Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 26
How to Read Both
Finally, the rule that follows from the whole.
Where Marx appears to criticize Hegel, one must examine what the criticism is aimed at. If it targets a real feature of Hegel’s own presentation—the diction that makes a task sound like an accomplishment—then it generally lands. If it targets the method, then generally it does not, for Marx works with that very method. If it targets a concreteness that Hegel could not have achieved in his time, then it is a continuation, not an objection.
The reverse holds as well: where Marxists fall back behind what Hegel had already achieved—where reflection takes the place of mediation, where the method is reduced to three laws, where truth is shortened to efficacy—they lose more than they gain. The criticism of the diction is justified; the abandonment of the logic of the concept is not.
And for both sides, the same rule applies, one that Marx himself established but did not consistently uphold: an abstraction must not be elevated into an acting subject, and real human beings must not become its bearers. Wherever this happens—whether it is the Idea that acts or value—the question that actually matters is covered over: who exactly does what, in which position, under what given conditions.
Whoever reads both this way has neither a system nor a school. What he has are tools, and he knows their range.
Bibliography
Hegel
Science of Logic (1812–1816), GW 11, 12, 21.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), TWA 8–10.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), TWA 7.
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), GW 9.
Marx and Engels
Cited from the Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), Berlin 1956 ff.
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), MEW 1.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844), MEW 40 (supplementary volume).
The Holy Family (1845), MEW 2.
Theses on Feuerbach (1845), MEW 3.
The German Ideology (1845/46), MEW 3.
The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), MEW 4.
Grundrisse of the Critique of Political Economy (1857/58), MEW 42.
Capital, vol. 1 (1867), MEW 23; vol. 2 (1885), MEW 24; vol. 3 (1894), MEW 25.
Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), MEW 21.
Secondary Literature
Johannes Heinrichs, Reflexionstheoretische Semiotik [Reflection-Theoretical Semiotics] and the writings on reflection logic — for the argument that every materialist position is an act of thought.
Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert [The Science of Value], Münster 1991 — on the distinction between value-form and value-substance.
Own Preparatory Work
On the logic that both presuppose, Hegels Logik; on the philosophy of right, which is where Marx’s critique sets in, Hegels Rechtsphilosophie; on the economic side Kapitalismus – eine Einführung.