Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 21
What Marx Delivers
From Marx one gets two things: a description that hits its mark, and proof that the method works as a research procedure.
The description is contained in the formula that captures an entire economic form in three letters. Money is transformed into a commodity in order to become more money. The prime at the end is the point: what stands at the end is not the same sum as at the beginning, and the surplus is not a byproduct but the purpose of the whole operation. What this formula captures is the inversion that distinguishes this economic form from all earlier ones. Where people produce to satisfy needs, the goal lies with the goods; where they sell in order to buy something else, likewise. Only where the commodity becomes a means for the multiplication of money has the goal stepped outside the world of goods — and thereby become indifferent to what is actually produced in the process.
The second yield is linguistic, and it weighs more heavily than it first appears. Where Hegel speaks of the self-movement of the concept, Marx speaks of the internal contradictoriness of the commodity. Where Hegel unfolds the Absolute, Marx analyzes the total social capital. Where Hegel diagnoses the cunning of reason, Marx shows that uncoordinated individual decisions produce a result that no one intended. What is thereby gained is a language in which these determinations can be demonstrated on everyday objects. On the commodity, on money, on the labor contract, one can show what contradiction, mediation, and inversion mean, without needing a register that first has to be learned.
This is not the first application to a subject matter. Hegel carried the philosophy of realization through nature and anthropology, right and the state, art, religion, world history, and the history of philosophy, and the Philosophy of Right, as Part II showed, develops substantive determinations within a logical connection. What Marx adds is twofold. First, a subject matter that Hegel had treated only in outline: modern economics — for Hegel, the system of needs within civil society; for Marx, the object of an entire work. Second, an elaboration that descends all the way into factory reports, statistics, and legal texts, and becomes verifiable precisely where Hegel’s presentation remains general.
The demystification, however, has a flip side that belongs to the yield. By presenting Hegel as someone who derives the world from thought, Marx produces a distorted image — and one that not only obscures the methodological kinship but also renders invisible half of the philosophy of realization from which he himself draws. The translation gains in vividness and loses the ground from which it was made possible.