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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Singer
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June 23 - July 3, 2021
One might say that Hegel is trying to show that history is not merely one event leading to another, but the progress of Mind following a logically necessary path, a path along which it must travel in order to reach its final goal.
Perhaps the most celebrated passage in the Phenomenology concerns the relationship of a master to a slave. It well illustrates what Hegel means by dialectic, and it introduces an idea echoed in Marx’s view of the relationship between capitalist and worker.
Although it seems at first that the master is everything and the slave nothing, it is the slave who works and by his work changes the natural world.
For Hegel, the ultimate outcome must therefore be the liberation of the slave, and the overcoming of the initial conflict between the two independent beings.
Hegel describes this as a situation in which Mind is ‘alienated’ from itself—people (who are manifestations of Mind) take other people (who are also manifestations of Mind) as something foreign, hostile, and external to themselves, whereas they are in fact all part of the same all-encompassing whole.
Hegel referred to the Christian religion at a certain stage of its development as a form of alienation, for while God reigns in heaven, human beings inhabit an inferior and comparatively worthless ‘vale of tears’. Human nature is thus seen as divided between its essence, which is immortal and heavenly, and its non-essential, mortal, and earthly incarnation. Hence individuals see themselves as fulfilled only after they leave their body and enter another realm; they are alienated from their mortal existence and the world in which they actually live.
Hegel had taken Mind as the moving force in history, and humans as manifestations of Mind. This, according to Feuerbach, locates the essence of humanity outside human beings and thus, like religion, serves to alienate humanity from itself.
Hegel’s tale of the progress of Mind, overcoming alienation in order to achieve freedom, was for Feuerbach a mystifying expression of the progress of human beings overcoming the alienation of both religion and philosophy itself.
Marx seized on this idea of bringing Hegel down to earth, and he too began using Hegel’s methods to attack the present material and economic condition of human beings.
Marx sees economic life, not religion, as the chief form of human alienation.
Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and being, this alien essence dominates him and he adores it.
‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ Marx portrays religion as a response to the oppression and heartlessness of the world; but an inadequate response because instead of challenging the oppression itself, it merely numbs the pain.
In ancient Rome, the lowest class of citizens was the proletariat. Marx applies this term to industrial society to refer to the working class, those who do not own property and live by selling their labour.
The proletariat, following the lead of the new radical philosophy, will complete the dialectical process in which humans have emerged, grown estranged from themselves, and become enslaved by their own alienated essence. The property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves, but in doing so, they would not win freedom for all human beings.
Since human alienation is not a problem of a particular class, but a universal problem, whatever is to solve it must have a universal character—and the proletariat, Marx claims, has this universal character in virtue of its total deprivation. It represents not a particular class of society, but all humanity.
it is not difficult to see parallels between Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, and Marx’s dialectic of the capitalist ruling class and the proletariat. The proletariat fits neatly into this dialectical scenario, and one cannot help suspecting that Marx seized upon it precisely because it served his philosophical purposes so well.
Marx tailors his conception of the proletariat to suit his philosophy, and tailors his philosophy in accordance with his new-found enthusiasm for the working class and its revolutionary potential.
Marx had now developed two important new ideas. The first is that the chief form of human alienation is not philosophical nor religious, but economic, grounded in the way we satisfy our material wants; and the second is that the material force needed to liberate humanity from its domination by the capitalist system lies in the working class.
according to classical economics the worker becomes a commodity, the production of which is subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. If the supply of workers exceeds the demand for labour, wages fall and some workers starve. Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive.
Those who employ the workers—the capitalists—build up their wealth through the labour of their workers. They become wealthy by keeping for themselves a certain amount of the value their workers produce. Capital is nothing else but accumulated labour. The worker’s labour increases the employer’s capital.
What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?’ (By ‘abstract labour’ Marx means work done simply in order to earn a wage, rather than for the worker’s own specific purposes. Thus making a pair of shoes because one wants a pair of shoes is not abstract labour; making a pair of shoes because that happens to be a way of getting money is.) Marx, in other words, wants to give a deeper explanation of the meaning and significance of the laws of economics.
The externalization of the worker in his product implies not only that his labour becomes an object, an exterior existence but also that it exists outside him, independent and alien, and becomes a self-sufficient power opposite him,
In contrast to Hegel, whom Marx praises for grasping the self-development of man as a historical process, the classical economists take the present alienated condition of human society as its ‘essential, original and definitive form’. They fail to see that it is a necessary but temporary stage in the evolution of mankind.
Under conditions of alienated labour, workers must produce objects over which they have no control, because the products of their labour belong to their employers.
The employers then sell these objects, profiting from their sale, and increasing their capital. In this way the workers’ products are used to increase the wealth and power of the employers. Thus the workers are alienated from the products of their labour. They are also alienated from their activity, because they have sold their labour-time to capitalists, who control them and compel them to work long hours of repetitive, mindless factory work. Because workers are no longer able to produce freely in accordance with their imagination—and that was, Marx thought, what distinguishes us from
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In the alienated condition caused by private property we cannot appreciate anything except by possessing it, or using it as a means. The abolition of private property will liberate our senses from this alienated condition, and enable us to appreciate the world in a truly human way.
Marxism is more down to earth than Hegel’s philosophy of history, but it is still a speculative philosophy of history rather than a scientific study.
The proletariat becomes conscious of its misery, and therefore seeks to overthrow the capitalist form of society, but this consciousness arises only because of the present situation of the proletariat in society.
Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life
And in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx had referred to communism as ‘the riddle of history solved’. This ‘riddle of history’ is Hegel’s riddle of how Mind is to achieve liberation.
What Marx is saying is that the problems of philosophy cannot be solved by mere interpretation of the world as it is, but only by remoulding the world to resolve the philosophical contradictions inherent in it. Philosophy is crucial because it points to the problems that can be overcome only by changing the world.
The materialist conception of history is a theory of world history in which practical human activity, rather than thought, plays the crucial role.
What is important is that Marx’s theory of history is a vision of human beings in a state of alienation. Human beings cannot be free if they are subject to forces that determine their thoughts, their ideas, their very nature as human beings. The materialist conception of history tells us that human beings are subject to forces they do not understand and cannot control. These forces are not supernatural tyrants, forever above and beyond human control, but the productive powers of human beings themselves. These productive powers, instead of serving human beings, appear to them as alien and
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The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
So we have a three-stage process: productive forces determine relations of production, which in turn determine the political, legal, and ideological superstructure. The productive forces are fundamental. Their growth provides the momentum for the whole process of history.
Like Hegel, Marx has a view about what is ultimately real. His materialism is the reverse of Hegel’s idealism. The materialist conception of history is usually regarded as a theory about the causes of historical change, rather than a theory about the nature of ultimate reality.
He replaced the liberation of Mind by the liberation of real human beings. Instead of seeing history as the development of Mind through various forms of consciousness to final self-knowledge, Marx saw it as the development of human productive forces, by which human beings free themselves from the tyranny of nature and fashion the world after their own plans.
How Marx and Hegel see history.
Few historians—or philosophers for that matter—now see any purpose or goal in history. They do not explain history as the necessary path to anywhere.
Marx, in contrast, saw history as the development of the real nature of human beings, that is, human beings satisfying their wants and exerting their control over nature by their productive activities. The materialist conception of history was not conceived as a modern scientific account of how economic changes lead to changes in other areas of society. It was conceived as an explanation of history which points to the real forces operating in it, and the goal to which these forces are heading.
By 1844 Marx had come to hold that the capitalist economic system, regarded by the classical economists as natural and inevitable, was an alienated form of human life. Under capitalism workers are forced to sell their labour—which Marx regards as the essence of human existence—to the capitalists, who use this labour to accumulate more capital, which further increases the power of the capitalists over the workers. Capitalists become rich, while wages are driven down to the bare minimum needed to keep the workers alive. Yet in reducing so large a class of people to this degraded condition,
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Marx starts with labour. Labour is described as ‘the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life’. Yet it becomes, under capitalism, a commodity the worker must sell in order to live. Therefore his life-activity is reduced to a means to go on living. It is not part of his life, but ‘a sacrifice of his life’. His real life only begins when his work ceases, ‘at table, in the public house, in bed’
Exchange-value’ is a key term in Marxist economics. It is contrasted with ‘use-value’. The use-value of a pound of sugar is its power to satisfy people’s desires for something sweet. The exchange-value of a pound of sugar might be, in a certain time and place, two pounds of potatoes or, expressed in terms of money, say, £1. Use-values therefore exist independently of a market or any other system of exchange: exchange-values do not.
Wages may rise in real terms, but the gulf between workers and capitalists will increase.
If capital grows, the domination of capital over workers increases. Wage-labour ‘produces the wealth of others that rules over it’
From this hostile power the labourers receive their means of subsistence, only on the condition that they again assist the further growth of capital.
But the capitalist has bought twelve hours of labour-power for his £1, and can now use the remaining six hours to extract surplus value from the worker. This is, Marx claims, the secret of how capital is able to use the worker’s creative power to increase its domination over the worker.
Thus a new machine that makes it possible to produce two coats in the time it used to take to produce one will increase the use-value of an hour’s labour (because two coats are more useful than one) but will not increase the exchange-value of the hour’s labour (because an hour’s labour remains an hour’s labour, and if a coat can be made in only half the time it used to take, it will, in the end, be worth correspondingly less). Increasing the fruitfulness of labour therefore increases its use-value but not the exchange-value of its output.
Through machinery and the division of labour, capitalism greatly increases the productivity of human labour; but this increased productivity does not benefit the producers.
Under capitalism, however, labour is geared to the production of goods for exchange. Paradoxically, under these conditions increased productivity does not lead to the production of more exchange-value. Instead, the exchange-value per item of what is produced drops.
The capitalist obtains the use-value of the worker’s labour-power, and pays only the exchange-value. Because labour-power is a commodity that can be used to produce more value than it has itself, the capitalist is able to retain the difference between the two.
