From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998
Subject: capitalism AND dialectics AND nature
>From David Black
On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, Kenneth Ferris wrote:
The Nation magazine in the U.S. has recently said (probably not the
first time anyone has said this), that capitalism is always in crisis. Any
thoughts on why that is so?
A number of recent studies have highlighted the odd resemblance between the
self-moving, self-manifesting and self-grounded categories of Hegel's Logic
and the value-form of capital, as a totalizing abstract universal; in Marx's
words, "growing big with itself" as it sucks in the living labour of human
beings and invades every area of their existence. Istvan Meszaros, a former
student of George Lukacs, has produced a magisterial critique of Capital as
an "order of social metabolic reproduction" which subjects humanity under
its "shadow of unconrollability" and asks: "are we really destined to live
forever under the spell of capital's global system glorified in it's
Hegelian conceptualization, resigned - as he advised us to be in his poetic
reference to 'the owl of Minerva [that] spreads its wings only at the
falling of the dusk' - to the tyrannical exploitation of the World Spirit?"
Hegel's absolutes however, end up being permeated with absolute negativity,
there his dialectic remains relevant to Marx's dialectic of Labour and
Capital. In Capital, Vol. I in the chapter on "the absolute general law of
capitalist accumulation"; capitalism, which cannot produce wealth without
producing poverty, eventually "begets its own negation", the organised
working class and other "new passions, new forces".
Because Nature, according to Hegel, is incapable of self-movement, it is the
job of pure thought to discover its own Essence as Freedom. The Absolute
Idea thus externalizes itself, allowing the moment of the Particular to go
freely from itself into Nature. But in Hegel's view of Nature, which is the
very opposite to Rousseau's, Humanity's natural state of Particularity is
that of untamed individual wills, selfishness and irrational passions. In
societies in which individual wills are fully under the rule of such
external necessity, freedom can only have the most an abstract existence.
Thus Hegel, having proceeded from his Phenomenology of consciousness to
Science as the of pure thought of Logic whose Nature if is its Essential
freedom, now has need of another element to transcend the state of nature:
the Philosophy of Mind. For Hegel, the Beginning is also the End, although
the self-movement of reality is not so much circular, as a "circle of
cirles"; what goes around comes round, but at a higher level, as in a
spiral. However, what is involved in this process of reconstitution at a
higher level is not just a spiral of Progress; from Hegel's "standpoint of
political economy" progress is implicitly a spiral of Crisis. As Marx puts
capital is destructive as well as productive.
As early as 1841 Marx argues that the "practice of philosophy" is "the
critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the
particular reality by the Idea".
Marx, in breaking with Hegel, declares: "theory becomes a material force
when it grips the masses" and in mid-1843, in his unpublished Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, he attacks Hegel for failing to "measure the
idea by what exists" and for making an a priori deduction of Prussian
reality from a philosophical construction. However, Marx, as Dunayevskaya
would have it, by no means leaves behind the notion of Hegel's
self-determined Idea when he takes onboard labour and political economy; and
in this light, to go off on another track, Althusserian arguments on Marx's
allegedly Feuerbachian attempt to project "the recuperation of an alienated
essence" through the subject becoming an "identical subject/object" are
highly questionable. Marx does not project the notion of an alienated human
'essence' unconditioned by history. Rather, in his sixth Theses on Feuerbach
in 1845, Marx writes: "Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the
human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction in each single
individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."
In the 1844 Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic, Marx writes that the
"greatness" of Hegel's "dialectic of negativity as the moving and creative
principle" is its grasp of the "essence of labour" and the possibility of
human self-realisation through human collectivity and "as a result of
history".
Hegel had put "activity" as the mediator between subject and object, but he
presented it as thinking activity mediating between thought-entities.
Although Feuerbach, in breaking from Hegel, wanted to differentiate
thought-objects from sensuous objects, Marx found Feuerbach's "materialist
dualism" wanting; Feuerbach conceived reality "only in the form of an object
or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not
subjectively".
Marx sees Hegel's standpoint as that of "modern political economy". In
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the "reciprocal" relations which allow
production and exchange to take place are inherently universal "in their
content", even though the "system of needs" in which individuals are
"assigned" to their allotted place takes the form of "class divisions". In
Hegel's idealized civil society; "each man in earning, producing, and
enjoying on his own account is eo ipso producing and earning for the
enjoyment of everyone else. The compulsion which brings this about is rooted
in the complex interdependence of each on all, and it now presents itself to
each as the universal permanent capital".
But in the actuality of the wage-labour/capital relation, as opposed to its
idealization, subject and object are inverted. Capital, supposedly an
objective entity which simply exists in order to be manipulated for human
needs, becomes subject, whilst the labourer - the real subject - is degraded
and manipulated as an object.
For Marx, the concept of Labour becomes, as Meszaros puts it, the
"converging point of the heterogeneous aspects of alienation". Although
Labour is the first-order, essential mediation between the human subject and
nature, political economy conceptualizes second-order "mediations" - private
property, exchange and division of labour - as "natural" entities and
imposes them between the human being and his or her natural, potentially
self- fulfilling activity. Marx, in his critique of political economy, calls
for the supersession of its categories through the reconstitution of the
subject/object relationship in reality, by real, live human beings
Hegel discussion
... I in the chapter on "the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation"; capitalism,
which cannot produce wealth without producing poverty, eventually ...
www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/hegel/txt/douwdy4.htm - 8k - Cached -
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