Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 19
The Automatic Subject
Marx coined a formula for the movement of capital that sounds puzzling at first glance: capital is an automatic subject. Something that seems to move itself and yet is not a subject, because it has neither hands nor will.
Read precisely, the formula captures something real. There is an appearance, and the appearance is effective. In the language used to talk about the economy, capital is constantly acting: it seeks investments, it reacts to crises, it withdraws. This way of speaking is not merely careless — it has a reason. The many individual activities stand under the same directive and are so coordinated with one another that a unified result emerges — it looks like the action of a will. A subject that does not exist becomes real through the coordinated labor of those over whom it rules.
Marx does not sustain this precision everywhere. Elsewhere in the same work, the appearance almost becomes a fact: value moves itself, capital appears as a being that feeds on alien labor, as a vampire, as something that lives. This is more than an image. It is the elevation of an abstraction to an acting subject, with real human beings turned into its bearers.
This commits exactly the error that Marx had criticized in Hegel. In Kreuznach he had reproached Hegel for making the Idea the subject and turning the real subjects — family, civil society, the state — into predicates of this Idea. The reproach was justified insofar as it hit Hegel’s diction. It falls back on Marx as soon as value, in his account, begins to act.
The critique is immanent: it needs no external standard. Marx set the rule himself; it applies to him as it does to Hegel. And it is not the critique of a mistake but the identification of a danger inherent in the matter itself. Whoever describes a movement that no one steers and that nonetheless proceeds in a directed way always stands on the verge of personifying it — in Hegel the result is called absolute spirit, in Marx, automatic subject. In both cases, personification is a shortcut that skips over the process from which the movement actually consists.
What follows from this for how the formula should be used is easy to state and hard to sustain: the first use of the formula should be kept — the appearance that has real effects — and the second dropped, the one in which the appearance turns into a being. Whoever does this loses nothing in sharpness. He regains the question that personification covers over: who exactly does what, in what position, under what directive. This question runs through Kapitalismus – eine Einführung, Kapitel 13.