From Marx to Hegel and Back

Capitalism, Critique, and Utopia

Victoria Fareld, Hannes Kuch, Victoria Fareld, Hannes Kuch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350260993
• eBook ISBN: 9781350082694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The relation between Hegel and Marx is among the most interpreted in the history of philosophy. Given the contemporary renaissance of Marx and Marxist theories, how should we re-read the Hegel-Marx connection today? What place does Hegel have in contemporary critical thinking? Most schools of Marxism regard Marx's inversion of Hegel's dialectics as a progressive development, leaving behind Hegel's idealism by transforming it into a materialist critique of political economy. Other Marxist approaches argue that the mature Marx completely broke with Hegel. By contrast, this book offers a wide-ranging and innovative understanding of Hegel as an empirically informed theorist of the social, political, and economic world. It proposes a movement 'from Marx to Hegel and back', by exploring the intersections where the two thinkers can be read as mutually complementing or even reinforcing one another. With a particular focus on essential concepts like recognition, love, revolution, freedom, and the idea of critique, this new intervention into Hegelian and Marxian philosophy unifies the ethical content of Hegel's philosophy with the power of Marx's social and economic critique of the contemporary world.

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From Marx to Hegel and Back

Toward a Helical Approach

Victoria Fareld and Hannes Kuch

1 Why Hegel and Marx—Again, Today?

In the wake of the global financial crisis, growing social inequalities, rising populism, and a resurrection of social movements, there is a wide-ranging revival of interest in Marx and Marxist thought.¹ For the task of critically understanding and contesting our social and political world, a rereading of Marx is indeed of vital importance. But to which Marx should we return? Which of all the Marxian guises should be explored anew? In light of the impact of Marxism on the history of the last century—in its emancipatory as well as totalitarian forms—a return to its source has to take the form of a self-critical reassessment that can actualize its potentials in new ways. Our suggestion in this book is to explore anew the Hegelian Marx. Hegel’s social and political philosophy, with its focus on recognition, desire, alienation, social freedom, and its critique of liberalism, was not only crucial for Marx but has become one of the most productive sites for critical theories today.² Such an elaboration of Hegel’s philosophy on Marx’s thinking can provide us with new standards for critically rethinking society—and for refiguring the concept of critique. In an attempt to explore and revitalize the Hegelian foundations of Marx’s thinking, we return to some key questions: Was Marx Hegel’s most important and merciless critic? Did he misread essential aspects of Hegel’s thought? At what points was Marx more Hegelian than he realized himself? In exploring the Hegelian foundations of Marx’s thinking, we also have to ask ourselves: which Hegel? The suggested answer is, with a temporal inversion, the Marxian Hegel. How can we reread Hegel in ways that were opened up by Marx? What would a Hegelian critique of Marx look like today? What place does Hegel have in contemporary critical thinking?³

Most schools of Marxism regard Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s dialectics as a progressive development, leaving behind Hegel’s idealism by transforming it into a materialist critique of political economy. Other Marxist approaches argue that the mature Marx completely broke with Hegel, or at least that Marxism should be expunged of any Hegelian traces. Instead of regarding Hegel as a metaphysical idealist, many strands of Hegelian Marxism have understood him as an empirically informed theorist of the social, political, and economic world, rendering his philosophy much more ‘materialist’.⁴ Our focus in this volume is to point out new dimensions of this ‘materialist’ side of Hegel’s thinking. We propose a spiral-shaped—or ‘helical’—movement ‘from Marx to Hegel and back’. The word ‘helical’ refers to something that has the form of a helix. We use it here to grasp an interpretive movement that follows a spiral course. Similar to the ‘hermeneutic spiral’, the helix only seemingly moves in circles; it incessantly finds new paths, looking at the previous ones from a different perspective. Correspondingly, the helical approach proposed here offers a rethinking of the Hegel–Marx relation through a movement that oscillates between the two thinkers, providing new associations and interpretations, aiming at encompassing a Marxian rereading of Hegel as well as a rereading of Marx from a Hegelian perspective. The promise is that, in this way, Hegel and Marx can complement one another, filling the gaps that the other left open or reinforcing one another’s insights.

There are a number of strong affinities between Hegel and Marx: their critique of abstract liberalism, their view of freedom as communal or social, their attentiveness to the concept of need, their interest in the rabble and the proletariat, and their reflections on universalism and species-being. There are also, however, strong differences and disputes: Hegel’s idealism is often seen as opposed to Marx’s materialism; the former’s appraisal of the actual is set against the latter’s merciless criticism of it. The same goes for Hegel’s social institutionalism and belief in the state, clashing with Marx’s critique of the ‘state machinery’ and his hope for unmediated communality. Hegel’s affirmation of personal property conflicts with Marx’s critique of the private ownership of means of production. And although both thinkers strongly criticize free markets, Hegel defends a certain kind of market whereas Marx’s critique of market capitalism is fundamental. Both of them criticize ‘abstract rights’, but they diverge in their assessment of the proper role and scope of individual rights. A helical approach highlights the overlap in Hegel’s and Marx’s social and political philosophies, not, however, without addressing the tensions and substantial disputes between them directly and systematically. Its central aim is to unify the ethical content of Hegel’s philosophy with the explanatory power of Marx’s social and economic critique of the contemporary world.

The relation between Hegel and Marx is among the most interpreted in the history of philosophy and the tradition of critical thought, and for good reasons: Hegel attempts to bring the philosophy of his day to a conclusion; his system absorbs the best insights from Aristotle to Kant. At the same time, it provides a thoroughgoing critique of his philosophical predecessors, of Kant even more than of Aristotle. Hegel demonstrates that philosophy cannot remain purely philosophical; even when dealing with core philosophical issues, such as reason, knowledge, truth, freedom, and universality, philosophy has to go beyond itself—into the realm of social theory, broadly conceived. After Hegel, philosophy must get involved with questions of recognition and human sociality, social norms and institutions, or power and authority. It is precisely at this point that Marx draws on Hegel, moving the focus even closer to the question of the conditions and shapes of social life, by reworking, transforming, criticizing, inverting, and eventually exceeding Hegel’s thought.

When analyzing the various ways of relating Hegel and Marx, it is important to keep apart several distinct levels of analysis. One important level concerns Marx’s own explicit assessment of Hegel, whether positive or negative, as well as his deliberate appropriation of Hegelian ideas, arguments, and concepts.⁵ ‘Dialectics’ and ‘alienation’ are examples that immediately spring to mind when focusing on Marx’s appropriative use of Hegel, whereas his critique of the state in capitalist societies, which is largely directed at a Hegelian understanding of it, exemplifies his conscious detachment from Hegel. This issue becomes even more multifaceted when we take into account that there is not only one Hegel or one Marx; there are, rather, many versions of both thinkers. A second level of analysis refers to the implicit ways Marx related to Hegel. Marx often remained Hegelian without explicitly saying it and sometimes even without acknowledging it, or still more, all the while criticizing a caricature of Hegel. Conversely, Marx did leave Hegel behind in many ways, yet at times without bothering to balance accounts with his ‘teacher’ explicitly.⁶ Both these affinities and differences between Hegel and Marx are situated on an implicit level, but they may turn out to be highly significant. A third level of investigation is the history of Marxism (and Hegelianism) and the various ways in which the Hegel–Marx relation has been interpreted in the historical trajectory of the different schools of (Hegelian) Marxism. Certainly, there is no single school of Marxism, not even of Hegelian Marxism, but only a wide (and often incompatible) historical variety of ways to relate Marx’s thinking to Hegel, from Vladimir Lenin and Georg Lukács to Slavoj Žižek and Axel Honneth.⁷ This list of names—radically incomplete as it is—merely serves to exemplify the broad diversity of traditions that might be taken into account when interpreting the relation of Hegel and Marx.

Thus, there are multiple possibilities to reconstruct the Hegel–Marx connection, with at least three levels of investigation, where each of these levels again opens up diverse ties and points of dissociation. This means, in turn, that to relate the two thinkers in a particular way crucially depends upon the underlying subject in question. In our book, such a systematic reconstruction takes its guiding aim from substantive questions of Critical Theory (or critical theories, in lower case) that go beyond purely historical issues of de facto influences. In other words, we are not primarily interested in Marx’s own stated or tacit relation to Hegel, or only interested in how the Hegel–Marx connection has been construed in different schools of Marxism and Hegelianism. Our examination of Hegel’s and Marx’s interrelated thinking is an attempt to critically examine our own contemporary situation.

2 Progression, Disruption, Reversion: Mapping the Terrain

It is impossible to give an encompassing overview of the immensely vast and rich literature on the relation between Hegel and Marx. But in a rough sketch, three general ways to relate Hegel and Marx can be distinguished: ‘progression’, ‘disruption’, and ‘reversion’. This section provides a broad outline of these approaches. In the following section, we argue for a shift in perspective by proposing a conceptual framework that considers a dynamic, two-way, helical movement of interpretations.

(i) Progression: This line of relating Hegel and Marx assumes a substantial development between the two thinkers where Marx in some way aims at a ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) of Hegelian insights. The idea is that there is a significant progress from Hegel to Marx, where Marx is seen as a corrective to Hegelian philosophy or even as the one who fulfills Hegel’s philosophy by overcoming it. Within this field of interpretation, we situate readers of Hegel and Marx who, in various ways, emphasize Marx’s critical appropriation and further development of Hegelian ideas, concepts, and arguments. One strand of progressive readings of the Hegel–Marx relation focuses on the idea that Marx brings Hegel’s philosophy to its fulfillment by transforming it in different ways—radicalizing it, materializing it, overcoming it. The view on Marx’s relation to Hegel as one of progressive development was brought to the fore by Georg Lukács. To Lukács, Marx critically completes Hegel’s philosophy, and Hegelian Marxism is a theory of human realization by means of the revolutionary transformation of society. In History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, Lukács articulates a conception of political praxis by drawing on Hegel’s view of society as a totality, although radically modified by Marx. Crucial to Lukács’ interpretation is the claim that Marx uncovered the true content of Hegel’s idea of a collective subject of history by releasing it from its idealist and metaphysical constraints and transforming it into a theory of the historical agency of the proletariat.⁸ From Lukács’ point of view, as elucidated in The Young Hegel (1948), Marx’s rejection of Hegel’s idealist metaphysics was thus neither a rupture with, nor a rejection of, Hegel’s philosophy, but a critical realization and transformative completion of it.⁹ Lukács maintains that in Marx’s critical fulfillment of Hegel’s thinking, history appears as a revolutionary process toward human self-realization, in which humanity eventually recognizes itself in the social world it produces. The variety of progressive approaches, despite their many internal differences, is held together by the view that Marx qualitatively developed a form of thinking that originated from Hegel.¹⁰ This proximity between the two is nicely captured by Adorno’s remark that, in Hegel’s philosophy, we can already see “society’s dawning critical consciousness of itself”.¹¹

Many topics can be placed within the progressive tradition: Apart from the key concepts of alienation and dialectics, a progressive line of development can be found in the influence of Hegel’s logic on Marx’s Capital, in the idea of immanent critique, and in the philosophies of history of Hegel and Marx. In order to illuminate how progressive approaches operate, we will spell out the two latter themes in more detail. Marx and the Left Hegelians, particularly in the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory, inherited from Hegel the idea that critique operates by way of critical standards that are derived from the very object under investigation.¹² In this respect, Hegelian and Marxist approaches are fundamentally at odds with vast strands of contemporary political philosophy that operate more or less on a Kantian basis, by construing abstract normative principles detached from social reality without asking about the foothold these principles have in social life, or the social forces that might help to realize their normative demands. Almost all schools of Hegelian Marxism reject this kind of moral condemnation of capitalist society where seemingly transcendent moral ideals are held against a bad reality. In contrast, immanent critique is based on norms, which the social orders or institutions in question necessarily rely upon themselves. The object of critique is judged by its own avowed standards and norms, by accepting the self-conception and claims that the object itself established, and then by detecting the internal contradictions and inner conflicts characteristic of that object with respect to its foundational standards and norms. Marx...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 From Marx to Hegel and Back: Toward a Helical Approach Victoria Fareld and Hannes Kuch
• Part 1 Reassessing the Legacy of Hegel and Marx
• Part 2 Capitalism and Critique
• Part 3 Postcapitalism and Utopia
• Index
• Imprint