3 Marxism and Dialectics

Where critical theory comes from

Critical theory comes out of one strand of Western Marxism, and more specifically out of the subset we call Hegelian Marxism. Its core is the Hegelian dialectic, which makes its most notable appearance in the early Marx. Last time we met Georg Lukács (LOO-kahch; /ˈlukaːtʃ/) and his claim that orthodox Marxism is not a doctrine but a method; the method is the dialectic, and its aim is a stage of self-recognition, in which the working class recognizes itself as the subject and object of history. Today we see what blocks that recognition. Lukács’s answer is reification, and to understand it we have to go back to Hegel (HAY-gel; /ˈheːɡl̩/).

Hegel’s dialectic of spirit

The core of Hegel’s philosophy is human rationality, reasoning. Reason examines the world, and finds that the world does not conform to its expectations. It struggles with that resistance, comes to understand it, and in the end comes to accept the world as its home: a world it can recognize as its own.

Hegel thinks that the individual subject undergoes this, and so do culture, politics and the whole of human history. He calls all of it together Geist (GUYST; /ɡaɪ̯st/), spirit or mind: all human experience is a manifestation of Geist, so all human activity is the activity of Geist. Geist is subject, subjectivity itself, and it is collective. Geist strives for self-knowledge and self-realization, and it gains actuality in the world: it puts itself out into institutions, laws, artworks, a whole culture. Its own surroundings become the manifestation of its purpose. Its goal, its telos (TEL-oss; /ˈte.los/) (Greek for “end,” or final cause), is freedom.

On the way there are obstacles, and an obstacle is a kind of negativity in the path. Spirit overcomes them, and in overcoming them it negates their negativity: hence Hegel’s phrase that the course of spirit is the negation of the negation. Only when spirit has gained actuality in the world does it arrive at self-recognition, full self-knowledge, full satisfaction. That is the ultimate shape of human history and culture. It is a difficult path, and there are many arguments about how it goes. But Hegel insists it is a rational process, ending in full rationality, and he can say that the rational and the actual coincide. The self-realization of spirit, its shape over time, is the dialectic.

An image: the sculptor

Imagine a sculptor with a block of marble. The sculptor has an idea, beauty, which so far exists only in her mind. The block is the negative: it resists the idea; it is not yet beautiful. The chiselling is the negation of the negation. Through it the abstract idea becomes manifest and concrete, and when she steps back she sees her own consciousness reflected in the result. The carved marble is her agency become an object. Subject and object meet.

Rationality, and the end of history

Is there a “right way” for history to go? From close up, human history looks like a slaughter-bench. From a higher perspective, Hegel says, it has structure. Rationality here is the criterion for when things fit together and become transparent to us. A rational world is one we can explain, one that reflects our purposes, one in which we feel free: a world we can justify to ourselves.

What is the endpoint? Hegel was of the opinion that his own world was, in its essentials, rational; his political philosophy ends in a constitutional monarchy, which few of his readers now find a satisfying last stop. And what happens when Geist reaches its final stage, its telos? “The end of history”: a dialectical standstill. (Francis Fukuyama borrowed this in 1989 to crown liberal democracy as the end of history. I love a dunk on Fukuyama, lol.)

Marx’s dialectic of labor

The young Marx takes Hegel’s dialectic of self-realization and gives it a new subject. In place of Geist he puts actual human beings, and he strips away what is “mystical” in Hegel. The human being is agency; its telos is freedom. Agency strives for self-knowledge and self-realization, and it gains objectivity through labor: work is the seam along which we realize ourselves. Only once human beings have gained this objectivity do they realize their freedom, and only a world in which laboring humanity is fully actualized is a fully free world. Human beings labor to become free.

Marx credits Hegel with exactly this insight: the outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology, he says, is that it grasps the self-creation of man as a process, and grasps “the essence of labor,” conceiving objective man as the outcome of man’s own labor. (Quotation 1 on the handout.)

The early Marx on alienation

But in the world as it is, labor does not make us free. Under private property self-actualization is obstructed, and labor produces unfreedom. Marx inverts Hegel’s dialectic: self-realization turns into self-loss. The worker is distorted, alienated from his own labor, and so blocked from the self he could become. Labor should produce a more expansive sense of self; instead it produces a smaller one.

Go back to the sculptor. Objectification as such is good: putting yourself into an object is how you realize yourself. The problem is that the object is taken from you: alienated, appropriated. Worse, under capitalism the laborer is turned into the bourgeoisie’s marble, carved and sold. The worker, Marx says, becomes poorer the more wealth he produces; he becomes a cheaper commodity the more commodities he makes; the devaluation of the world of human beings grows in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. His product confronts him “as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.” The laborer is severed from the object, from himself, from society, and from his “species being.” Marx’s words for this are Entäußerung (ent-OY-ser-oong; /ɛntˈʔɔɪ̯səʁʊŋ/), externalization, and Entfremdung (ent-FREM-doong; /ɛntˈfʁɛmdʊŋ/), estrangement. (Quotation 2.)

The later Marx: commodity fetishism and exploitation

The later Marx uses the word “alienation” less. In Capital the same problem returns as the fetishism of commodities, and here it is built into the economy itself. A commodity seems to have value of its own, independent of the labor that produced it. The “secret” of the commodity is that a relation between persons appears as a relation among things: the social character of people’s labor appears to them as an objective property of the products of that labor. Marx’s word for the commodity considered as such is quâ (Latin qua (KWAH; /kwaː/), “as”): the existence of things qua commodities has nothing to do with their physical properties. It is a definite social relation between people that takes on, in their eyes, “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” (Quotation 3.)

To find an analogy, Marx says, we have to go to the mist-enveloped regions of religion, where the products of the human brain appear as independent beings. Capitalist economy is religious fetishism. You carved the idol: why do you bow down and worship it?

Commodity fetishism is not a mistake people happen to make. It is the actual logic of bourgeois economics, which disguises the fact that human relations run the world and sustains the illusion that the economy and its commodities are independent powers.

Alongside fetishism stands exploitation, which is an economic term: the extraction of surplus value from the laborer. The worker produces more value than he is paid for; he is paid a fraction, and the rest is surplus value. Some readers, notably Louis Althusser, have argued that the later Marx is purely economic, separated from the young humanist Marx by an “epistemic rupture.” Professor Gordon calls this a myth: alienation is still there in Capital, under the name of fetishism.

Lukács and the rebirth of Hegelian Marxism

“What Is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919)

Lukács says Marxism is not dogma but method, because Marxism is itself a process: human self-realization in history. The method is the dialectic, and the dialectic insists on totality. For Lukács the working class is the grand subject of human history. The bourgeoisie has already been rationalized and has its telos; once the proletariat recognizes itself as the subject and object of history, it will be free.

So why can’t the proletariat recognize itself?

“Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923)

Something must be distorting the picture, and Lukács’s name for it is reification: from the Latin res, res (RAYSS; /reːs/), “thing,” in German Verdinglichung (fair-DING-likh-oong; /fɛɐ̯ˈdɪŋlɪçʊŋ/), “thing-ification.”

The commodity form, Lukács argues, is both objective and subjective. Objectively, it is the structure of the economy. Subjectively, it is the structure of consciousness. Once the commodity becomes the universal category of society as a whole, it imprints its logic on everything, because everything becomes exchangeable. The economy is reified: what we have collectively made seems to operate automatically, self-governing, with power over us. And consciousness is reified too. Commodification is one case of reification, not the whole of it.

Lukács calls the result a second nature: laws, apparently independent of human beings, that govern society as if they were laws of nature. Capitalism blocks subject–object consciousness. The proletariat is inhibited from its self-recognition; it cannot see itself as the maker of the world that dominates it. What we want instead is revolutionary class consciousness. (Quotation 4: the commodity becomes crucial both for the subjugation of consciousness and for people’s attempts to free themselves from the servitude to the “second nature” so created.)

A paradox

So there is a paradox. Both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat suffer this reification of consciousness. But the bourgeoisie’s position lets it observe the system’s periphery, though it cannot step outside, and so see the structure as a whole; it arrives at a kind of pseudo-telos. That vantage point is less true than it looks: it is, invariably and inexorably, its own religious bondage. Two further thoughts from the margins: on this reading capitalism is necessary, since it must arise for us to dismantle it; and part of what holds people to it is fear of losing its telos, the one the bourgeoisie holds out.

Was Lukács clairvoyant?

The strangest part of the story is the Paris Manuscripts. They were written by the young Marx, aged 24 or 25, in Paris in 1844, and never published in his lifetime. Their central text, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, was discovered by David Ryazanov (ree-ah-ZAH-nof; /rʲɪɐˈzanəf/), director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and first published in the original German in 1932. Lukács wrote about reification in 1923, nine years before anyone could read Marx on alienation, and the two match closely. Was Lukács clairvoyant? Next time we see how Herbert Marcuse (mar-KOO-zeh; /maʁˈkuːzə/) read the manuscripts when they appeared.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation: the rebirth of Hegelian or “Western” Marxism

• A. The significance of the dialectic
  • Marx’s Hegelian origins: the young Marx and the later Marx
  • Marx’s enduring Hegelian commitments
  • the unknown Paris Manuscripts of 1844: Marx’s “left-Hegelian” phase: alienation
  • the later Marx (e.g., Capital): commodity fetishism and exploitation
• B. Lukács and the turn to Hegelian dialectics
  • “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919) in History and Class Consciousness (1923)
  • orthodox Marxism not as doctrine but as method
  • the dialectic, totality, and the problem of reification

II. The deeper philosophical background: Hegel to Marx

• A. Hegel’s dialectic of spirit
  • spirit (Geist) as a subject with coherent, rational agency: freedom as its telos or final cause
  • agency strives for self-knowledge and self-realization: it gains actuality in the world
  • only once spirit has gained this actuality does it arrive at self-recognition
  • only a world in which spirit is fully actualized is a fully rational world
• B. Marx’s dialectic of labor
  • the human being as agency: freedom as its telos or final cause
  • agency strives for self-knowledge and self-realization: gains this objectivity through labor
  • only once human being has gained this objectivity does it realize its freedom
  • only a world in which laboring humanity is fully actualized is humanity fully free [quote 1]
• C. The early Marx on alienation
  • labor under conditions of private property: self-actualization obstructed
  • labor produces not freedom but unfreedom
  • the inversion of Hegel’s dialectic: not self-realization but self-loss
  • laborer is severed from object, from self, from society, and from “species being” [quote 2]
• D. The later Marx on exploitation and the fetishism of commodities
  • the “secret” of commodity fetishism as described in Capital [quote 3]
  • relation between persons disguised as relation among things
  • commodity fetishism as the actual logic of bourgeois economics
  • exploitation as an economic term: the extraction of surplus value from the laborer
  • a note on the myth of an “epistemic rupture” (Louis Althusser): alienation in Capital

III. Lukács and the rebirth of Hegelian Marxism

• A. “What Is Orthodox Marxism” (1919)
  • Marxism not as dogma but as a method
  • the dialectic and the importance of totality
  • the proletariat (working class) must recognize itself as the “subject and object” of history
• B. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923)
  • the commodity form as objective (economy) and subjective (consciousness)
  • reification: from the Latin re (thing); in German, Verdinglichung
  • the reification of consciousness: proletariat inhibited from its self-recognition
• C. The discovery of the Paris Manuscripts
  • written by young Marx (age 24–25) in Paris 1844; unpublished during his lifetime
  • central text: the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” (EPM)
  • discovery by David Ryazanov (director, Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow)
  • publication of the Paris Manuscripts in original German (1932)
  • “alienation” in the Paris Manuscripts and “reification” in Lukács’s essay [quote 4]
  • was Lukács clairvoyant?
  • Marcuse on Marx’s theory of existence [next lecture]

On the back: (1) the young Marx on the significance of Hegel’s dialectic; (2) the young Marx on alienation; (3) Marx on the fetishism of commodities, Capital I (1867); (4) Lukács on reification, from “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”