Karl Marx

On Hegel's Philosophy of Right


Every complaint I had about Hegel's philosophy of right is taken up by Marx in this brief piece. Most importantly, as the introduction in the Selected Writings of Marx points out, Marx takes issue with Hegel starting with abstract ideas and working out the way things should be, rather than taking the way things are and working from there to theory. As Marx puts it in a more philosophical manner: "Hegel gives the predicates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them in a mystical fashion into their subjects" (18). That's a mouthful, but I think it means that Hegel has taken what is supposed to be the acted upon and made it the actor. He's subordinated actually existing humanity to his abstract philosophy, which is obviously the opposite of Marx's project. Another quote makes this more concrete, whereas Hegel's Philosophy of Right (also translated as Philosophy of law) puts his theoretical conception of the law first and asks that the people conform to it, Marx writes "Man does not exist for the law but the law for man." (20)

The German Ideology

The German Ideology is a really great and clear philosophical enumeration of materialist philosophy, just as we'll see that the 18th Brumaire is an example of actually writing history using materialist philosophy.

The basic point of the German Ideology might boil down to this: the real world exists, and the world of consciousness is not a separate plane, but simply one aspect and manifestation of the physical/material world.

Marx starts, in a very un-Hegelian way, with dealing with what reality is. He begins at the very beginning: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human organisms" (149). Damn. That's a good first premise.

But how do you define the human organism? There are several ways (including consciousness and speech) which Marx mentions, but a materialist conception of humanity begins with production (150). Everything else in human society flows from the fact that they must work to produce their subsistence; every historical event stems from the play of intercourse - of trade - ie the course that production and exchange takes place.

This leads Marx to make some very big claims:
p. 155 - "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." His method of philosophy starts with "real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness" (ie not as some vague, abstract spirit consciousness)

158 - "Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all."

160- Since the interaction of production leads to different classes, one of which must dominate at any given time, "It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought amongst each other."

Spirit-philosophers like Hegel might describe the march towards liberalism as democracy becoming consciousness, but Marx knows that's a bunch of bull. All democracy is is the lower classes, who do not control production, trying to get empower themselves politically so they can control production. And if they control production, they can better their lives materially - the only goal.

162 - "Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." Post-Soviet Union, I have a tendency to view Communism as a vague and unattainable abstraction. It's good to have this perspective - Communism as an active changer of the world.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I have to confess, I didn't get much out of this piece. This is definitely Marx at his most cogent and insightful; you could subtitle it "Marx for Bartlett's."

It includes the classic lines: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second as farce" (594).

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past" (595). The first part of this phrase gave us Sartre's existentialism; the second, Levi-Strauss' structualism.

Besides that, the 18th Brumaire is just a very well-reasoned and very specific analysis of the movement of history, as it works itself out through class. The most interesting thing is the introducer's description of it "as a prologue to later Marxist thought on the nature and meaning of fascism" (594). Statements about Louis' rise seem to support this, such as: "The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate it; not the country folk who want to overthrow the old order through their own energies linked up with the towns, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied bondage to this old order, want to see themsleves with their small holding saved and favoured by the ghost of the empire" (609).