http://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/uchida/index.htm
Hiroshi Uchida (1988)
Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic
Source: Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic by Hiroshi Uchida,
published by Routledge 1988, Preface, Chapter 1 and excerpts from
following chapters.
Preface
1. Doctrine of Notion
2. Doctrine of Being
3. Doctrine of Essence
Preface
This book deals with the relation between Karl Marx's Grundrisse and
the Logic of G. W. F. Hegel. I attempt to prove that the relation is
more profound and more systematic than hitherto appreciated.
Marx's application of Hegel's Logic to the Grundrisse was first
mentioned in a letter, written around 16 January 1858, to Friedrich
Engels:
In my method of working it has given me great service that by mere
accident I had again leafed through Hegel's Logic - Freiligrath found
some volumes of Hegel which originally belonged to Bakunin and sent me
them as a present.
Many students of Marx have referred to the letter and have discussed
it, but Marx's use of Hegel's Logic in the Grundrisse has not been
fully examined. Let us consider some representative writers who have
concerned themselves with the relationship.
There are the editors of the original German edition of the Grundrisse
(1953). This photocopy edition of the original two volumes of 1939 and
1941 has end-notes, many of which refer to Hegel's Logic. A reader
using these notes, however, inevitably fails to find the hidden use of
Hegel's Logic in the Grundrisse, because the notes are not based on a
correct understanding of Marx's critique. These notes only create
confusion.
Roman Rosdolsky wrote The making of Marx's 'Capital', the pioneering
study of the Grundrisse, whilst 'inhabiting a city whose libraries
contained only very few German, Russian or French socialist works',
and so he was able to use only 'the few books in his own possessions
He nevertheless became aware of the relation of Hegel's Logic to
Marx's Grundrisse, and wrote:
The more the work advanced, the clearer it became that I would only be
able to touch upon the most important and theoretically interesting
problem presented by the 'Rough Draft' - that of the relation of
Marx's work to Hegel, in particular to the Logic - and would not be
able to deal with it in any greater depth.
Although he thought that he could only 'touch upon' the problem, and
that he could not 'deal with it in any greater depth', he ventured to
remark:
If Hegel's influence on Marx's Capital can be seen explicitly only in
a few footnotes, the 'Rough Draft' must be designated as a massive
reference to Hegel, in particular to his Logic irrespective of how
radically and materialistically Hegel was inverted! The publication of
the Grundrisse means that the academic critics of Marx will no longer
be, able to write without first having studied his method and its
relation to Hegel.
The fact that Hegells influence on Marx's Capital is largely implicit
was suggested in Marx's letter of 9 December 1861 to Engels: '. . .
the thing [Critique of political economy 1861 -3] is assuming a much
more popular form, and the method is much less in evidence than in
Part I' [i.e. A contribution to the critique of political economy of
1859]. This letter relates to the manuscripts of 1861 - 3, but the
case is the same with Capital. Compared with Capital (or the
manuscripts of 1861 - 3), the Grundrisse has many explicit references
to Hegel, to the Logic. Rosdolsky, who studied with 'a number of
difficulties', suggested that Marx critically utilised Hegel's Logic
in writing the Grundrisse. However, Rosdolsky did not fulfil the task
of proving this in his book.
Rosdolsky referred eight times to Hegel in his study of the 'Chapter
on Money' from the Grundrisse, and nine times when he considered the
'Chapter on Capital'. He indicated a few specific points where Marx's
critique of political economy was carried out in reference to the
Logic. Most of the examples which Rosdolsky gave his readers are
arbitrary and not relevant to the theoretical context of the
Grundrisse. This should be said, albeit in the light of the
difficulties which he endured whilst writing his study of the
Grundrisse, the first variant of Capital.
Martin Nicolaus, the English translator of the Grundrisse in the
Pelican Marx Library, has a similarly high opinion of the importance
of Hegel's Logic in the 'Rough Draft'. In the Foreword to the English
translation of the Grundrisse Nicolaus wrote as follows:
If one considers not only the extensive use of Hegelian terminology in
the Grundrisse, not only the many passages which reflect
self-consciously on Hegel's method and the use of the method, but also
the basic structure of the argument in the Grundrisse, it becomes
evident that the services rendered Marx by his study of the Logic were
very great indeed.
Readers of Nicolaus's introductory Foreword naturally expect him to
refer to the crucial points where the Grundrisse contains a critical
application of the Logic. However, this expectation is not fulfilled,
though the Grundrisse contains several footnotes to the Logic. Those
footnotes are never sufficient to explain how the Logic was critically
absorbed as a whole and in detail in the Grundrisse. For example,
though Nicolaus properly noted that Marx relates 'production' to
Hegel's 'ground', he failed recognise that the reference is intimately
connected with Marx's conception of money in its third determination
as 'a contradiction which dissolves itself'. The same expression
appears just before 'ground' in the Logic.
Nor did Nicolaus notice that Marx refers 'means of production' to
'matter' (Materie) and 'labour-power' to 'form' (Form) in the Logic,
and he mistranslated the German term Materie as 'material'. Therefore
it may be helpful to remind readers of the Nicolaus translation that
they should consult the original German text if they wish to
rediscover Hegel's Logic in the Grundrisse.
Besides Hegel, Aristotle should be considered in connection with
philosophical aspects of the Grundrisse. Alfred Schmidt commented on
this in his excellent work, The concept of nature in Marx: 'Although
the Grundrisse contains an extraordinary amount of new material on the
question of Marx's relation to Hegel and, through Hegel, to Aristotle,
they have so far hardly been used in discussions of Marx's
philosophy.' Marx's comments in his letter of 21 December 1857 to
Ferdinand Lassalle are evidence that he was most interested in
Aristotle whilst writing the Grundrisse: 'I always had great interest
in the latter philosopher [Heraclitus], to whom I prefer only
Aristotle of the ancient philosophers.'
Schmidt is correct to point out the use of Aristotle in the 'Rough
Draft', remarking that Marx approached Aristotle through Hegel.
However, Schmidt failed to find any direct use of Aristotle by Marx.
As we will see later, Marx does refer directly to him, for instance,
when he posits the commodity at the beginning of the 'Chapter on
Money' as the concrete instantiation (synolon) of the primary
substance (prote ousaia) and the secondary substance (deuterai
oustai).
However, Schmidt made a noteworthy suggestion concerning the use of
Aristotle in the Grundrisse:
Here [in the Grundrisse] Marx tried to grasp the relation of Subject
and Object in labour by using pairs of concepts, such as
'form-matter', or 'reality-possibility', which stem from Aristotle,
whom he rated highly as a philosopher. In an immediate sense, of
course, Marx depended on the corresponding categories of Hegel's
logic, but as they are interpreted materialistically their
Aristotelian origin shines more clearly through than it does in Hegel
himself.
According to Schmidt, Marx used Aristotle to construct a materialist
basis for his theory, and he used Hegel to inquire why and how modern
life is alienated and appears in an idealist form. Hegel, though
thinking himself to be the greatest Aristotelian, actually deformed
Aristotle's philosophy. He changed what Aristotle defined as 'active
reason', which existed in every individual, into 'substance as
subject'.
In my view, Marx attempts to reform Hegel's philosophy using
materialist aspects of Aristotle's philosophy, in order to prove why
and how modern life is developed through the force of capital. His
critique of Hegel does not simply reduce his idealism to a materialist
basis, but consists in converting his philosophy of alienation and
reification into historical categories. He uses these to clarify
perverted life in capitalism, and he reads Hegel's 'idea' as a form of
bourgeois consciousness.
Marx's use of Hegel's Logic in the formation of Capital can be
summarised as follows:
In the Economic and philosophical manuscripts (1844) he studies
not only the Phenomenology of spirit and the Philosophy of right, but
also the Encyclopaedia. He characterises the Shorter Logic as 'the
money of the spirit'. This means that the Logic is the most abstract
philosophical expression of the bourgeois spirit or consciousness of
value. This consciousness of value forms the basic economic relation
of bourgeois society.
In The holy family of 1845 he discusses Hegel's mode of
presentation, writing, for example, that many forms of fruit really
exist, so 'man' may abstract 'fruit in general' as an idea. Hegel,
however, reverses the process, insisting that at the beginning 'fruit
in general' exists as substance, and it posits many particular forms
of fruit as positive subjects. Marx reveals the secret of Hegel's
philosophy, which presupposes an ideal subject par excellence, even
though this subject is in reality a 'thought-product' or abstraction
that exists merely in the mind.
In the Poverty of philosophy of 1847, Marx implies a simultaneous
critique of political economy and of Hegel's philosophy, especially
the Logic, when he criticises Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's System of
economic contradictions, or the philosophy of poverty of 1846.
In the Grundrisse of 1857-8 Marx at last develops his critique of
political economy and of Hegel's philosophy, especially the Logic,
which he claims Proudhon misread. In Marx's view Proudhon grounded his
socialism falsely. Marx uses a critical reading of the two classics to
undermine Proudhon's theory of socialism.
Whilst writing the Critique of political economy 1861-3, Marx
re-reads the Shorter Logic and takes notes from it. Although his
method of working in these manuscripts is 'much less in evidence', as
already mentioned, the fact that he seems to apply the Logic to these
manuscripts should not be overlooked.
As is well known, in the Afterword to the second German edition of
Capital, Marx recalls his criticism of 'the mystificatory side of the
Hegelian dialectic' in The holy family,and announces:
I ... openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even,
here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with
the mode of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which the
dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being
the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive
and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be
inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical
shell.
Terrell Carver correctly suggested that Marx's 'rational kernel' is
Hegel's analysis of logic and the 'notion', and 'the mystical shell'
is Hegel's confusion of categorial movement with reality. The
difficulty in reading Hegel's Logic, however, consists in making a
clear distinction between these two aspects and giving concrete
examples from the text. In the text Hegel describes the process of
'becoming' of the 'notion' as simultaneously the process in which the
'idea', the mystical subject, posits itself as reality. The Grundrisse
is the first text in which Marx attempts to relate the 'becoming' of
the 'subject' to the categories of political economy, and therefore
there is more evidence of his analysis in it than in Capital, which
displays his solution. The Grundrisse is the most suitable text for
studying the relation of the critique of political economy to the
Logic.
The correspondence of each part of the Grundrisse to the Logic is
briefly summarised as follows:
The Introduction corresponds to the Doctrine of the Notion.
The Chapter on Money corresponds to the Doctrine of Being.
The Chapter on Capital corresponds to the Doctrine of Essence.
If the relation were not conceptualised this way, it would never
become visible as 'an artistic whole'.
The themes of the Grundrisse can be summarised in the following way:
For Marx, Hegel's Logic is 'the money of the spirit', the speculative
'thought-value of man and nature'. This means that in bourgeois
society 'man' and nature, and body and mind, are separated and
reconnected through the relation of private exchange. Their relation
is alienated from the persons who form the relation, which is mediated
by value. They become 'value-subjects', and those who possess enough
value also rule the society. The Logic in fact describes the
value-subject abstractly.
In bourgeois society the value-subject also rules nature, the
indispensable condition of life, because the subject monopolises
physical as well as mental labour, so the non-possessor of nature is
forced to engage in physical work. This coercion is seemingly
non-violent and is legally mediated through the value-relation on
which modern property is founded. In modern society there is
wide-spread acceptance of the legitimacy of one person controlling the
product of another's labour, and the other's labour itself, in order
to appropriate a surplus product. This approval is founded on the
value-relation and the 'form' of the commodity. Value is abstract and
imagined in the mind, and also embodied in money. Hegel's Logic
implicitly ascribes a sort of power to money, and Marx presents it as
the demiurgos of bourgeois society. That is why he characterises the
Logic as 'the money of the spirit'. His task in the Grundrisse
therefore consists in demonstrating that the genesis of value and its
development into capital are described in the Logic, albeit in a
seemingly closed system which reproduces itself, and overall his work
is directed towards transcending capitalism in practice.
Further Reading: Geoff Pilling on Concepts of Capital | Ilyenkov on
Abstract & Concrete | Hegel, Economics & Marx's Capital, Cyril Smith |
Logic of Marx's Capital, Tony Smith | Marx on Capital | Marx on Method
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
