Marx`s Intellectual Debt

This essay addresses the degree to which Marx owes an intellectual debt in his work, to the philosophy of Hegel and the Utopian Socialists respectively. It will argue that Marx’s philosophy owes its intellectual debt predominantly to Hegel and the Classical Political economists such as Smith, Say and Ricardo, and that the Utopian Socialists played only a minor, more comparative role in the development of his philosophy. In order to show this, the essay outlines the key themes of alienation, historical materialism and revolution within Marx’s work and demonstrates their origins in different philosophical and economic concepts. The key texts in the essay are Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscri pts, and ‘The Communist Manifesto’, arguably his most accessible works. The essay begins by arguing that Marx utilises and expands on the language and theoretical framework of Classical Political Economy. It will then proceed to show that Marx synthesises this theoretical framework with Hegelian philosophy, discussing the way in which Marx takes the notion of alienation and applies it to his notion of man as a species being, and even further in his later work with the theme of commodity fetishism. The essay will then argue that Marx’s synthesis of the concept of the dialectic within Hegel’s work, with his own concept of historical materialism and the necessity of real revolutionary action, allows him to resolve the problem of alienation and follows logically from the contradictions he identifies as inherent within the alienating system of capitalism. The essay concludes by briefly addressing the reasons for the inclusion within the ‘Communist Manifesto’ of a discussion of Utopian Socialism and the potential influence of these thinkers on Marx’s philosophy. The essay seeks to show that Marx’s synthesis (and re-working) of the philosophy and methodology of Hegel, with his adoption and adaptation of the theoretical framework of Classical Political Economy, is central to his political thought, whilst the Utopian Socialists have a comparatively subordinate influence on his intellectual development.

The Theoretical Framework of Classical Political EconomyThe first part of the 1844 Manuscri pts sees Marx outlining the theoretical terms and definitions associated with Classical Political Economy, those of Jean-Baptiste Say, and predominantly the terms outlined in Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’. Marx adopts Classical Political Economy’s terms as the economic basis for his critique in his own words, Marx has:

#147proceeded from the premises of political economy...accepted its language and its laws...presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land...division of labour, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc” (Marx, 2012: p.58)

Marx accepts Smith’s definition of capital as “stored up labour” (2012: p.27), the value of a commodity as constituted by the labour-power necessary for its production (Barber, 1991: p.131), the impact of a mechanised workplace (2012: p.17), as well as the concept of wages, workers and commodities being linked to the laws of supply and demand as supply of workers increases, wages will decrease to the lowest necessary wage to keep the worker alive (Marx, 2012: p.13, 17). The worker must find a buyer for his labour-power in order to survive, putting him in the same position as any commodity (2012: p.13). Marx’s agreement with such truths of political economy is unremarkable however his synthesis of the conclusions he draws from analysis of the implications of such laws of economics with Hegelian philosophy in order to explain the economic basis of alienation distinguishes his work from that of the Classical Political Economists. This transforms Marx’s work from mere descri ption to critique of Political Economy and its inherent contradictions.

The Synthesis of Classical Political Economy and Hegelian PhilosophyMarx draws the idea of alienation from Hegel’s work on absolute knowledge in ‘The Phenomenology of the Spirit’. Hegel’s central concept within his work is the “relationship of knowledge to its object” (Arthur, 1986: p.52) the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. The self must make itself an object of consciousness through its own activity in order to become known to itself and its relation to the world of objects the objective world is estranged from the subjective knowledge of the spirit (Arthur, 1986: pp.52-53). For Hegel, the spirit makes itself known to itself through interaction with the natural world of objects.

Marx praises Hegel for recognising “the essence of labour and comprehends objective man...as the outcome of man’s own labour” (2012: p.123). Marx’s own concept of alienation builds on this interpretation of how the spirit overcomes estrangement by referring to the notion of the species being, and the impact of the alienation of man from the object of his production under the capitalist system, as analysed utilising the framework of Classical Political Economy.

The development of Marx’s concept of the species being can be seen to be somewhat Hegelian in its origin. Marx believes, as Hegel does, that man is part of nature but is differentiated from animals by his work on the objective world as it is free from “the dominion of immediate physical need” (Marx, 2012: p.64) man produces creatively and with aesthetic considerations. Nature:

“...appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created” (Marx, 2012: p.64)

Elements of Fourier’s philosophy are echoed in this passage, as he associated richness of need and enjoyment with ‘association’ of labour (Arthur, 1986: p.11). Marx contrasts this natural, species being state of man as a producer to that of the worker who sells his labour to the capitalist. Under the capitalist system described by Marx, the worker’s product is alienated from him as it does not belong to him it is appropriated by the capitalist. Further, the labourer does not work voluntarily but out of the necessity to survive, to achieve the means of subsistence – in this sense it is not a satisfaction of a need to produce but merely a means to satisfy needs external to it (Marx, 2012: p.62), something Fourier again spoke against “production for the sake of production” (Arthur, 1986: p.11). Man, under capitalism, does not feel himself in his product as he does when he produces to satisfy his species-being – he only feels himself ‘free’ in his animal functions those of eating, drinking, procreating etc (Marx, 2012: p.62). Within the capitalist system, the worker, in his labour, produces himself as a commodity (Marx, 2012: p.59). So estranged is he under this economic system that he becomes “the subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost to himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labour is man lost to himself” (Marx, 2012: p.70) his product is not part of him and he does not see himself in it. Marx claims, therefore, that Hegel’s standpoint is like his own that of political economy (Arthur, 1986: p.47). Alienation is an ontological necessity for Hegel in order for the self to become self-conscious, as opposed to being “brought about through specific material processes in the history of mankind’s emergence” (Arthur, 1986: p.71) as it is for Marx.

Marx further identifies the estrangement of man from man in his descri ption of the fetishism of commodities in ‘Capital’. The fetishism of commodities changes the way in which relationships between man and man are seen in the capitalist system through the medium of exchange of goods inanimate objects are attributed qualities that only human beings could possess thus disguising and mystifying relationships between people as relationships between things (Ollman, 1976: p.195).

Having outlined man as alienated under capitalism, Marx must show how the alienation of man from his species being, identified through the synthesis of Hegel and Classical Political Economy, is to be overcome in capitalist society. To do so, Marx employs the Hegelian concept of the dialectic and synthesises this with his own concept of historical materialism, whilst at the same time rejecting some of the conclusions that result from following Hegel’s phenomenological method. The next section analyses the economic nature of Marx’s historical materialism and it’s relation to the dialectic, showing how, in Marx’s terms this drives historical change as a result of the resolution of contradictions inherent in relations of production and the capitalist system.

Contradictions in Capitalism, Historical Materialism and the DialecticMuch has been made of Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s notion that the social whole is to be found in the political state the sphere of men’s material interests and activities (Wood, 1972: p.247). Marx posits instead that human society “is a developing system of collective productive activity, aimed at the satisfaction of historically conditioned human needs” (Wood, 1972: p.247). This assertion is the basis of Marx’s concept of historical materialism, which can be found in varying degrees of clarity within the 1844 Manuscri pts. For example his discussion of the serf/lord relationship of production, in which land was appropriated but was not yet a commodity, as it would be later, is described as containing the seeds of the system of private property (2012: p.54). In the same section, the centrality of class struggle to the dynamic progression of history is presented – the relationship between the tenant and the landlord as one of “the hostile antagonism of interests”, is taken by Marx to be the basis of social organisation (2012: p.46). In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx charts the development of society from ancient relations of patricians and plebeians in Rome, through feudal serf/lord relations, to the modern bourgeois society that is characterised by the relationship between worker and capitalist (Marx & Engels, 2008: pp.3-6). Human productive activities consist of capacities to subject nature to their will inherited from previous generations (Wood, 1972: p.248), and forces of production determine relations between men in their historically given form (Wood, 1972: p.248).

In his analysis of the capitalist system via the framework of political economy, Marx observes contradictions in the capitalist system as a result of the relationship of production between the worker and the capitalist as driving history to their resolution. In the 1844 Manuscri pts, Marx discusses the tension between competition and monopolisation within the feudal system, and subsequently the capitalist system. Competition between landowners renting their land necessarily creates a situation whereby smaller landowners lose out to the accumulative capacity of larger landowners and are reduced to the status of workers, until the class of landowner is subsumed by that of ‘capitalist’ (Marx, 2012: p.52). In the same way, under capitalism, capitalists are placed in competition with each other to provide goods, necessitating that smaller capitalists lose out to larger ones because of the capacity of large capitalists to buy in bulk and undercut smaller capitalists, who then join the ranks of the working class (Marx, 2012: p.34). As more workers enter the pool of potential workers, competition for jobs increases (in accordance with the laws of supply and demand), deflating wages to the point of subsistence (Marx, 2012: p.16). As this process of accumulation, competition and monopolisation continues, the ranks of the working class expands, and wages deflate, to such an extent that class distinctions become almost obsolete (Marx, 2012: p.57). It is at this point that systemic contradictions are resolved by the dialectic, resulting in the necessary abolition of private property, alienated labour and the class system.

In order to resolve these contradictions, Marx synthesises the notion of historical materialism with the Hegelian concept of the dialectic to explain how the struggles he identifies throughout history result in dynamic change. Hook defines the dialectical situation of Hegel as occurring when:

“two (or more) phases present a relation of opposition and interaction such that the result (1) Exhibits something new, (2) preserves some of the structural elements of the interacting phases, and (3) eliminates others” (Hook, 1966: p.60).

In Hegel and Marx, alienating objects “confront the individual and represent a contradiction between what the object is and what it should be” (MacGregor, 1984: p.17) – the individual’s labour acts on this object to “surmount this antithesis” and positively transforms external reality, transcending the contradiction (MacGregor, 1984: p.17). The dialectic, in Hegel’s terms, “negates the negation” (Arthur, 1986: p.60), which is to say that the alienating object is overcome by the resolution of contradiction to create a new epoch out of the old. The sublation of alienation in Hegel is achieved through recognising that which estranges and incorporating it into the self-consciousness of the individual, which Arthur terms “speculative reconciliation” (1986: p.62).

Marx accepts most of the logic of Hegel’s dialectic and the overcoming of alienation, but challenges Hegel’s phenomenology the idea that simply becoming conscious of that which alienates is sufficient to overcome it. Marx agrees that consciousness is highly important, but man cannot think away the system of private property through mere philosophical reinterpretation of the world (Arthur, 1986: p.62). Marx characterises communism as the negation of the negation (Marx, 2012: p.102) but frames the abolition of private property in historical materialist terms. The overthrow of capitalism and establishment of communism originates from everything that came before it (Marx, 2012: p.102 & Arthur, 1986: p.70) and is contingent in regards to history. Communism is therefore not a “true, self-originating position” (Marx, 2012: p.102), nor a “goal of human development”, but is “the actual phase necessary for the next stage in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation” (Marx, 2012: p.95). The dynamic material progression of history, mans relationship to production, and the increasing alienation of man under capitalism necessarily leads to the downfall of the system and its replacement with communism.

Marx criticises Hegel’s phenomenological method as insufficient to overcome private property and alienation, arguing that becoming conscious of the alienating nature of private property and the idea of communism merely overcomes the idea of private property (Marx, 2012: p.102), not it’s reality. For Marx, private property will be overcome when history leads to the moment of “actual communist action to abolish actual private property” (Marx, 2012: p.102), manifest in when the expansion of the working class and competition for work becomes so great that revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is necessary. Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s phenomenological method stems from his belief that Hegel conceives of the material world as estranged from man only in its “thought form” (Arthur, 1986: p.61), thus for Hegel recognition of the abstract concept of that which estranges is sufficient to overcome it. It appears to frustrate Marx that, whilst recognising alienation as originating in history, Hegel treats it as a problem of consciousness (Arthur, 1986: p.49) and not from material existence (Hook, 1966: p.81). Marx’s solution is couched in objective reappropriation of the estranged object (Arthur, 1986: p.62) through revolutionary practice to overthrow capitalism. The proletariat will necessarily be the class of revolution because they are so immiserated by the alienating nature of capitalism they embody as a class the idea of human emancipation (Hyppolite, 1969: p.148). The transcendence of private property through revolution means that objects become human, social objects made by man for man, not appropriated and estranged from him (Marx, 2012: pp. 89-90).

This section has shown how Marx retains Hegel’s concept of the dialectic and of the historical succession of things, but rejects what he sees as Hegel’s philosophical idealism, and instead replaces it with his ‘scientific’ method of historical materialism (Hook, 1966: p.29). Hegel and Marx both recognise the alienating nature of labour, but are differentiated in their proposed solutions the “objective reappropriation” of Marx and the “speculative reconciliation” of Hegel (Arthur, 1986: p.62). Hyppolite writes: “where Hegel’s reflections upon history had culminated in completely transcending it, Marx remains within history, seeking to transform it” (1969: p.148). Marx’s belief in the objective overthrow of private property has been shown to be a synthesis of his concept of historical materialism as the driving force of history, and the centrality of Hegel’s “concern with the present and its destruction” to Marx’s project, manifest in his invocation of the dialectic and the negation of capitalism (Geoghegan, 1987: p.33). From this brief explication of the nature of communism as a historically contingent position, this essay will now discuss the impact of the Utopian Socialists on Marx’s political thought, and highlight some of his objections.

Utopian SocialismIn the 1844 Manuscri pts, Marx posits “the return of man to himself as a social being” as a result of communism as being “accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development” (2012: p.84). This passage is particularly pertinent when paired with Marx’s later criticisms of Utopian Socialism in final part of ‘The Communist Manifesto’. Marx appears to be sympathetic to the writers, arguing that the thoughts of Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen “spring into existence in the early undeveloped period...of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie” which did not “as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat”, leading them to negate “historically created conditions of emancipation” in favour of “fantastic ones” (Marx & Engels, 2008: p.35). Marx argues that they were writing in such a period that class antagonisms, such as he identifies as the catalyst for overthrowing the system of private property, were in an embryonic stage (through no fault of the writers) which led them to instead posit utopian theories of socialism that were not grounded in historical conditions. Indeed, Geoghegan argues that “Marx and Engels deemed as inappropriate the positing of utopias not grounded in existing tendencies” (1987: p.27). The condemnation of Utopian Socialism may be somewhat exaggerated in order to distinguish Marx and Engels’ own socialism in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Utopian Socialist theories of the new society are embedded in “the changes that have occurred historically in the social function of power” (Geoghegan, 1987: p.11), but they do not draw the same conclusions as Marx. For both Fourier and Saint-Simon, the system will remain capitalist in a Marxist sense of the term, but “with wealth and ownership spread across society” (Geoghegan, 1987: p.12). The distinction drawn between the socialism that Marx and Engels posit in ‘The Communist Manifesto’, and that of the Utopian Socialists, is intended to raise the collective class consciousness of their readership to their conditions and engender proletariat revolution. This section of the Manifesto serves to explain and distinguish their own scientific, objective analysis and from other socialist traditions, making them unattractive in the process (Geoghegan, 1987: pp.28-29).

This is not to say that Marx was not influenced by the Utopian Socialists class defined by economic capacity and productive labour, not ownership as with Marx, is central to the thought of Saint-Simon (Geoghegan, 1987: p.10). His equivalent category to Marx’s proletariat consists of all workers, “from the proletariat machinist to the bourgeois factory owner” placed in opposition only to the nobility and clergy (Geoghegan, 1987: p.10). Clearly, the appearance of historical context, and the centrality of class in the work of the Utopian Socialists, is reflected in Marx’s own work.

This essay has charted the development of various themes in Marx’s work and identified their origins in the works of primarily Hegel and the Classical Political Economists. It has shown that Marx owes his intellectual debt to these thinkers first and foremost, but that he was also influenced by the Utopian Socialists, albeit to a lesser degree. Marx’s synthesis of Hegelian philosophy and the framework of Classical Political Economy with his original concept of historical materialism allowed him to scrutinise the capitalist system and propose a logical resolution of the problems inherent in it. Marx’s account is sensitive to historical context and emphasises the progression of history as a result of the contradictions he identified in various stages of human development, resulting from the relationship of man to the means of production. The result is a complex, nuanced account of man’s development through history that is still pertinent today.

Bibliography

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