What is the difference between Hegel and Marx?

Hegel for Social Movements, Lecture 1

This series of lectures is the outcome of an immanent critique I have carried out over the
past 20 years of three currents of thinking, founded in turn by Hegel, Marx and
Vygotsky. These three figures each worked in very different circumstances, and
circumstances very different from own times. But they belong to a single current of
monist thought. My aim is to offer a philosophical synthesis which is equally the
immanent product of each of these currents. I am not offering a comprehensive
philosophical or political system, something which is practically impossible in our times,
but I do claim to offer a foundational position from which the ideas of Marx and Hegel
can be brought to life and made relevant to our times.
Although I aim to present a synthesis, I shall open the series with two lectures which
critically reflect on the relation between Hegel and Marx. In this first talk I ask the
question: what is the difference between Hegel and Marx, and in the second talk, after
the break, I ask: in what sense was Hegel an Idealist?

The difference between Hegel and Marx

The philosophical difference between Hegel and Marx is a topic which has been hotly
disputed for over a century and will be examined presently, but the essential difference
between Marx and Hegel is the times they lived in. In Hegel’s words:
every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It
is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an
individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes.
Given the economic, social and cultural peculiarities of Germany in Hegel’s day there
was some basis for Hegel to believe that it would be through philosophy, rather than
with guns and mobs, that Germany could modernise itself. That was certainly an
‘idealist’ position, but that does not invalidate the choice Hegel made in his day.
Hegel was 18 at the time of the storming of the Bastille. He supported the aims of the
Revolution, and in particular Napoleon’s extension of the Revolution across Europe, but
he was horrified by Robespierre’s Terror and saw the Revolution as a tragedy.
At the time Hegel wrote the first draft of the Philosophy of Right in 1817, the Congress of
Vienna had just consolidated 300 states of the Holy Roman Empire to just 38. The
average population of a state in Germany was thus about 600,000, about the population
of Newcastle today. Surrounded by great states with mass armies, the German states
were powerless. But Hegel did not advocate for German unification, which was only
achieved by Bismarck in 1871.
The Prussian King was a reformer but as a result of religious disputes, he took a
reactionary turn in 1817, suppressed dissent, and Prussia returned to absolute
monarchy. In this context, Hegel’s vision of a constitutional monarchy outlined in
Philosophy of Right was a progressive program for reform. But Hegel did not advocate
revolutionary action. According to the Philosophy of Right, social change proceeds
within the existing legal framework. This was conditional; a nation occupied by a foreign
power, under the heel of a despot, or subjected to slavery, were not only justified but
obliged to fight to the death for liberty. Now the citizens of Germany of that time had
less opportunity for political action than a citizen of Australia today, but insurrectionary
violence was no more viable in his day than it is in Australia today.

The world after Hegel’s death

After Hegel’s death in 1831, his students drew the revolutionary conclusions that were
implicit in their teacher’s philosophy. Hegelianism spilt over the walls of the academy as
his students popularised his teachings and translated them into the language of politics
‒ or rather, translated politics into the language of Hegelianism. In 1841, the Prussian
government moved to “expunge the dragon's seed of Hegelian pantheism” from the
minds of Prussian youth. The newly-appointed Minister for Culture mobilized Friedrich
Schelling (the last surviving representative of German Idealism, and now a conservative)
to come to Berlin and do the job. His lecture in December 1841 was attended by Engels,
Bakunin, Kierkegaard and notables from all over Europe and failed to quell the spread
of radical ideas and revolutionary agitation.
It is a remarkable fact that almost all the revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th century
were either students of Hegel, Hegelians of the second or third philosophical generation
or they received their Hegel secondhand through Marx or other critical currents. Hegel
was, after all, the first progressive opponent of Liberalism and individualism. Although
Hegel saw himself as a foot soldier of the Enlightenment, his critique of Liberal
individualism provided the philosophical basis for the next epochal change.
Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, 280 km from Hegel’s birthplace, and was 12 years old at
the time of the July 1830 Revolution in Paris, just a year before Hegel’s death. I mention
the July Revolution, because this event was the first occasion on which the proletariat
took revolutionary action on its own initiative, rather than as cannon fodder
manipulated by other classes. This event marked a watershed. For the first time the
proletariat emerged as an independent social and political actor in its own right, even
though on this occasion, yet again, a bourgeois government took the opportunity to step
into the vacuum of leadership and take power.
By the time that Marx resigned the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843, France
had been rocked by a series of working class revolts and Paris was seething with
revolutionary ferment, the English working class had constructed the first working class
political party in history (the National Charter Association) and were challenging
bourgeois rule in Britain, and an advanced industrial working class was emerging even
in Germany. It was obvious that change would come in Europe through the struggle of
the industrial working class. Capitalist development was disrupting all the old relations
and it was going to be the industrial working class who would lead that transformation.
Furthermore, the leaders of the labour movement were not just demanding inclusion in
or reform of the state, or aiming to replace it with one of their own, some aimed even to
smash the state. This was all unimaginable in Hegel’s day.
On reflection, it will be seen that all the political and philosophical differences between
Marx and Hegel arise from the changes that took place in Europe in the interval between
Hegel’s last years and Marx’s entry into radical political activity.
The Europe which Marx knew was one in which the obviously leading progressive force
in politics – the industrial proletariat ‒ was excluded from political life. With good
reason, Marx regarded the state as an instrument wielded by one class against another
and which ought to be abolished. For Hegel and any other educated person of his time,
the activity of the rabble was a social problem, and it was the responsibility of the ruling
elite to address the grievances of the people and restore social peace. Although there was
underground labour activity at the time in Britain and France, it did not exist in the
backward social conditions of Hegel’s Germany.
Hegel was, of course, a conservative professor of philosophy, but in the context of his
time he was a progressive, an opponent of slavery and a critic of the absolute monarchy.
Hegel’s politics arose from the conditions of his time, and these conditions no longer
existed in the Germany of 1848 and after. But nor do the conditions in which Marx
wrote the Communist Manifesto and Capital exist today.

Times have changed since Marx wrote Capital

At the time Marx wrote Capital, it was the practice of industrialists to make their
employees work as long as possible, pay them as little as possible, and reduce the
number of ‘unproductive’ workers to the barest minimum. They acted just as they were
represented to act by Marx in Capital. Proletarians were concentrated in vast
conurbations with a maybe single shopkeeper or doctor being the sole representative of
the middle class. And they really had nothing to lose but their chains.
But things didn’t stay that way. In 1898, Frederick Taylor promoted 25% of the workers
at Bethlehem Steel into supervisory positions with a 30% wage increase, and increased
productivity by a factor of 10, while splitting the industrial working class itself into
numerous strata. The truism that the manufacturer made a profit by keeping hours as
long as possible and wages as low as possible was turned on its head in 1914 by Henry
Ford, who cut 1 hour from the working day, doubled wages, and made a mint, while
creating a corporatist layer within the industrial working class. Postwar reconstruction
gave us the welfare state, and what remains to this day the core of the organised working
class in the old capitalist countries, in health and education, and building and
maintaining infrastructure – supposedly spending and not creating surplus value. As
macroeconomic reform gave way to microeconomic reform, Toyota turned Frederick
Taylor inside out, passing the supervision of labour back to the shop floor and bringing
the market inside of the capitalist enterprise itself. Now we have Google and Facebook
who employ a small crew of so-called symbolic analysts to cream the profits off the
unpaid labour of the users of their product. Meanwhile, most of what looks like
industrial labour is being done in countries where the labour process and the working
class still look much like they did in Europe in Marx’s lifetime.
The labour process and the working class which Marx knew has changed since Marx’s
day even more dramatically than it had changed between Hegel’s day and Marx. In a
country where the working class is educated and enjoys universal suffrage and is
represented in Parliament by the Labor Party, Hegel is no more ‘out of date’ than Marx.

A Monist social philosophy

What Hegel gave us was a monist social philosophy. It was Spinoza who had first tried to
formulate a secular monist philosophy but he did so using the same formal logic which
the mediævals had used. Spinoza posed the problem, but he could not solve it. Dualism
prevented European philosophy from resolving any of the problems it posed for itself
until Hegel broke through with the concept which he called Spirit.
The thing about monism is that it doesn’t matter what you call the one substance
because it is not Sprit as opposed to something else. Everyone understands the term
Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, for instance. ‘Spirit’ is not a mental thing, or rather it is
not just a mental thing. It’s just as much the social and material conditions of the time.
It is what people are doing, or more exactly, what people can do. It is the condition of
the population, their means of communication, their health, level of organisation and
social trust, the overall cultural level and traditional ways of life. It is both the reality
any political or social activist faces and the means available for changing those
conditions.
Marx was not a philosopher, his doctorate in Greek philosophy notwithstanding. He was
a communist, a spokesperson, an organiser and agitator. Marx inherited Hegel’s
monism and reformulated it for his own times, his own projects. He did not write any
philosophical treatises. What we know of Marx’s philosophical views have been gleaned
from scraps of notebooks and incidental comments in his economic, political and
journalistic writing. Hegel by contrast left us an entire Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences.
The Marx we see in his 1843 critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right exhibits the views of
a young communist. Although not lacking in insights, this is not yet the Marx which is
evident in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach. The 1843 article scores points against the
idealist Hegel from the materialist playbook of Ludwig Feuerbach. The first words of
Marxism which we see in the 1845 Theses are a critique not of idealism, but of
materialism, “that of Feuerbach included.” It is the Marx of 1845 who wrote the works
which form the basic canon of modern communism.

Analysis of modernity
When Marx wrote Capital, the first concept he presented, the concept which is implicitly
the founding concept of modern life, is the commodity relation, the simplest social form
of value, manifested in the exchange of products. Capital arises from commodity
production as a new social form of value, which in turn will control the production of
commodities. When Hegel formulated his theory of modern social life he began from
property, not exchange, just property, by which someone gains recognition as a person,
with rights. The state arises as the ultimate objectification of the person, which in turn
guarantees the rights of its citizens.
An important difference: property, or exchange of property, but really somewhat
striking isn’t it, how similar are these two writers in how they approach the analysis of
modern society.
When Hegel turned his attention to value he failed to live up to the standard of analysis
which he himself had set. Value, he claimed, was a measure of the usefulness of a
product, determined in exchange, but a product only had value if it was a product of
labour. He failed to go that extra step and see that value is therefore overdetermined,
that it is determined both by labour time and by usefulness and this contradiction was in
fact the motor force which drove the movement and development of capital around an
economy. So here Marx departed from Hegel, but really he only followed the method
Hegel had outlined in the Logic, but had failed to carry through in this instance.
Hegel held, for example, that if a worker owed a debt, then the debt should not be
collected if doing so would deprive the worker of the tools of their trade. It never
occurred to Hegel that this is exactly what the industrialists were doing every day in
their factories – a practice which Hegel abhorred, but was never able to offer an
alternative to. How could he? Without a proletariat capable of expropriating and
running the factories, exploitation of labour was inevitable. Charity would only
humiliate the worker, exporting labour to the colonies was only a temporary fix,
ultimately self-defeating; job creation schemes would only result in overproduction.
Hegel saw the problem. But the solution – a revolutionary workers movement – did not
exist and it never occurred to Hegel that such a thing could exist. It was just such a
revolutionary workers movement which swept the young Marx up in its arms and sent
him on his way as a communist revolutionary.

The situation today

But the situation we have today has features which put us in mind of Hegel just as much
as it puts us in mind of Marx. The industrial proletariat in the rich capitalist countries
has been in political decline since the late 1940s; and yet the real working class is better
off, better educated, and more in control of their lives than ever, but the overwhelming
majority do not even belong to the category of “productive workers” envisaged in
Capital, if you allow that teachers, doctors, nurses, truck drivers, retail workers,
personal service workers and knowledge workers of all kinds were deemed by Marx ‒
echoing bourgeois thinking at the time ‒ to be consuming not producing surplus value.
And what is more, they all vote. And they administer the state and the economy! It’s not
that class divisions have disappeared. Far from it. Class differences have proliferated,
but that’s the problem. “Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your
chains” remains a viable slogan in some parts of the world, but it doesn’t in developed
capitalist countries like Australia.
The point is that the political differences between Hegel and Marx are very real but they
correspond to the difference in the times they lived in and they both held very sound
and radical political positions in their own times. But anyone who thinks that the
politics of 1848 or 1917 are viable today in a country like Australia is nuts. But the same
monist social philosophy should be our guide.
Marx was in many senses more consistent in his dialectic than Hegel. For example,
Hegel says in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right that “The owl of Minerva, takes its
flight only when the shades of night are gathering,” but goes on, in the final sections of
that book to engage in fantastic speculations about world history. But Marx, aside from
his personal letters which betray someone who really thought the Revolution was just
around the corner, in his scientific work Marx was absolutely meticulous. The political
economy he analysed in Capital was just how the capitalists of his time operated. If he’d
lived long enough to see Taylorism or Keynesianism in action, he would have amended
Capital accordingly. The programmatic demands in the Communist Manifesto were
what the workers movement was actually aspiring to at the time, and he waited to
observe the Paris Commune before he could formulate what the workers would do if and
when they seized political power. His theory was strictly empirical. He took the advice of
the Owl of Minerva seriously.
But writing 50 years later, after Darwin had written Origins of Species, after the
discovery of the cell, after Maxwell formulated his equations of electromagnetism and
knowledge of ancient cultures beyond Europe had become general ... Marx did not
attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Hegel was the last great encyclopaedic
thinker. Like the other writer that I will be drawing from in these lectures, Lev Vygotsky,
Marx wrote one paradigmatic scientific study on one topic, bourgeois political economy
in his case, and as we have seen, with the benefit of 50 years of social, cultural and
economic development, writing from the workshop of the world in industrial Britain,
Marx was able to do a much better job of the objective dialectic manifested in the
market economy, than Hegel could in economically and socially backward, albeit
culturally advanced Germany.
By focussing his critique on political economy, Marx was able to make (with the help of
Engels) a thorough study of the reality of political economic practice, as well as the
writing of other theorists. When he identified contradictions in the existing theory, he
sought a resolution of these contradictions through a close study of the real field of
practice. Hegel on the other hand, confined himself to logical critique of the political
economists. Hegel had no time to look into the reality of economic activity, because he
had an Encyclopaedia to write. As a result, he never even saw the contradiction in the
concept of value or the contradiction between the exchange of equivalents in the
circulation of commodities, and the accumulation of profit by capitalists. Hegel was
restricted to formal critique, of which he was, nonetheless, a master.
When Marx declared that “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it
‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and
fights” and that “Men make their own history, ... but under circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past,” he is only superficially criticising
Hegelian Idealism which personifies History. He is also criticising materialism: “The
materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets
that circumstances are changed by people and that it is essential to educate the educator
himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is
superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human
activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only
as revolutionary practice.”
The Hegelian Marx is for taking revolutionary action, for changing the situation. The
materialist Marx explains how the situation constrains and enables what can be done.
When the Marxist humanists appeared in opposition to the bureaucratism of the
Stalinised Communist Parties in the 1960s, it was to Hegel they turned. It is actually the
philosophy of the conservative professor of philosophy which provided the means of
theorising initiative and revolutionary action within the theoretical legacy of the
Communist Karl Marx.
In the next lecture, after the break, I will examine the meaning of the opposition
between materialism and idealism on six different axes, each of which need to be
attended to. But what is obvious from even a brief reading of the two writers is that
Marx writes in the language of everyday life about the problems of everyday life to an
audience which included the self-educated artisans who built the International
Workingmen’s Association. Hegel on the other hand wrote in the language of philosophy
and logic to an elite audience. The change in language flowed from the change in the
times they lived in and identity of the agents of social progress.
Marx did not have to write a Logic, because Hegel had already written it. But he had to
adapt it to his times.
We will now have a 5 minute break and I’ll allocate people randomly to break out rooms
so you can have a chance to formulate some questions while I get myself a drink.