Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 17
The Self-Interpretation of 1873
In the afterword to the second edition of 1873, Marx speaks explicitly about his method:
“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” (MEW 23, 27)
What is here called the direct opposite turns out, on closer inspection, to be a rendering of what Hegel’s concern actually was. Hegel’s Idea is not an essence beyond actuality but actuality’s comprehended structure; where he speaks of the process of thinking, he does not mean representations in individual heads but the forms of rational coherence. And Marx’s formula about the material translated within the human head describes an operation in which the ideal and the material do not occur separately — precisely the structure Hegel had formulated as the self-movement of the concept.
The distancing nonetheless aims at something real. Hegel’s talk of absolute spirit, of the cunning of reason, of world history as world judgment, suggests a supra-individual power that asserts itself behind the backs of the agents. Marx strips it of this appearance: the cunning of reason is the name for the unintended consequences of individual actions within a context that no one surveys. And he himself says what hits its mark and what does not:
“With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” (MEW 23, 27)
What is hit is the self-interpretation, not the method. The turning-right-side-up consists in interpreting the method differently, not in changing it.
One occasionally reads that the distancing was the precondition of the achievement: that as an orthodox Hegelian, Marx would have tried to derive economics from logic, and would have failed at it. This explanation does not hold up. No Hegelian ever tried to derive objects from logic, Hegel included; they tried to present the logic of their objects; that is something else. Nor is it apparent why a science of conceptual thought should be unsuited to any particular object — even unreason and delusion can be ordered conceptually.
Marx himself speaks against this reading. In a letter to Engels written during work on the Grundrisse, he reports that leafing once more through Hegel’s Logic had rendered him great service regarding the method of treatment. He needed it, then, even as he set himself apart from it — and he knew it.
What the distancing actually accomplishes is more modest. It is, first of all, a position taken within a field in which Hegel’s name stood for the justification of the existing order; anyone who wanted to write politically at the time could ill afford to invoke him as an authority. And it has a consequence that benefits the work: someone who cannot appeal to any authority must develop every determination from the object itself. Marx could nowhere fall back on the claim that a relation had already been clarified elsewhere; he had to show, on the commodity, on money, on the labor contract, what he was asserting. A commentary would not have demanded this, and a presentation permitted to invoke a predecessor easily loses the occasion for looking closely.
And the distancing came at a cost. Because Marx never clarified what he was taking over, the tradition made the distancing into a badge of identity. People understood themselves as materialists against an idealist Hegel, and in doing so lost sight of the method. The announced quarto sheets on the rational element in Hegel’s Logic were never written by Marx; what stands in their place are systematizations such as the three fundamental laws of dialectics, which turned a procedure into a schema.
A biographical parallel was mentioned in Part I. Marx names Hegel mostly as a figure to be distanced from, and Gans hardly at all. Both follow the same logic: a method that has truly been absorbed no longer needs to be named. This describes his relationship to his teachers more accurately than the formula of the turning-right-side-up.