by Gill Hands
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a German philosopher who believed civilization progressed through intellectual development and saw the history of society as a series of conflicts or ‘dialectics’.
Hegel’s philosophy is difficult to put into simple terms. It is often obscure and not related to the real world. Marx intended to make Hegel intelligible and rational to ordinary thinkers on a few sheets of paper, for he thought that Hegel’s own words were too mystical and not rational enough, but sadly he never had time to do it. He and Engels were both impressed by the historical perspective of society that ran through Hegel’s work.
Hegel studied to be a Lutheran Pastor at a theological college and it was here he met the visionary poet Friedrich Hölderlin who became his closest friend. Hölderlin was passionate about the ancient Greeks and introduced Hegel to their philosophy. When Hegel became a private tutor he had time to read and think and spend time observing the natural world and he began to write his own philosophy; his earliest work concerned free enterprise, economics and labour for he read the works of Adam Smith and other political economists. It is unlikely that Marx was able to read Hegel’s earliest work but there is a strange synchronicity in the development of their thought at a young age: both of them were friendly with poets and loved literature but they concentrated their intellects on the works of political economists.
Hegel went on to teach philosophy to large classes and so he began to develop a scientific form or template for the understanding of philosophic thought. He was trying to construct a huge system of philosophy that was complete in itself and encompassed everything. The Science of Logic was finally published in three volumes beginning in 1812.
Hegel’s philosophical arguments have two main strands. The first is that human civilization comes about through intellectual and moral progress and that this is due to some kind of rational spirit that exists in humanity (universal mind) and not through divine intervention. It is as if history was a book written by the universal mind and humans are just characters in a book that it has written. This appealed to people at the time: they could see history as something coherent, that everything has its place in the plot that has been written and that history has not been random or meaningless. Civilization was an intentional progress towards a fixed end, and that end was finalized in Prussian society in 1805.
The second strand is the development of the dialectic, that is, the idea that change comes about as a result of conflict between two opposing movements. Hegel realized that his dialectic philosophy (he called it speculative reason) was totally different from the logical syllogism of Aristotelian philosophy; it differs from Aristotle because it cannot be applied to everything or stated in simple terms.
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Insight
In a book of this length it is difficult to summarize thousands of years of philosophical theory but anyone wishing a deeper understanding could begin with Understand Philosophy.
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Hegel believed that things only acquire their true meaning if we see them as part of a process of change and that ‘all things are contradictory in themselves’.
He saw this development consisting of three stages of dynamic movement, which are sometimes called thesis, antithesis and synthesis, although he rarely used these terms himself. According to Hegel, development happens in this way:
Thesis – the original idea or form is set up. This is also known as the ‘position’.
Antithesis – the second, contradictory viewpoint contradicts the first. This is also known as ‘negation of the position’.
Synthesis – the amalgamation of the two opposing views occurs. A ‘negation of the negation’ occurs but does not cancel it out, for a whole is formed. The whole is formed by overcoming the thesis and antithesis but still preserves them as a part of its final form. Hegel called this Aufhebung which is sometimes translated as ‘sublation’.
In Hegel’s view, ideas develop through contradiction. The original idea, or thesis, is set up but is then contradicted and rejected by the antithesis. Eventually, the best parts of both the thesis and antithesis can be combined: this is called the synthesis. A synthesis of ideas cannot take place until the first two stages have been gone through. Because the synthesis is made from the amalgamation of two opposing viewpoints it also must eventually be opposed or rejected. A new idea will then take its place, to again be contradicted.
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Insight
It cannot be stressed enough that one of the most important parts of Marxist theory is the idea that the economy and society are inherently unstable because society is made of a synthesis of two opposing classes.
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In Hegel’s philosophy, ideas are constantly developing and changing and history progresses by learning from its mistakes. This contrasted with the beliefs of the materialist philosophers who went before: they believed that everything followed immutable natural laws, seeing man as a cog in a machine that he could not influence.
Marx later took this idea of the dialectic and applied it in a practical way to the development of society and the economy instead of to the purely philosophical world of ideas. He claimed that in Hegel’s work the truth stood on its head and he had now put it the right way up by showing that ideas developed from the material world of economics; in other words, the conditions in which a person lives and works determine the way in which he thinks. This seems obvious to us today.
LUDWIG ANDREAS FEUERBACH
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–72) was a German philosopher and student of Hegel who went on to join the Young Hegelians. His most famous work, The Essence of Christianity, proposed that religion is ‘the dream of the human mind’, in other words, man creates an illusory God based on human ideals and experiences. Feuerbach saw God as a projection of mankind’s inner self and every aspect of God – morality, love, understanding, etc. – corresponds with the needs of human nature. In this way, God is not separate from man or above him. This viewpoint was derived from a development of Hegel’s theory of the universal mind as discussed in the previous section of this chapter. Marx and Engels were enthusiastic about Feuerbach’s theories at first but later came to reject them in The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach.
How did Marx differ from those who went before?
Hegel’s ideas were important but Marx did not think they went far enough. Hegel believed that civilization had reached its final stage in the Prussian Empire and that there was no need for it to progress any further; he believed the State was the most important part of society. He accepted the political development and religious views within the Prussian Empire, so he believed that in any conflict between the State and the individual the State should prevail. He also held the rather contradictory view that human consciousness could achieve self-understanding and freedom. It was these apparent contradictions that were discussed by the Young Hegelians who, as we have seen, were instrumental in shaping Marx’s philosophy.
Hegel said that people felt alienated from the world around them because of religious views that mean they are striving to live in an ideal world that they can only inhabit when they die. Bauer and Feuerbach criticized religion and tried to show people that God was a creation of their own minds so that there was no need to feel alienated. Feuerbach felt that even Hegel’s concept of a universal mind alienated people and that man himself was the centre of philosophy. He felt that the universal mind was a concept that prevented people from believing they could change their situation.
Where Marx differed from all these philosophers was his realization that it was not ‘God’ or ‘Mind’ that alienated people but money: ‘Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life … it dominates him as he worships it’. It was then that he decided to devote his life to the study of economics and the way in which it affected social development. His development of historical materialism, a way of studying the ways in which the material world affects th
e world of ideas, came from his interest in Hegel’s philosophy but his own philosophy was also greatly influenced by his study of the great British political economists.
Political economy
In a pamphlet on slavery in 1849 the writer and historian Thomas Carlyle described economics as ‘the dismal science’. The study of political economy had begun to become very intense during the Industrial Revolution and was written about at length. As this revolution took place mainly in Britain, most of the great political economists were British. They were analysing and commenting on a new form of trading and business that affected the structure of society, and some of their writings, such as those of Malthus on population and Samuel Smiles on self-help, were an attempt to justify the poor treatment of the workforce.
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Insight
Samuel Smiles’ book, Self-Help, was published in 1859 and was a Victorian best seller. It stresses the importance of hard work, thrift and perseverance and implies that poverty is the fault of the individual and not of society as a whole.
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When Marx started working as a journalist and writing about the problems of the wine-growers and Prussian peasants, he began to read the works of the political economists in order to understand the practical realities of a world that he had little understanding of. There were two main political economists that Marx took an interest in.
Adam Smith (1723–90) lived in Glasgow, one of the growing industrial centres in Scotland. His view of human nature was that it was natural for people to want to ‘truck and barter’ and so he believed the capitalist system could be justified as an extension of this natural need. In 1776 he wrote The Wealth of Nations which argued that government intervention in the economy would be harmful because it would destroy the natural equilibrium of the economy that he strongly believed in. Smith’s ideas were an important part of the progress of political economy because he was the first to recognize that capitalists belonged to a class of their own. He also examined and described ideas of supply and demand which are now an important part of economic theory.
David Ricardo (1772–1823) wrote The Principles of Political Economy in 1817. He was born into a family of Sephardic Jews who had emigrated to England and he had a great deal of experience in monetary affairs as he joined his father at the London Stock Exchange at the age of 14. He did not become interested in economic theory until he read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. This inspired him to start work on his own theories and to begin writing about them. One of his interests was the value of commodities and Marx later developed his theories into the labour theory of value (there is more detail on this in Chapter 4). Ricardo saw the capitalist society as a natural thing but identified that there would be a class struggle over the division of profits in society.
What part did Engels play?
There is no doubt that Engels was an important figure in the life of Karl Marx: ‘I owe it all to you, that this has been possible’, Marx wrote in a letter to his friend. As the son of a wealthy manufacturer, Engels was able to support the Marx family financially, allowing Marx to continue with his research and writing. However, there is great academic debate over the part he played in formulating Marx’s philosophy. It is difficult for us to know now how much Engels actually contributed to the body of work Marx published during his lifetime.
Marx met Engels in Paris where they became great friends and co-writers and began collaborating on The Holy Family. This was intended to be a pamphlet exploring the class struggle but it eventually became a 300-page book. Engels only contributed 15 pages to the total. Other works on which they collaborated were The German Ideology, a criticism of current German philosophy, and The Communist Manifesto. Again we know from documentary evidence that Marx contributed most of the writing.
It is alleged that Engels wrote newspaper articles on behalf of Marx when Marx was too busy to do his own research. He also helped with translation and as an interpreter when Marx met foreign workers’ leaders. Engels wrote mainly about science, business and industrial practice, of which he had first-hand experience from his father’s textile mill in Manchester. He also specialized in writing on questions of war and nationalism.
It is well known that he completed the second and third volumes of Das Kapital from the unfinished manuscripts and notes that Marx left behind after his death. Marx was notorious for having bad handwriting and being badly organized so it was fortunate that the business-minded and efficient Engels was available to sort everything out. How much he altered the original manuscripts or put his own interpretation on the work is open to speculation.
When Marx died Engels became the well-known authority on communism and tried to keep all followers to the true path. He became the interpreter of all that Marx had said or written and kept up a huge correspondence until his death in 1895.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Marx was both a philosopher and an economist, but he believed philosophy was not enough to change the course of the world.
He studied philosophy as far back as the ancient Greeks.
Philosophers see the world in either idealist or materialist terms.
Marx’s view was materialist and developed from the ideas of Hegel, Bauer and Feuerbach.
He was also greatly influenced by the works of British political economists.
He had some dealings with revolutionaries, anarchists and Utopian Socialists but could not agree with most of their theories.
His main contribution to the development of philosophy was historical materialism: a way of studying the relationship between the material world and the world of ideas.
Friedrich Engels was an important figure in the life of Karl Marx but academics cannot agree on the amount he contributed to Marx’s philosophy.
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4
Economic theory
In this chapter you will learn:
about Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism
how historical materialism relates to the economy
key facts about labour, labour power and the division of labour
about commodities, money and capital
about profits and surplus value
why Marx believed capitalism was in crisis.
Marx’s major work on the economy was Das Kapital, the writing of which took many years. Marx often believed he was nearly finished only to find something more he needed to take into account, much to the dismay of his publisher. Marx began to be interested in the workings of the economy during his time as a journalist. When writing about the plight of the peasants and the political unrest in Europe, he began a serious study of the writings of political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Until then his learning was based around the rarefied ideas of philosophers. Das Kapital was the end product of a long and systematic study of both political economy and the Blue Books in which the British Government recorded factory and census statistics. The Blue Books gave Marx first-hand evidence to illustrate some of his theories.
His work on Das Kapital really began in 1857 in a document that is now called the Grundrisse. This is German for ‘foundations’ or ‘elements’ and the original document was an investigation of the basic foundations of political economy. The original document comprised notes made in preparation for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital and was not intended for publication. Basically it was an early and rough draft of the finished work. Between these notes and the final publication of Das Kapital there were ten years of hard work. Marx wrote other works on the economy and economic theory around the same time, all of them stepping stones to the final work.
1845–6 – The German Ideology. This was not published until after his death and it was a collaboration with Engels. It is important because it states the theory of the materialist view of history and further discusses alienation in a capitalist world.
1859 – A Critique of Political Economy. A short piece on economics that is important mainly for
the preface, which summarizes the theory of historical materialism.
1861–3 – Theories of Surplus Value (sometimes known as Das Kapital : Volume 4). This work was contained in 23 huge notebooks and was not published until 1906–8. It is mainly notes for Das Kapital and deals with the historical perspective of economic theory.
A whole branch of Marxist economics has flourished in academic circles and his theories go in and out of fashion. His economic theories can be interpreted in different ways: his views altered slightly through time as he developed his theories and foreign editions were slightly different from each other. Engels translated much of his work into English and simplified it for the general reader, and this is where a lot of controversy has taken place. Das Kapital consists of three volumes (or four if you count Theories of Surplus Value, extracted from Marx’s notes, as a part of the whole, which some people do). There are also numerous books of notes as yet unpublished.