I have spoken before on the difference between Hegel and Marx. In this talk I shall illustrate the comparison by reflecting on the similarities and differences between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and Marx’s Capital.
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.
Marx would agree with this, but how is the present world to be understood and characterised?
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 including his native Germany, but he was horrified by Robespierre’s Terror and saw the Revolution ultimately 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 Greater Newcastle today (1/10 the size of Sydney). Surrounded by great states with mass conscript armies, the German states were powerless. But Hegel did not advocate for German unification, which was 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 best 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. The citizens of Germany of that time had less opportunity for political action than a citizen of Australia today, but insurrectionary violence like that advocated by Marx in the later 19th century was no more viable in Hegel’s Germany than it is in Australia today.
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 but 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 liberal 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.
Hegel’s Idealism was reflected in his view of the intellectual and social elite as the vehicle of social progress. 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. Marx wrote Capital in order to understand the labour process which was shaping the proletariat and the opportunities these developments would offer for a socialist revolution. Thus the difference between the Idealist Hegel and the materialist Marx originates in the historical changes in Europe. One wrote a philosophy of the state, the other wrote a scientific theory of economics.
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 really matter what you call that one substance because it is not Sprit as opposed to something else like ideas as opposed to matter. Spirit is not a mental thing, or rather it is not just a mental thing. It is both the reality any political or social actor faces and the means available for changing those conditions. Spirit can better be grasped as the totality of human practices than the totality of human thought.
Marx was not a philosopher, his PhD in Greek philosophy notwithstanding. He was a communist, an organiser and agitator. Marx inherited Hegel’s monism and reformulated it for his own times. What we know of Marx’s philosophical views have to be gleaned from scraps of notebooks and incidental comments in his economic, political and journalistic writing. While Marx left us Capital, Hegel left us an Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. But other than Logic, the only science with which he had real expertise was his social theory, embodied in the Philosophy of Right.
I will use these two works to illustrate the differences between Hegel and Marx, beginning with an outline of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
I should note that the kind of state which is outlined in Philosophy of Right bears little resemblance to the absolute monarchy of Hegel’s Prussia. Hegel was opposed to universal suffrage, though, and favoured a structure of collegiate bodies in which each person’s voice was expressed through their participation in various kinds of vocational bodies. This was not a figment of Hegel’s imagination, as Hegel used forms of association which existed or had existed in the past in Germany, arranged in a kind of corporatism under a constitutional monarchy somewhat akin to Victorian England.
At the time Hegel was writing, all the debate about social and political life centred around private property and the state, and whether these were created by the suppression of the freedom people “enjoyed in a state of nature.” By means of a close study of the nature of human beings, Hegel concluded the exact opposite.
For Hegel, a person was more than just any living thing. “A person is a unit of freedom aware of its sheer independence.” The simplest, immediate form of freedom is abstract right: “the immediate embodiment which freedom gives itself in an immediate way, i.e. possession, which is property - ownership.” The person and their freedom is the basis of any state and a good state must give the fullest possible expression to that freedom. Consequently, the Philosophy of Right makes its beginning from abstract right, i.e., private property (which Hegel understands as inclusive of bodily autonomy). The study of freedom turns out to be the science of the state.
The Philosophy of Right, like all Hegel’s books, is made up of a linked series of circles, sciences, each of which is unfolded from one “universal individual” such as “abstract right,” a developed into a concrete science. From property, Hegel derived a series of units, viz., Possession (Taking Possession, Use and Alienation); ‘Contract’ (Gift, Exchange and Pledge) and ‘Wrong’ (a Non-malicious Wrong, a Fraud and a Crime) - thus a series of concepts making up the foundations of civil law. This structure is continued throughout the Philosophy of Right. The second part, ‘Morality’ is based on the individual subject who consults their own conscience in decided up their actions. Morality goes through a series of these units: Purpose, Goal, Means, Intention, Welfare, the Good, among others. The third part of the Philosophy of Right, ‘Ethical Life’, goes through: Family, Market, Public Authorities, Corporations, and finally, the State.
Thus, the fine structure of the Philosophy of Right is a “circle of circles,” each circle constituting a specific branch or sub-branch of the science. I have mentioned but 28 of the “germ cells” which form the structure of the whole. In each case, the universal necessarily develops into particulars in expressing itself in the material world.
Note that each of these germ cells was a really existing material relation, found in any developed modern state in some form or other. But in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel criticised their usual understanding and formulated scientific concepts of them, thus constructing a concrete science of the state in outline.
Hegel introduced the terms Right, Morality and Ethical Life to indicate three, what I will call, “ethical realms” which contradict one another but co-exist in the modern state. Right, Morality and Ethical Life, the three “books” making up the whole Philosophy of Right.
Right refers to the rights every person enjoys under civil law irrespective of their social status, religion or whatever, provided they are a rational person. It is broadly the same as what is called “negative liberty” inasmuch as it includes not only the right to own private property excluding that of all others, but entails equality before the law and bodily autonomy and is inalienable. It is also sometimes called “human rights,” which pertain to every person whether or not they are a citizen of the state.
Morality is the free exercise of a subject’s own conscience, determining its action with regard to its own welfare, having regard to all the foreseeable consequences on the rights of other people. The moral subject acts within the constraints of the law and the rights of other persons, but within that make judgments according to their own conscience. A child or an insane person is not a subject. Hegel claims, however, that evil just as much as good can arise from exercise of a subject’s own conscience, because an individual subject cannot foresee all the consequences of their actions. Consequently, the development of the state depends on the development of a culture in which subjects recognise that their own welfare is dependent on the general good.
Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) is determined by participation of all citizens in a number of institutions, specifically the Family, Civil Society and the State. In ethical life not all are equal. “Equality” is meaningless within the family where bonds of love entail sacrifice and care; in civil society, employers and employees, for example, have distinct rights and duties, just as citizens have different roles within the political state. Ethical life is constructed by an historical community with the aim of developing to the maximum the freedom of all its citizens in the circumstances it finds itself according to its own customs and habits.
Human beings may be simultaneously persons, subjects and citizens. Their actions are simultaneously determined by their rights as persons, by their own conscience as subjects and by the law as citizens. Clearly, these three ethical realms may be in contradiction. I may give up my property according to my conscience to help another person or I may have my property confiscated for a project determined by the state. The unity and conflict between these three ethical realms is manifested in the historical development of the state.
All of Hegel’s works are constructed by syllogisms, that is, logical developments in which two conflicting claims are resolved in the formation of a third. An example of such syllogisms is seen in the structure of Ethical Life: Family, Civil Society and the State. Historically, civil society (literally “bourgeois society”) emerged as a gap opened up in feudal societies in which Family and the State were identified, that is, in which every person’s right and duties was determined by their position in relations of blood and land. Civil society mediated between the state (then the exclusive domain of the nobility and royalty) and the day-to-day life of the masses, building new institutions such as town councils, trade unions, and corporations.
When Marx resigned editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung and
eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study, the first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.... My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy. (Marx, 1859, Preface)
The economic theory we find in Capital is completely original and owes nothing to Hegel as to its content. I will show however, that so far as its structure goes, it owes everything to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
The first sense in which we see Marx as a materialist as against Hegel the idealist is here, is that Marx sought the anatomy of modern society not in the State but in Bourgeois Society, i.e., the economic production of everyday life.
Marx’s determined the starting point of Capital in the same way that Hegel determined the starting point of Philosophy (Being) and his theory of social life (Freedom). That is, by means of an immanent critique of his forebears in Political Economy. Immanent critique means accepting the terms of the relevant discourse, entering into it as a critical participant, and determining the basic principle which makes sense of the problems with which the discourse is wrestling, and by analysis of this basic principle, showing the way forward for the discourse.
Marx found that among the Political Economists, it was David Ricardo who had come closest to making a true science of political economy by making value the foundation and starting point of the science, and trying to understand all the phenomena of political economy as forms of value. Ricardo, however, had been unable to achieve this consistently, mainly because Hegel’s Logic was unknown to him. Thus, Marx agreed with Ricardo’s principle, but applied Hegel’s method by adopting as the sole starting point of political economy, not “value,” but the “simplest social form of value, the commodity” ‒ the “universal individual” of political economy.
Capital thus began with a critical examination of the commodity form and generates out of this examination the first basic concepts of economics - exchange, exchange-value, use value, circulation and finally money. An important feature of this derivation is that Marx distinguishes between particular commodities (cloth, boots, coal or whatever) and the universal commodity, money, which acts as a universal equivalent. The individual moment of value refers to any concrete, single commodity. Marx thereby generates from the “germ cell,” the three moments of a concrete concept of value, as identified in Hegel’s Logic: Universal, Particular and Individual. Throughout Capital the distinction between the universal form (invariably a form of money) and particular forms is continued at each stage of the analysis .
This method of beginning a science with the examination of the simplest possible instance of the subject matter is characteristic of Hegel’s method of science and differs sharply from the usual method. Ricardo for example, took the uniform general rate of profit as a given datum from the start of his theory, without deriving it. In fact, the uniform general rate of profit is in direct contradiction to determination of price (which Ricardo never clearly distinguishes from value) by labour time.
When Hegel turned his attention to value he failed to live up to the standard of analysis which he himself had set. Value, Hegel claimed, was a measure of the usefulness of a product, realised in exchange, while 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. Hegel never examined production under the rule of capital, being concerned only with bourgeois society and capital had not yet transformed production as it had in England. So here Marx departed from Hegel in his analysis of value, but really he only followed the method Hegel had outlined in the Logic, but had failed to carry through in this instance, because the productive forces had not yet developed so as to make these contradictions visible.
Although it has been recognised that the commodity functions as a germ cell, it is not true that the whole of Capital is unfolded from this single germ cell. Indeed, in the second part of Volume One, Marx introduces the unit of capital, in which a capitalist buys in order to sell more dearly. Although this is a new form of value, it is clearly not a commodity because commodities entail exchanging products at their value. In fact, Marx derives the structure of modern capitalism by the use of 15 distinct units.
Volume One is made up of the commodity, a unit of capital, and each day’s unpaid labour time and necessary labour time, productive labour and the day’s wage. Volume Two is made up of the circuit of capital, turnover time and the unit of circulation and production. Volume Three is made up of cost price and cost of production, the average rate of profit, accumulated constant capital, commercial capital, finance capital and the private landowner.
Each of these germ cells is a simple, discreet unit, the result of a unique insight by Marx into the development of value in capitalism. Each solve a particular problem which has arisen in the history of political economy, and its examination yields insight into some necessary aspect of capitalist economic life. These are the mundane relations which underlie the judicial units of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
In each case, the simple germ cell is developed into a concrete concept, that is, it has both a universal moment and particular moments. Because money is a universal equivalent, the universal moment is often a monetary entity. Thus for example, the unit of capital can be an accumulation of commodities (commercial capital), but the universal unit of capital is a sum of money. Or, the circuit of capital which begins from a sum of money and returns to a sum of money is a universal circuit, while the collection of commodities held by a trader which returns after sale and restocking to a collection of commodities is a particular circuit. Also, the unit of industrial capital is the universal unit of capital because the industrial capitalist directly appropriates unpaid labour time, whereas the usurer or commercial capitalist merely extorts a share of the surplus already appropriated by industrial capital.
It can be easily observed that the microstructure of Capital resembles the microstructure of the Philosophy of Right, also made up of units.
Almost all of the interest in the Hegelian elements of Marx’s Capital have been focussed on the first Part, the first three chapters on the Commodity, Exchange and Money. The irony is that the subject matter of this part is bourgeois society, that is, that community of artisans and merchants which had existed in the interstices of ancient society for millennia and does not include capital, which appears only in Part Two.
It is no wonder then that the principle of bourgeois society, that products of labour are exchanged at their value being the average quantity of labour required for their production, is in contradiction to the principle of productive capitalism that products are sold at cost price plus profit at the prevailing rate of profit? Part One on Bourgeois Society is a completely different ethical realm which has been subsumed by Productive capitalism, which has transformed the labour process and appropriated the surplus labour time and shared it amongst themselves in proportion to capital invested.
The genius of Marx’s Capital is that instead of trying to eliminate this contradiction, as had Ricardo and his followers, Marx incorporated the contradiction in his system. The workers are exploited by the appropriation of unpaid labour, and this is demonstrated by considering each capital separately in Volume One. But despite the fact that prices are in fact determined by the ethos of capitalism, the total amount of value produced and shared amongst the hostile capitalist brothers is fixed by the considerations of Volume One, before the competition and the circulation of capital is considered.
Then, when Finance capital enters the picture in the latter part of Volume Three, we find that Finance capital reduces the industrial capitalist to the status of a mere salaried employee, by loaning capital for the industrial or commercial capitalist to use to appropriate surplus value, but never releases ownership of that capital, but takes an on-going share of the surplus by means of interest, irrespective of whether the borrower makes a profit or not. This is capital in its pure form, continuously demanding profit without any concern for the labour process at all. The banks position themselves to they can create money out of nothing, loan it out and demand interest in return. This is a new ethos.
Thus, like the Philosophy of Right, Capital presents three ethical realms. The first basic realm, Bourgeois Society in which products are exchanged at their value, sets limits on the real wealth of the society, all the rest simply determining how the surplus is to be shared. In the second ethical realm, Productive Capitalism, Industrial capital rules, and the price of all goods and services is determined by the quantity of capital they employ. Value is passed back and forth between different industries through the action of the commodity and capital markets, to equalise the rate of profit. In the Third ethical realm, values are not exchanged at all as the banker retains ownership of the capital which the capitalist employs to justify his own existence and earn the interest to pay the bank.
Just as in the Philosophy of Right, Rights, Morality and Law co-exist while at the same time contradicting one another, the same is true of Bourgeois Society, Industrial Capitalism and Finance Capitalism, coexisting in conflict.
Marx was not a great fan of the syllogism. None the less he explicitly constructed the relation between the three Volumes of Capital as a syllogism.
Volume One is titled “The Immediate Production of Capital,” and it is characterised by the fact that each process of production is considered immediately and separately from the action of every other actor in the production process. Competition is not considered in Volumes One and Two, but it is assumed that products are sold at their value as in Bourgeois Society, on the presumption that the market will determine that this is so. And indeed under the unrealistic condition that all products incorporate the same proportion of “constant capital” this would be true. But this is counterfactual. The method of Hegel, described by Marx as the “ascent from the abstract to the concrete,” allows Marx to consider capitalist production in this “abstract” way, i.e., considering each producer separately to begin with, and then later considering the result of the interaction between the different producers in the market.
Volume Two is entitled “The Process of Circulation of Capital.” Here, rather than taking the commodity market and labour labour for granted as if given to the capitalist entrepreneur by Nature, Marx considers how each unit of capital (firstly money capitals, then productive capitals and then commodity capitals) reproduces itself in the entire circuit through circulation, consumption and production. In so doing the units of capital reproduce the entire social formation by means of their circuit through different parts of the economy. However, Marx still treats each of these circuits separately, each reproducing itself out of its own circuit of value, transmuting between different forms of value.
Volume Three is entitled “The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole” and Marx claims: “the capitalist process of production taken as a whole represents a synthesis of the processes of production and circulation.” And
The various forms of capital, as evolved in this book, thus approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves.
Here Marx explicitly describes the macrostructure of Capital as a syllogism and points out how “step by step” he has arisen from the abstract to the concrete as its exists in “the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves.”
Equally, instead of going straight to an outline of his imagined State, Hegel derived it from a synthesis of Rights and Morality.
Thus the four elements of the structure of Capital can be seen to be directly appropriated from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
When Engels declared in 1886 that materialism and idealism constituted “two great camps” it doubtless sounded good to his audience of self-educated artisans. A young worker in East London put it best for me when he asked rhetorically: “Who built Hadrian’s Wall?” But the endless repetition of this idea over the 150 years since has not been helpful. Materialism stands opposed to idealism along at least six different axes and in no case is truth entirely on the side of materialism.
Hegel was the final product of the philosophical movement known as “German Idealism,” which arose in Germany in response to Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Kant had aimed to resolve the impasse between Empiricism and Rationalism, and scepticism and dogmatism. These philosophical currents had been driven by problems which had arisen from the development of natural science since Galileo, chiefly the nature of reality, and the sources and limits of human knowledge. Kant had proposed that a thing existed “in itself” and human beings could have knowledge only of appearances, while the nature of the thing-in-itself remained unknowable. Kant’s approach generated many troubling dualisms and contradictions, and the German Idealists attempted to resolve these contradictions by focusing on forms of knowledge, rather than by speculating on the nature of a reality outside of human practice - which was the preserve of the Materialists.
Hegel put it this way:
“The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes Idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. ... A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, ... in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable.”
So the archetypal materialists were the ancient Greek Atomists - everything, including human life, was the result of interactions between atoms. Modern materialism, which arose after Hegel, has a broader concept of material reality which is inclusive of social practice, but earlier materialists, whether Democritus or Spinoza, were blind to the social formation of knowledge and consciousness.
It was the Idealists, Hegel in particular, who discovered the social character of consciousness and knowledge, not the materialists. However, the idealists did not make forms of practice explicitly the subject matter of their systems; rather they took logical categories, concepts, ideas, etc., as their subject matter, thus justifying their description as “Idealists.” A critical reading of Hegel will show however that the content of these ideal forms is forms of human practice.
Not all forms of idealism are the same. In particular, Hegel distinguished between subjective idealists like Bishop Berkeley, and objective idealists, such as Schelling and Hegel. That is, for Hegel, ideals were not imaginings existing only inside your head, but existed objectively, in activity, institutions and material culture, independently of any single individual, and which individuals acquired in the course of their activity.
The very first expression of Marxism ‒ Thesis 1 of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach ‒ is referring to Hegel when it speaks of “idealism”:
“The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism ‒ that of Feuerbach included ‒ is that the Object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism ‒ but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. ...”
Not only did the Idealists see the creation of institutions as objective activity, they saw perception as an active process. They also saw the interpretation of one’s experience, how you conceived of and reacted to a situation, as an active process. The contrast with the materialist attitude to the social formation of human beings is set out in Thesis 5:
The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed people are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is people who change circumstances and that the educator must themself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. ...”
On the other hand, we see that Marx lambasted the philosophers (that is, Hegel) for merely interpreting the world rather than seeking to change it, partly because “idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such,” being concerned with concepts rather than activity - ideology rather than activity itself.
So Marx presents us with the contradiction that it is the idealists who saw the struggle to change reality, rather than correctly reflecting the given reality, as fundamental, but like all professional philosophers, they merely “interpreted” the world, rather than acting to change it.
Having witnessed social change in Britain thanks to industrialisation, and in France thanks to the guillotine, Hegel looked forward to a less traumatic and chaotic revolution in Germany which he saw as led by the social elite - philosophy professors, enlightened monarchs and a meritocratic civil service, rather than the blind destruction wrought by mobs and factories. Although he supported the right of slaves and oppressed nations to throw off their oppressors, he wanted his native Germany to achieve modernity through the perfection of states which would guarantee the freedoms of their citizens. He saw states as guarantors of freedom, not instruments of oppression and was opposed to destructive, revolutionary methods of achieving social progress. He regarded the poor and working class as incapable of being agents of social progress - their misery was a social problem which could be solved only by the intervention of the enlightened elite.
When a work process is improved is it thanks to the engineer who devises the improved method, or should we credit the workers who actually implement the process? Do we get to a better world by (at least some) people forming an image of that better world and then going out and fighting for it, or does the better world arise out of contradictions inherent in the present state of affairs which drive people into actions irrespective of whether or not they foresee the outcome?
We call those people “idealists” who think that the social class whose business is plans and ideas are the agents of change, rather than the masses who act out those ideas. We call those people “materialists” who see social change arising directly out of the conditions of social life with ordinary people as its agents.
But recall Thesis 5 quoted above: if, as materialists, we see people as products of their social conditions we risk reducing them to passive objects of social change, leaving consciousness of change to the intelligentsia or the Party. Hegel and the Idealists erred on the side of change-from-above, but exclusive focus on change-from-below is equally mistaken because it makes the people passive objects of structural forces beyond their control.
Anyone will recognise that over the years automobiles have come to better accord with their concept than they used to, conveying passengers to their desired destination in comfort without breaking down; likewise, washing machines have become more and more likely to wash your clothes and not wreck them since they were first invented in 1908. Hegel believed that this idea applies to social institutions as well as to useful artefacts, and is crucial to his social philosophy.
Although states originate in violence, according to Hegel, the concept of the state is Freedom - freedom from crime, famine and outside attack, freedom for personal development and the enjoyment of culture. That is to say, a worthwhile concept, once it comes into being, will tend to realise itself in increasingly perfect forms and only collapses when the concept becomes out of step with its conditions. In this sense, Hegel sees the logic of concepts as the driving force in history. Marx responded:
“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; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”
Here Marx is expressing a materialist position, in that people are not to be seen as captive of ideas but as real actors. But if Marx is not to be accused of voluntarism, we must take account also of his aphorism:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
That which is “transmitted from the past” - the institutions, symbols and beliefs built up by a people over centuries ‒ unfolds in a way Hegel ably described with his dialectical idealist philosophy. But how people make use of those conditions is not always logical; people do not always do what they have to do, so to speak, so Marx’s insistence that the realisation of an idea is a matter of struggle is an important corrective to the Idealist vision of history unfolding according to intelligible principles. But it has always been the idealists who have emphasised human agency in social change. When Hegel talks of concepts as if they were living creatures with a will, he is only agreeing with the Marx when he said: “theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel is sometimes unbelievably naïve: he thinks that the civil service is (or could be) a meritocracy which serves the public good, and doesn’t even consider that civil servants will look out for themselves like everyone else; it doesn’t matter to him how judges are appointed or from what social class they are drawn, because it is their concept to apply the law to individual cases, not further their own class or political agenda; that the constitutional monarch, as the traditional owner of the land, is an extremely wealthy person does not cause Hegel to suspect that their judgment might be prejudiced by their wealth.
Marx ridicules this idealism, noting that a ‘civil society’ necessarily operates within the civil service. Hegel seems to think that officials will act according to their job description; Marx does not believe this. Everyone knows that the remuneration structure determines an employee’s actions far more effectively than the organisation’s mission statement.
In the USA everyone seems to accept that Supreme Court judges act according to their own political agenda. However, in most developed countries, despite the fact that judges are always drawn from the most privileged section of society, the law does generally tend to develop and be applied in a rational fashion worthy of writing up in the law books, rather than being a naked expression of class prejudice. What is more, when decisions are made which are expressions of naked class prejudice, there is public outrage, appeals and political pressure. Even if it takes centuries, there is some merit in the aphorism: “The truth will out.” In the long run, Hegel’s idealism in this sense often turns out to have more truth than a cynical materialism would suggest. Science advances, for example, despite the rewards offered for conformism.
Hegel first published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817. In this monumental work he aimed to outline (among other things) the entire development of natural science. But natural science did not progress by the writing of ever more perfect encyclopaedias; rather, individuals and groups beavered away on narrowly defined problems, all the while lacking any sophisticated view of the whole, and gradually, over the decades, the separate strands more and more came into contact with one another, and viable overall scientific visions gradually emerged.
Each strand of research was influenced by the discoveries and theories and techniques and tools produced by the others; the scope and complexity and interconnectedness of human activity developed, throwing up new insights, new techniques endlessly, way beyond the subjective capacity of a single mind to plan or predict. Every insight, every discovery is the product of a human mind, but the process as a whole is a gigantic objective social process.
At each moment, the latest discovery to come out of the endless unfolding of human practice is intelligible in the light of what has gone before, what has already been discovered. But who can tell what the next discovery will be?
When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto he left many questions unresolved. One of these was the question of whether the workers’ movement could could seize power and how they would use that power. Marx did not attempt to work this out in advance. He waited until the Paris Commune demonstrated what the workers movement would do. He then amended the Manifesto accordingly - adding to the 1872 Preface the words: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.”
Likewise, in the writing of Capital, Marx took as his starting point not the concept of value as such, but the simplest social form in which value was manifested, the exchange of commodities. Living in England, at that time the most advanced capitalist country, it was possible to observe the unfolding of the value relation from exchange of commodities. The “concept of value” was observable in the writings of the political economists, but exchange of commodities is a real act which can be witnessed and grasped viscerally by anyone. He could make the development of capital intelligible by means of his analysis of economic activity, but he made only the most general and qualified predictions of where it was headed based on his clear view of the contradictions manifested in the present. But he could not predict the successive transformations of capital which would flow through the economy after his death, and Marx knew this.
As an Idealist, Hegel falsely believed that Logic would allow him to foresee what was as yet outside social experience. Given he was writing in 1817, before the Michelson-Morley experiment, the microscope and Darwinism, and the burgeoning of natural scientific investigation during the 19th century, it is obvious to us that the project of the Encyclopaedia was untenable. Only the social process itself as a whole “outside the head” can work out and reveal the real content of a concept; this insight is available to the theorist to the extent that they can observe and make intelligible what exists or is already at least in the process of formation.
This is the difference between Idealism and Materialism in terms of method.
Looking over the six ways in which I have said that Hegel was an Idealist, a common thread can be seen running through them. But when Marx claims that “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. .... With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again,” this is true enough in some senses, but quite false in other senses. The aphorism does not tell us what is to abandoned and what is to be retained. Hegel’s idealism has to be appropriated in full consciousness of its limitations and one-sidedness.
Engels was not entirely mistaken when he claimed that “The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being.”
But Hegel does not use the term “being” in quite the same way as Marx did. For Hegel, “being” has the same scope as the verb “to be” which can refer to Mickey Mouse or a childhood memory equally as the number of your fingers. It is in fact an entirely empty concept. For Marx it could refer to “social being,” that is, a person’s place in social practice, or it could refer to the animal nature of a person ‒ their material existence in either sense.
“Matter” is another problematic word. As Lenin correctly said: “Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to us by our sensations, ... while existing independently of them.” Hegel denotes the same category as “externality,” which as we learnt, is “only the one concrete whole.”
The question is not one of giving good definitions of “being” and “thought.” The question is generally “where to begin?”
For Hegel that concept was Spirit, Geist. For Marx it was practice: “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”
Note that “praxis” is the German word for “practice” and does not have some separate meaning. Behaviour differs from practice because in “behaviour” we abstract from the consciousness with which an action is done, that is, in isolation from its motivation. “Consciousness” is also an abstraction from practice, that is, in isolation from what is actually done.
So a dichotomy immediately arises from setting out with a dualism of thought and behaviour. Thought and behaviour are abstractions from the one concrete whole.
A second dichotomy arises from setting out either from Nature - human beings are products and creatures of Nature, or from social practice alone. Nature is not something other than social practice. The solution to this dichotomy is to understand that the material world exists for us in so far as it is included in human activity, as its means. Hegel actually makes this point almost at the end - page 800 and something ‒ of the Science of Logic.
So our starting point must be material practice, the practice of human beings as material creatures of Nature, using elements of Nature in their every act, changing the material world and with that the conditions in which human beings will act in the future. Consciousness exists only insofar as it is manifested in practice; dreams and phantasies exist only insofar as they eventually manifest in practice. Concepts like consciousness, behaviour and Nature are abstractions, concepts we come to understand only in and through the study and understanding of material human practice. “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”