I’m in the middle of reading through the Early Writings collection right now. But I started out with this 50-page introduction to the book. Lucio Colletti gives a pretty good summary and breakdown of the major arguments. The actual Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State was very dense and uninteresting for me. I was helped through it by this introduction, as well as some other writers’ commentary on what was happening. But I’m not sure I would have managed to get what Marx was saying apart from the outside commentaries. Usually, I read these source materials so I can get the facts straight from the horse’s mouth, to use the common phrase. But not having read Hegel first, and then reading Marx’s blow-by-blow commentary on his work, it was a real chore to plow through. To be honest, I skimmed over much of it, and only managed to do so because I had the outside help.
So I think I’ll post the recap of the summary by Colletti here, rather than longer posts on the individual works. Though I may post additional comments on some of the individual works after I’ve finished.
What is written below is my attempt to summarize the basic arguments presented in the various works.
In fact, the importance of these works is really to understand Marx’s philosophical development of the basis for socialism/communism. Clearly, Marx thought he was bringing about something that would change the world for the better and finally emancipate man. What his work actually brought about was not only something entirely different but, in many respects, the polar opposite.
Introduction by Lucio Colletti
1 Marx’s philosophical position wasn’t so much known since his philosophical manuscripts weren’t published until after his death. Much of his position was assumed to have been elucidated by Engels.
When the Early Writings did appear, they were met with some distaste since “Marxism” had already largely been distilled into doctrine, and yet now there was clear evidence that there were differences.
Engels saw a contradiction between Hegel’s revolutionary principles and his conservative conclusions. He thought that once the principles were liberated from this compromise, the revolutionary principles would dominate the future.
Engels came to communism primarily on political economy, rather than by continuing his critique of Hegel and the speculative tradition.
The Russians paid strict attention to the philosophical and saw in their received Marxism a philosophical theory called dialectical materialism leading to historical materialism, which was extracted from Engels. And it was assumed, given the lack of Marx’s own philosophical writings, that Engels and Marx were in agreement.
When the Early Writings did appear, the dissimilarity to dialectical materialism was noticeable. They said nothing about the dialectics of nature; nothing which prepared the way for Engels theory of three basic dialectical laws (The transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, the negation of negation, the coincidence of opposites). Instead, there was a complex critique of Hegel. There was also a distinction between Hegel’s alienation, where it meant the objectivity of nature, and Marx’s, where it meant what happens when the products of labor become commodities.
Thus, in Marx, alienation became central to the revolutionary critique of capitalism.
2 Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State is a critique both of Hegel’s dialectical logic and his ideas on the state. Marx criticizes Hegel because Hegel’s reason isn’t human thought, but the Totality of things. Marx says Hegel has reduced being to thought, and real facts don’t have genuine reality.
Hegel concerned himself with a number of historical institutions, and rather than explain them by investigating their causes in history to determine if they have any reason for existing today, he shows the rationale of their existence by an Idea. This Idea presupposes everything, but can’t presuppose anything outside itself, which means the logic/deductive process is one of creating objects. Marx deduces that Hegel conjures the finite out of the infinite. Hegel doesn’t give us a historical or scientific understanding of the state, but a defense of them, and his task isn’t to discover the truth of empirical existence, but to discover the empirical existence of truth.
The importance of Marx’s criticism of Hegel is that it provides us with a key to understanding his criticism of bourgeois economics. Marx thought that bourgeois economists abstracted the realities into logical categories, and these abstractions detached them from the realities.
3 Marx next tackled the modern state. Hegel sees the modern state as contradictory and self-destructive, so he attempts to go backward to some elements of feudalism in order to maintain it. Hegel sees that bourgeois society has unleashed individualism, and looks for a way to restore the unity between the public and private spheres. The task of the modern state is to restore the ethic and organic wholeness of the ancient polis, where the individual was integrated into the community. He wants to find a new way to recompose the fragments of society. Private interests are both separate from each other, but further, opposed to all the others. Marx and Hegel disagree though on some points since Marx thinks Hegel has inverted the subject and predicate. For Hegel, because he turned the universal into a substance, and makes it the creator of reality, history proceeds from the state toward society and family. Marx believes the opposite is true: family and civil society are the preconditions of the state.
Marx believes Hegel is upside down, but the inversion doesn’t come from Hegel himself, it comes from the reality he is trying to reflect. In other words, Hegel is just looking at society and trying to make sense of it. Marx sees the construction of modern liberal society as upside down. It tried to separate the state from the body of society, but the modern state was a modern product, it shouldn’t be like this. This abstraction is what he called alienation, or estrangement. The modern state is a phenomenon of detaching the state from society. Ancient states had no such thing. The people and the state were largely unified, and freedom, in the modern sense, was unknown. An individual was free to the extent that he was a member of a free community.
The modern liberal society has attempted to liberate man from his social ties.
Marx sees two fundamental divisions: the estrangement of individuals from each other, and the more general estrangement of the public from the private. The modern state has given political equality, while allowing class inequality. Just as Christians accept that in heaven, we’re all equal, yet on earth we are unequal, so individuals in the modern state have an equality before the law, but social and economic inequality.
Marx believes society can only acquire meaning and efficacy by renouncing private classes and thinking in terms of the whole. ‘Crass materialism’ arises from the fact that the abstraction of equality under the law, leads naturally to economic inequality. It ignores the reality of class inequality by treating citizens as legally equal. In fact, Marx writes, in the name of some abstract universal principle called “law”, which is supposed to express the general social will, it consecrates private property, which is the right of individuals to pursue their own interests independently of, and at times directly contrary to, society itself. Marx says “the general will is invoked in order to confer absolute value on individual caprice…. the cause of equality among men is defended so that the cause of inequality among them (private property) can be acknowledged as fundamental and absolute. Everything is upside down.”
Marx uses an illustration of this inversion whereby the concrete becomes the abstract. Roman law and German law or both systems of law. This is obvious. But if I say Law, this abstraction, is realized in Roman law and German law, these concrete systems of law, then the relationship is mystical. The abstract universal, ‘law’ which ought to be a property of the concrete German or Roman code, instead becomes the subject; while the real subject, the concrete German or Roman law, because the mere form of the abstract ‘law’.
While I struggle to understand the importance of this, Marx uses this inversion analysis to show the real relationship which determines the exchange value of commodities. Real useful work is transformed into the abstract ‘labor’, and ‘use value’ is transformed into the abstraction ‘exchange value’.
Men, therefore, don’t bring their labor into relation with each other as values, because they see them merely as instances of the more abstract ‘labor’.
In Marx’s treatment of the state, he uses the term ‘democracy’, but not in the sense we normally think of it. Marx thinks of democracy in the sense of the organic communities typified by the ancient city-states. This type of democracy can only happen when the modern state disappears. The modern state with its system of voting representatives from among the people, proves that the power belongs to the people. Yet as soon as the vote is done, these representatives, by the design of the system itself, become separate from the people. This isn’t a bug of the current democratic states, it is a contradiction built in. Adding in universal suffrage can’t fix this contradiction. This form of political state is inevitably separated from civil society.
What Marx proposes is that this separation need not exist because society is an organism of solidary and homogenous interests.
The writer, Lucio Colletti, notes that much of Marx’s political theory actually originates in Rousseau.
4 Colletti here discusses Marx’s views in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. He notes that for Marx, human nature doesn’t consist of a set of attributes that humans have, but as a series of relationships. Man becomes alienated when he is separated from his objective world- the world of his means of production and subsistence, and from the other men to whom his work-activity belongs.
In money, human essence is estranged from man. Man’s physical and intellectual energies, his work-capacity are removed from him. Man’s human essence is no more than the functional relationships of his rapport with nature and others. Money is the social bond transformed into the ownership of things. Understood as Marx understands it, the force of society is petrified into an object.