werke Eb., 586; C.W.3, 344; E.W., 398.
42 Werke Eb., 553; C.W.3, 313; E.W., 365.
43 Werke Eb., 583; C.W.3, 341-2; E.W., 395.
44 Werke Eb., 570; C.W.3, 329; E.W., 382.
45 C.W.4, 665.
46 e.g. J. Maguire, Marx’s Paris Writings: an Analysis, Dublin, 1972, thinks Marx’s
account of Hegel less than fair.
47 Rose G., Hegel Contra Sociology, London, 1981, p. 150.
48 Ibid., p. 214.
49 The Holy Family: C.W.4, 139.
50 Richard Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Brighton, 1976, pp. 112-15. Hegel’s
admission is quoted in J.N. Findlay’s Foreword to Hegel’s Logic, trans. W. Wallace, 3rd
ed., 1975, p. vii.
51 Rosen M., Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism, Cambridge. 1982. p. 81.
52 Werke Eb., 584; C.W.3, 342.
53 Werke Eb., 578; C.W.3, 337; E.W., 390.
54 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 215.
55 Werke Eb., 571; C.W.3, 337.
56G.W.9, 765.
57 Hegel’s Logic, para. 237. See Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (1939), London,
1968, pp. 48-58.
58Werke Eb., 577; C.W.3, 336.
59 For a vigorous, assertion of Hegel’s difference from Fichte, and the claim that he is
not ‘idealist’ but ‘realist’, see Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel (1947), ed. A. Bloom, trans. J.H. Nicols, New York, 1969, pp. 150-4.
60 J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge (1794), trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs, Cambridge,
1982, pp. 231-2.
61 Ibid., p. 154.
62 Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 152, 219.
63 For example: Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, 1977, paras. 788,
803-8.
64 Ibid., para. 36.

Chapter 7 – The Influence of the Phenomenology

← Chapter 6 | Chapter 8 →

Introduction
The fact that
Marx hangs his criticism of Hegel largely on a passage from the last
chapter of the Phenomenology warrants the inference that the main influence
of the work on him is its dialectic in general. However, there is no
doubt that Marx could not have been so interested in it if he had only
acquainted himself with the rather abstract formulations in the
conclusion and the Preface. Clearly the way Hegel works through historical
material in the concrete to flesh out the dialectic of consciousness and
self-consciousness must have impressed Marx.
Accordingly, this chapter is
devoted to a discussion of some of the materials concerned. In
relation to this, there is first a myth to be refuted. [1]

Lordship and Bondage

There is a widely held view that Marx was profoundly influenced by
the master – servant (‘Herrschaft und Knechtschaft‘) dialectic in
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This view was first popularized by
Jean-Paul Sartre, who refers in his Being and Nothingness (1943) to ‘the famous
“Master Slave” relation which so profoundly influenced Marx’; Sartre
does nor explain how he knows this. [2] Probably this remark reflects
the pervasive influence of Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the
1930s. Kojève presents a reading of the Phenomenology that centralizes
the place of the master – servant dialectic in it, in a quasi-Marxist
interpretation. Kojève may have assumed that Marx himself read it in the
same way. However, it is one thing to read Marxism back into Hegel, it
is another to generate it out of Hegel. Three years after Sartre we find
Jean Hyppolite again saying that the dialectic of domination and
servitude is the best-known section of the Phenomenology because of ‘the
influence it has had on the political and social philosophy of Hegel’s
successors, especially Marx’. [3]
As a matter of fact, despite the
assertions of numerous commentators to the contrary, Sartre and Hyppolite
did not attend Kojève’s lectures. The myth that they sat at the feet of
the ‘unknown superior’ is now well established. Thus Wilfred Desan says
that the audience included Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite; and,
more specifically, ‘Sartre learned to study Hegel in the classes of Kojève
just before W.W.Il’; but he does not give any evidence for it. [4] Let
us turn then to first-hand accounts. Kojève’s disciple Raymond
Queneau, who was responsible for collecting and publishing Kojève’s lectures
in 1947, has given a list of participants that does not include Sartre
or Hyppolite. [5] As far as Hyppolite is concerned, we have the
additional testimony of Madame Hyppolite that he did not attend ‘for fear of
being influenced’. [6]
However that may be, by the time Sartre and
Hyppolite made their equations between Hegel and Marx, a crucial document
of Kojève’s was already in the public domain. In the issue of Mesures for 14 January
1939 Kojève published a free translation, with
interpolated glosses, of the section of the Phenomenology entitled ‘Autonomy and
Dependence of Self Consciousness: Mastery and Servitude’. [7] Still more
interesting for our purposes is that Kojève includes as an epigraph
the following words of Marx: ‘Hegel . . . erfasst die Arbeit als das Wesen, als das sich
bewährende Wesen des Menschen.’ (‘Hegel . . . grasps labour as the essence, as the self-
confirming essence of man.’) No
reference is given, but in fact this is quoted from Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts,
which remained unpublished until the 1930s. Kojève, therefore, was one
of the first to make a direct connection between this judgement of
Marx’s on Hegel and the master servant dialectic in the Phenomenology.
Today it is dogmatically asserted in numerous books that Marx was inspired
by Hegel’s analysis of the labour of servitude. [8] This view is
false. Here I will attempt to show that this is so in the light of the
account above of the real significance of Marx’s critical appropriation of
the Phenomenology.
If we are to examine the influence of Hegel’s Phenomenology on Marx, the crucial text to
consider has to be the 1844 Manuscripts. As we have seen, Marx praises Hegel there
for having grasped man
as the result of his own labour. Nearly all commentators, innocently
assuming that material labour is meant here, turn to the Phenomenology and find that
there is indeed a fascinating discussion in the ‘master –
servant’ section of the significance of material labour, in and through
which the servant ‘finds himself’. Furthermore, the fact that this
labour is seen by Hegel as actualized in the context of servitude leads
some commentators to make the more extravagant claim that in his theory
of alienation Marx draws on this same section, Herbert Marcuse was
probably the first to do so; he says in his Reason and Revolution (1941) that Marx
‘described the “alienation” of labour in the terms of Hegel’s discussion of master and
servant’. [9]
The only difficulty with these
presuppositions of the secondary literature is that Marx never refers to
this section of the Phenomenology – never mind giving it any
importance! – when, in his 1844 Manuscripts, he embarks on a ‘critique of Hegel’s
dialectic’. [10] He discusses the Phenomenology as a whole and draws
attention to its last chapter especially; he singles out three other
sections for praise; but none of them is on the master servant dialectic.
This should make us suspicious, therefore, of the claims made for the
‘Herrschaft und Knechtschaft‘ section. (Incidentally, although it is
popularly nominated the ‘master-slave’, the correct translation of
‘Knecht‘ is servant’ or ‘bondsman’. That this choice of terminology is deliberate is seen
when we find that in his 1825 Berlin lecture on Herrschaft
und Knechtschaft Hegel draws a distinction between der Sklave and der
Knecht[11])
Let us now rehearse the dialectic of lordship and
bondage. This section occurs early in the Phenomenology at the point where
consciousness is to turn into self-consciousness. Hegel believes that the
self can become conscious of itself only in and through the mediation
of another self-consciousness. The first stable relationship that
emerges in Hegel’s dialectical development of this topic is that of lordship
and bondage. The master is acknowledged as such by his servant, and he
achieves immediate satisfaction of his desires through goods and
services provided by the servant’s labour. The dialectic moves forwards
precisely through the servant, however, because ‘through work . . . the
bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is’. Work forms and shapes the
thing; and through this formative activity the consciousness of the
servant now, in the work outside it, acquires ‘an element of permanence’;
for it comes to see in the independent being of the object ‘its own independence’.
‘The shape does not become something other than himself
through being made external to him’, says Hegel, ‘for it is precisely
this shape that is his pure being-for-self.’ The result of this
rediscovery of himself is that, ‘precisely in labour’, whose meaning seemed so
alien to him, the bondsman gains a sense of himself – ‘a mind of his
own’ so to speak. [12] These terms are superficially comparable to Marx’s
in that both Hegel and Marx see work not merely in its utilitarian
aspect but as a vehicle for self realization; thus they see the servant
rather than the master as the locus of a more developed human existence.
Fundamental differences between
Marx and Hegel become obvious when we
notice that, whereas Marx holds that only a change in the mode of
production recovers for the worker his sense of self and its fulfilment, Hegel
thinks that the educative effect of work, even within an exploitative
relation of production, is sufficient for the worker to manifest to
himself his own ‘meaning’ in his product. Furthermore, at this stage in
the phenomenological dialectic, as we shall see below, the condition of
‘fear and service’ is stipulated as necessary to this end; that is, to
the servant’s becoming objective to himself.
Remembering now the
crucial passage in Marx’s complex discussion of the Phenomenology, in which
Marx praises Hegel for grasping the importance of labour: does such a
judgement (as Kojève insinuates and so many later writers boldly assert)
rest on Hegel’s discussion of the labour of servitude? The first thing
that should give us pause is that immediately after this praise Marx
qualifies it by complaining that ‘the only labour Hegel knows and
recognizes is abstract mental labour’. The servant’s labour is clearly material, so this
remark seems to show that not only has Marx not drawn on
that analysis, but he has actually forgotten about it and done Hegel an
injustice! [13]
What Marx does refer us to is ‘the dialectic of
negativity as the moving and producing principle’. Spirit comes to know itself
through producing itself, in the first instance as something alien
standing over against it. In the final chapter, as we have seen, the world
of estrangement thus brought to life is overcome, or negated, in a
peculiar way in that – as Hegel puts it – ‘self-consciousness has sublated
this alienation and objectivity . . . so that it is at home with itself
in its otherness as such’. When Marx refers to the final result of
the Phenomenology being ‘the dialectic of negativity as the moving and
producing principle’ it is to this entire labour of spirit in the Phenomenology that he refers.
Of course, in Marx’s view, man produces himself
through material labour. It would be a mistake, however, to assume
therefrom that he praises Hegel for what he says about material labour, such
as that of the servant. When Marx says Hegel grasps labour as the
essence he is talking not about what Hegel actually says about material
labour (hence the lack of reference to ‘Lordship and Bondage’) but about
the esoteric significance of the dialectic of negativity in spirit’s
entire self-positing movement (hence Marx’s claim that the only labour
Hegel knows is spiritual labour). Marx sees in Hegel’s dialectic of
negativity the hypostatization of the abstract reflection in philosophy of the
material process whereby man produces himself through his own labour,
a process which (Marx concurs with Hegel) must pass through a stage of
estrangement.
Nevertheless, Marx holds that Hegel’s discussion of the
problematics of alienation is embedded in speculative illusions, and
because of this it is a ‘merely apparent criticism’, shading over into
uncritical positivism. In this connection one must draw attention to the
sophisticated use of quotation by Kojève in the above-mentioned
epigraph to the effect that Hegel grasps labour as the essence. The passage
from which Kojève quotes is as follows – with Kojève’s ‘quote’
stressed:

Hegel adopts the standpoint of modern political economy. He  grasps

labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence of man; he sees only the
positive and not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming
to be for himself within alienation or as alienated man. [14]
This
passage is not so much praise, as criticism, of Hegel. It is praise only in
a paradoxical sense. As we have seen, in adopting the standpoint of
labour, both Hegel and political economy achieve an understanding, in
different ways, of the genesis, not merely of wealth, but of human being
itself. But, just because labour is identical with alienating activity,
the result is ‘man’s coming to be as alienated man’. Marx takes the critically adopted
standpoint of labour, the standpoint of the critique of
labour as alienating; he projects the abolition of labour, its
transformation into free productive activity.
As we have seen, a crucial move
Hegel makes is to transform labour into spiritual activity; and hence
to project the overcoming of alienation as a revolution in
consciousness, namely, spirit’s achievement of absolute knowledge of itself and all
its works. It is necessary to locate the ‘master-slave’ dialectic
within this perspective of spirit’s development of its self-awareness. As we
have already noted, and now stress, it is an early moment in the story
of spirit’s recovery of itself. It is much less ‘concrete’ (in Hegel’s
terms) than cultural achievements such as law, art, religion and
philosophy. None the less, it is located at a turning point of some
importance, for the problem Hegel faces is how to develop dialectically self-
consciousness out of the mere consciousness of external objects.
Consciousness cannot grasp itself in things. It must distinguish itself
absolutely from them through their radical negation. The consumption of
objects of desire accomplishes this in an evanescent way. To risk one’s life
in forcing another consciousness to grant one recognition represents a
more promising mediation. But the master finds himself frustrated in
reducing the vanquished to his servant, his thing. Self-consciousness can
only gain proper recognition through mutual respect such as that
accorded to individuals constituted in the legal and ethical relations Hegel
develops later in the story. At this stage Hegel is not really
discussing individuality, and a fortiori, not social relationships. (Hence
there is no discussion of master – master or slave – slave relationships.)
We are concerned here
with the most primitive level of
self-consciousness, that of self-consciousness in general as against consciousness of
objects.
In a neat reversal, the dialectic advances now through the
despised servant. As we have seen, he ‘finds himself’ through the negating
action of work on things. Hegel defines work as ‘desire held in check’;
that is to say, it involves putting a distance between the immediate
impulses of self-will and formative activity grounded in objective
principles. If you like, it is really the master who is a slave because his
object is the ‘unalloyed feeling of self-satisfaction’: that is to say,
he is a slave to his appetites; but his satisfactions are ‘only
fleeting’, lacking the permanence of objectivity. The servant, on the other
hand, in the work he creates, achieves mastery of his craft; it is he who
rises to the level of universal human reason. But Hegel introduces the
notion that ‘fear and service’ are necessary to induce the check to
desire and to ensure that consciousness rises above self-centred goals to
the freedom that comes from a consciousness of the ‘universal power’
of human creative activity. [15] Indeed, it is worth noting that in
Hegel’s Encyclopaedia ‘Phenomenology’ no mention is made of the worker
finding himself in his product; the emphasis in the outcome of the
‘master-slave’ there is on ‘community of need’ and the idea that ‘fear of the
lord is the beginning of wisdom’. [16] By contrast, in the Phenomenology Hegel says that,
‘albeit fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom,
consciousness is not therein aware of being self-existent’. But
‘through labour it comes to itself’. However, it turns out that both are
necessary: ‘for the reflection of self into self the two moments, fear and
service in general, as also that of formative activity, are necessary . . .’ [17]
The real point in all this is that it brings about an advance
to self-consciousness. Strictly speaking, it is not the material achievement that is
important to provide a basis for Hegelian
self-consciousness, but rather the consciousness of the power of labour to transform
things. The servant becomes aware in this of the power of thought, of
universal concepts. This does not have much in common with Marx’s
interest in the realization of an objective being in forming the material
world, but it is of a piece with the project of the Phenomenology as a
whole. [18] As it is a spiritual odyssey it is quite wrong to place
special stress on this moment of material labour (as is the case with the
overly ‘Marxist’ readings of Marcuse and Kojève), for its importance lies
not in the material result but in the spiritual one. Only if one
accepts this can one fail to be surprised when the next twist of the
phenomenological dialectic brings us to the pure universality of thought in the
attitudes Hegel identifies with Stoicism and Scepticism. The split
between the lord’s satisfaction in his autonomy and the negatively
universal power developed on the servant’s side is re-worked at this new
level.
Desire and work are found wanting from the point of view of free
self-consciousness; they fail to effect adequately the negation of
otherness. The self’s negating power cannot be enjoyed by the servant in the
product, but only in itself, the power of consciousness working within
itself. For the servant is not independent on his own account in the
objective world, since he is dominated by the fear of the lord and
subjected to his desires. Paradoxically, Hegel relies on just these
‘negations’ to make an advance, claiming that without this complete repression
and fear consciousness would remain bogged down in particularity and
servitude, that consciousness of freedom would be mere wilfulness and
obstinacy. Consciousness wins its freedom when its power and knowledge are
redirected inwards, when it deals with its own thought material. Now
consciousness says to itself: ‘In thinking I am free, because I am not in
another, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself.’ [19] This ‘freedom’ of
inner life is compatible with any social position; as
Hegel says: ‘Whether on the throne or in chains . . . its aim is to be
free.’ [20] (It will be recalled that two prominent Stoics were the
emperor Marcus Aurelius and the Slave Epictetus.)
Does Marx, as Marcuse
and others claim, follow in his theory of alienation the terms of
Hegel’s master – servant dialectic? We have already said enough to cast doubt
on this. It would certainly be strange, as well, to refer to this
section to illustrate the claim that Hegel equates material labour with
alienation, because here labour is a recuperating moment in spirit’s drive
to realize its freedom in the face of the blankness of objectivity.
The peculiar thing about Hegel’s treatment is that, as we have seen, in
so far as his thematization of the servant’s labour touches on the
alienation involved in such activity, it is seen, on the one hand, as
still sufficiently fulfilling for the worker to identify himself in it, and,
on the other hand, even as necessary to impel his consciousness to the
level of absolute negativity.
These points are illustrated if we ask
the question: does Hegel actually mention alienation in this section?
There are two terms to consider. The term ‘Entfremdung‘ does not occur;
the nearest Hegel comes to it is when he says that the labour seems to
have only ‘fremder Sinn‘; this sentence, however, is precisely that in
which the servant is said to discover himself in labour in spite of the
fact that it is orientated to the master’s desire. The term
‘Entäusserung‘ does not occur either at this point in the Phenomenology. But Hegel
does use it in his Encyclopaedia when he thematizes the master – servant
relationship. Here the labour-process is said to overcome ‘self-will’
and ‘the inner immediacy of desire’; this in turn is identified as
‘Entäusserung‘ (translated by Wallace as ‘divestment of self’ and by Petty
as ‘privation’). The point, nevertheless, is that this is treated
positively; it
makes possible ‘the beginning of wisdom’, the transition to
‘universal self-consciousness’. [21] We are very far from Marx now.
Our
conclusion must be that Marx did not draw on Hegel’s analysis of the
labour of servitude in his theory of alienation. He fails to mention it
for the simple reason that it did not strike him as important.
It
remains to be noted that he does not cite this section in any other
writings, early or late. What we do find in a few places are echoes of its
terms. For example, in 1844 itself there is a somewhat obscure passage in
his notes on James Mill. [22] However, let us close this section with
an interesting quotation from Marx’s Capital manuscripts.
Hence the
rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of things over man, of
dead labour over the living, of the product over the producer . . .
Thus at the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm
of the social – for that is what the process of production is – we find
the  same situation that we find in  religion at the ideological level,
namely the inversion of subject and object. Viewed  historically this
inversion is the indispensable transition without which wealth as such,
i.e. the relentless productive force of social labour, which alone can
form the material base of a free human society, could not possibly be
created at the expense of the majority . . . What we are confronted by
here is the  alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. To that
extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from the
outset, since the latter has his roots in the process of alienation and
finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the
worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and experiences it as a
process of enslavement. [23]

‘The Critical Elements’

Marx finds that,
though in mystified form, Hegel tackles the problem of estrangement in
his Phenomenology: ‘even though man appears only as spirit, their lie
concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner
often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint’. What
elements does Marx have in mind? As we have just seen, ‘lordship and
bondage’ is not mentioned. In fact, he cites three sections: ‘the unhappy
consciousness’, ‘the honest consciousness’ and ‘the struggle of noble
and base consciousness’. According to Marx, these separate sections
contain ‘the critical elements’ of whole spheres of estrangement such as
‘religion, the state, civil life, etc.’ [24] Unfortunately he gives us
no analysis of these sections. These phenomenological figures will be
touched on now in so far as they relate to the problem of alienated
labour.
Citation of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ explains Marx’s reference
to the sphere of religion because the most obvious source for Hegel’s
subject matter here is traditional forms of religious experience. Hegel
may well have intended to exempt Lutheranism from this category but
Marx would obviously include it too. Findlay even suggests that it applies
best to Kierkegaard’s morbid Protestant Christianity. [25] The
‘unhappy consciousness’ finds itself desiring and working but in work and
enjoyment it feels itself lost in superficiality; it does not identify
itself in the world but supposes itself to belong to an unreachable beyond.
Although it cannot help getting satisfaction from its work, it
attributes every success to God and endeavours to play down earthly life in
order to get closer to the absolute it supposes to lie beyond it. [26] Hegel’s critique
relies on the view that activity, especially work, is
necessary to self-realization; and that self-consciousness must find its
satisfaction there and not rely on priestly mediators to direct it
towards salvation.
The ‘honest consciousness’ certainly seeks satisfaction
in work, in keeping busy so to speak; but this figure of consciousness
is presented as engaged on his enterprises as an individual. It turns
up in a section with the curious title ‘The spiritual animal kingdom’. [27] This seems to
be Hegel’s attempt to characterize a form of
self-consciousness divorced from relations of inter-subjectivity. He deals
here with an individuality that takes itself to be self-sufficient, single
and specific. Hegel starts with some interesting remarks on the
significance of activity. He argues that ‘consciousness must act merely in
order that what it is in itself may become explicit for it’; in other
words, ‘an individual cannot know what he [really] is until he has made
himself a reality through action’. [28] The ‘work done’ (das Werk)
expresses the individual’s original nature. Marx would certainly find this
congruent with his own ontology, organized as it is around productive
activity. However, Hegel’s thematization of action soon slips towards
idealism. This is not because he focuses on certain particular forms of
activity. The work carried out could be material/physical or
intellectual. It is rather a question of the meaning he finds in it. At this point
it is valuable to cite Löwith’s opinion: for Hegel, he says, ‘work is
not a particular economic activity, to be contrasted, say, to leisure or
play, but the basic way in which man produces his life, thereby giving
form to the world . . . Work is neither physical nor intellectual in a
particular sense, but spiritual in the absolute ontological sense’ [29]
How, in the section under consideration, does Hegel spiritualize the
work? He argues that consciousness becomes aware that it need not
identify itself with any particular work, that it is universal because it
is ‘absolute
negativity’ in so far as it withdraws itself from any determinate or particular work’. [30] In
so far as work takes its place as a
determinate particular in the world it passes into an ‘alien reality’.
For example, the interest of other individuals in my work is something
quite different from the work’s original interest. Hegel does not give
examples here, but one might recall the verdict of the market place on
new commodities, or the way literary and artistic products are
appropriated by audiences in ways quite unexpected by their authors. (Indeed
one might recall that Hegel’s own works have been read in many different
ways!) Even in its own terms, whether the work is a success depends on
‘fortune’, the selection of appropriate means, and so on. Consciousness
therefore takes an ‘idealistic’ attitude to work. The negation of the
work is itself negated, and consciousness takes the true reality to be
solely its own negativity. ‘In this way then’, says Hegel,
‘consciousness is reflected out of its perishable work into itself, and preserves
its concept and its certainty of what objectively exists and endures in
the face of the experience of the contingency of action.’ [31]
This
form of consciousness, then, busies itself with ‘the matter in hand’
(‘die Sache selbst‘) in abstraction from its moments – end, means and
object. It is true that ‘they all have this “matter in hand” as their
essence’, Hegel allows, ‘but only in such a way that it, being their abstract universal,
can be found in each of them, and can be a predicate of
them’. [32]
It is at this point that Hegel identifies the ‘honest
consciousness’. ‘Consciousness is called honest‘, he says, ‘when it has . . .
attained the idealism which “the matter in hand” expresses . . .’. [33] Hegel emphasizes
that this engagement is independent of results. If it
does not succeed in its action it has at least willed it, something was taken in hand. If
everything goes wrong it still finds satisfaction
‘just like naughty boys who enjoy themselves when they get their ears
boxed because they are the cause of its being done’. [34] Hegel points
out that it is not even necessary to do anything at all: if ‘it should be an
event of historical importance which does not really concern him, he
makes it likewise his own; and an interest for which he has done nothing
is, in his own eyes, a party interest which he has favoured or
opposed, and even combated or supported’. [35] One recalls here the pater
familias who leaves trivial matters, like the choice of schooling for the
children, to his wife; while he concerns himself with important matters
such as whether war should be declared on Russia.
Hegel now enters
into one of his dialectical reversals. This man is not as honest as he
seems. Although he keeps busy he is not really in earnest about anything,
only about his own status in the matter. Others soon realize the
dissimulation involved. For example, should they point out that they
themselves have already accomplished the matter, or offer their help, the
result is a fit of pique on the part of the consciousness, whose interest
is really in its own action. The others are in turn put out by his
rejection, because they were only interested in their own self-satisfaction
too. Hegel says: ‘a consciousness that opens up a new field soon learns
that others hurry along like flies to freshly poured out milk, and
want to busy themselves with it . . . ‘ [36]
In this whole discussion one
is irresistibly reminded of the self-centredness and asocial sociality
of bourgeois life. Although Hegel’s discussion is quite general, most
commentators assume that he has particularly in mind the intellectuals
of his day, academics, specialists and artists of various kinds. [37] Obviously Marx
found it amusing.
More seriously, however, what would
Marx make of the final outcome? Consciousness acquires the concept of a
common ‘matter in hand’, a work which is the concern of all and each,
and in which the particularity of the individuals is dissolved. Thereby
the ‘matter in hand’, Hegel argues, ‘no longer has the character of a
predicate, and loses the character of lifeless, abstract universality’. [38] It is a universal
shared by all, a spiritual essence, ethical
consciousness.
In trying to look at this whole dialectic from Marx’s point
of view, let us remember the general verdict: we have here ‘all the
elements of criticism’ – ‘but still in estranged form’.

Clearly Marx
would agree with two points here: that human work has a universal
character, and that bourgeois individualism needs to be transcended. Less clear
is why Hegel’s discussion is objectionable. Recall the following
passage from Marx’s critique:
The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity
of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction,  absolute
negativity – an abstraction which is again fixed as such and
considered as an independent activity – as sheer activity. Because this
so-called negativity is nothing but the  abstract, empty form of that
real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a  formal content
produced by abstraction from all content. [39]
This seems very
pertinent to the idea of absolute negativity Hegel evolves at the beginning
of this discussion. Instead of the universality of activity being
celebrated in the wealth of its content, the content vanishes in the purity
of absolute negativity. But did not Hegel himself find wanting such
abstract universality? Yes and no. The concept of ‘absolute negativity’
represents a real gain in the constitution of spirit, as is clear from its
retention in the overview given in Hegel’s ‘Preface’. The problem at
this stage of the phenomenological dialectic is that it is constituted
in
opposition to the real life of the individual subject. There is an
‘antithesis of doing and being’. The solution arrived at is to make the universal itself the
real individual, which makes itself identical with
the entire content. The emphasis here, as in the rest of the story,
prioritizes logical forms over real content. [40]
The third section mentioned by Marx, ‘the struggle of noble and base consciousness’,
is part of
an important stage of spirit’s development, namely, ‘self-estranged
spirit’ (‘Der sich entfremdete Geist‘). The historical allusions become
particularly clear here; the material draws on the world of eighteenth
century France up to, and including, the revolution. We are not therefore
dealing with absolute spirit and the total process of its recovery of
itself from alienation, but with a finite stage of its development. It
deals with the individual and his alienation from society. We are at a
richer, more concrete, level of development of consciousness than in the
previous stages considered, in that the self knows the substance of
social life as its spiritual essence, but society also faces the
individual as an ‘alien reality . . . in which it does not recognize itself’.
The individual and its world are estranged from each other. Even though
the individual knows that it belongs in that world and must find its
place there, to begin with it finds social institutions face it simply as
objectively given realities to which it must conform. It achieves
something within its world only in alienating itself from itself, in
leaving behind its natural self and moulding itself to these objective
requirements. This process of mediating the extremes (nature and society) is
‘Bildung‘ – perhaps here to be translated as ‘acculturation’. Hegel
says: ‘it is therefore through culture [Bildung] that the individual
acquires standing and actuality’. In observing this development, says Hegel,
we will see ‘the estrangement estrange itself and, through this,
return into its concept’. [41]
This second alienation needs explaining.
The idea is symptomatic of Hegel’s dialectic in general. Given a totality
within which two moments stand in an antagonistic opposition, this can
exist only through a mediating movement. If the estranged elements are
not transformed and brought into harmony, the mediating movement
itself must appear as an alienation. The original estrangement is sublated
in a second alienation. Earlier we discussed the case of labour: given
the estrangement of labour-power from its object, any reunification
under the aegis of wage-labour is alienating in itself and reproduces the
whole system of estrangement. Here, in Hegel, the self alienates itself
from its original nature in cultivating social skills and acquiring
power in society. In this way the original subject-object split is
overcome, but within estrangement.
Rousseau’s critique of his times rested in
just such a diagnosis, namely that natural and civilized man were at
odds. Even in his positive prescription we find a second alienation
solution. Lacking the political virtues of the ever pre-given unity of the
Greek polis, and thus beginning with ‘natural’ individuals, unity is to
be established politically in ‘the general will’ through ‘the total
alienation of each associate … to the whole community’. Moreover,
Rousseau stresses the fact that this involves taking away man’s ‘natural
resources’ and providing ‘new ones alien to him, and incapable of being
made use of without the help of other men’. [42]
Returning now to Hegel,
the social order is presented as structured in terms of state power
and wealth. It is in considering the possible attitudes of
self-consciousness to these that the ‘noble’, and ‘base’, consciousness appear. The
consciousness that takes a positive attitude towards each sphere is
called noble. It respects public authority and is grateful for its
enjoyment of wealth. The consciousness that adopts a negative relation to them
is base. It regards sovereign power as a fetter and it obeys only with
a secret malice, always on the point of revolt. It loves wealth but,
conscious of its temporary and contingent enjoyment, suspects it at the
same time. There are fairly obvious allusions in Hegel’s discussion to
the class struggles between the nobility and the third estate.
In a way
similar to the master-servant dialectic, Hegel then develops each side
into its other. The noble consciousness comes to see in the state and
wealth the power of an alien reality on which it depends. The base
consciousness learns to affirm itself even in its negative relation to
them.

The dialectic advances next through the cultivated consciousness

that ‘sees through’ all this. It knows everything to be self-alienated,
and it adopts a detached and ironical attitude to social reality. Hegel
says that ‘the vanity of all things is its own vanity, it is itself vain; it is the self-centred self
that knows, not only how to pass
judgement on and chatter about everything, but how to give witty expression to
the contradiction that is present in the solid elements of the actual world’. It seeks
power and wealth while distancing itself from them in
its consciousness. Aware of the self-disruptive nature of all
relationships it achieves pure self-identity ‘as self-consciousness in revolt’. [43]
It is clear that Marx was impressed by this description of the
estrangement of individuals in the social institutions they themselves
sustain in their activity: a culture of ‘universal inversion and
estrangement’, as Hegel puts it. [44] State power and wealth appear as alien
powers, even ‘selves’, standing over against the individuals.
At the same
time, the general criticism Marx brings against Hegel’s reduction of
social forms to forms of consciousness applies with particular force
here. Indeed, the following comment of Marx’s must have been based on this
section: ‘when wealth, state power, etc., are understood by Hegel as
entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form
as thoughts.’ [45]
Since this sort of criticism was dealt with in the
previous chapter it will not be further laboured here. (The reader is
also referred to Richard Norman’s commentary where the application of
Marx’s criticism to this material is discussed with subtlety and clarity. [46]) Instead, let
us pick up the reference in Hegel’s discussion to
‘the self-consciousness which rebels against this rejection of itself’
(Empörung = ‘rebellion’). [47] It will be recalled that in the passage
from the Capital materials quoted earlier in connection with the
master-servant dialectic, Marx also spoke of rebellion. But what is striking
about Hegel’s master-servant dialectic is the lack of any rebellion on
the part of the servant. The most one can say is, with Richard Kroner,
‘perhaps young Marx, reading this, found the germ of his future
programme’; he explains that ‘in any case, foreshadowed in these words [“mind
of its own”] is the pattern for a labour movement which was to make the
proletarian conscious of his existence and to grant him the knowledge
of having a “mind of his own”.’ [48]
In Hegel’s text the most one can
find is a reference to mere obstinacy. Gadamer comments: ‘obstinacy is
only thought to confirm freedom and is, in fact, a form of rebellious
dependency.’ [49] In fact, to speak here of rebelliousness is already
going too far. None the less, there is an interesting idea here. Hegel
clearly distinguishes the exercise of freedom from undisciplined
wilfulness. In a way, Marx could agree. Simple Luddism is not in itself
revolutionary; but he believes the proletariat potentially embodies universal
emancipation, not a merely partial standpoint. If one denies, as Hegel
does, the historical supersession of bourgeois society, then of course
the proletariat’s rebelliousness is mere particularism.
However, in
the dialectic of noble and base consciousness, Hegel explicitly speaks of
rebelliousness. Therefore, if one is looking for a place where Hegel
gives hints to Marx on rebellion it is here and not in the
master-servant dialectic. As a matter of fact, Marx explicitly acknowledges this
when composing The Holy Family later in 1844. Here is the passage:
The
propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human
self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened
in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as  its own power and has in
it the  semblance of a human existence. The latter feels
annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the
reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel’s,
in its abasement the  indignation {Empörung} at that abasement . . . [50]
It is possible, however, that Marx may not have had the Phenomenology in mind so
much as the Philosophy of Right. [51] In the 1833 edition
Gans intercalated material from Hegel’s lectures on the subject. One
reads there: ‘a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a
disposition of mind, an inner indignation [Empörung] against the rich,
against society, against the government, etc.’. [52]
Another
interesting point about the Philosophy of Right is that this idea of der Pöbel (translated by
Knox as ‘rabble’), a mass of rebellious paupers with no
stake in the existing order, has been thought to be a source for Marx’s
conception of the modern proletariat, as he first defines it as class
in civil society but not of civil society. [53] Another source was
Lorenz von Stein’s book on French communism. [54]
To conclude these remarks
about the influence of Hegel on Marx, let us return to the
comprehending consciousness of absolute knowledge. It is interesting to notice
that Marx himself occasionally echoes the Phenomenology when he treats the
standpoint of the communist movement as such a comprehending
consciousness. In one place he states that the genesis of communism is rooted in
‘the entire movement of history’ and, therefore, it is ‘for its
thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.’ [55] This
seems to amount to the same claim Hegel makes for absolute
knowledge when he says that it is ‘comprehended history’. [56]
None the
less, in Marx the objective dialectic of supersession is dominant. The
communist movement does not simply know itself to be ‘the riddle of
history solved’, but will actually abolish private property through a
revolutionary ‘negation of the negation’. In Hegel, on the contrary, the
shadowy status of absolute knowledge, as we noted earlier, leads some to
identify it with Hegel’s own achievement. Marx’s view of this appears
in The Holy Family in the following passage:
Already in  Hegel the
absolute spirit of history has its material in the  mass and finds its
appropriate expression only in  philosophy. The philosopher, however, is only
the organ through which the maker of history, the absolute spirit,
arrives at self-consciousness  retrospectively after the movement has ended.
The participation of the philosopher in history is reduced to this
retrospective consciousness, for the real movement is accomplished by the
absolute spirit  unconsciously. Hence the philosopher appears on the
scene  post festum. [57]
This is from a polemic of Marx against the Young
Hegelian Bruno Bauer. Bauer ‘overcomes Hegel’s half-heartedness’; he
‘consciously plays the part of world spirit‘ in opposition to the
masses, says Marx. Doubtless Marx takes the possibility of a personal
identification of the philosopher with absolute knowledge to be already
implicit in Hegel’s position.
Even if one insists on the objectivism of
Hegel’s unification of subject and substance, Dunayevskaya’s verdict still
has force: ‘because Hegel could not conceive the masses as “subject”
creating the new society, the Hegelian philosophy – though it had
replaced the viewing of things as “things in themselves”, as dead impenetrable
matter – was compelled to return to Kant’s idea of an external unifier
of opposites.’ She concludes ‘Hegel had destroyed all dogmatism except
the dogmatism of “the backwardness of the masses”.’ [58]

Summary
As
far as the separate sections of the Phenomenology are concerned, Marx
does not mention, and does not draw upon, the dialectic of ‘lordship and
bondage’. Of the three sections he mentions as evidence for ‘critical
elements’ in Hegel’s work, the most influential is ‘the struggle of
noble and base consciousness’. Here Hegel treats of the estrangement of
the individual from social institutions such as state power and wealth.
As always, Marx finds in Hegel that the idealist exposition of such
elements of criticism results in their presentation still in estranged
form.

1 The following section is a

reworking of my article on the subject, ‘Hegel’s master/slave dialectic
and a myth of Marxology’, New Left Review, 142 (1983), pp. 67-75.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943, trans. Hazel Barnes,
London, 1958, p. 237. Marcuse, in a review (Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, March 1948) of Being and Nothingness, says that ‘Sartre
makes reference to Marx’s early writings . . .’: Herbert Marcuse, From
Luther to Popper, essays trans. Joris de Bres, London, 1983, p. 188. In
fact there is no such reference. Marcuse probably has in mind this
remark about the ‘master-slave’ influence on Marx – a view held
independently by Marcuse and which he had already linked to Marx’s early writings
(see below).
3 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s
‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (1946), trans.
S. Cherniak and J. Heckman,
Evanston, 1974, p. 172. Also: ‘the famous dialectic of Master and Slave that
became the inspiration of Marxian philosophy’, Hyppolite, Studies on Marx
and Hegel (1955), trans. J. O’Neill, New York, 1969, p. 29.
4 Wilfred Desan, The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1965), New York, 1966, pp.
24, 50n.
5 Critique, nos. 195-6, 1963. The list is cited in Vincent
Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (1980), Cambridge, 1982, p. 10n.
6Interview with John Heckman; see his Introduction to the English
translation of Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. xxvi. Heckman is under
the impression Sartre attended, p. xxiii.
7 Republished by Queneau, ‘In
Place of an Introduction’, as the first chapter of his Kojève
collection; the (partial) English translation of this collection of Kojève’s
lectures, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. A. Bloom, trans. J. H.
Nicols, New York, 1969, includes it also as chapter 1.
8 Some
examples: Dirk Struik, Introduction to K. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844, New York, 1964, P. 36; Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: a
Reinterpretation, Garden City, NY, 1965, p. 137; W. Desan, Marxism of
Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 34; G.A. Kelly, ‘Notes on Hegel’s “Lordship and
Bondage” (Review of Metaphysics, 1966), reprinted in Hegel, ed. A.
MacIntyre, Garden City, NY, 1972, P. 190; Mark Poster, Existentialist Marxism in
Post-War France, Princeton, NJ, 1975, pp. 13-15; Z. Hanfi,
Introduction to F.B., 42; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, New Haven, Conn.,
1976, p. 73; Richard Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Brighton, 1976,
pp. 53, 73; Joachim Israel, The Language of Dialectic and the Dialectics
of Language, Brighton, 1979, P. 122; M. Petry, Introduction to Hegel,
The Berlin Phenomenology, Dordrecht, 1981, p. lxxxix; Allen W. Wood,
Karl Marx, London, 1981, pp. 242-3; R.C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel,
Oxford, 1983, p. 425.
9 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (1941), 2nd ed., London, 1954, p. 115. In fact
Marcuse had already said in
his 1932 review of the 1844 Mss that Marx’s critical concepts point back
to the ontological categories of ‘labour’ and ‘domination and
servitude’ developed by Hegel in his Phenomenology (From Luther to Popper, pp.
13. 39). Pierre Naville gives prominence to Hegel’s discussion but
asserts that it is too simple to say this was Marx’s source – De
L’aliénation à la Jouissance, Paris, 1957, p. 10. Those who do include Robert C.
Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1961, p. 147, and Joachim
Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution, (1956), trans. R.D.
Winfield, Cambridge, Mass., 1982, p. 120.
10 The only occurrence of the phrase ‘lordship and servitude’ is when Marx copies out
the entire list of contents of the Phenomenology.
11 The Berlin Phenomenology (Petry), pp. 86-9. Der Knecht counts as ‘a member of the
family’.
12 That is, ‘eigner Sinn‘ as against ‘fremder Sinn‘: G.W.9, 114-15; Phenomenology of Spirit.
trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, 1977, para. 195-6.
13 Werke Eb., 574; C.W.3, 333; E.W., 386. David McLellan, Marx Before
Marxism, London, 1970, notes this (p. 197).
14 Werke Eb., 574; C.W.3, 333; E.W., 386,
15 G.W.9, 115-16; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 196;
this is still clearer in The Berlin Phenomenology (Petry), pp.
86-9.
16 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W, Wallace, Oxford, 1971, paras.
434-5; the Nürnberg Propaedeutic (1808-I1) is mid-way in this respect;
the transition is to Reason, as in the Encyclopaedia, but the
importance of labour is still stressed; in J. Loewenberg’s Hegel Selections, New
York, 1929, p. 77.
17 G.W.9, 115-16; Phenomenology (Miller), para.
196.
18 The same comparison between Marx and Hegel is to be found in
Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge, 1975, p. 120; Hegel and Modern
Society, Cambridge, 1979, PP. 50-1.
19 Phenomenology (Miller), para.
197.
20 G.W.9, 117; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 199.
21 Paragraph 435 of
the 1830 edition.
22 C.W.3, 227.
23 C.1 (Penguin), 990.
24 Werke Eb., 573; C.W.3, 332.
25 J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Re-Examination,
London, 1958, P.100.
26 For Jean Wahl in La Malheur de La Conscience (1929), Paris, 1951, this figure is
paradigmatic of the whole Phenomenology. He argues that the dialectical method is
based in the historical
experience of humanity; ‘and for Hegel is not this experience something
more? Before being a philosopher he was a theologian’ (p. vi).
27 For pertinent remarks comparing Hegel with Darwin, Malthus and Hobbes, see
Marx’s letter to Engels of 18 June 1862; Selected Correspondence, ed. S. Ryazanskaya,
Moscow, 1965. p. 128.
28 C.W.9, 218; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 401.
29 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (l941),
London, 1965, p. 265.
30 G.W.9, 220; Phenomenology (Miller), para.
405.
31 G.W.9, 223; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 409.
32 G.W.9,
224; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 411.
33 G.W.9, 224; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 412.
34 G.W.9, 224; Phenomenology (Miller), para.
413.
35 G.W.9, 225; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 413.
36 G.W.9, 227; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 418.
37 Findlay, Hegel, p. 113;
Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 297; Kojève, The Reading of Hegel, P. 68.
38 G.W.9, 228; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 418.
39 Werke Eb., 585; C.W.3, 343.
40 For a comparison of Marx’s concrete universal
with Hegel’s see my essay ‘Dialectics and Labour’ in Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. I,
ed. John Mepham and D.H. Ruben, Brighton. 1979.
41G.W.9, 264-9; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 484-91.
42 J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole, London, 1973, pp. 174,
194. For material on the influence of Diderot and Rousseau, see Stanley
Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel – an introduction to the science of wisdom, New
Haven, Conn., 1974.
43 G.W.9, 282; Phenomenology (Miller), para.
526.
44 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 521.
45 C.W.3, 331.
46 Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology, ch. 5 ‘History and alienation’.
47 G.W.9, 282; Phenomenology (Miller), para. 520.
48 Richard Kroner, Introduction, p.
50, to Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M.
Knox, New York, 1961.
49 Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, p. 71.
50C.W.4, 36.
51 Shlomo Avineri makes this connection; Hegel’s Theory of
the Modern State, Cambridge, 1972, p. 97.
52 P.R. (Knox), p.
277.
53 ‘Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung’ p. 181, in New MEGA, 1,2.
T.B. Bottomore’s translation of Marx’s Early Writings,
London, 1963, started the fashion for rendering ‘einer Klasse der
bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, welche keine Klasse der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft
ist‘ as ‘in . . . but not of . . . ‘ (p. 58) thus producing a rhetorical
contrast not in the original straight contradiction; C.W.3 gives ‘of’ both
times (p. 186).
54 For the debate on the influence of Stein on Marx see Kaethe
Mengelberg’s Introduction to her translation of Lorenz von Stein, The History of
the Social Movement in France 1789-1850 (1851), Totowa, NJ, 1964.
55 Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 297; E.W., 348. Compare also C.W.3, 313,
337.
56 For a somewhat exaggerated view of this parallel, see R. N. Berki, Insight and
Vision: the Problem of Communism in Marx’s Thought, London,
1983, p. 56.
57 C.W.4, 86.
58 Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, New York, 1958. p. 38.

Chapter 8 – Hegel on Wage-labour

← Chapter 7 | Chapter 9 →

Introduction
The extraordinary complexity of Marx’s verdict on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is
evident if we take three statements from the same (crucial) page.
1. Hegel grasps the nature of labour and conceives man as the result of his own labour.
2. Hegel’s standpoint is that of political economy, namely labour (= alienation) as the
essence of man.
3. Hegel knows only abstract mental labour.
It seems almost impossible at first sight to make these consistent. It seems equally
impossible to take even one of them at face value. If (3) is true, how can (1) and (2) be
true? But how can (3) be fair when we know about the labour of the servant and the
‘honest consciousness’? As for political economy, Hegel never mentions it in
the Phenomenology! (Somewhat bewildered, the editors of Marx’s works cite in a
footnote [1] two other works of Hegel – one of them unknown to Marx! I deal with both
below.)
The exhaustive exposition of Marx’s arguments so far has provided the necessary
basis for endorsing all three points, properly interpreted. This interpretation requires
discussion of the method at work in Marx’s criticism of Hegel. The main difficulty in
understanding Marx’s critique is that he does not compare like with like. His own
interest is in material production, and more especially the material labour of the wage-
worker with its inherent alienation. But what he compares with his own discoveries
is not what Hegel says about such labour, but Hegel’s alternative ‘producing principle’,
the negating action of consciousness and self-consciousness. That this must give rise
to problems becomes obvious when we recall that for Marx the contradictions of
consciousness are to be subsumed under the practical ones, whereas for Hegel
material labour is merely one sphere in which spirit is at work.
The procedure adopted by Marx is to evaluate Hegel by reading spiritual activity as
material. This is how he can praise Hegel for grasping man as his own product, and
equally how he can blame Hegel for confusing productive activity with alienating
activity. Hence, in Hegel, alienating activity is taken as the essence, just as the
standpoint of political economy is that of (wage-)labour. As we noted earlier, Hegel’s
crucial misidentification is not the simple-minded castigation of objectification as
alienating, but the more subtle endorsement of alienation because it is taken to be the
only possible form of objectification. In fine, the parallelism is not one of content but of
a homology of conceptual structure in the speculative philosophy of Hegel and the
ideological presuppositions of political economy. This means that Marx can criticize
both on the same grounds.

Once we grasp the character of Marx’s procedure in his Hegel critique, two things
follow: first, that what he says about Hegel’s equation of objectification and alienation
has nothing to do with anything Hegel says about material labour; second, that his
failure to deal with what Hegel says about material labour, and more especially his
claim that Hegel knows only abstract mental labour, might amount to an injustice to
Hegel. Certainly, if anyone were to claim that Hegel thought material labour necessarily
alienating, or even that he knew nothing of material labour at all, Hegelians could come
flying with contrary quotations from nearly all his works. We have already mentioned
the positive role labour is given in the master-servant dialectic and in the work
occupying the ‘honest consciousness’. Even in the chapter on ‘self-estranged spirit’,
individual labour is seen as socially constitutive in so far as each ‘in working for
himself . . . is at the same time working for all and all are working for him’. [2] Indeed it
would be closer to the truth to say that Hegel has a claim precedent to that of Marx to
be the first to found social theory on material labour. It even has an important place in
his Science of Logic. It appears in its greatest prominence in the Jena lectures of the
early 1800s and then gradually diminishes in its significance in Hegel’s thought. Yet as
late as 1821 Hegel speaks almost casually, in the Philosophy of Right, of ‘the moment of
liberation intrinsic to work’, as if this were obvious. [3]
Nevertheless, Marx is ultimately in the right, because the interest Hegel takes in labour
is to show that it exhibits in actuality moments of consciousness, determinations of the
will, or even categories of logic. In spite of the fact that he has more acute things to say
about labour than any other pre-Marxist philosopher, Hegel is, after all, an idealist.
Instead of objective relations of production, the ultimate reality is absolute spirit in
communion with itself. For Hegel, material labour has an important role in the sphere of
objective spirit but this is in turn incorporated within absolute spirit. If we are to
compare Marx with Hegel in terms of content then it is instructive to compare what
Marx says about wage-labour with what Hegel says. This is the objective of the present
chapter. Here the Phenomenology is not of much help. The treatment of ‘wealth’ in the
‘self-estranged spirit’ section does not specify the relations of production involved; and
if it did they would hardly be those of modern industry, given the historical background
to it.
In truth, the young Hegel was a radical critic of modern industrial production. This is
especially so in his writings from the Jena period (1801-6). In a manuscript known
as Hegel’s First Philosophy of Spirit (1803-4) Hegel points out that the subjugation of
nature in modem industry increases the individual’s dependence on outside forces
because the division of labour ties the individual to a particular task (he cites Smith’s
account of a pin factory); that the labour becomes deadening mechanical work; and
that ‘the coherence of the singular kind of labour with the whole infinite mass of needs
is quite unsurveyable . . . so that some far-off operation often suddenly cuts off the
labour of a whole class of men . . . and makes it superfluous and useless’. Hegel adds
that ‘need and labour’, elevated into the universality of money, create a ‘monstrous
system’ of mutual dependence in society, ‘a self-propelling life of the dead, ebbing and
flowing blindly’, which ‘requires . . . taming like a wild beast’. [4]
Such striking passages were unknown to Marx because they remained unpublished for
many years (a curious parallel to Marx’s own 1844 Manuscripts!)

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

In Hegel’s mature published work, wage-labour is given its place within his system
in The Philosophy of Right (1821). When Marx speaks in his 1844 Manuscripts of the
conservatism of Hegel’s later work, this text is foremost in his mind. Here Hegel
endorses private property and wage-labour. He claims that the subsequent socio-
economic contradictions can be reconciled within the framework of a suitably
constituted modern state. We shall see that Hegel’s apology for wage-labour is effected
through his idealist method. [5]
The central organizing idea of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is freedom; the book is
designed to show that it is actualized in the institutions of the modern state. The first
part introduces the notions of personality and property. According to Hegel, the person
actualizes his inherent freedom through embodying his will in an external thing,
immediately different from him, thereby making it his. Property, on this account, is a
substantive end in virtue of its role in giving personality objectivity. It is necessary to
emphasize mediatedness in the development of this idea. It should not be thought, for
example, that Hegel’s conceptual distinction between persons endowed with purposes
of their own, on the one hand, and appropriable things, on the
other, immediately coincides with the distinction between humanity and the rest of
nature. A human being has to become a person through the development of physical
and mental powers whereby its naturally given basis is sublated; and the realm of
nature becomes man’s object through various processes of appropriation. For Hegel, it
is absurd to suppose that man is free in the immediacy of his natural existence, within
which he is tied to nature, however romanticized the presentation of this so-called
‘state of nature’ in which the satisfaction of everyone’s simple necessities is supposed
to be adequately assured:
to be confined to mere physical needs as such and their direct satisfaction would
simply be the condition in which the mental is plunged in the natural and so
would be one of savagery and unfreedom, while freedom itself is to be found only
in the reflection of mind into itself, in mind’s distinction from nature, and in the
reflex of mind in nature. [6]
For Hegel, as later for Marx, it is not a question of locating the concept of freedom in a
given pre-ordained place of man in relation to nature; rather it is to be grounded on a
developing subject – object problematic. In order to play a part in the actualization of
human freedom, Hegel claims, natural objects have to be given a new determinateness
in serving human ends as property. Natural objects as such are not property – they are
reduced to immediacy for free-will in so far as they are posited as ‘without ends of their
own’, but free-will proves its ownership only by embodying itself in them through some
mediation (such as ‘forming’, ‘marking’ and so on). On this account, Joachim Ritter
stresses the historical dimension of this process and says that ‘the freedom of the
person and the determination of nature as object of the will belong inextricably
together’. [7] However, he tends to pick up only the material moments in Hegel’s
discussion (as if Hegel were Marx). In fact, we shall see that there is a slippage in
Hegel whereby the recalcitrance of the natural object to the person’s material efforts to
‘prove its lack of self-subsistence’ is ‘overcome’ by mind’s ‘reflection back from nature
into itself’, its assertion of its universality in distinction from the particularity of the object
world.
Let us then look at the material content Hegel attributes to the moments of private
property he describes. The positive moment is signified by ‘taking possession’ of the
thing immediately whereby one becomes objective to oneself in a particular piece of
property. This sinking into the particular inadequately realizes the universality of the
will. Thus Hegel moves to the moment of negativity whereby the will distinguishes itself,
through the use of the thing for its own ends, from the thing itself. Yet, lest we should
be tempted to look here for a material content, Hegel reminds us that use is merely a
moment in the development of the will’s relation to the thing. For example, squatting is
rejected thus:

The fact that property is realized and actualized only in use floats before the
minds of those who look on property as derelict and ownerless if it is not being
put to any use, and who excuse its unlawful occupancy on the ground that it has
not been used by its owner. But the owner’s will, in accordance with which the
thing is his, is the primary substantive basis of property; use is a further
modification of property, secondary to that universal basis, and is only its
manifestation and particular mode. [8]
In the relation of use the will is still debased by its involvement with the particularity of
the things and their use-value. Hence the will must be asserted absolutely and not in
connection with the particularity of its objects. This is realized in alienation. In the
dialectic of the will’s relation to the thing as property, the moment of alienation, rather
than posing any problem for Hegel, is seen as the most complete actualization of
ownership. It is in distinguishing myself as an owner rigorously from any particular
content to this proprietorship that I become a real proprietor! Possession and use are
limited, finite relations of the will to property in which its movement runs aground; but
through treating things merely as exchangeable objects, in the endless cycle of
acquisition and alienation, the will is reflected into its own self, without getting bogged
down in the natural features of the alienated objects; in this way the dialectic
progresses to contract where the will is dealing with its own other. ‘This relation of will
to will is the true and proper ground in which freedom is existent.’ [9]
Raymond Plant points our that this is a particular case of a general pattern in Hegel’s
thought. [10] An advance in self-consciousness (in this case the institution of private
property) requires the descent into particularity (in this case the things held as
property); yet institutions allowing this differentiation develop their own pattern of
integration of the particulars within an ideal totality. The form in which it is achieved in
this case is that, when the autonomous persons holding various objects as private
property align their wills through contractual arrangements, this means that ‘one
identical will can persist within the absolute difference between independent property
owners’ [11] Thereby universal freedom is made possible. In sum: the overriding
moment in the ‘mastery of things exhibited by free-will’ is that which is most removed
from their useful material character, namely the process of their alienation; this pushes
forward the actualization of the will to the form of contract whereby it achieves
recognition in another person. Only as a proprietor among proprietors am I free!

The Alienation of Labour

Hegel considers that the relation between persons and their labour-power is one of
property, and also that, as such, labour is alienable. He recognizes that there is a
problem in accounting for, and justifying, such alienation because he sees that labour-
power is not ‘immediately external’ in the sense that other alienable things are. Before
taking up the question of labour’s alienation then, we must review Hegel’s account of
bodily power. Hegel considers that men, while free ‘in their concept’, are not free in
their immediate natural existence. Thus he speaks of ‘the possession of our body and
mind which we achieve through education, study, habit, etc., and which exists as
an inward property of mind’. [12] Immediately, a bodily organism is merely ‘out there’
without exhibiting specifically human behaviour. ‘It is only through the development of his
own body and mind . . . that he takes possession of himself and becomes his own
property and no-one else’s’. [13] Thus one is to own oneself and one’s bodily and
mental powers. Even though the actuality of men is freedom, ‘not something which
they have, as men, but which they are‘, [14] the actualization of this idea depends upon
an objective development whereby man becomes what he is implicitly in accordance
with his concept.
Let us note, however, that, since the immediacy of human existence need not compel
recognition of personality, slavery is feasible. According to Hegel, slavery is based on a
class of un-persons being taken as ‘things’ suitable for holding as property, in virtue of
a view of man as a ‘natural entity’ [15] like any other. Marx, by the way, draws our
attention to the fact that, ‘under slavery, according to the striking expression employed
in antiquity, the worker is distinguished only as instrumentum vocale from an animal,
which is instrumentum semi-vocale, and from a lifeless implement, which is instrumentum
mutum‘. [16] In truth, we find in Hegel a certain confusion. First it is said that, in virtue of
their being my ‘substantive characteristics’ rather than ‘external by nature’, ‘my
personality as such, my universal freedom of will, my ethical life, my religion’ are
‘inalienable’; but then it is allowed that, inherent in ‘this concept of mind as that which is
what it is only through its own free causality, . . . lies the possibility of the alienation of
personality and its substantive being, whether this alienation occurs unconsciously or
intentionally’. Hegel’s examples of the alienation of personality are slavery, serfdom,
disqualification from holding property, and so forth. He also mentions ‘alienation of
intelligence and rationality . . . in ceding to someone else full power and authority to fix
and prescribe what actions are to be done . . . or what duties are binding on one’s
conscience or what religious truth is, etc.’. It is not clear whether Hegel thinks that such
practices are merely offensive to ‘the idea of freedom’, or whether, in view of ‘the
contradiction in supposing that . . . I am giving up what, so soon as I possess it, exists
in essence as mine alone, and not as something external’, only a pseudo-
alienation would be formally effected: for example, in the case of alienation of
conscience; in so far as I am a genuine moral agent I remain responsible for accepting
authority in general, and for having chosen a particular source of direction. [17]
Hegel is even prepared to say that, from the standpoint of ‘man’s absolute freedom’, ‘if
a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery’. In fact, Hegel believes that
the progress of history has now made explicit, and irrevocably established, the
knowledge of ‘man’s absolute unfitness for slavery’. [18] However, although Hegel finds
outright slavery repugnant, he allows the alienation of personal powers in more modern
forms. He recognizes that it seems unsatisfactory to speak merely of juridical
ownership and alienation of such possessions for ‘there is something inward’ involved.
But he attempts to rationalize the situation as follows:
Attainments, erudition, talents, and so forth, are, of course, owned by free mind
and are something internal and not external to it, but even so, by expressing
them it may embody them in something external and  alienate {veräussern} them …
and in this way they are put into the category of ‘things‘. Therefore they are not
immediate at the start but only acquire this character through the mediation of
mind which reduces its inner possessions to immediacy and externality. [19]
As he notes in the margin with respect to the term ‘alienation’ here, to alienate is to
hand over a possession that is already external, and this leaves aside the question of
how it became external in the first place. [20] Thus it has to be shown how one’s ‘inner
possessions’ acquire the mode of externality, and whether or not this is contrary to their
concept.
Leaving aside any problems that might arise with a person’s products, what of
alienation of personal powers themselves? The alienation of such powers ought to
pose difficulties for Hegel because if I possess my labour-power only in making my
body my own in such a way that its powers only exist as powers developed by my will,
Hegel should find it problematic that my abilities could yet be posited through alienation
as the object of another’s will. As we saw, Hegel regards slavery as incompatible with
the idea of freedom, but he makes an ingenious distinction between wage-labour and
slavery whereby the former may be endorsed as free: I can give someone ‘the use of
my abilities for a restricted period, because, on the strength of this restriction, my
abilities acquire an external relation to the totality and universality of my being’. He
allows that ‘by alienating the whole of my time, as crystallized in my work, and
everything I produced, I would be making into another’s property the substance of my
being, my universal activity and actuality, my personality’. As he explains, ‘it is only
when use is restricted that a distinction arises between use and substance’; so here,
‘the use of my powers differs from my powers and therefore from myself, only in so far
as it is quantitatively restricted’, It seems then that Hegel admits that my labour-power
is part of the substance of my personality, an essentially inward property in so far as I
am in possession of myself. However, as he notes, it might be possible that in
manifesting my powers I reduce them ‘through a mediation of mind’ to ‘immediacy and
externality’. Here, the mediation required is identified with the time limit that posits a
distinction between use and substance, even though the substance of my power is
nothing but ‘the totality of its manifestations’. ‘On the strength of this restriction’, the
wage-labourer remains a free agent, so to speak. [21]
The trouble with Hegel’s distinction between entire alienation and alienation piece by
piece – a distinction supposed to guarantee the independence of the worker’s
personality – is that it breaks down when one considers the possibility (which is
effectively realized in the case of modern wage-labour) that, through successive
piecemeal alienations of the worker’s time, his entire labour time is appropriated by
others. What is a ‘thing’ in pieces is all of a piece a ‘thing’. It is only Hegel’s instinct for
the non-legal essence of possession of one’s powers that prevents him from reifying
them wholesale, but he capitulates to piecemeal reification. If the worker’s entire
labouring time is thus alienated, then his distinction from a slave is surely reduced to
his legal status, while materially he is in slavery to capital.
These quantitative considerations may be left at this point; for there is a deeper,
qualitative, incoherence in Hegel’s endorsement of wage-slavery. Since the worker’s
power only exists in so far as he is ‘in possession of himself’ and he has developed it
as essentially inward property, it is not a ‘thing external by nature’ but is itself ‘will-with-
thing’, so to speak. In developing his powers they become his inward possessions. The
mediation through which his labour-power is yielded to the will of another, even by hire
rather than outright sale, cannot consist therefore in his withdrawing his will from his
body, leaving behind only an ’empty will’ [22] marking his right to recover his powers.
The powers of his brains, nerves and muscles only exist in so far as he is present
exercising them. If they are alienated their use requires, none the less, not the
exclusion of his will, but his own use of his powers, however grudgingly exercised. To
exercise them in the service of another requires, therefore, the subordination of his will
to the other.
There are two problems with labour’s alienation that arise from this fact. One is a
problem for the purchaser. How is he to appropriate the use-value of the worker’s
labour if it involves the subordination of the worker’s will? After hiring the worker the
capitalist must find ways of getting the work out of him with the desired quality and
maximum quantity. This requires the effective subordination of the worker to the
dictates of the capitalist labour process so that surplus labour can – in Marx’s graphic
phrase – ‘be pumped out of him’.

The other problem arises for Hegel’s apologetics. There is a contradiction implicit in his
view of personal powers as, on the one hand, inward property of a free being, and, on
the other hand, potentially alienable property held mediatedly as a ‘thing’. If this second
relation is realized in the alienation of labour, the will exists in contradiction with itself;
for, in Hegel’s general theory, the moment of alienation establishes the will as will
through its reflection from the thing back into itself; in the contractual relation with
another will, symmetrically mediated in the thing, it becomes identical with its other and
both equally achieve objective recognition; but, since the thing here itself embodies the
will, as we have seen, the alienating mediation presupposes
an asymmetrical relationship at the same time, in which one will bends to the other,
being thus ‘refracted’ rather than reflected, so to speak, in this alienation. [23] This is
nothing less than self-estrangement.
It is to be noted that this contradiction between the symmetry of the wage-contract
effected between autonomous, juridically equal, persons, and the asymmetry of the
employee’s relationship during the working day to his ‘hands’ (to employ the striking
vernacular of capital), finds its way into Hegel from reality. This reality disguises the
relations of personal dominance inherent in wage-slavery by reifying the personal
powers of the labourer so that they become a ‘factor of production’ like any other, to be
sold or hired on the market.

Conclusion
We have shown that Hegel thinks private property is necessary for human freedom and
that he manages to justify wage-slavery at the same time. What is it about his method
that allows this? The procedure is in fact stunningly simple. Instead of making the
historical judgement that in this society freedom means freedom of property, he makes
the philosophical judgement that the concept of freedom actualizes itself in the private
property system. Hegel says of his method that in philosophical science ‘the concept
develops out of itself, and in a purely immanent process engenders its determinations.
It does not advance ‘by the application of the universal to extraneous material . . .
culled from elsewhere’. [24] Not withstanding this assertion, Hegel does in fact ‘apply
universals’ to extraneous material, namely the existing property system.
What Hegel does in his philosophy is to find methodological resources that allow him to
pass off the facts about wage-labour as rational, as the actualization of freedom. With
regard to private property itself, its various determinations are organized in a hierarchy
that makes freedom appear less real in concrete work with, and use of, one’s property,
but more fully actualized in relations that abstract from the determinate content
involved. He does not attend to the evil consequences of the commodification of
labour. Whilst acknowledging that personal powers are not ‘external by nature’, Hegel
manages to assimilate them to property in external things (and hence properly
alienable within the limit specified and criticized above) through abstracting from the
specific difference involved in order to pass off the alienation of labour as free activity.

Summary
ln the 1844 Manuscripts Marx compares his theory of alienated labour with Hegel’s
negating action of spirit. Hence, as far as content is concerned, it might be said that he
does not compare like with like. In fact Hegel has a lot to say about material labour. It is
in the Philosophy of Right that his fullest account of wage-labour is found. He is uncritical
of it, reconciling it with property, and both with freedom.

1 C.W.3, 604-5.
2 Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, 1977, para. 494.
3 P.R., para. 194. On the background see Manfred Riedel, Between Tradition and
Revolution (1969), Cambridge, 1984, ch. 1.
4 Jenaer Systementwürfe I (1803-4): Gesammelte Werke Band 6, Hamburg, 1975, pp.
329-4; System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. H.S. Harris, Albany, NY,
1979, pp. 248-9. For the background to Hegel’s thinking at this time see Bernard
Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, Dublin, 1979, pp. 70-2.
5 Some of the argument below is condensed from my paper ‘Personality and the
dialectic of labour and property – Locke, Hegel, Marx’ in Radical Philosophy Reader, ed.
R. Edgley and R. Osborne, London, 1985.
6 P.R., para. 194.
7 ‘Person and property’ (1961), in Hegel and the French Revolution, trans. R.D. Winfield,
Cambridge, Mass., 1982, p. 135.
8 P.R., para. 59.
9 Ibid., para. 71.
10 Raymond Plant, Hegel: an Introduction, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1983, p. 155.
11 P.R., para. 74.
12 Ibid., para. 43.
13 Ibid., para. 57.
14 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace, Oxford, 1971, para. 482.
15 P.R., para. 57.
16 C.1 (Penguin), 303, n.18.
17 P.R., para. 66.
18 Ibid., para. 57 & Addition.
19 Ibid., para. 43.
20 ‘Hegels eigenhändigen Randbemerkungen’ in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts,
ed. J. Hoffmeister, Hamburg, 1955, p. 330.
21 P.R., para. 67. Ernest Mandel says that for Hegel material labour is alienating
‘because labour is, by its nature, the externalizing (Veräusserung) of a human capacity,
which means that man loses something that previously belonged to him’: The Formation
of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, London, 1971, p. 155. Mandel seems to have in
mind this paragraph of the Philosophy of Right, which deals with
the Veräusserung (=alienation in the sense of sale) of human powers. If so, this is a
misrepresentation of it. It is clear that Hegel does not say labour ‘by its nature‘ as
‘externalizing’ is alienating; rather, he says complex social mediations achieve alienation
through setting labour in an (artificial) external relation to the person.
22 ‘If the whole and entire use of a thing were mine, while the abstract ownership was
supposed to be someone else’s, then the thing as mine would be penetrated through
and through by my will and at the same time there would remain in the thing something
impenetrable by me, namely the will, the empty will, of another’ (P.R., para, 62).
23 For Marx private property in general is an alien mediator estranging man from man.
What is shown here is that even if one accepts Hegel’s defence of private property it
implies that capitalist property relations are contradictory. It is utterly absurd, however,
to speak of ‘Hegel’s devastating critique of capitalist private property’ and to equate him
with Marx, as does David MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx, London,
1984, 189 et passim. Hegel’s intentions are manifestly apologetic. Even when he
recognizes that material to meet wants is barred to the needy because it consists of
external objects held as private property by others, and hence ‘its recalcitrance is
absolute’ (P.R., para. 195), he seems to assume at this point that the problem is
overcome through universal exchange. Later, when he concedes that modern society
in fact creates ‘a rabble of paupers’ (P.R. para. 244), he speculates on a solution
through imperialism (P.R., para. 246).
24 P.R., para. 31.

Chapter 9 – Marx and Feuerbach

← Chapter 8 | Chapter 10 →

Introduction
The turning point in Marx’s intellectual development comes in 1844 with his discovery
of labour, an event documented in his manuscripts composed in Paris that year under
the impetus of his first encounter with political economy. In this chapter the process of
Marx’s intellectual formation is investigated with the aim of illuminating the importance
of this transition, and, in particular, the way in which he appropriates, and yet rejects,
Hegel, as we have already seen, and appropriates, and finally yet rejects, Hegel’s most
determined critic, Ludwig Feuerbach, as we shall see below.
A great deal of energy can be expended in assessing the relative influence of thinkers
such as Rousseau, Hegel, Feuerbach and the ‘Young Hegelians’ on the formation of
Marx’s thought. For example, Lukács declares roundly that, methodologically, ‘Marx
took over directly from Hegel’ rather than from the ‘Young Hegelians’, who had affinities
with Fichteanism. [1] Michael Löwy replies that ‘the philosophy of practice’ of Fichte,
Cieszowski and Hess, ‘is also a foundation stone for Marxism, a necessary step in the
evolution of the young Marx’. [2]
Certainly, Marx is quite properly identified at the time of his move to Paris as a member
of the so-called ‘Young Hegelian’ movement. None the less his relationship to it was
always nuanced. He was never a wholehearted disciple of any of its leading figures,
except, for a few months, Feuerbach. We cannot now accept as good Marxian coin the
aphorism: ‘There is no other road to truth and freedom but through the brook of fire
{Feuer-bach}’. It comes from an anonymous article of 1842. attributed to Marx by
Riazanov, but now thought not to be his work. [3] None the less, it expresses very well
Marx’s attitude to Feuerbach in 1844. At the same time, he was always ‘his own man’
when participating in the movement, even when heaping praise on Feuerbach.
This chapter will show that Marx, in his 1844 Manuscripts, advances decisively beyond
the standpoint of Feuerbach. Marx’s own genius first shows through in 1844 with his
category of labour, founded on the ontologically constitutive nature of productive
activity for social being. We have seen that in complex ways he relates this discovery
to Hegel’s speculative version of activity. It could be argued that Marx’s discovery of
the importance of material production is not unexpected in the context of the Young
Hegelians’ anthropological reading of Hegel. Indeed, as early as the 1830s the first of
them, D.F. Strauss, delivers himself of such vague formulations as that, in the course
of human history, humanity ‘ever more completely subjugates nature, both within and
around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active
power’. [4] The idea of production as a ‘species activity’ is further developed by
Feuerbach and by Hess. However, in the works of the ‘Young Hegelians’ such views
have no fundamental significance. They lie alongside remarks about other human
functions. Only with Marx does the social and historical theory of man as his own
product emerge – and here the important source is Hegel himself!
The strange thing, none the less, is that the manuscripts are penned explicitly under
the sign of Feuerbach. [5] The Preface declares that ‘it is only
with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins’; his writings
‘contain a real theoretical revolution’. [6] If for no other reason, this solidarity with
Feuerbach makes it necessary to avoid reading too much ‘Marxism’ into the early
Marx. We know that as late as 1847 he was still engaged in the process of ‘self-
clarification’ and the effort to ‘settle accounts’ with the Young Hegelian heritage. Only
then, in the context of polemics against Feuerbach, does the first outline of the
materialist conception of history as a sequence of modes of production take definite
shape. Given the self-affiliation of Marx to Feuerbach in 1844 it is necessary to clear up
the question of the role played by Feuerbach in Marx’s evolution in general, and his
influence on the 1844 Manuscripts in particular.

Young Hegelianism
Hegel died in 1831 and within a few years his followers polarized: there were
conservatives, or ‘Old Hegelians’, and radicals, or ‘Young Hegelians’. [7] This
divergence is foreshadowed in internal tensions in Hegel’s own philosophy. In spite of
the rationalist and historical elements in Hegel’s thought, he did not give philosophy a
radical role in social affairs, at least in his well-known mature works; it seemed that the
role of philosophy was to reconcile thought to the present. The Young Hegelians
claimed that there was, nevertheless, an esoteric radical Hegel in the exoteric
conservative who compromised with the Prussian monarchy. Certainly the younger
Hegel welcomed the French Revolution and its Napoleonic extension to Germany. He
gave philosophy the task of herald of the new order, indeed, even its promulgator.
Soon after the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel wrote to a friend: ‘Daily I
become more convinced that theoretical work accomplishes more in the world than
practical; once the realm of ideas is revolutionized, reality cannot hold out.’ [8] Whether
Hegel himself continued to believe this or not, the Young Hegelians certainly held such
a view wholeheartedly.
We need look no further than Friedrich Engels, in the period before he joined forces
with Marx, to find a typical exponent of Young Hegelianism. Although already a
declared ‘communist’ in the early 1840s (having been converted by Hess), he held that
communism followed directly from ‘German Philosophy’, that is, from the ‘left’
interpretation of Hegel. Engels makes this claim in a fascinating article he wrote in
1843 for the Owenite periodical New Moral World. Here he explains to his English
readers that Hegel ‘neglected to free himself from the prejudices of his age’, notably
the attachment to monarchy and religion, but that the Young Hegelians had freed the
principles of his thought, little by little, from these conservative encrustations.
Eventually, indeed, Hegelianism became in effect atheism, a charge Engels declared
himself the first to have allowed just. [9] The reference here is to a pamphlet he had
published anonymously in Germany the previous year. This was a counterattack on
Schelling’s Berlin lectures directed against Hegelianism. [10]Here Engels develops at
greater length the theory of Hegel’s ‘prejudices’. He says that Hegel’s conclusions
would have been different if he had proceeded from ‘pure thought’; but, instead,
‘positive’ elements crept in because he was ‘a product of his time’. ‘The principles’,
says Engels, ‘are throughout independent and free-minded, the conclusions – no one
denies it – sometimes cautious, even illiberal’. [11]All that is necessary for a left wing to
take form, then, is to keep to the principles and reject the conclusions. Here Engels
expresses the outlook of Young Hegelianism perfectly.
But what would be the right conclusions to draw? Engels has no doubt whatever that
‘the necessary consequence of New Hegelian philosophy’ is communism. He informs
the English socialists that ‘philosophical communism may be considered for ever
established in Germany’. Striking a note he will return to at the end of his life, he
declares that ‘our party’ must prove to the Germans that they must either reject their
philosophical tradition as useless, or ‘they must adopt communism’. [12]
Let us turn now to the knotty problem of Marx’s very different encounter with
Hegelianism. Althusser says that the Hegel Marx met was ‘the Hegel of the neo-Hegelian
movement, a Hegel already summoned to provide German intellectuals of the 1840s
with the means to think their own history and their own hopes; a Hegel already made to
contradict himself, invoked against himself, in despite of himself’. [13] There is some
truth in this; but Marx had his own distinctive position based on his own acute reading
of Hegel. Well before Engels repeats the above commonplaces of Young Hegelianism
with respect to ‘principles’ and ‘prejudices’, Marx was writing in his doctoral dissertation
that it was silly for Hegel’s followers to explain some feature of his system by his
accommodation to existing reality; [14] even if a philosopher is consciously making
some sort of accommodation, ‘what he is not conscious of is the possibility that this
apparent accommodation has its deepest roots in an inadequacy . . . of his principle
itself’. [15]
Thus the searchlight must be turned on the principle itself to see how it makes possible
the expression of conservative prejudices. This is precisely the task Marx undertakes in
1844 when he shows how Hegel’s conceptualization of the problematic of alienation
leads to a reconciliation of ‘reason’ with ‘unreason’ and an accommodation with
religion, the state etc. This false position, Marx concludes, is founded in ‘the falsehood
of his principle’. [16] The Young Hegelian attempt to preserve the ‘principle’ from
‘accommodations’ on Hegel’s part is therefore untenable. However, we are running
ahead of our story.
Let us return to the beginning. We know that when Marx first came into contact with
Hegel’s philosophy at the University of Berlin its ‘craggy melody’ repelled him. For a
time he was imbued with ‘the idealism of Kant and Fichte’ and wrote effusive poetry in
this vein. [17] He later dismissed this poetry as marked by ‘complete opposition
between what is and what ought to be’. [18] A slightly later poem is of peculiar interest
in exhibiting his first reaction to Hegel. In a book of verse sent to his father in the spring
of 1837 we find the Hegel Epigramme, which are full of irony at Hegel’s expense. The
most piquant is the third:
Kant and Fichte soar to heavens blue
Seeking for some distant land;
I but seek to grasp profound and true
That which in the street I find. [19]
This epigram is completely misunderstood when it is thought that ‘I’ refers to Marx
himself. [20] The ‘I’ is Hegel – just as it is in the previous epigram beginning ‘words I
teach all mixed up in a devilish muddle’ – but it is Hegel forced to speak against himself
by Marx. Given this, it is not the case that Marx here endorses the standpoint of Hegel
against that of Kant (much less opts for materialism). [21] According to Marx’s own
account, in a letter to his father, it is later in 1837 that he ‘arrived at the point of seeking
the idea in reality itself’ and found himself delivered into ‘the arms of the enemy’,
namely Hegel. [22] As was noted in the remarks on his dissertation, Marx very soon
begins to depart from Hegel, but the project of ‘seeking the idea in reality itself’
remains.
In departing from Hegel Marx was enormously encouraged by the work of Feuerbach.
In 1843 and 1844 he works with the slogan ‘real humanism’, following Feuerbach’s
basic principle. Feuerbach wrote: ‘the new principle makes man, together with nature, as
the basis of man, the sole, universal and highest object of philosophy.’ [23] At this time
Marx is an enthusiastic partisan of Feuerbach and continually tries to interest him in
new publishing projects.
The received version of events is that Marx was an Hegelian, then he was converted
by Feuerbach to materialism and then he struck out on his own ‘to change the world’.
The true story is more complicated.

The authority of Engels has to be recognized of course, so let us begin with the
account in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888).
He speaks of Feuerbach in dramatic terms: ‘with one blow’ Feuerbach’s Essence of
Christianity (1841) ‘broke the spell’ of idealism; Hegel’s system was ‘exploded and cast
aside’; ‘the liberating effect of this book’ aroused ‘general enthusiasm’; ‘we all became
at once Feuerbachians’ [24]
Engels’ memory plays him false here. At first Feuerbach’s book was generally taken to
be an application of Hegelian principles rather than a refutation. Engels himself is
testimony to this. In his anti-Schelling pamphlet of 1842, in passing he defends Hegel
also against Feuerbach and opines that ‘Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity is a
necessary complement to the speculative teaching on religion founded by
Hegel’. [25] Engels also forgets to mention that as far as the critique of Hegel is
concerned Feuerbach’s major blows were delivered in the 1843 texts, Preliminary
Theses towards the Reform of Philosophy and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future.
As for Marx, Engels goes on, ‘how enthusiastically Marx greeted the new conception
and how much – in spite of all critical reservations – he was influenced by it, one may
read in The Holy Family‘. [26] But this is a work written three years after Essence of
Christianity appeared. In fact, Marx was somewhat slow to respond to the book; there is
little sign of its influence in his 1842-3 newspaper articles. In truth, the first major
impact on Marx’s thinking of Feuerbach is documented in his study of Hegel, written in
Kreuznach in the spring and summer of 1843. The method applied is taken straight
from Feuerbach’s newly published Preliminary Theses.
It is true that at the outset Marx expresses some reservations about this work. In a
letter to Ruge of March 1843 he says that Feuerbach’s aphorisms refer ‘too much to
nature and too little to politics’; he explains that philosophy needs an alliance with
politics to come true. [27]
It is a great mistake to treat this opinion as Marx’s final judgement on Feuerbach, and
to collate it with the critique offered in the theses On Feuerbach of 1845. For example,
N. Rotenstreich connects the appeal to politics here with the first of the theses, in which
Marx appeals to practice against Feuerbach’s contemplative materialism; [28] but the
practice meant there is not politics, it is a material production. At the earlier date of
1843 Marx is concluding his period as a journalist whose radicalism is clearly idealist in
tendency. In taking up in his articles such questions as the law on the ‘theft’ of wood
from forests, and the distress of the Mosel peasants, he becomes aware of the
inadequacy of his knowledge. Under the impact of this practical experience in coming
to terms with material interests, and of Feuerbach’s ‘theoretical revolution’, Marx rook
advantage of the closure of his newspaper to undertake a materialist critique of
Hegel. [29] This is inspired methodologically by Feuerbach’s charge that Hegel inverts
the real relations and that, therefore, the road to truth lies in a reinversion. Feuerbach
has in mind, very largely, central philosophical questions about man, God and nature.
Marx undertakes to remedy the one-sidedness of Feuerbach’s critique by applying the
latter’s method to Hegel’s political philosophy. In this study he shows how Hegel inverts
the real relations of ‘civil society’ and ‘the state’. But, in spite of his turn to ‘civil society’
as the ‘real basis’, there is as yet no properly materialist ontology grounded in
production. Hence the turn from politics to economics, even to nature, in the 1844
Manuscripts represents an advance over the position held at the time of the letter to
Ruge of March 1843.
Given that in the 1843 study on Hegel there is no stress on productive activity,
obviously Hegel cannot be praised for grasping man as his own product. The verdict on
Hegel at this stage is simply that his idealism mystifies real relations. Although Marx’s
critique opens up a new field of inquiry, and although he goes beyond the critique of
Hegelian ideology to a critique of real relations, the whole enterprise is Feuerbachian
through and through. For example, one of the most striking, and oft-quoted,
pronouncements is that ‘knowledge is not gained by applying “the logical concept”
everywhere, but in grasping the logic proper to the peculiar character of the object
concerned’. [30] This is well within the scope of Feuerbach’s Criticism. [31] Feuerbach
writes (in his Philosophy of the Future, 1843):
Only those determinations are productive of  real knowledge which  determine the
object by the object itself, by its own individual determinations; but  not those that
are  general, as for example the logico-metaphysical determinations that, being
applicable to  all objects without distinction, determine no object. [32]
More than in the 1843 notebook study, Marx’s articles On the Jewish Question, published
in 1844, go beyond the critique of ideological inversions to criticize the real
estrangement of the modern state from civil society. Marx calls for a recuperation of the
sociality disrupted in the split between the atomized members of civil society and the
abstract community of citizenship well described by Rousseau. Human emancipation
will be achieved, Marx concludes, ‘only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in
himself the abstract citizen . . . only when man has recognized and organized his “force
propres” as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from
himself in the shape of political power’. [33]
It is at this date, that is early in 1844, that Marx for the first time nominates the
proletariat as the revolutionary force in Germany, in a remarkable essay which exhibits
the connection of theory and practice in the highest degree of tension.

However radical philosophical critique becomes, it remains the case, he says, ‘that
revolutions need a passive element, a material basis’. The theoretical revolution brought
about within post-Hegelian philosophy cannot complete itself within the domain of
theory. ‘It is not enough that thought should strive for realization; reality must itself
strive towards thought.’ [34] Where then is the material agent of revolution? Marx
answers that it must be a class which is forced to revolt under the compulsion of
‘material necessity’, whose revolt has a universal character ‘because of its universal
suffering’; it must be a class ‘which is the total loss of humanity and which can
therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity’. There is indeed
such a class without any stake in the existing order and thrown into opposition to it –
‘the proletariat’. [35]
So the proletariat is nominated as the material agent of revolutionary change. But let us
look carefully at how its struggle is related by Marx to ‘theoretical needs’. ‘Clearly’, he
says, ‘the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons, and material
force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force
once it has gripped the masses.’ [36] He finishes the essay with a whole series of such
propositions: ‘just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the
proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy’; ‘the head‘ of the struggle is
‘philosophy, its heart, the proletariat‘; ‘philosophy cannot realize itself without . . . the
proletariat’ and the proletariat cannot liberate itself from its chains without ‘the
realization of philosophy’. These are the ‘inner conditions’ of revolution. [37]
It is clear from a reading of this text that Marx has broken with his erstwhile
philosophical background in so far as he realizes that criticism cannot change reality.
But it is equally clear that he is simply adding in a mechanical way the practical needs
of the proletariat to this theoretical criticism. It is a marriage of convenience, not a real
union. Furthermore, in the above formulations it is still theory which is the overriding
moment; it ‘grips the masses’; theory is not evolved from the practical standpoint of the
proletariat. Hence it retains an abstract and moralizing character. He speaks of the
‘categorical imperative’ to redeem humanity. [38]
The proletariat is assigned its revolutionary role because of its neediness and
oppression; it is thus qualified to be the bearer of universal emancipation. This intuitive
imputation is buttressed dialectically by a very bare and abstract play of the categories
of universality and particularity. It is too glib. It has justly been characterized as Marx’s
‘Hegelian choreography’. [39] The antithesis of property and propertylessness is not yet
interpreted as that of labour and capital. Furthermore, the revolutionary perspective
remains an utterly vague call for ‘human emancipation’.
In the Preface to the 1844 Manuscripts Marx says that he abandoned his plan to do a
critique of Hegel’s political philosophy because ‘the intermingling of criticism directed
only against speculation with criticism of the various matters themselves proved utterly
unsuitable’. [40] From this original critique of Hegel to the subtitle of Capital – ‘Critique
of Political Economy’ – ‘criticism’, is one of Marx’s favourite words. But what does it
mean? Early on, in his doctoral dissertation, a purely idealist definition appears: critique
‘measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the
Idea’. [41] This is the guiding spirit of his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung. But in the
1843 Hegel study a more interesting definition emerges: ‘truly philosophical
criticism . . . not only shows up contradictions as existing, it explains them, it
comprehends their genesis, their necessity’. [42]
In fact there is a hint of this idea already in the Rheinische Zeitung when Marx is forced
to touch on communism for the first time. In 1842 his newspaper was attacked by
another for ‘communism’; in his reply Marx ‘does not admit that communist ideas in
their present form possess even theoretical reality‘, although he also says that ‘the
sharp-witted work of Proudhon’ (What is Property?), and others, can be criticized only
after proper study. [43] Such a study must take on board the objective fact that ‘the
estate that today owns nothing demands to share in the wealth of the middle classes’.
This is ‘obvious to everyone in Manchester, Paris, and Lyons’. [44] We see that already
Marx is shifting the focus of attention from the ideological level to the real social forces
in motion. [45] A year later, nevertheless, Marx still writes that communism is ‘a
dogmatic abstraction’. The interesting thing, however, is that this complaint is spelled
out as an objection to its partial, one-sided realization of ‘the humanistic principle’, and,
more explicitly, it is said to be ‘still infected with its antithesis – the private
system’. [46] It seems that until his studies in political economy convinced him of the
dynamic potential of the struggle against capital he was inclined to regard communism
as a mere reflex response to inequality, its mere contrary, ungrounded in an adequate
theoretical understanding of the inner relationships of private property.
In the years 1843 and 1844 Marx’s ideas are changing rapidly and the stages of
development are hard to map on the texts because these stages frequently overlap
each other in the same work. However, it is clear that three ‘pure’ stages may be
disentangled from the material. First there is the criticism of private property in the light
of its lack of accord with the idea of humanity, private property seen as an alien
mediator; such a criticism reveals a discrepancy of real existence and supposed
essence. Second there is the transference of the contradiction to reality itself, a self-
criticism of society in so far as it produces the propertyless proletariat as ‘the
dissolution of society’, forced into revolt by ‘material necessity’. Finally, when the
antithesis of property and propertylessness is grasped as the antithesis of labour and
capital, the proletariat is seen as reappropriating its estranged powers in the positive
supersession of private property.

Prior to 1844 Marx’s effort to unify theory and practice remains an abstract programme
because he has not yet identified productive activity as the socially constitutive axis on
which all else turns. Now the way opens for an investigation of the material foundations
of society and history.

Once Marx grasps labour as the central category of historical dialectic, communism
takes its place as the necessary moment of transition to ‘the positive supersession of
private property’. Such a communism ‘is the riddle of history solved and it knows itself
to be this solution’. [47] Thus grounded, communism, he says later, is not an ideal to
which reality has to accommodate itself: ‘we call communism the real movement which
abolishes the present state of things’. [48]

Feuerbach’s Critique of Hegel

Given Marx’s account of ‘the great thing about Hegel’, a strange thing about the 1844
Manuscripts is that Marx gives credence in his Preface to the idea that Feuerbach
comprehensively supersedes Hegel, and nowhere does he compare him unfavourably
with Hegel. Marx says that ‘the less noise they make, the more certain, profound,
extensive, and enduring is the effect of Feuerbach‘s writings, the only writings since
Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic to contain a real theoretical revolution’. [49] The main
reason Marx advances in the body of the text for holding Feuerbach in such high
esteem is precisely his refutation of Hegelianism. Feuerbach, Marx holds, ‘is the only
one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made
genuine discoveries in this field’. In fact, ‘he is the true conqueror of the old
philosophy’. [50] Of particular interest is Marx’s judgement that ‘a great achievement of
Feuerbach is to have opposed to the negation of the negation which claims to be the
absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself and positively grounded in
itself’. [51]
How did Feuerbach argue against the ‘negation of the negation which claims to be the
absolute positive’? Hegel holds that absolute spirit posits itself in opposition to the
material world. Feuerbach does not accept the substantiality thus assigned to the
mediated being, spirit, as opposed to that which is immediate, the concrete and
sensuously manifest. If the natural, material and sensuous is merely the self-alienation
of spirit then it is only ‘something to be negated’, he says, ‘like nature which in theology
has been poisoned by original sin’. [52] Feuerbach says that ‘according to Hegel it is
only the negation of the negation that constitutes the true positing’. [53] But, he argues,
‘a truth that mediates itself is a truth that still has its opposite clinging to it’; spirit can
come to itself only through its mediation in its other, the material world. Feuerbach asks
rhetorically: ‘Why should I not proceed directly from the concrete? Why, after all, should
that which owes its truth and certainty only to itself not stand higher than that whose
certainty depends on the nothingness of its opposite?’ [54] ‘The Hegelian philosophy’,
he comments, ‘lacks immediate unity, immediate certainty, immediate truth.’ [55]
Feuerbach argues at length that sensuous intuition does possess immediate truth. Of
course, he is well aware that the Phenomenology begins precisely with a refutation of the
standpoint of sense certainty; although sensuousness claims immediate certainty, it
lacks the form of truth; it is therefore sublated in higher forms of cognition and grasped
ultimately in terms of spirit’s own objectification of itself, its free product constituted as
an otherness to be intuited. Feuerbach responds that all that is refuted in
the Phenomenology is the logical ‘Here’ and ‘Now’ – which does not touch
the real sensuous object. [56]
The second objection to the Phenomenology is that it rests on the presumption of the
identity of thought and being. Feuerbach argues that the circle of thought-
determinations can never reach the other of thought and must collapse to a formal
identity merely; difference is unreal where there is no objective ground for it. Hegel faits
to produce an actual substance because it relies for its content on forms of alienation,
and since these are denied their independence from spirit, this means that spirit is
denied real substantiality. Feuerbach argues that ‘thought which is isolated and cut off
from sensuousness cannot get beyond formal identity’. For thought determinations are
‘always repetitions of the self-identity of thought’. Hence the ‘other’, if ‘posited by the
idea itself, is not truly and in reality distinguished from it’. [57] Feuerbach concludes
that ‘the identity of thought and being expresses, therefore, only the identity of thought
with itself: ‘this means that absolute thought is unable to cleave itself from itself, that it
cannot step out of itself to he able to reach being‘. [58]
For any idealist philosophy the question of the reality of the natural world, including the
human organism, clearly poses problems. The transition to ‘Nature’ in
Hegel’s Encyclopaedia has always been found especially problematical. The various
moments of thought outlined in the Logic are internally connected through the self-
determination of the concept in its development. The categories cannot be external to
each other – they form a mediated whole. However, at the end of the Logic the
absolute idea freely posits itself in the form of otherness, ‘as nature’. [59] This problem
Feuerbach very early identified as a crucial limitation. In relation to the vexed question
of the validity of this transition he says: ‘If nature did not exist, logic, this immaculate
virgin, would never be able to produce it out of itself.’ [60] Hegel’s explanation is as
follows:
The idea, which is  for itself, when viewed on the point of its  unity with itself,
is  intuition: and the intuited idea is nature: But as intuition the idea is posited,
through external reflection, in a one-sided determination of immediacy or
negation. Enjoying, however, an absolute freedom the idea . . . resolves to let the
moment of its . . . other-being, the immediate idea as its reflected image, go forth
freely as nature. [61]
Marx comments on this trenchantly as follows:

The absolute idea which ‘resolves to let the moment . . . of its other-being,
the  immediate idea, as its reflection,  issue freely from itself as nature‘, this whole
idea, which conducts itself in such a strange and baroque fashion, and which has
given the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is purely and
simply . .  abstraction which, taught by experience and enlightened as to its own
truth, resolves . . . to  relinquish itself and . . . in place of its self-absorption, to
let  nature, which it concealed within itself as a mere abstraction, as a thing of
thought,  issue freely from itself that is to say . . . it resolves on intuition . . .
The  mystical feeling which drives the philosopher from abstract thinking to
intuition is  boredom, the longing for a content. [62]
This follows the same line as Feuerbach’s criticism. Marx follows Feuerbach too in
saying that ‘the abstract thinker who decides on intuition, intuits nature abstractly’;
hence ‘the whole of nature only repeats to him in a sensuous external form the
abstractions of logic’; and it follows that ‘nature as nature . . . distinct from these
abstractions . . . has no meaning, or has only the sense of an externality to be
superseded . . .’. [63] This is seen when Hegel says that ‘since . . . the idea is present
as the negative of itself, or is external to itself, nature is not merely external in relation to
this idea . . . but externality constitutes its specificity, as nature’. [64] Nature is an
external world of objects externally related to its own truth. It is absolute externality
because the internality to which that externality is related can only be reconstituted
through the medium of thought.
In the final part of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, ‘Spirit’, there is a ‘return out of nature’. Spirit is
defined as the unity of subject and object. ‘This identity is absolute negativity – for
whereas in nature the concept has its objectivity in a completely external manner, this
its alienation has been sublated.’ [65] When Hegel characterizes nature as ‘externality’
this sounds innocent enough; but, as Marx explains, externality here should not be
understood as a sensuously accessible world exposing itself to the light of day; rather,
he says, ‘it is to be taken in the sense of alienation, a flaw, a weakness . . .’. For Hegel
it is not a question of natural objectivity of which man is a part and in and through which
his existence is naturally mediated; it is a question of spirit positing the realm of nature
as immediately other, hence being moved to idealize this actuality, since, as inherent
externality, nature lacks ideality itself and must submit to its incorporation as a moment
in spirit’s actualization. As Marx puts it: ‘For the abstract thinker nature must therefore
supersede itself, since it is already posited by him as a
potentially superseded being.’ [66]
The difficulty in interpreting Marx’s position arises when we see that, although he does
not explicitly say so, he takes up a fundamentally different position from that of
Feuerbach with respect to materialism; and this in turn allows Marx a deeper
appreciation of Hegel’s merit. The issue turns on the centrality of material labour in
Marx’s social ontology. For Feuerbach, whatever the qualifications he introduces, the
main drift of his positive doctrine is the assertion of an immediate unity between man
and nature. He seems to identify mediation as such with the distance thought introduces
between man and the object and to reject it accordingly. For Marx, by contrast, the
unity of man with the rest of nature is not immediate, but established by labour, and
hence changes and develops with new forms of labour. The unity of man with nature is
always mediated in industry and incorporates within itself equally a struggle to bring into
human use the recalcitrant forces of nature. This gives rise to a historical dimension,
which depends on changes in the mode of production. This dimension is lacking in
Feuerbach. Marx finds it in Hegel, but it is raised to the level of purely philosophical
reflection which has lost touch with the real basis of history in material labour. None the
less, Hegel’s philosophy contains the idea of activity, and, moreover, an activity that
develops through a stage of alienation and estrangement.
Feuerbach sees Hegel’s negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy
with itself: to this he counterposes the positivity of sensuous immediacy. He does not
grasp the objective basis of Hegel’s thematization of alienating objectification.
However, Marx looks deeper into the historical content of Hegel’s work, and its real
achievement. He appears to follow Feuerbach in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic, and
he endorses Feuerbach’s naturalism; but this is by no means all, because he transfers
the problems of philosophy to the ground of historical practice and of revolutionary
transition. For Marx it is necessary to take the speculative problematic seriously as a
symptom of the real historical agenda. Feuerbach sees in Hegel’s problematic of
alienation only the self-delusion of a philosophy estranged from the real world, in that it
refuses to abandon itself to sensuousness. For Marx, Hegel’s speculative problematic
is an attempt to pose, and hence to solve, within philosophy, a real historical problem,
which Marx sees in terms of the necessity to supersede the rule of private property.
Hegel’s speculative solution is inadequate because the problem is not so much a
theoretical as a practical one.
But Feuerbach’s standpoint too cannot link up with practice. He interprets the problem
of estrangement as the view of nature as the ‘otherness’ of the idea, and the logical as
opposed to the human. This is interpreted again as exclusively a problem of the
consciousness of theologians and philosophers. To this speculative illusion Feuerbach
counterposes the immediate truths of naturalism and humanism, and he sets out to
reform consciousness to this effect. This makes him an idealist in practical philosophy,
as he himself naïvely confesses. [67] For Marx ‘positive humanism’ is a result of real
historical development, a necessary sequence in the self-production of the ontological
essence of man, whereas for Feuerbach it is seen in ethical terms; Feuerbach posits
the ‘communal essence’ of man as a fixed abstraction based simply on the capacity for
universal mutual recognition on the part of individuals. At best this allows for an equally
abstract criticism of the perversities of theology and philosophy. In Marx the communal
essence is established through production in society. Its estrangement is expressed in
the development of the division of labour and the money system. Money is the
mediation that both ties and separates individuals; it is the ‘estranged and alienating
species-essence of man’; [68] a person’s bond with society lies literally ‘in his
pocket’. [69] However, this critique is not an ethical-anthropological one, for it is
grounded in an ontology which allows for the development of alienation and its
supersession to be grasped as historical necessities. Thus Marx can assert ‘both
that human life needed private property for its realization and that it now needs the
abolition of private property’. [70]
In effect, Feuerbach falls below the level of historical concreteness already attained by
Hegel. One is inclined to agree with Lukács’ verdict that Hegel poses the problem of
estrangement as a problem of the structure of social being, and in the development of
the stages of spirit the reality of the historical periods breaks through their conceptual
expressions in the aprioristic framework. [71] But, although Feuerbach uses
a methodological dialectic in evolving and situating his thought in the history of
philosophy, [72] his positive doctrine in effect rejects objective dialectic
altogether. [73] Lukács is therefore right to set Hegel above Feuerbach, because in the
materialist alignment of Marx with Feuerbach we miss Hegel’s great insight into the
dialectical movement of history. [74]
Certainly Marx had good reason to feel much sympathy with Feuerbach’s Hegel
critique. He credits Feuerbach with having drawn attention to Hegel’s conflation of
objectivity with estrangement. [75] Much of what Marx says about the objective
character of man and his world is drawn from Feuerbach. It is possible to overlook this
and take as great discoveries of Marx himself things he copied wholesale from
Feuerbach. As an example of the identity and difference of Marx and Feuerbach let us
look at the last section of the 1844 Manuscripts to be written – a fragment on money. It
begins with the premise that ‘man’s feelings {Empfindungen}, passions {Leidenschaften},
etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the narrower sense, but
truly ontological affirmations of being (of nature) and . . . are only really affirmed
because their object exists for them as a sensual object’. [76] This is straight out of
Feuerbach, who says that ‘man’s feelings have no empirical or anthropological
significance in the sense of the old transcendental philosophy, they have rather, an
ontological and metaphysical significance . . .’. Significantly, however, Feuerbach’s
chosen example is that ‘love is the true ontological demonstration of the existence of
objects apart from our head . . .’. [77] Marx, by contrast, chooses a different path: ‘only
through developed industry does the ontological essence of human passion come into
being’. [78]
The passage is a good illustration of how Marx goes beyond Feuerbach in the attack
on idealism. The recurrence in Marx’s text of words such as ‘feeling’, ‘passion’,
‘ontology’, etc., which come from Feuerbach, obscures the fact that Marx’s ontology is
very different. In Feuerbach’s naturalism the emphasis is on feeling, whereas in Marx it
is on productive activity. ‘Feeling’ (Empfindung) denotes a relatively low form of
experience in which no distinction is drawn between subject and object; hence
Feuerbach uses it to denote an indifferent immediacy, not a dialectically mediated
unity. It is true that Feuerbach is capable of incorporating productive activity in the
essence of man. He says in the Essence of Christianity that ‘the idea of activity, of
making, of creation, is in itself a divine idea’ because ‘in activity man feels himself free,
unlimited, happy’; and ‘the most blissful activity is that which is productive’. Hence, he
concludes, ‘this attribute of the species productive activity – is assigned to
God’. [79] Nevertheless, this is not with Feuerbach, as it is with Marx,
a synthesizing category.
For Feuerbach the paradigm case of an objective relation is love, as we have just seen.
No such thing appears in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. Yet Erich Fromm [80] gets excited
when he reads this from Marx’s pen in The Holy Family: ‘love . . . first really teaches
man to believe in the objective world outside himself’. [81] Although Fromm’s reading of
Marx is Feuerbachian through and through, he does not recognize the provenance of
this remark in such statements as that quoted above. What happened was that Edgar
Bauer, under the pretext of a book review, attacked the idea of a love object, thus
covertly attacking Feuerbach. Then Marx, in his critique of the Bauer circle, reasserted
the Feuerbachian view in a highly contextualized manner, within this debate. Therefore,
although it is interesting that Marx expresses his solidarity with Feuerbach even on this
point, it is not this that Marx finds important about Feuerbach. Certainly no great
ontological significance should be attached to this isolated statement when Marx over
and over again stresses production as the central mediator. For example ‘species
being’ in the 1844 Manuscripts has quite a different content from what it has in
Feuerbach. It is not constituted in consciousness but in social production.
Feuerbach’s critique of religion is often given as an important source of Marx’s theory
of alienation. Undoubtedly Marx was impressed by it; but it is important to notice how
much more thoroughgoing is Marx’s own theory. For Feuerbach, religion consists in
‘the objectification of the essence of man’. [82] This means that ‘the personality of God
is the alienated, objectified, personality of man’. [83] Feuerbach finds ‘the secret of
religion’ is that man ‘objectifies {Vergegenständlichkeit} his being, and then again makes
himself the object of this objectified being, transformed into a subject, a person’. [84] He
amplifies this in an interesting note where ‘religious self-objectification’ is distinguished
from ‘that occurring in reflection and speculation’; for ‘the latter is arbitrary, the former
necessary – as necessary as art and language’. [85] The reference in this note to
‘speculation’ is explained by Feuerbach’s claim that Hegel’s philosophy is itself
alienating! It ‘estranges man from his own being and his own activity’. [86] This remark
is indicative. Feuerbach’s critique in truth is limited to a critique of ideology – worthless
ideology in the case of theology and philosophy, man’s lived relation to himself in the
case of religion as a necessary medium of species self-awareness.
Marx, by contrast, stresses that man ‘duplicates himself not only… in consciousness,
but actively, and actually, and therefore he sees himself in the world he has created’
(see p. 9). Likewise, alienation is objective.

In this light, one must enter qualifications about Marx’s – genuine – enthusiasm for
Feuerbach at this stage of his development. When he says Feuerbach’s great
achievement is to have counterposed to the negation of the negation the self-
subsistent positive, he has in mind primarily the way in which Hegel uses the negation
of the negation to affirm the absolute as spirit. Secondarily, Marx has in mind the way
in which the idealist negation of the negation fails to move beyond the stage of self-
reference in estrangement to a positive supersession. These two aspects of the matter
are connected, of course.
On the first point, however, Feuerbach rejects objective dialectics along with idealism;
while, on the second point, Marx diverges at least as far from Feuerbach as he does
from Hegel, because for Feuerbach ‘positive humanism’ is merely a philosophical
perspective produced by inverting religion and philosophy so that speculative thought is
brought down to earth, while for Marx it is historically produced through the
supersession of real objective estrangement. Marx is primarily interested in
the historical dialectic, and he wants to root communist revolution immanently in it;
hence he tries to recuperate Hegel’s dialectic of negativity within a materialist
conception of history. Feuerbach rejects Hegel’s negation of the negation altogether
because he is primarily interested in nature, which idealist dialectic reduces to the
status of an ‘externality’ to be sublated. Here Marx is bound to go some of the way with
Feuerbach. However, although the 1844 Manuscripts contain some undigested lumps of
Feuerbach’s naturalism, it is already clear that Marx advances beyond Feuerbach’s
endorsement of the immediate unity of man and nature to pose labour as their
mediation. This provides him with the ontological basis for his historical dialectic. It
follows that, with Marx, alienation is read as objective alienation. The new interpretation
of the world and its religious reflex provided by Feuerbach is inadequate from this point
of view: the point is to change the world. [87]

The Changing Verdicts

The thesis of a linear development from Hegel through Feuerbach to Marx is seen to
be untenable when we consider the evidence of the 1844 Manuscripts. Marx’s turn to
political economy there brought the category of labour to the forefront of his thought
and allowed him to make the complex connections with Hegel’s Phenomenology we
have already examined. Commentators as different as Marcuse and Althusser
recognize this return to Hegel.
Marcuse points out that when, in his theses On Feuerbach, Marx demarcates himself
from Feuerbach through the concept of human practice he thereby ‘reaches back
beyond Feuerbach to Hegel’; so the matter is not as simple as a straight road from
Feuerbach to Marx subsequent to a rejection of Hegel; ‘instead of this, Marx, at the
origins of his revolutionary theory, once again appropriates the decisive achievements
of Hegel on a transformed basis’. [88] Althusser speaks of ‘Hegel reintroduced by force
into Feuerbach’. [89]
It has to be said that Marx fails in the 1844 Manuscripts to make his differences with
Feuerbach explicit. No doubt the general enthusiasm of Marx and Engels for
Feuerbach’s devastating critique of theology and philosophy in the early 1840s led to
an over-estimation of his contribution and a lack of interest in taking any distance from
him at the outset of Marx’s own development of materialist criticism. This may be why
there is no trace in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts of any recognition of the distance he has
travelled from his mentor.
The first documented break comes with the theses On Feuerbach drafted in the spring
of 1845. Nothing before this is conclusive in my view. The early letter quoted above
containing a reservation on Feuerbach’s naturalism is evidently retracted in practice
with Marx’s materialist turn. Those, like Lukács [90] and Naville, [91] who cite Marx’s
1844 statement that Feuerbach sees Hegel’s negation of the negation only as the
contradiction of philosophy with itself, as if it were a criticism of Feuerbach, are reading
too much into the text. The statement occurs in a passage summarizing and endorsing
Feuerbach’s counterposition to Hegel of ‘positive facts’. [92] Instead of starting from
positive facts Hegel engages in a positing through double negation. If such Hegelian
doctrine is taken literally, then Marx rejects it as mystifying and anti-naturalistic. At this
level Marx is in agreement with Feuerbach and the statement quoted should be read as
an endorsement, or at least as a neutral report. Certainly no other remark in the 1844
Manuscripts can be said to be critical of Feuerbach, so the balance of probability is that
this is not either.
Where Marx goes beyond Feuerbach is in recognizing that Hegel’s dialectic of
negativity, freed from its estranged form of expression within philosophy, can be given
concrete content in the pattern of historical genesis. What Marx seems to say is that
past history itself can he criticized for positing through negation, but in the future
socialist man knows how to start from himself as a positive fact, so to speak.

At this stage Marx does not see it as his task to point out Feuerbach’s limitations with
regard to the comprehension of historical dialectic. Indeed, at this stage he still
entertains the hope of securing Feuerbach’s collaboration. He writes to him in August
1844 to persuade him that on his own humanist principles he too should become a
socialist. Marx points out that, whether he knows it or not, Feuerbach has provided ‘a
philosophical basis for socialism’ and that ‘the communists’ have understood this.

The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men,
the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to
the real earth, what is this but the concept of society? [93]
Strangely enough, Feuerbach responds to this injunction. While at first reluctant to
state publicly that he is a communist, [94] his reply (1845) to Stirner’s criticism of his
work ends in ringing tones with the declaration that, in as much as he ‘places the
essence of man in community alone’, he is ‘Kommunist‘. [95]
Rather ungratefully, Marx later writes (in the German Ideology) that Feuerbach ‘is
deceiving himself when he declares himself a communist’ because his conception of
‘communist’ is merely a category that registers an ahistorical fact about men’s need for
society whereas ‘in the real world’ a communist is a follower of a revolutionary party
bent on overthrowing the existing order: [96] ‘rather ungratefully’ because Marx’s
original letter makes such an equation between communism and ‘the concept of
society’. As for party affiliation: it is touching to learn that, when he was almost
forgotten, Feuerbach joined the Social Democratic Party, two years before his
death. [97]
However, this is to run ahead of the story. Returning to the question of Feuerbach and
Hegel, we have seen that the 1844 Manuscripts hail Feuerbach as ‘the true conqueror of
the old philosophy’. The only hint of a doubt in Marx’s mind is revealed by a passage at
the end of the Preface. He says that ‘Feuerbach’s discoveries about the nature of
philosophy still, for their proof at least, call for a critical discussion of philosophical
dialectic’. [98] Even then Marx had second thoughts and hastily crossed it through.
In The Holy Family (1845) he still talks of Feuerbach’s ‘masterly criticism’ of
Hegel, [99] and says that ‘Feuerbach was the first to describe philosophy as
speculative and mystical empiricism and to prove it’. [100] But in the German
Ideology (1846) Mans concludes that, after all, Feuerbach does not provide a criticism
of Hegel’s dialectics. [101] Before the German Ideology we have the well-known
theses On Feuerbach. For the first time Marx comprehensively, and consciously, breaks
with Feuerbach.
It must be remarked that this break occurs after the appearance of Max Stirner’s
scorching critique Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. Although dated 1845, this came out
late in 1844 and, judging by his correspondence, Marx must have read it at
once. [102] All the Young Hegelians felt constrained to reply to Stirner. Feuerbach’s
reply was mentioned above. M. Hess (using material in a letter of Marx’s) replied
immediately in his Die Letzten Philosophen. Marx and Engels set to work late in 1845 on
the German Ideology, by far the largest section of which is a page by page attack on
Stirner’s work. In this connection it should be noted that Engel’s reminiscences, quoted
earlier, are misleading. He lists the Young Hegelians in the order Strauss, Bauer,
Stirner, Feuerbach. The uninitiated might think that Feuerbach’s main works replied to
Stirner. In fact, it was Stirner who came last with a book, and that included a violent
attack on Feuerbach. At all events, Marx and Engels, in 1845, began to include
Feuerbach with the other young Hegelians as part of their past, now superseded.
From our point of view, the most important of the theses On Feuerbach is the first,
because in it ‘materialism’ (Feuerbach’s explicitly included) is charged with neglect of
the practical relation to objectivity; by contrast ‘the active side was set forth abstractly
by idealism’. [103] This shows how far Marx’s materialism, in its concentration on
practice, goes beyond the passivity of sensuous intuition presented by Feuerbach and
so many others as the nub of materialism. In thus distancing himself from ‘the old
materialism’ Marx even acknowledges once again merit in idealism (Hegel), despite the
fact that it transposes real activity into the dialectic of abstractions.
It is in the German Ideology that Marx and Engels develop the method of historical
materialism at length for the first time. However, these positive views are embedded in
a critique of the Young Hegelians, including Feuerbach. According to this account,
‘their polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this – each takes
one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as
against the aspects chosen by the others’. [104] A rather nice example of this occurs in
Feuerbach’s first Hegel-critique, where he inverts Hegel’s ordering of space and time,
preferring ‘the liberality of space’ to ‘the monarchical tendency of time’; but where both
are still recognizably Hegel’s categories. [105]
The main point, of course, is the emphasis placed by Marx and Engels on the
importance of the mode of production. Feuerbach says in his Essence of Christianity that
man is distinguished from animals by religion and by consciousness. [106] Obviously
with this in mind, Marx and Engels say:
men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from
animals as soon as they begin to  produce their means of subsistence . . . This
mode of production is a definite mode of life on their part . . . What they are,
therefore, coincides with their production. [107]
They take Feuerbach severely to task for his abstract contemplative materialism; they
point our that the cherry tree outside his window is an object of sensuous certainty for
Feuerbach only as a result of world trade; nature just as ‘given’ exists only on a few
coral islands; the progression of industry has thoroughly transformed the objective
world.

The final verdict of Marx on Feuerbach is given much later on. In an obituary (of
January 1865) on Proudhon, Marx remarks in passing that ‘compared with Hegel,
Feuerbach is exceedingly poor’. So why all the fuss? Because ‘he was epoch-
making after Hegel, since he laid stress on certain points disagreeable to Christian
consciousness while important for the progress of criticism, and which Hegel had left in
mystic semi-obscurity’. [108]
‘Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is exceedingly poor’: this is interesting not only for
Marx’s opinion of Feuerbach but for a revaluation of Hegel. How does it come about
that ‘the conqueror of Hegel’ now bears no comparison with him? What happens with
Marx is that as Feuerbach’s star wanes, Hegel’s rises. Not at first: not in The Holy
Family for example. Although this was composed – mostly by Marx – immediately after
the 1844 Manuscripts, there is little trace in it of the advances made there. In particular,
there is no mention of any ‘great thing’ in Hegel; Feuerbach is the hero. Hegel is
treated scornfully throughout, under such headings as ‘Mystery of Speculative
Construction’. Indeed, for the next ten years Marx’s references to Hegel and his
dialectic are almost uniformly negative: the German Ideology dismisses Hegel’s
speculative history; the Poverty of Philosophy (1847) makes fun of Hegel’s ‘strings of
thoughts’ in the methodology section; the dialectic of negation of the negation is
attacked without reference to any virtue in it.
 It is only when Marx seriously tries to get his economics into shape that there is a
second return to Hegel. The first was the 1844 return to the Phenomenology; this time it
is to the Logic. We have a letter (January 1858) in which Marx reports that he had been
made a present of Hegel’s Logic and found it of great service ‘in the method’. [109] This
influence was noted by several reviewers of Capital(1867), mostly with disapproval. In a
letter of 1868 Marx remarks of the fashion to treat Hegel’s dialectics as a dead dog that
‘Feuerbach has much on his conscience in this respect’. [110] So the man who was
first applauded for overthrowing Hegel’s dialectic should now apologize! Again in 1870
Marx mentions how put out Lange and others are by his resurrection of Hegel – after
they had long buried him! [111] When the second edition of Capital appeared in 1873,
Marx made a special point of asserting his affiliation to Hegel on the question of
dialectic – unfortunately in words too cryptic to construe easily.

Summary
What this survey shows is that there is no unilinear development from Hegel through
Feuerbach to a ‘mature’ Marxism. Moreover, in contrast to much recent talk of a ‘break’
in Marx’s work, and the contraposition of a ‘young’ and ‘old’ Marx, Marx himself showed
no inclination to reject any of his work, however early. In 1851, well after his adoption of
a communist outlook, he was happy to see republished his early journalism. [112] In
1867 he re-read The Holy Family and reported to Engels that he ‘was pleasantly
surprised to find that we do not need to be ashamed of this work, although the cult of
Feuerbach produces a very humorous effect upon one now’. [113]
At the same time, it is obvious that there are important developments in Marx’s thought.
We can mark out the following stages:

1. 1840-3
Young Hegelianism leading to radical democratic works.
2. 1843-4
Feuerbachian works, especially his notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right applying the
method of inversion of Hegel. A turn towards a practical thrust in the Introduction.
3. 1844
The turning point. Birth of Marxism in that labour is centralized, and political economy is
seen as a key science. Feuerbach is not yet rejected. The first return to Hegel in that there is
praise for the ‘producing principle’ of the Phenomenology.
4. 1844-57
Transitional works. Anti-speculative settling with philosophy, both Hegel’s, in The Holy
Family (still under the sign of Feuerbach) and Feuerbach’s also, in the Theses and German
Ideology. Growing concreteness of outlook, e.g. class struggle in the Manifesto.
5. 1857 on
Mature work on political economy and politics; the second return to Hegel, this time to
the Logic. [114]

1 Georg Lukács, ‘Moses Hess’ (1926) in Political Writings 1919-1929.

trans. M. McColgan, London, 1972, p. 203.
2
Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism (1975),
London, 1979, p. 196.
3
Possibly the author was Feuerbach himself; for the debate see T.I.
Oizerman, The Making of the Marxist Philosophy (1977). Eng. trans., Moscow,
1981, p. 124-5.
4The Life of Jesus (1835) in The Young Hegelians, ed. L. Steplevitch,
Cambridge, 1983, p. 48.
5
Marx’s over-enthusiastic espousal of Feuerbach does not go quite as far
as the stunning citation in H. P. Adams, Karl Marx in his Earlier
Writings (1940), London, 1965, p. 104: ‘Political economy owes its true
foundations to the discoveries of Feuerbach’. What Marx actually says (in
a deleted paragraph moreover) is that ‘positive criticism as a whole’ –
and therefore ‘criticism of political economy’ – ‘owes . . . etc.
(C.W.3, 232).
6Werke Eb., 468; C.W.3, 232.
7
This standard classification is a bit simplistic. For the full story
see J.E. Toews, Hegelianism: Path to Dialectical Humanism 1805-1841,
Cambridge. 1980. For Young Hegelian materials in translation, see
Steplevitch, The Young Hegelians.
8
Hegel to Niethammer 28 October 1808; in Briefe von und an Hegel Band 1,
ed. J. Hoffmeister, Hamburg. 1952, p. 253.
9C.W.3, 404.
10
The existence of this pamphlet is sufficient refutation of Alan White’s
claim that Engels was ‘receptive’ to Schelling’s critique: see White, Absolute Knowledge:
Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics, Athens, Ohio,
and London, 1983. p. 7. Equally mistaken is Alfred Schmidt’s claim
that Schelling’s critique influenced the young Marx. Marx’s contempt for
Schelling’s later work is evident in his letter to Feuerbach of 3
October 1843. Schmidt’s reference to an allegedly Schellingian passage in the
young Marx does not make it clear that it is Hegel‘s view Marx is
characterizing: see Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (1962), London,
1971, p. 20.
11Schelling and Revelation (1842): C.W.2, 196.
12C.W.3, 406. Compare with this the closing page of Engels’ 1888 work Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (in M.E.S.W.).
13
Louis Althasser, For Marx (1965), trans. Ben Brewster, London, 1969, p. 65.
14
For the latest account of Hegel’s accommodation see Ilting in The State and Civil Society,
ed. Z.A. Pelczynski, Cambridge, 1984.
15C.W.1, 84.
16Werke Eb., 581; C.W.3, 339.
17C.W.1, 18.
18
Ibid., 11.
19Werke Eb., 608; C.W.1, 577; another translation is in M.A. Rose, Reading the Young
Marx and Engels. London, 1978, p. 68.
20
‘In a poem written in 1837 … preoccupation with the world of thought
is contrasted with his own concern for the everyday life of man.’
Bertell Ollman, Alienation, Cambridge, 1971, p. 264.
21
For a critical reading of this period, see Rose, Reading.
22 C.W.1, 18.
23 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: K.S.II, 337; F.B., 243.
24M.E.S.W., 602-3.
25C.W.2, 237.
26M.E.S.W., 603.
27C.W.1, 400; New MEGA III, 1, Briefe bis April 1846, p. 45.
28
Nathan Rotenstreich, Basic Principles of Marx’s Philosophy,
Indianapolis, 1965, p. 29.
29
See Marx’s mini-autobiography in the Preface to a work of 1859: M.E.S.W., 181 ff.
30
‘ . . . die eigentümliche Logik des eigentümlichen Gegenstande zu
fassen‘: New MEGA 1,2, p. 101; C.W.3, 91; E.W., 159.
31
Galvano della Volpe does not realize this and hence sees the 1843
critique of Hegel as more important than the 1844 Mss in the development of Marx’s
new science. See ‘For a materialist methodology’ (1955-57), in Della Volpe, Rousseau
and Marx (1964), London, 1978.
32K.S.II, 332; F.B., 238-9.
33C.W.3, 168.
34New MEGA 1, 2, 178; E.W., 252.
35New MEGA 1, 2, 181-2; E.W., 256.
36New MEGA 1, 2, 177; E.W., 251.
37New MEGA 1, 2, 182-3; E.W., 257.
38New MEGA 1, 2, 177; E.W., 251.
39
By M. Nicolaus, Studies on the Left, 7 (l967), no. I, who believes this
is carried through at least as late as the Grundrisse.
40Werke Eb., 467; C.W.3, 231.
41C.W.1, 85.
42C.W.3, 91.
43C.W.1, 220.
44
Ibid., 216.
45
E.V. Il’enkov sums up the turn Marx’s thought takes now as follows:
‘Marx in 1842 did not turn to a formal analysis of contemporary communist
ideas (they were indeed quite naïve), nor to a criticism of the
practical attempts to implement them (they were quite feeble), but rather he
contemplated a theoretical analysis of the conflict within the social
organism which spawned these ideas and the elucidation of that real
demand which expressed itself in the form of ideas such as Utopian socialism
and communism.’ In Marx and the Western World, rd. N. Lobkowicz, Notre
Dame, Indiana, 1967, p. 397.
46C.W.3, 143.
47
Ibid., 297.
48C.W.5, 49.
49Werke Eb., 468; C.W.3, 232.
50Werke Eb., 569; C.W.3, 328.
51
Ibid.
52Principles: S.W.2, 276; F.B., 205.
53S.W.2, 276; F.B., 206.
54S.W.2, 301; F.B., 229.
55Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy: S.W.2, 227; F.B., 157.
56Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy: S.W.2, 227; F.B., 157.
57Principles: S.W.2, 310-11; F.B., 237.
58S.W.2, 282; F.B., 211.
59Hegel’s Logic (Encyclopaedia I), trans. W. Wallace, 3rd rd., Oxford,
1975, para. 244.
60Philosophische Fragmente: S.W.2, 363; F.B., 270.
61
Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830)
Hamburg, 1975, para. 244. In Hegel’s Phenomenology the same idea appears:
‘spirit displays the process of its becoming spirit in the form of free contingent happening,
intuiting its pure self as Time outside of it,
and equally its being as Space. This last becoming of spirit, Nature,
is its living immediate becoming . . . But the other side of its
becoming, History, is a conscious self-mediating process – spirit emptied out
{entäusserte} into time; but the externalization … is equally an
externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself’ Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, 1977, para. 807-8.
62Werke Eb., 585-6; C.W.3, 344; E.W., 397-8.
63Werke Eb., 587; C.W.3, 345-6; E.W., 398-9.
64Philosophy of Nature: Enzyklopädie para. 247.
65Philosophy of Mind: Enzyklopädie para. 381. For a defence of the
incorporation of physical objects in ‘infinite teleology’ see, Crawford
Elder, Appropriating Hegel (1980), Aberdeen, 1981.
66 Werke Eb., 588; C.W.3, 346.
67
Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity: F.B.,
252.
68Werke Eb., 565; C.W.3, 325; E.W., 377.
69
K. Marx, Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, 1973, p.
157.
70Werke Eb., 562; C.W.3, 321; E.W., 374.
71
Lukács, Political Writings, pp. 210-12.
72
This aspect in well brought out by M. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, Cambridge,
1977.
73
Lukács, Political Writings, pp. 202-7; David McLellan, The Young
Hegelians and Karl Marx, London, 1969, pp. 18, 112.
74
Lukács, Political Writings, p. 211; Lukács, The Young Hegel, trans. R.
Livingstone, London, 1975, pp. 548, 559.
75C.W.4, 665.
76Werke Eb., 562; C.W.3, 322.
77Principles: K.S.II, 318; F.B., 226.
78Werke Eb., 563; C.W.3, 322. Thus ‘the science of man is a produce of
man’s self-formation through practice’, adds Marx; that is, man only
knows what he is when he has become what he is in the totality of
expressions. This view of science is parallel to that in Hegel’s Phenomenology.
79 Gesammelte Werke 5, Berlin, 1984, p. 365; Essence of Christianity,
trans. Marian Evans, New York, 1957, p. 217.
80
Erich Fromm. Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), New York, 1971, p. 32.
81C.W.4, 21.
82Essence: F.B., 262.
83Essence: Gesammelte Werke 5, p. 377.
84Essence: Gesammelte Werke 5, p. 71; F.B., 127.
85Essence: Gesammelte Werke 5, p. 71, n.3; F.B., 133.
86 Principles: K.S.II, 301; F.B., 209.
87On Feuerbach thesis 11, C.W.5, 5.
88
Marcuse (1932) in Marcuse, From Luther to Popper, essays trans. Joris
de Bres, London, 1983. pp. 21-2.
89
Louis Althusser. Politics and History (1970), London, 1972, p. 176.
90
Lukács, Young Hegel, p. 559.
91
Pierre Naville, De L’Aliénation à la Jouissance, Paris, 1957, p. 134.
92Werke Eb., 570; C.W.3, 329.
93
Marx to Feuerbach 11 August 1844: New MEGA III,1, Briefe bis 1846, 63; C.W.3, 354.
94
According to Engels, C.W.38, 22.
95K.S.II, 441.
96C.W.5, 57.
97
Wartofsky, Feuerbach, p. xx.
98C.W.3, 254.
99C.W.4, 139.
100C.W.4, 39.
101C.W.5, 530. Jindrich Zelený holds the German Ideology is also an
implicit self criticism of Feuerbachianism in the 1844 Mss: The Logic of Marx (1968),
Oxford, 1980.
102
See Engels to Marx, 20 January 1845: C.W.38, 16.
103C.W.5, 3.
104C.W.5, 29.
105K.S.11, 18; F.B., 54.
106Gesammelte Werke 5, p. 28; F.B., 97.
107C.W.5, 31.
108
Marx to J. B. Schweitzer, 24 January 1865, Selected Correspondence, ed.
S. Ryazanskaya, Moscow, 1965, P. 151.
109Selected Correspondence, p. 100.
110
Marx to Engels, 11 January 1868: Werke Band 32, Berlin, 1965, p. 18; Selected
Correspondence, trans. Dona Torr, London, 1934. P. 233.
111
Marx to Kugelmann, 27 June 1870. Marx’s words (‘ . . . das sie – poor
deer – ihn langst begraben haben‘) pose problems for translators because
of the strange spelling and syntax: (a) Werke Band 32 takes Marx
literally and informs the German reader that Marx calls Hegel ‘armes Tier‘
(P. 686); (b) the English Selected Correspondence (1965) silently
corrects to: ‘that he – poor dear – had long been buried by them’ (p. 240);
Raya Dunayevskaya, in Philosophy and Revolution, New York, 1973,
following the syntax, assumes Marx meant to be patronizing to the ‘poor dears’
Lange & Co. (p. 50).
112
Maximillien Rubel, Marx Life and Works (1965), London, 1980, p. 26.
113
24 April 1867: Selected Correspondence (1934), p. 217.
114
Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure (1971), Cambridge, Mass., notes
the two distinct appropriations of Hegel (p. 61).

Chapter 10 – Towards an Assessment

← Chapter 9 | Chapter 11 →

Introduction
So far, we have concentrated largely on exegesis and clarification of Marx’s ideas and
their relationship to his philosophical antecedents. The remainder of this book gives
some indication of their validity and their limitations.

Given that we claim Marx’s theory of alienated labour has not been properly
understood, it follows that most previous objections raised against it are
irrelevant. [1] This chapter considers the most interesting charge, namely that Marx
does not really break with Hegel’s problematic as far as alienation is concerned. I reject
this; but acknowledge also that there are important limitations in the ontology of
the 1844 Manuscripts. I believe this is overcome in the subsequent development of
Marx’s thought, and that the ambivalence in his later writings on the question of the
abolition of labour flows from his appreciation of the difficulties inherent in such a
perspective.
The next chapter will go on to discuss briefly the contribution to Marx’s Capital of the
ontology inaugurated in the 1844 Manuscripts.

Marx and the ‘Inversion’ of Hegel

Louis Althusser holds that the 1844 Manuscripts represent nothing but an inversion of
Hegel and that consequently the dialectical form remains the same, even though
activity is grasped as material rather than spiritual. Althusser holds that in Hegel we
have ‘the simple unity of a totality produced by the negation of the negation . . . a simple
original unity which develops within itself by virtue of its negativity, and throughout its
development only ever restores the original simplicity and unity in an ever more
“concrete” totality’. [2] Again: ‘the Phenomenology celebrates “the labour of the negative”
. . . but negativity can only contain the motor principle of the dialectic . . . as a strict
reflection of the Hegelian theoretical presuppositions of simplicity and origin . . . as a
pure reflection of the principle of alienation itself’. [3] Althusser alleges that ‘it is this
“Hegelian dialectic” that reigns in glory over Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts‘. [4]
Let us consider this charge that the 1844 Manuscripts, being nothing but a materialist
inversion of Hegel, are open to the objections sustainable against Hegel’s dialectic. To
begin with: even a cursory reading of Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s dialectic discloses that
the self-identical totality is a main object of attack. It is linked to, but distinct from, the
criticism that Hegel does not know real material labour but only the movement of mind.
The attack is against the way in which Hegel uses the concepts of negation of the
negation, and of ‘Aufheben‘, to present spirit as at home with itself in its otherness,
having overcome, and yet preserved, estrangement as a moment in the absolute.
As we have seen, Marx follows Feuerbach in counterposing to Hegel’s self-identical
totality a view of man as an objective being constituted in and through objective
relationships. There is no suggestion in the text of a subject requiring to negate
objectivity as such through grasping it as its own. On the contrary, Marx carefully
distinguishes objectification and objectivity as such, on the one hand, from alienation
and private property as specific historical determinations, on the other. As far as Marx’s
concept of practice is concerned, we have seen that he pictures man as created in and
through material production, but he stresses that the worker can create nothing without
the sensuous external world as material for production; he speaks of the necessity for a
dialogue with nature. [5]
In order to solve the problem of Marx’s conceptualization of the totality within which
material production goes on, it is necessary to distinguish between an ‘identity‘ of
opposites, in which the ‘other’ is nothing but the self in alienation, and a unity of
opposites in which the other is really distinct as a pole of the relationship, however
transformed in it.
It is clear that Marx conceives the unity of man and the rest of nature as a unity of this
latter type. The unity is grounded in man’s natural origins (‘for man is a part of
nature’ [6]); but the specific difference of the social must also be granted;
the synthesizing moment is historical practice which takes up natural elements as
material in the development of industry, the ontological foundation of properly human
existence in society, It is clear that this work is an open-ended, always to be furthered
project.
What then of Marx’s appropriation of the ‘negation of the negation’ and of ‘alienation’
from Hegel? We have shown that there is a big difference between Hegel’s
absolutization of these moments and Marx’s view that they relate only to the history of
mankind’s emergence, and are to be superseded in socialism positively grounded on
itself. This is only possible in turn because his fundamental ontological frame of
reference is the mediation of man and nature in industry, while the problem of
alienation is reduced to a historically relative stage, however prolonged, by inscribing
within the fundamental mediations the distorting effect of the secondary mediations:
wage-labour and private property.

In this dialectic Marx is very careful to distinguish his understanding of estrangement

from Hegel’s precisely through inscribing it within the unsurpassable reality of
objectification as a specific historical determination. Therefore, overcoming alienation
does not mean, as in Hegelianism, the encompassing of all otherness it just means ‘the
destruction of the estranged character of the objective world’. [7] Spirit has as its
negative something which is merely its own other because objectification can only be
brought about within the absolute movement of negativity. The negative is easily
negated in its turn simply through recollection of the process of its origination. In spite
of Hegel’s incorporation of history within his system, his conception is ultimately
ahistorical in that it requires a fixed ‘end’ to development, an end which always implies
a return, however more developed, a closing of the circle. Marx’s conception implies a
spiral progress which is open-ended; being immanent in a self-mediating subject with
objective relationships it implies a perennial ‘starting over’ whenever the objective room
for development of a given social totality is exhausted. Marx’s inquiry is into the
material stages of development of human history, not the moments of movement of
spirit’s production of itself out of itself. In the latter case the end bends back on the
beginning, which in some sense presupposes it. But Marx’s inquiry into real history
discloses the existence of distinct stages of development, complete in themselves, and
separated by real discontinuities, by revolutionary transformations. One must
distinguish transitions within a self-developing totality from transitions of such a more
radical type, ontological breaks which refound the fundamental determinants of social
being. In the present case the communist revolution marks a transition from ‘the
relative ontological continuity inherent in the unfolding of capital’ (Mészáros [8]).
In the transition from capitalism to socialism the achievement of capitalism in
developing the productive forces is to be appropriated and preserved, not by
incorporating their existing form as private property within a higher totality, but by
divesting them of their alien form through abolishing private property. It will not be the
case that socialism will recognize its productive forces as marked by their origins in
private property (once the transitional stage passes) even though Marx believes that
the capitalist stage of their development was historically necessary.

In the dynamic contradiction of labour and private property the negation of the negation
does not effect a closure then – an end of history – because this specific dialectic is
inscribed, as the estrangement of social being, within the wider intermediations of man
and nature. Hence the negation of the negation brought about through communist
revolution opens out the possibility of a real human history no longer carried on under
the mark of estrangement.
It is important here, therefore, not to oversimplify the dialectical movement of alienation
and its supersession. When Marx speaks of ‘the emergence of nature for man’ this
relation of difference – man for himself and nature for man – is a genuine advance
beyond that state in which man is sunk in the natural, unable to perceive his own
specificity as an acting subject and to grasp nature as an object of purposeful activity.
At the same time this difference must maintain its necessary unity; for man depends on
nature for his material reproduction. Two consequences follow; first, that, if in the
estranging system of secondary mediations subject and object are opposed, they are
none the less united, even though in a contradictory dynamic; second, that abolition of
estrangement does not abolish this difference and restore relations of natural
immediacy, but rather produces a unity in diversity, mediated through social labour,
and freed from the contradictions of the estranging system of private property. The
history of alienation does not go from identity to difference back to identity; rather, it
goes from identity to contradictory unity in difference, on to non-antagonistic unity in
difference.

Before I admit my own reservations on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, let us look further at

criticism. Ian Hunt and Roy Swan claim that in the Manuscripts Marx conceives of
society ‘after the Hegelian manner’ as taking up its origin into itself, It is worth quoting
in full the difference they see between the young Marx and mature Marxism.
In the transition from the Hegelian to the mature Marxist dialectic, the initial
step is from an ideal to a material content, from the Idea to (material) labour,
from Spirit to Society, which in Early Marx is conceived in its fruition as the
union of humankind with nature in free, conscious self-determination.

As Marxism develops, it effects no radical alteration of the materialist content,

although it does render it radically more concrete. However, the developing
Marxism effects a radical change in dialectical form, and later in its formulation
of the dialectical process. In terms of Hegel’s metaphor of the circle, there is a
change from an emphasis on the circle ‘closing on itself’ to an emphasis in
mature Marxism on ‘bursting out’ of the circle, which while completing, more
fundamentally brings to dissolution one process and begins another. Whereas
Hegel sees a ‘circle of circles’, that is, every ‘bursting out’ as in turn a circle
enclosed in the all-embracing circle of the absolute, mature Marxism see an
endless progression, a spiral movement (i.e. a ‘bursting out’ of a circle) which
does not close on itself, but is open-ended.
By an emphasis on self-enclosure we mean, to begin with, the encompassing of
all otherness within the subject that is supposed to ensure the true infinitude and
freedom of the subject. Thus, in early Marxism, the conclusion of social
‘prehistory’, itself a part of nature and natural history, is Society brought to
fruition, and this is after the Hegelian manner conceived as in turn
encompassing (practically and theoretically) nature and natural history. In
mature Marxism society is conceived as a part of natural history which in turn
does not enclose natural history. [9]
Thus Hunt and Swan. What textual support could be mobilized in support of this view?

In the 1844 Manuscripts the description of communism as the positive supersession of

private property certainly uses the imagery of ‘return’. Thus it is said to be ‘the
complete return of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being – a return
accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development’.
Furthermore, ‘it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and
between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and
essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity,
between individual and species’. [10] In this light, communism ‘is the riddle of history
solved, and knows itself to be this solution’. [11] Further on it is asserted that ‘society is
the complete unity in essence of man with nature’. [12] This means that ‘it is only when
the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s
essential powers . . . that all objects become for him the objectification of himself,
become objects that confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects: that is,
man himself becomes the object’. [13] The key relationship here as that of industry:
‘conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers’ it realizes
‘the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man’. [14]
What are we to make of all this? The charge is that Marx here conceives man, in
Hegelian fashion, taking up his origin into himself such that the condition of his activity
becomes its consequence. This is answered if we recall the distinction between the set
of primary mediations inhering in the permanent ontological framework man-activity-
nature, and the secondary mediations labour-capital inscribed within it. It is only with
regard to the secondary mediations that it is plausible to speak of a radical
transcendence of the objective condition (private property) consequent on its being
posited as the product of labour. But such a reversal is not possible with the material
aspect of private property, the objects of productive activity; for nothing can be
produced without naturally given material on which to work, however much this
objectivity becomes socially mediated and mediates social man. Nature remains as a
condition of activity, albeit more and more a determined determinant.
Certainly the natural basis of human being which lies at the origin as a given
condition becomes more and more the object of human practice with the consequence
(as Marx formulates it in Capital) that in acting on external nature man changes himself.
[15] Yet, however highly mediated, social being still presupposes transformed natural
objectivity, and reproduces itself in this framework. [16]
In distinguishing Marx’s 1844 dialectic from Hegel’s, it is important to contrast the self-
mediatedness of spirit established through absolute negativity with the self-
mediatedness of human being established in and through material practice. Take this
crucial passage cited by Marx from Hegel’s 1830 Encyclopaedia:
Spirit is nature’s  truth. In this truth nature is vanishing, and spirit has resulted as
the idea which has attained being-for-itself, whose  object as well as  subject is
the  concept. This identity is  absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept
has its perfect external objectivity, its alienation has been sublated and the
concept has become identical with itself. It  is this identity  only in that it is a
return from nature. [17]
Marx charges Hegel with here characterizing the externality of nature as a defect, and
with positing it as potentially superseded from the outset. [18] From this we must
conclude that Marx could not simply replace the negating activity of thought with the
material transformation of practice, while yet holding nature in the same contempt. If
Marx insists, following Feuerbach, that man acts in the context of objective
relationships, then his self-mediatedness cannot be absolutized in the manner of
Hegel’s spirit. This is because he bases himself not on the identity of opposites but on
their unity, in this context. One can see now that the difference in content must make a
difference to the general form of working of the dialectic when it is stood on its feet,
having been grounded materialistically, In Hegel, the unity of opposites collapses to an
identity, pure self-distinction, which allows the negation of the negation to effect a
closure and reduces historical time to an organon of absolute teleology. It is the
irreducible distinction between man and the objective basis of his activity, however
intermediated through labour and industry, that allows us to grasp the dialectic of
human practice as historical and open-ended.
Furthermore, it is not possible to say that Marx views nature as inert matter to which
human activity is to give shape. In discussing the appropriation of objects Marx says
that such activity must take into account the determinate nature of such objects:
‘The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the
nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinate
nature of this relationship which shapes the particular real mode of affirmation.’ [19]
It cannot be said, therefore, that Marx simply substitutes material labour for that of spirit
in Hegel’s dialectic, with the consequence that society is to enclose nature. The stress
on objectivity in the text speaks too strongly against that. At the same time, it has to be
allowed that there is something unsatisfactory about talk of ‘a complete unity in
essence of man with nature’. There is indeed something deficient in the ontology of
the 1844 Manuscripts. In my view the problem has to do less with the assimilation of
Hegel than with that of Feuerbach.

The Real Problem

The defect is not a question of Marx’s conceptualizing subjectivity as enclosing all
otherness in the Hegelian manner. The difficulty lies rather in the unproblematized unity
of subject and object conceptualized under the influence of the Feuerbachian absolute
– ‘man on the basis of nature’. The assumption is present that, just because man is
natural, nature can be humanized through the mediation of industry. It is true that Marx
(like Feuerbach) says that ‘man as an objective sensuous being is therefore
a suffering being – and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being’. [20] The
stress, however, lies on the affirmative character of appropriation of the objects
satisfying particular needs. There is no real recognition of the sheer recalcitrance of
nature to human use.
The 1844 Manuscripts concentrates on the importance of overcoming the estrangement
inherent in the private property system. Upon the reappropriation of the ontological
essence of man therein alienated, it seems that man’s genesis through negation of the
negation is complete. Marx fails to recognize here that genesis is a continuing process
because the struggle to overcome ‘the realm of necessity’ (as Capital will call it)
remains ever present; the retreat of the natural boundary, as the conditions of his
existence pass under his control, is always a relative matter. [21]
Instead of bringing this aspect into focus, Marx takes the rather ‘phenomenological’
stance that with the end of estrangement man knows he is his own creation and freely
exercises his active power on nature. He does not think through the problems inherent
in slogans about the unity in essence of society and nature. He does not have clearly in
view the fact that nature is self-subsistent on the basis of natural interactions. Of
course, if asked, he would admit that this is so, because to do otherwise would be too
obviously idealist. What he does not yet realize is the consequences of this in terms of
the real recalcitrance of nature to human efforts and the problems to which this gives
rise. Later he becomes more aware of it, as we see in this passage from the third
volume of Capital:
The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity
and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of
material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to
satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and
he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production.
This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs
do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time.
Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the
associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational
way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as
a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in
conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always
remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of
human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish
with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the
basic prerequisite. [22]
What we find in the 1844 Manuscripts is a peculiar synthesis of Hegel and Feuerbach.
Whereas a purely Hegelian dialectic would arrive at an identity in which man
incorporates his origin, Marx, having absorbed Feuerbach’s critique of identity, pushes
the movement of negativity back into a kind of pre-history so as to arrive, after this
‘genesis’ is completed with communist revolution, at a Feuerbachian ‘positive,
positively grounded in itself’, that is, the recognition by man of his origins in and unity
with nature and the reorganization of social relations on this basis so as to promote the
resolution of all contradictions.
In a way, the young Marx combines both Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s optimisms. In hailing
man’s achievement in becoming aware of his self-mediatedness as the riddle of history
solved, Marx is too Hegelian. In not taking the otherness of nature too seriously, once it
has been retrieved from the alienated objectivity of private property and posited as the
internally related object of man himself, Marx is too Feuerbachian.

After the end of alienation there must remain a dialectical process of interaction, even
of opposition, as successive obstacles thrown up by nature are encountered. Negative
ecological feedback cannot be supposed only a problem of capitalist anarchy, for
example. The nature that is ‘for man’ is always a continually surprising interlocutor.

Although the unity of man with nature is insufficiently problematized in the 1844

Manuscripts the centralization of the category ‘labour’ already destabilizes such
Feuerbachian residues. The curious thing is that Marx does not yet seem to realize
this, although he will soon attack Feuerbach precisely for neglecting the ontological
importance of activity. Because Marx follows Hegel in giving priority to activity, now
transposed to a materialist key, the Feuerbachian immediacy of ‘man on the basis of
nature’ is undermined.
Marx’s view is of man at the centre of a totality in which nature is ‘for man’, not as a
passive object appropriated in a contemplative synthesis of sensuous intuition, but in a
mediated unity actively constituted in so far as nature is posited as the object of human
productive power. Inevitably, Marx soon sees that simply abolishing the status of the
object as private property is not enough, that the level of development of the productive
forces is also a key to emancipation. Without this, socialization of property could not
have the desired consequences. [23]
The implications of such revisions in the ontological perspective are significant. For
example, one cannot take seriously talk of genuine resolution of existence and
essence, freedom and necessity, and so forth. If human essence is not merely species
consciousness but is reproduced socially through material activity, it becomes subject
to continual transformation. Any ‘naturalism’ of the essence must be rejected in favour
of historically developing mediatedness. This means, as Mészáros says, that there
cannot be ‘a point in history at which we could say “now the human substance has
been fully realized” . . .’. [24]
The most interesting consequence, for our theme, is that of the future of labour.

The Abolition of Labour

It is necessary before going any further to recall the terminological point discussed in
chapter 1, namely, that in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx uses the term ‘labour’ to refer to
alienated productive activity carried on under the regime of private property. As was
said there, failure to consider such terminological problems leads to intolerable
confusion. (An example, giving rise to such problems of interpretation, is discussed in
an Appendix to this chapter.) Nevertheless, this point about the differences in usage of
1844, and Marx’s later work, is connected to a genuine problem. In the 1844
Manuscripts Marx could use the term ‘labour’ in the way he does because he is working
with a very simple dichotomy: under the regime of private property, productive activity
is labour, that is, alienated activity; with the positive supersession of private property it
is free activity – ‘labour’ is abolished.
He speaks of the abolition of labour as late as the German Ideology (1846). He says
there also that, whereas now self-activity and material production diverge completely,
with the appropriation of the existing totality of productive forces ‘self-activity coincides
with material life’, and labour ‘is transformed into self-activity’; then, the fully developed
individual casts off the ‘natural-grown’ one. [25] With the change in ontological
perspective such a simple inversion can no longer be maintained. [26] The abolition of
the system of estrangement cannot amount to the abolition of the realm of necessity
itself. Material production (‘labour’ in the revised terminology) remains subject to its
imperatives. Hence in the quotation from the third volume of Capital given above Marx
sees a permanent opposition between a realm of freedom and a realm of necessity,
within which only the balance can change, in that the working day can be shortened.
Before looking further at the question of how Marx revised the over-simple perspective
of his youth, it should be emphasized that when he speaks there of the abolition of
labour he certainly does not mean the abolition of material productive activity itself. He
has in mind rather the seizing by the workers of the instrument and object of production
and the consequent abolition of vertical and horizontal stratification (self-management,
end of the division of labour). At this stage in Marx’s development it seems clear that
his view of the potential of socialism is considerably influenced by Fourier in this
respect, although his terminology is somewhat different. [27] The clearest example of
Fourier’s influence is the notorious passage in the German Ideology on the abolition of
the division of labour. Then ‘nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can
become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,
criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman,
shepherd, or critic’. [28]
This illustration maps pretty well the sort of working days Fourier outlined in his utopian
scheme. [29] The pastoralism may well be ironical, since Marx had already, in the 1844
Manuscripts, criticized Fourier for taking agricultural work as exemplary. [30] What is not
ironical, apparently, is the general idea of such a solution to the division of labour. Yet
one is struck by the fact that one does not overcome the present fragmentation of
production by collating a heap of fragments. [31]
At all events, with the rejection of such Fourierism and the substitution of a relativized
problem of continuing engagement with the imperatives of labour, the question of the
relationship between free activity and material production becomes open. There are
three possible solutions, each of which Marx toys with at some time. There is no space
here to study in detail the ambivalence, and apparent contradictions, on the question in
Marx’s later writings. All we can do is to give some indication that he grapples with the
problem.

The first alternative we have already seen, namely, the acknowledgement of the
permanence of the realm of necessity, the distinction from this of the realm of freedom,
and hence the view that labour remains man’s curse. All one can hope for is the
possible abolition of labour through total automation (a tendency anticipated by Marx in
his Grundrisse). [32] The second alternative is to return unblushingly to the original
perspective. This we find in one of Marx’s last works, the critique of the Gotha
programme, in which his vision of ‘a higher phase of communist society’ includes,
besides the abolition of the division of labour, the remarkable claim that labour
becomes ‘life’s prime want’! [33] This seems to return us to Fourier. For Fourier,
productive labour is a natural and spontaneous need; given a suitable social structure it
becomes identical with self-enjoyment.
The third solution would refuse such an identity, but refuse also the unmediated
opposition of self-activity and material production. it would be an attempt to try for a
dialectical interpretation of freedom and necessity. [34] This idea can be found in Marx,
when he goes for a middle way between Smith and Fourier, in his Grundrisse. Marx
argues that because Smith has in mind only capitalist forms of employment he
counterposes labour to freedom and happiness. In trying to envisage an alternative
conception Marx first argues that an individual in his normal state of health needs to
work; he then argues that this does not mean that such work is to be ‘mere fun, mere
amusement, as Fourier with grissette-like naïvety conceives it’; for ‘really free working,
e.g. composing,’ is a serious business requiring ‘intense exertion’. The key thing that
brings it within the realm of freedom is when the aims that impose this discipline are not
imposed from without but are posited by the individual himself. In such a context,
overcoming obstacles ‘is in itself a liberating activity’ [35] (a very Hegelian idea).
‘Real economy’, Marx declares, ‘consists of the saving of labour time’. This of course
depends on ‘the development of the productive forces.’ However, the free time won is
in truth ‘time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon
the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power’. [36] Given this,
we cannot accept an abstract antithesis between ‘direct labour time and free time’. This
is an illusion grounded in ‘the perspective of bourgeois economy’. Marx underlines
Fourier’s contribution in shifting the attention of socialists from questions of distribution
to that of the mode of production; but he reasserts that ‘labour cannot become play, as
Fourier would like’. [37] Yet, because free time allows for ‘higher activity’ we get a
different kind of subject entering production, an educated worker. In work Marx sees
three aspects: the ‘discipline’ involved in the process of becoming human; the creative
use of acquired knowledge and power; and even ‘in so far as labour requires practical
use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time
exercise’. [38]
The solution suggested in such passages to the supposed antithesis between free
activity and materially determined production presupposes the whole ontology
inaugurated (if not completed) in the 1844 Manuscripts. Once the socially constituted
unity in difference of man with nature is thought through, such an abstract antithesis
must be rejected; even if, from the perspective of the existing estranged relationships, it
seems all too plausible. Free activity (like alienated activity in fact) is constituted
socially. Society in turn is constituted on the basis of material production. There is
therefore a relationship between free activity and material production which it is the
task of historical materialism to elucidate. As we have seen, this relationship is not
simply quantitative, where free time depends on the shortening of the working day,
although this is certainly important and rests on the potential of the productive forces
available. It is also a matter of a growing mediatedness of the two sides such that the
material practice through which man actualizes himself is a unified process which,
though conditioned by existing wants and productive powers, also realizes both in
itself, and in its grounding of other practices, human creativity and liberation. This
process is open-ended in that new goals, new obstacles, and new powers, spring from
it.
Freedom is not something given, it is won and re-won in the dialectic of history.

Summary
Marx’s theory of alienation is not simply a materialist transformation of Hegel. None the
less, the unity of man and nature is insufficiently problematized in 1844. Hence, the
abolition of private property is identified with the abolition of ‘labour’ and the transition
to free activity. Later, Marx recognizes that productive activity, even in socialism, is a
labour caught up in the dialectic of freedom and necessity.

Appendix

Problems of Interpretation
In order to show the sheer difficulty of reading the text of 1844 (towards the overcoming
of which these labours are directed), let us take as a case study a single passage and
see how four different commentators respond to it. This passage is of peculiar
importance because it is from the beginning of the section on ‘estranged labour’ in the
first manuscript, that is to say, the place where Marx first introduces the idea of
alienation. Marx writes:
Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as
a  commodity . . . This fact simply means that the object that labour produces, its
product, confronts it as  something alien, as a  power independent of the producer.
The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object; it is
the  objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification.
Under these economic conditions this realization of labour appears as loss of
reality for the workers, objectification as  loss of, and bondage to, the object,
appropriation as  estrangement, as  alienation . ‘ . So much does the appropriation
of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces
the less he can possess and the more he boils under the sway of his product,
capital. All these consequences flow from a situation characterized by this: that
the worker is related to the  product of his labour as to an  alien object. [39]
Ignorant writers, not worthy of particular notice, take ‘objectification’ here to carry a
negative load, to be nothing but a synonym for alienation. They do this without knowing
any Hegel. Yet even a sophisticated scholar like Pierre Naville tends to the same
mistaken identification when he says that what we have here is a philosophical account
borrowed from Hegel of the equation of objectification and alienation. He qualifies this
merely by granting that Marx is anxious to give the idea ‘a practical basis’. [40]
Lukács, by contrast, says of exactly the same passage that, while Hegel is not
mentioned by name, ‘even a cursory glance’ reveals that these remarks amount to ‘a
fundamental critique of Hegel’s philosophy’. This is because estrangement is sharply
distinguished here from objectification in the act of labour. [41]
Erich Fromm equates the passage with one from Capital.[42] This arouses the ire of
Ernest Mandel, who objects that ‘Fromm does not notice that in the former what is
being discussed is labour and the products of labour in general, whereas the latter
begins with these very words: “Within the capitalist system . . .”.’ [43] Mandel avers that
the passage in question does not seek the origin of alienated labour ‘in a specific form
of human society, but in human nature itself’. [44]
Mandel’s reading is clearly wrong. The references to commodities and capital are clear
enough. Furthermore, Marx cannot believe that alienated labour is rooted in human
nature itself because the sequence of oppositions between objectification and loss of
the object, etc. shows he is aware that specific economic conditions are responsible
when appropriation appears as alienation. One reason why Mandel is led astray is that,
as was explained in chapter 1, Marx uses ‘labour’ in his early writings in the same
sense as does political economy, namely as productive activity formed by the present
economic conditions, not as the more general notion Mandel takes it to be. Unlike
political economy, Marx does not take such labour to be inherent in human nature.
Hence he can look forward to the practical abolition of alienation.

1 Because he grounds human being in its objective relations Marx’s ontology in

the 1844 Mss supersedes a mere anthropology; thus it is not touched by such claims on
the part of Althusser, Sève and others.
2 Louis Althusser, For Marx (1965), trans. Ben Brewster, London, 1969, p. 197.
3 Ibid., p. 214.
4 Ibid., p. 198n.
5 Werke Eb., 512-16; C.W.3, 273-6; E.W., 325-8.
6 Werke Eb., 516; C.W.3, 276.
7 Werke Eb., 583; C.W.3, 341; E.W., 395.
8 István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, London, 1970, p. 45.
9 Ian Hunt and Roy Swan, ‘A comparison of Marxist and Hegelian dialectical
form’, Radical Philosophy (1982), no. 30., pp. 36-7.
10 Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 296.
11 Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 297.
12 Werke Eb., 538; C.W.3, 298; E.W., 349.
13 Werke Eb., 541; C.W.3, 301.
14 Werke Eb., 543; C.W.3, 303.
15 C.1 (Penguin), 283.
16 See Georg Lukács, Ontology of Social Being: Marx (1972), tram. D. Fernbach,
London, 1978, p. 9.
17 Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830), Hamburg, 1975. para. 381.
18 Werke Eb., 588; C.W.3, 346; E.W., 399-400.
19 Werke Eb., 541; C.W.3, 301. For a vigorous attack on neo-Hegelian Marxism for
conceptualizing nature as unformed material for human practice see Peter
Ruben, Dialektik und Arbeit der Philosophie, Köln, 1978.
20 Werke Eb., 579; C.W.3, 337.
21 Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 409-10; see also
Lukács, Ontology, pp. 8-10.
22 C.3 (Penguin), 959.
23 For example, in the German Ideology, C.W.5, 49.
24 Mészáros, Theory of Alienation, p. 119.
25 C.W.5, 87-8. The last phrase is my attempt to give sense to ‘Abstreifung aller
Naturwüchtigkeit‘ because C.W.5 gives somewhat the wrong impression with ‘casting off
all natural limitations’.
26 Pierre Naville, in De L’Aliénation à la Jouissance, Paris, 1957, thinks Marx stock to the
aspiration to abolish labour in favour of free activity. J.R. Mailer, in Actualité de Fourier,
ed. Henri Lefebvre, Paris, 1975, refutes Naville (pp. 264-87).
27 For a comparison see Janina Rosa Mailer, ‘Fourier et Marx’, in Lefebvre, Actualité de
Fourier.
28 C.W.5, 47.
29 Oeuvres Complètes Tome VI. Paris. 1966-68, pp. 67-8.
30 Werke Eb., 534; C.W.3, 294.
31 Kostas Axelos says that this is a ‘transcendence of “differences” into a world of
generalized indifference’, unless it is reconceptualized as ‘play’: Alienation, Praxis and
Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx (1961), trans. R. Bruzina, Austin, Texas, and London,
1976, p. 258.
32 Grundrisse, pp. 704-6.
33 M.E.S.W., 324. See the analysis in Kate Soper, On Human Needs, Brighton, 1981, pp.
196 ff.
34 For remarks on this see Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete (1961), Dordrecht,
1976, pp. 123-7.
35 New MEGA II, 1, Teil 2, 499; Grundrisse, p. 611.
36 New MEGA II, 1, Teil 2, 589; Grundrisse, p. 711.
37 New MEGA, ibid.; Grundrisse, p. 712.
38 Ibid. The reference to discipline here perhaps recalls Hegel’s definition of work as
desire restrained and checked, and its role in the becoming of self-consciousness. It is
amusing in the light of Marx’s criticism of Fourier that contemporary French philosophy
is still prone to celebrate ‘the play of desire’ as against ‘productivism’.
39 Werke Eb., 511-12; C.W.3, 272; E.W., 324.
40 Naville, De L’Aliénation, pp. 148-9.
41 Werke 8, 631; The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London, 1975, p. 549.
42 Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), New York, 1971, pp. 51-2.
43 Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (1967), London,
1971, p. 165.
44 Ibid., p. 161.

Chapter 11 – The Continuing Importance of 1844

← Chapter 10 | APPENDIX: Problems of Translation →

Introduction
It was in 1844 that Marx first embarked on ‘the critique of political economy’; it was a
task he never really completed. The only substantial result of his labours that he
himself saw published was the first volume of Capital in 1867. A question arises
immediately. If it took Marx 23 years’ work before he could present the core of his
findings in published form, of what value are the unpublished studies of 1844? The
controversy about the ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx is well known. It is beyond the scope
of this work to trace the development of Marx’s thought throughout his entire opus,
although some brief indications have been given earlier; the attempt here is solely to
clarify the ideas of 1844. None the less, it is necessary to say something, however
brief, in order to indicate the continuing importance of this turning point.

1844 and 1867

It must be conceded at the outset that there is no trace in the 1844 Manuscripts of the
specific concepts Marx employs in his subsequent scientific account of the capitalist
economy. Most importantly, he has no adequate account of the capital relation and
hence no theory of surplus value. The concept of alienation evidently embraces this;
but Marx lacked the resources to spell out the more concrete determinations required.
Let us see how one or two sympathetic commentators deal with this issue. Allen Wood
finds that Marx’s mature theory ‘does not assign to alienation the basic explanatory role
projected for it in the early fragment’. Nevertheless, Wood also believes that ‘Marx
does not simply abandon the concept of alienation in his mature writings. The position
is that in the later works it is no longer explanatory but descriptive or diagnostic’. [1] it
describes the effects of the existing mode of production rather than accounts for them;
rather as a doctor might diagnose fever without yet having discovered the bacterium
responsible.
On this view, then, we could say that in 1844 Marx goes as far as problematizing the
private property relationship, but not explaining it. In spite of his claim to have
explained the findings of the political economists to them, he merely accepts their
results (the labour theory of value, the conflicts over distribution) and then draws
attention to the paradox that everything is traced to labour, yet labour gets nothing and
private property everything. But the private property relationship must be examined in
itself to show not just that philosophical critique demands a resolution but that the real
nature of the object itself is driving towards it.
Marx has grasped the elevation of capital to a pure form abstracted from content but he
has not yet discovered the dynamic of the form itself and the way it really sustains itself
on the basis of surplus labour. Capitalism as an ontologically distinct finite system of
self-determination is not produced. He has not shown how the capital relation is
reproduced. He cannot therefore prove that the private property relation is a dynamic
contradictory one producing its own grave diggers. In 1867 we get a scientific account
of the inner nature, as opposed to the phenomenal results, of the relation earlier
problematized. Nevertheless, when his development of the theory of capitalist
production is successful, we may argue, this does not mean a rejection of his early
work, rather its adequate founding; the intuitions become solid arguments; the
‘choreography’ gets its infilling.
In my opinion there is more to the 1844 Manuscripts than this. While the view outlined
above would justify paying attention to the 1844 Manuscripts, it does not give it an
essential role, not just in posing problems, but in founding Marx’s new science.
Alex Callinicos suggests that such a role may be elucidated by recourse to the
distinction made by Popper and his followers between scientific and metaphysical
propositions. According to this view, philosophical theories are metaphysical because
they can never be conclusively tested, and attempts to establish their truth involve
some a priori procedure. Metaphysical propositions may, nevertheless, serve a
heuristic function in a scientific research programme. ‘In so far as the hypotheses they
generate are confirmed or refuted, such metaphysical statements may themselves be
regarded as verifiable or falsifiable . . .’. [2]
According to Callinicos, the 1844 Manuscripts contain such a metaphysical theory (of
man as a producer, and the analysis of estranged labour). This theory is not empirical
but none the less inspires some of Marx’s assumptions. ‘For example, there can be no
doubt that it partially motivated Marx’s choice of social labour, rather than utility, as the
homogeneous factor underlying the variety of commodities placed on the
market.’ [3] However, Callinicos hastens to add that the truth of the labour theory of
value cannot be derived from the truth of Marx’s theory of human nature, since the
latter is treated as a metaphysical theory which can be neither confirmed nor refuted by
experience; rather it depends upon the falsifiable empirical hypotheses derived from
it’. [4]
Callinicos is right to say that Marx’s philosophy of man should not be vindicated on a
priori argument but on the success of the research programme it inspires. However, to
label it metaphysical simply expresses a certain narrow epistemological prejudice.
What we are discussing are the ontological commitments implicit in any science. It is
how things are that determines how they are known and not the other way around.
It is impossible to show here in detail how chapter after chapter of Capital can be
understood as a further concretization of the ideas of 1844. What can be asserted in
particular is that the thrust of Capital as a critique of political economy is made possible
by the ontological framework established in 1844 and somewhat modified later in the
manner discussed in chapter 10. [5] The movement of history is there understood as
the outcome of the transformation of the man-nature relationship. In this way the
concept of ‘mode of production’ is made possible.
On the basis of this ontological priority accorded to productive activity all modes of
production and associated forms of social organization are opened to radical
critique. [6] It is the interplay in Marx’s theory between the permanent moment of
mediated unity of man and nature, and the historically specific social forms this takes,
that allows critical space for the diagnosis of the self-supersession of a given form.
Certainly, in order to unmask the fetishized ‘naturalness’ of capitalist relations of
production such an ontological framework is required. The critique of political economy
requires a double movement. First the recognition that, as private property, labour-
power and capital are estranged, each recalcitrant to appropriation by the other. This
can be grasped only when the estranged forms are distinguished from the underlying
man-nature unity. Then in turn the secondary mediations, exchange, wages, profit, can
be represented as alien mediators reproducing rather than cancelling the estranged
relationship. This critical understanding of the social form in which the man-nature
dialectic is now worked out is possible only if alienated labour is grasped both in its
non-identity with the primary mediation and also as the historically specific form taken
by this underlying content considered as ontologically basic. The historical conditions of
alienation can become the object of analysis only if they are situated in relation to
that mediated unity which, in so far as it is mediated, allows for this alienation, and
which in so far as it is a unity, allows a correct understanding of the existing system of
social reproduction based on ‘labour’ (under the sign of private property) as an alien
mediator.
The phenomena of estrangement must be understood in terms of the way in which the
fundamental mediated unity of man and nature gives rise through specific historical
processes to particular alienated forms of such mediation.

The form of value, for example, as Marx points out in his well-known letter to
Kugelmann, must in some way enshrine, albeit in mystified form, the process of
objectification and material reproduction. [7] It is not necessary to know this in order to
adhere to a labour theory of value. This was possible for Smith and Ricardo. But
it is necessary if the value-form of the product of labour is to become an object of
criticism instead of being illegitimately naturalized, as it was in classical political
economy which identified the two levels of mediation. At the same time, the labour
theory of value cannot be articulated sufficiently on the basis of the ontological
premises alone. To articulate correctly the forms of appearance of the content is no
easy task. Marx had to expend enormous effort in working out the dialectic of the
value-form itself, in solving the secret of surplus value and in disentangling the essence
of the capital relation from its mystifying forms of appearance (interest, profit etc.). But
it is only when the capital relation is conceived as a specific social form of material
reproduction that the essential relation can be distinguished from the fetishized forms.
Although the failure of bourgeois economics may be explained politically, its intellectual
limitations come down to its conflation of different levels of mediation, and its
methodological individualism, that is to say, its failure to grasp the nature of social
being: its weakness is in its ontology. Conversely, Marx’s Capital is inconceivable
without its ontological underpinning, and that was first opened up in the 1844
Manuscripts.
We may say that anyone who fails to see the relevance of the 1844
Manuscripts to Capital has simply not understood Capital itself. Some corroboration of
this is that Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism is driven into a bizarre idealism of the
structure, which treats particular individuals merely as bearers of its relations, in the
same way as Hegel’s ‘concept’ (quelle horreur!). In this way, far from providing a
critique of reification, theoretical anti-humanism capitulates to it. But, to borrow Marx
and Engels’ words, structure ‘fights no fight’; ‘it is real living man who fights’. [8] In
proletarian revolution the workers precisely refuse to be bearers of the commodity
labour-power any longer.
In comprehending such transformations the importance of an ontological framework
against which to measure the shifting historical forms is clear. Otherwise critique would
be reduced to contesting the validity of the existing order from the standpoint of a
historically contingent utopian aspiration. By contrast, Marx’s critique acquires a
rootedness in material reality whereby it can ground the historical necessity of existing
forms, while yet grasping their limits and the conditions of their supersession.

The Standpoint of Labour

Both in the 1844 Manuscripts and Capital it is clear that the political location of Marx’s
critique is that of the proletariat. [9] It is important to recognize that this is not a matter
of a sympathetic identification with their problems. It flows from the identification of
labour as the key social mediator. Furthermore, simply to say that Marx takes the
standpoint of labour is inadequate. It has to be said also that Marx takes
the critically adopted standpoint of labour, and that this is a matter not of mere partiality
but of the place of labour in the social totality.
We have shown that, already in 1844, the standpoint of practical criticism is not man in
general, but ‘labour’, that is to say, a definite pole of the system of estrangement. This
is a political as well as a philosophical advance over Feuerbach’s humanism because
Marx explicitly links it to class-political communism, not just to the question of human
essence. Significantly, the very first sentence of the 1844 Manuscripts reads: ‘Wages
are determined through the hostile struggle between capitalist and worker.’ [10] The
identification of the proletariat as the class of the future is no longer based on its
universal suffering but on its strategic position in the economic order. However, in order
to go beyond his sources in political economy, Marx has to unmask their identification
of productive activity with wage-labour, and to grasp ‘labour’ as an estranged and
alienating mediator falsely absolutized by Smith, and modelled in idealist philosophy by
Hegel.
Hence the importance of characterizing Marx’s position as that of the critically adopted
standpoint of labour. At the same time this implies that Marx cannot be satisfied with a
call for higher wages, or better conditions, in this way expressing the standpoint of
labour against capital within the private property system. Because he grasps such
‘labour’ as a transient historical form of the productive activity that underpins the whole,
he can envisage the proletariat abolishing itself as proletariat in the communist
revolution.
Moreover, for Marx, such a revolution is to be no mere juridical rearrangement realizing
‘justice’, nor a narrowly economic matter of efficient allocation of resources to meet
basic needs. It is a question of a fundamental transformation of social being, hence of
individuals, their activity and their essential relations. It is a question of what socialism
is all about – emergence of a truly human society. The later scientific achievements,
and the orientation to problems of political organization, never obliterated Marx’s
commitment to the profound insights of 1844.

1 A.W. Wood, Karl Marx, London, 1981, p. 7.

2 Alex Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy, Oxford, 1983, p. 41.
3Ibid., p. 53. Scott Meikle goes so far as to say that, given the 1844 Mss, ‘the labour
theory of value must follow’: Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, London, 1985, p.
55.
4Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy, p. 53.
5See Georg Lukács, Ontology of Social Being: Marx, trans. D. Fernbach, London, 1978,
pp. 10-15, on this.
6See Gülnur Savran, ‘Rousseau, Hegel and the Critique of Civil Society’, DPhil. thesis,
University of Sussex 1983; the line of argument below is in agreement with her
analysis.
711 July 1868: Selected Correspondence, ed. S. Ryazanskaya, Moscow, 1965, p. 208.
8 The Holy Family: C.W.4, 93. For useful discussions see Alfred Schmidt, History and
Structure, Cambridge, Moss., and London, 1981, esp. pp. 61-2, and Norman
Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, London, 1983, esp. pp. 92-4.
9’In so far as such a critique represents a class, it can only represent the class whose
task is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all
classes – the proletariat’: C.1 (Penguin), 98.
10 Werke Eb., 471; C.W.3, 235.

Problems of Translation
← Chapter 11 | Bibliography →

Entäusserung (and Entfremdung)

According to Lukács there is nothing novel about these terms: they are simply German
translations of the English word ‘alienation’. ‘Alienation’ itself, he points out, was used
in political theory to refer to the renunciation of natural liberty implicit in the social
contract. He says that Entäusserung was first used in philosophy by Fichte. [1]
We translate Entfremdung by ‘estrangement’ (but fremd as ‘alien’),
and Entäusserung nearly always by ‘alienation’. As a matter of fact Entäusserung is a
rather unusual German word. An illustration of this is that Cassell’s Dictionary (12th ed.,
1968) does not give it in the English section as an equivalent for those English words
given under the entry for Entäusserung in the German section, preferring a more usual
form, namely Veräusserung. Possible translations of Entäusserung include ‘alienation’,
‘renunciation’, ‘parting with’, ‘relinquishment’, ‘externalization’, ‘divestiture’, ‘surrender’.
Where alienation of property is concerned one can use Entäusserung but
not Entfremdung, the latter is restricted to cases of interpersonal estrangement. There is
indeed no reason not to use ‘estrangement’ to render Entfremdung, thus leaving
‘alienation’ free to render Entäusserung.
The closest translation of Entäusserung from a purely etymological point of view is
‘externalization’. It is the usual choice of Miller in his translation of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The root ‘äusserung‘ means manifestation
(from äusser-‘outer’) and the prefix ‘Ent‘ indicates establishment of or entry into a new
state or relinquishment of an old state; thus, in combination, the sense is that
something is manifested in such a way as to change its state. Whereas Veräusserung –
a more common equivalent of alienation, especially when it just means ‘sale’ – is a
fairly neutral word, it is clear that Marx means Entäusserung to have a negative
connotation.
The sense of relinquishment comes out strongly when Marx contrasts the root and its
modification in connection with life: he says of private property that in it man’s
‘expression of life {Lebensäusserung} is his alienation/loss of life
{Lebensentäusserung}’. [2] In other places Marx contrasts similarly ‘Ver‘ forms with ‘Ent‘
forms: ‘In these economic conditions this realization {Verwirklichung} of labour appears
as a loss of reality {Entwirklichung} for the worker.’ [3] Again: ‘Hegel conceives
objectification {Vergegenständlichung} as loss of object {Entgegenständlichung}.’ [4]
Before the investigation in the 1844 Manuscripts the aspect of alienation that had most
impressed Marx was the universalization of market relations with the consequent
reification of the human world. He says: ‘Selling is the practice of alienation’ (‘Die
Veräusserung ist die Praxis der Entäusserung‘). This is because man can ‘produce objects
only by making his products and his activity subordinate to an alien substance and
giving them the significance of an alien substance – money’. [5] Because Marx
carefully distinguishes between Vergegenständlichung (‘objectification’) and Entäusserung,
to translate the latter as ‘externalization’ creates a risk of confusion.
The question arises as to whether Entfremdung and Entäusserung are one concept or
two. As we have already explained, Entfremdung is of narrower application, in that it
could not be used with reference to transfer of property. Furthermore, it seems to have
a less active connotation than Entäusserung. With Hegel’s Phenomenology it is tempting to
suggest that Entfremdung stands to Entäusserung as phenomenological result to the
active process of spirit’s positing of itself in otherness. This would conform with Marx’s
gloss: ‘Entfremdung . . . constitutes the real interest of this Entäusserung‘. [6] Clearly this
is not meant as a tautology, so Marx must be observing some distinction in Hegel.
Richard Schacht [7] makes this point in criticism of T.B. Bottomore, who usually
translates both terms as alienation on the grounds that ‘Marx (unlike Hegel) does not
make a systematic distinction between them’. [8] But, since Marx is here referring
precisely to Hegel, it is still possible that Bottomore is right. However, in order not to
prejudge the question, they should certainly be distinguished in English translation.
As I explain in the text, Hegel finds something ‘positive’ in Entäusserung: this could
hardly be so with Entfremdung, which is precisely the negative aspect of the movement.
Probably Marx uses Entäusserung when he has in mind that man loses something of
himself through alienation, and Entfremdung to mark its appearance as something other
than himself.
As far as my own commentary is concerned, I use both ‘estrangement’ and ‘alienation’,
not only for stylistic variation, but sometimes also to indicate a distinction between a
state (estrangement) and a process (alienation).

A table of translations of Entfremdung and Entäusserung in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts and

Hegel’s Phenomenology is given below.

Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts

M. Milligan: Economic and
Philosophical
 Manuscripts of 1844,
Moscow 1960, and also,
revised by D. Struik,
in Marx-Engels
Collected Works Volume
3, London 1975.
Entfremdung =
estrangement.
Entäusserung =
alienation (or
externalization)

Karl Marx Early

Writings, London, 1963.
Entfremdung and
Entäusserung =
T.B. alienation (or
Bottomore: estrangement)

Writings of the Young

Marx, New York, 1967.
Entäusserung =
L.D. Easton externalization
and K. H. Entfremdung =
Guddat: alienation.

Karl Marx Early

Writings,
Harmondsworth, 1974.
Entfremdung =
estrangement.
Entäusserung =
alienation (or
G. Benton: externalization)

Karl Marx Early Texts,

Oxford, 1971.
Entfremdung =
alienation.
D. Entäusserung =
McLellan: externalization

Hegel’s Phenomenology
A.V. Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Miller: Spirit, Oxford, 1977.
Entfremdung = alienation.
Entäusserung =
externalization. Miller warns
 that he ‘departs from a rigid
consistency in rendering . . .’.
This is so: he has
‘externalization’
for Entäusserung in para. 804,
but in para. 805 he has
‘alienation’, while in para. 806
he switches back.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Mind, London, revised 2nd ed.
1949.
Entfremdung = estrangement.
Entäusserung = various, he
often resorts to a bracketed
alternative, e.g. ‘relinquishes
(externalizes)’. (He also gives
as an alternative to ‘unhappy
consciousness’ the phrase
‘alienated soul’, which does
J.B. not appear in the German (p.
Baillie: 251).)

Das Moment (moment)

This term of art Hegel generalizes from mechanics. With reference to the resultant
force exerted by a lever, weight and the distance from the point of application, are
called its moments. It is clear from this that it has nothing to do with a moment in time.
In German Hegel can distinguish between das Moment (as an aspect of a dialectically
structured whole or process) and der Moment (of time).

Aufheben
Hegel tells us in his Science of Logic that ‘aufheben‘ is one of the most important notions
in philosophy. He says that it is not a question of reducing something to nothingness
but of disposing of it as a result of mediation. He points out that in ordinary
language aufheben means both ‘to abolish’ and ‘to preserve’ and that he intends to take
advantage of this double meaning. [9]
According to W.T. Harris ‘reduce to a moment’ is the ‘exact signification’
of aufheben (although he uses ‘cancel’ himself). [10] In some ways this would be a good
translation were it not for the implication of elevation in the term. I use ‘supersede’
when the stress is more on abolition, and when the stress is on preservation I use the
slightly ‘technical’ term ‘sublate’, which was the choice of the Logic’s early translator J.
H. Stirling (The Secret of Hegel). The dictionary definition of ‘sublate’ is ‘to resolve in a
higher unity’.
Der Mensch
Although this refers to human beings in general it is standardly translated as ‘man’. But
German also has ‘der Mann‘ where the male of the species is meant. Unfortunately,
because English uses ‘human’ as an adjective it is not available as a noun. I have
therefore followed standard practice in using ‘man’ as a generic both in the quotations
and my own commentary. However, it should be noted that Marx’s German is not as
sexist as English translations make it appear. Where Marx discusses the relationship of
man to woman each term is employed in its separate sense. Thus: ‘The relation
of Mannes to woman is the most natural relation of Menschen to Menschen.’ [11]

Setzen (posit)
‘To posit’ is to put in place, set up, or establish. In an intellectual context it refers to the
assertion or proof of some truth. However, Hegel and Marx use it in wider contexts,
wherever something is brought into a specific place or relation. Thus the antithesis of
property and propertylessness is ‘posited by private property itself’ when there is a real
causal relationship between them – that one has property just because the other has
not. [12]

1
Werke 8, 658; The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London, 1975,
p. 538.
2
C.W.3, 299.
3
C.W.3, 272.
4 C.W.3, 332-3.
5
‘On the Jewish Question II’, E.W., 241.
6
Werke Eb., 572; C.W.3, 331.
7
Schacht, Alienation, London, 1971, p. 72 n.7.
8
Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore, London, 1963, p. xix.
9
Wissenschaft der Logik, Hamburg, 1955, pp. 93-5; Hegel’s Science of
Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, London, 1969. pp. 106-8.
10
In Hegel Selections, ed. J. Loewenberg, New York, 1929, esp. p. 102n.
11
Werke Eb., 536; C.W.3, 296.
12
Werke Eb., 534; C.W.3, 294.

Bibliography
← Appendix | Contents →
This bibliography assembles full details of works to
which reference is made in the text and notes into five sections. The first
covers editions and translations of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts; the
second gives other volumes of Marx and Engels’ works cited here; the third
gives the Hegel texts; the fourth lists other primary sources; the fifth
contains the secondary literature referred to. A date in brackets is
that of original publication; then follow details of the edition or
translation.

1 Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts

These manuscripts, written in
Paris in 1844, are known by the title Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte. They are
referred to throughout this text as the 1844 Manuscripts. A
considerable part of the text has not been preserved; what remains comprises three
manuscripts, each with its own pagination. There are marginal notes
indicating Marx’s intentions to reorder the material. Number 1 below
contains the material reproduced as closely as possible from the original
manuscripts. It also contains, quite separately, a lightly edited
version. Number 2 contains a more thoroughly edited text attempting to follow
Marx’s intentions. This is the volume to which references are made
throughout the text (Werke Eb.). Number 3 contains the standard English
translation (based on numbers 5 and 6), to which quotations are also
keyed (C.W.3). However, it should not be assumed that the renderings given
follow this. For further comparison, references are sometimes given
also to the translation listed as number 4 below (E.W.). Numbers 8 and 9
contain only partial translations of the 1844 Manuscripts.
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung Band 2,
Werke März 1843 bis August 1844, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1982.
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Ergänzungzband, Schriften bis
1844, Erster Teil, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1968.
3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works Volume 3 (1843-44),
trans. M. Milligan and D.J. Struik, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1975.
4. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Gregor Benton, The Pelican Marx
Library, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1975.
5. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans.
Martin Milligan, F.L.P.H., Moscow, 1960.
6. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk
J. Struik (revised version of Milligan trans.), International
Publishers, New York, 1964.
7. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore, Watts, London,
1963.
8. Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans.
Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1967.
9. Karl Marx, Early Texts, trans. David McLellan, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
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 Adams, H.P., Karl Marx in his Earlier Writings
(1940), London, 1965.
 Althusser, Louis, For Marx (1965), trans. Ben
Brewster, London, 1969.
Politics and History (1970), London,
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 Arthur, C.J., ‘Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and a myth of Marxology’ New
Left Review (1983), 142.
 Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political
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 Axelos, Kostas, Alienation, Praxis and Techné in the Thought of Karl
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 Berki, R.N., Insight and Vision: the problem of Communism in Marx’s
Thought, London, 1983.
 Bottomore, Tom, (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford, 1983.
 Callinicos, Alex, Marxism and Philosophy, Oxford, 1983.
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 Della Volpe, Galvano, Rousseau and Marx (1964), London, 1978.
 Desan, Wilfred, The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1965), New York, 1966.
 Descombes, Vincent, Modern French Philosophy (1979), Cambridge, 1982.
 Dunayevskaya, Raya, Marxism and Freedom, New York, 1958.
Philosophy and Revolution, New York, 1973.
 Dupré, Louis, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism, New York, 1966.
 Edgley, Roy, and Osborne, Richard (eds.), Radical Philosophy Reader,
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 Elder, Crawford, Appropriating Hegel, Aberdeen, 1981.
 Findlay, J.N., Hegel: a Re-Examination, London, 1958.
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 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Hegel’s Dialectic, New Haven, Conn., and London,
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 Geras, Norman, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, London,
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 Gould, Carol C., Marx’s Social Ontology, Cambridge, Mass., and London,
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 Hunt, Ian, and Swan, Roy, ‘A comparison of Marxist and Hegelian
dialectical form’, Radical Philosophy (1982) No. 30.
 Hyppolite, Jean, Genesis and Structure, of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of
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Hegel (1955), trans. J. O’Neill, New York. 1969.
 Israel, Joachim, The Language of Dialectic and the Dialectics of
Language, Brighton, 1979.
 Kamenka, Eugene, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, London. 1962.
 Kaufmann, Walter, Hegel: a Reinterpretation, Garden City, NY, 1965.
 Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), ed. A.
Bloom, trans. J.H. Nichols, New York, 1969.
 Kosík, Karel, Dialectics of the Concrete (l961), Dordrecht, 1976.
 Lefebvre, Henri, Dialectical Materialism, (1939), London, 1968.
Actualité de Fourier, colloque d’Arc-et-Senans sous la direction de
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 Löwith, Karl, From Hegel to Nietzsche (1941), London, 1965.
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