Hurory of European Ideas. VOl I t. pp 907-934, 1989 0191-6599/89 $3 oo+o.

ca
Printed m Great Bntam 0 IWO Pergaman Press plc

HEGEL, MARX, LUKACS: THE DIALECTIC QF FREEDOM

AND NECESSITY

RICHARDB. DAY*

In &g&r False ~~~~~~ GezruitreU~~~~~~~(a chapter from his incompfete final

work, The U~t~~~~yof ~~~~~~ge~~g~, Georg Lukacs describes the development of
classical German philosophy from Kant’s theoretical rejection of ontology to
“the fully evolved ontology of Hegel’.’ ‘Hegel’s logic’, he observes, ‘. . , is not a
lagic in the scholastic sense, not a formal logic, but rather an inseparable
intellectual union of logic and ontology, On the one hand, as far as Hegel is
concerned, the genuine ontological relatianships only find their adequate mental
expression in the Forms of logical categories, while on the other hand these logical
categories are not conceived simply as determinations of thought, but must
rather be understood as dynamic components ofreality, as stages or steps along
the road towards the self-attainment of Mind.‘2
The highest ambition of the Hegelian system, as Lukacs explains, was to
provide a ‘unitary ontology for nature and history’.3 Whereas Kant saw in the
categories only epistemological principles of knowing, in Hegel’s work they are
transformed and expanded into ontological principles of being, or objective
thought-entities with a being independent of any particular mind. The Absolute
Idea is the form of Hegel’s Log&, while the categories are its content. The logical
categories are epistemological (as definitions of the existent world); they are at
the same time ontological (as definitions of the Absolute). Their dialectica
progression towards unity of form and content is the motion whereby the Idea, as
Charles Taylor writes, emerges as ‘the inner reason which makes the external
reality what it is’.4
Luk5cs believes that Hegel was fundamentally mistaken in seeing nature
structured according to the categories of thought. However, he is equally
convinced that by ignoring Hegef’s work modern Marxism has produced a ‘chaos
of ingeniously distorted, superficially reductionist and falsely “profound”
theories’. A genuine renovation of Marxism, he contends, requires ‘a well-
founded and founding ontology that finds a real basis for social being in the
objective reality of nature, and that is equipped to depict social being in its
simultaneous identity and difference with nature’.’ My purpose in this paper will
be to explore Luk&cs’ argument with a view to clarifying some of the difficulties
arising from Marx’s approp~ation of the Hegefian dialectic. What I propose to
demonstrate is that from the time of the 1844 ~~~~~~r~~~~Marx’s rejection of
Wegel’s ontology excluded the possibility of culmination in an Hegelian self-
mediated, or concrete universal, with the consequence that from the standpoint
of dialectics Marx necessarily produced an abstracr definition of human freedom.

*Professor of Political Economy, Erindale Campus, University of Toronto,

Mississauga, Ontario, L5LlC6, Canada.
907
908 Richard B. Day

LUKACS’ PROPOSAL FOR A MARXIST ONTOLOGY OF SOCIAL BEING

In his proposal for a Marxist ontology of social being, Lukacs begins by credit-
ing Hegel with two brilliant insights. First, for Hegel ‘The category of
totality. . . obtains a significance that it could never have previously. “The truth
is the whole”, said Hegel programmatically in the Phenomenofog?, . . . Thus
reality does not just have a property of totality as such, but it rather consists of
parts, or “elements”, that are simultaneously structured as totalities in their
turn.‘6 Secondly, Hegel was able to arrive at this grasp of totality and truth
because he assigned dialectic ‘an ontological importance as the real vehicle of
history’.’ At the same time, however, Lukacs also finds in Hegel’s work an
insoluble contradiction when Hegel treats ‘the real present as the realization of
reason’.* How, he asks, can the present be ‘the actually attained realm of reason’,
when in truth ‘the present can only acquire a genuine ontological foundation as
the bridge between the past and future’?’ Emphasising the historical character of
social being, Lukacs claims that ‘if the present is the real fulfilment of the
inherent potentialities of the dialectic, then this process must come to an
end.. .and what was up till now the ontological motor of reality itself must
abandon the specific forward movement.. . and become a mere moment of self-
reproduction’ of the present.”
As Lukacs views the matter, Hegel’s ‘coincidence of fulfilled idea and
historical present’” can only be the product of a false ontology, one which is
methodologically founded upon the Logic, treats the categories of thought as
true ‘dynamic components of reality’, and thus necessarily ends in the
‘philosophical myth’ of the identity of subject and object.‘* Although in HistorI,
and Class Consciousness Lukacs had himself followed Hegel’s dialectic in pursuit
of the identical subject-object, in his final work he limits Hegel’sgenuine ontolog)
exclusively to his analysis of social being. Mankind cannot fully subjectivise the
objective world, but in our social being we nevertheless do acquire ‘an
ontologically autonomous form as mind’. Social being, Lukacs declares,
represents ‘a specific synthesis of individual acts and passions’, or a synthesis of
conscious acts, which is at the same time ‘independent of the individual
consciousness of particular men’ and therefore constitutes ‘a being suigeneris’.‘3
For Lukacs, a correct understanding of the relation between subject and object
must begin with what he considers to be the centrality of the reflection
determinations in Hegel’s dialectic. Reflection gives rise to a ‘distancing’ of the
subject from the object, whereby reality is reproduced in consciousness in order
that it may be altered in accordance with the teleological positings of human
labour. In this way we pursue the practical domination of contingency. But
Lukacs maintains that contingency always ‘stands to necessity in an
insurpassable reflection relation’,14 for though we may impose our purposes
upon them, the means and objects of our labour remain ‘in themselves natural
things subject to natural causality’.15 There is no ontological dialectic which
hierarchically structures both nature and the activity of human subjects. In itself,
nature is a mere ‘chain of relations’, governed by objective natural laws.i6 Thus it
is the ‘concrete dialectical interconnections’ of ‘natural causality and labour
teleology’ which produce social being as a contradictory unity of ‘two
heterogenous moments, which.. . are in fact antitheses: being and its reflection in
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 909

consciousness’. *’ Within the sphere of social being, consciousness clearly cannot

be ontologically indifferent to what it knows, for all social being grows out of
individual acts of labour, and all labour is teleological. Consciousness is,
therefore, a ‘component of being’-not in the sense of Hegel’s Idea producing a
world out of itself, but rather in the sense that human reason can reproduce in
thought ‘what is essential and universal in the facts and their succession’ and
thereby shape them in accordance with human needs.18
It is important to notice that when Lukacs refers to the essential and the
universal, what he has in mind are ‘dialectically structured complexes’ which
always have ontological priority over their individual elements.” It is precisely
because social being is such a complex, ‘an objectively dynamic complex whose
laws run beyond the will of any individual man’, that he believes ‘freedom is
never completely free from determination’.” Considering nature to be more
readily shaped to human purposes than human society, Lukacs claims that the
predominant moment offreedom is ‘free movement in the material’,21 and this is so
because the epistemological transition from understanding to reason gives us the
ability to choose between alternatives posed in the process of human labour. The
labour process is ontologically structured as a ‘chain of alternatives’,22 wherein
the “‘place” and organ’ of choice between alternatives is human consciousness.23
Yet we are ultimately condemned to choose in circumstances beyond choice. In
other words, social being always remains ‘a dynamic and contradictory
relationship of individual acts’.24 It is for this reason that Lukacs finds Hegel’s
false ontology especially evident in the Philosophy of Right, where, according to
Lukacs, mind is ‘severed from its dynamic connections with the activity of
individuals.. . and becomes a self-consciousness which exists purely for itself .25
Hegel would respond, of course, that Lukacs has fundamentally misrepre-
sented the Philosophy ofRight. He would point out that the purpose of the work is
precisely to demonstrate that Spirit necessarily and continuously produces out of
itself individual and group activities, which are then consciously reintegrated
through the mediating institutions of ‘objective spirit’. Hegel acknowledges the
‘right’ of the individual personality to self-determination, but he considers this
right to be abstract (or one-sided) until mediated into the concrete universal of
ethical life. The role of the state, as the ethical community, is to raise the abstract
subjectivity of individuals and particular corporations to the level of the
universal and to a consciousness of universal purpose. For Hegel, the state is a
concrete universal, wherein the particular and the universal consciousness are
united through ‘self-determining actions on laws and principles which are
thoughts and so universal’.26 In its universality the state transcends particular
wills of individuals in civil society; its concreteness lies in the fact that as a
mediated totality it upholds these particulars by raising them to awareness of
mutual rights and duties as the necessary foundation of their individual activities.
The right of freedom is fulfilled when citizens belong to an ethical order.*’ The
‘supreme duty’ of an individual, therefore, is ‘to be a member of the state’.28
The ontological foundation of Hegel’s theory of ethical life appears in his
Logic in the doctrine of the Notion, or that stage of thought which moves beyond
the doctrine of Essence and the reflection determinations emphasised by Lukacs.
The Notion is an identity of opposites, or the universal which contains its
910 Richard B. Day

opposition within itself. Insofar as the Notion opposes itself to itself, it thereby
negates itself. But the resulting identity of its opposite with itself represents the
negation of the negation, or absolute negativity, and thus the affirmative return
of the Notion into itself. The identity of identity and difference is the singular, or
the individual. The Notion is the unity of immediacy and mediation, or the
synthesis of being (immediacy) and essence (mediation). As such, it is the self-
mediated universal, which, after passing through objectivity, is reflected into self
as the Idea. The Notion necessarily contains within itself the three moments of
universality, particularity and individuality. *’ All being, from this point of view,
is a progression of syllogisms leading to a synthesis of the three moments. In the
Philosophy of Right the state is the unity in difference of the universal principle of
the family (the ethical order in its immediacy) and the particular principle of civil
society (the ethical order in its externality and division). The combination of
these two moments produces the third, individuality, or the self-mediated ethical
universal. The state, in other words, is the true individual. The state is the
individual objectified, or the actual individual, in which each citizen finds his self-
conscious ethical substance.
By insisting that the reflection determinations constitute the centre of Hegel’s
dialectic, Luk&s denies that paired opposites can be transcended and thus
repudiates the implications of the Notion for the kind of subjective freedom
which the Philosophy of Right describes. It is for this reason that he finds more of
value in Hegel’s early work, particularly in his discussion of tools during the
Frankfurt and Jena periods. Here Hegel had shown that through tools ‘the
subjectivity of work is raised to the level of the universal’, for everyone can
appropriate a tool and use it in the same way as any other.30 In Hegel’s words:

Faced with the general level of skill the individualsets himselfup asaparticular, sets
himself off from the generality and makes himself even more skilful than others,
invents more efficient tools. But the really universal element in his particular skills is
his invention of something universal; and the others acquire it from him thereby
annulling his particularity and it becomes the common immediate possession of
alL3’

In Z& Young Hegel Lukacs affirms that ‘Hegel’s novel interpretation of

dialectics is well-developed when the subject under discussion is work,
activity. . . . Hegel views the activity of work, man’s active relation to the world of
objects mediated by tools, simultaneously as something general and particular.’
As Marx declared in the 1844 Manuscripts, so Lukics claims that these early
writings point towards Hegel’s Phenomenology, ‘whose central idea is the self-
production of man through his activity’.32
What Lukics will not grant, however, is that the political and cultural life of a
community can be understood by analogy with the production and use of tools;
that is, that man produces his culture while the cultural community produces the
tool-user. In this regard, J.M. Bernstein has written that ‘Hegelian.. . work
includes institutions, laws, codes, customs and values. These artifacts are the
ultimate shapers of the psyche; and it is the continual production of
them.. . which is underwritten by Hegel’s account of self-consciousness.‘33
Charles Taylor makes a similar point. Society may well be a ‘dialectically
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 911

structured complex’, as Lukacs claims, but at the same time our individual acts of
labour are embedded in social institutions which ‘say’ what our labour means:

. . . we can think of the institutions and practices of a society as a kind of language in

which its fundamental ideas are expressed. But what is “said” in this language is not
ideas which could be in the minds of certain individuals only, they are rather
common to a society, because embedded in its collective life, in practices and
institutions which are of the society indivisibly. In these the spirit of the society is in
a sense objectified. They are, to use Hegel’s term, “objective spirit”.34

While LukBcs will not accept any suggestion of the identity of material
production and ethical life, he is perfectly aware that individual acts of labour
‘say’ nothing uniquely human insofar as they are merely expressions of natural
need and natural causality. ‘No values are known in nature, but only causal
connections and the transformations and changes in things and complexes that
these bring about.‘35 This elementary fact implies, he acknowledges, the
‘ontological reality of ethical. . . behaviour’.36 Whereas the ‘ought’ of the labour
process is a ‘valuable’ object, or a ‘being-for-us’ of the product of labour, at a
higher level of social being the objects of human practice include both a
‘meaningful’ life and determination of the conditions of social obligation.
‘Obligation implies those human attitudes that are determined through social
ends (and not only through mere natural or spontaneous human inclinations).‘37
To speak of social obligation, Lukacs continues, is also to posit the need for
certain ‘rules’ of social practice as ‘forms of mediation’. ‘We can refer here to the
sphere of law in the broadest sense of the term (Recht).‘38 For Luklcs, it is
precisely ‘the objective social independence of the realm of law from the
economy, combined with the ensuing heterogeneity, that in their dialectical
simultaneity determine both the specificity of value and its social objectivity’.39
Law and the economy are necessarily independent, for the economic will always
remain ‘a closed system. . . with its own immanent basis, in which real practice is
possible only through an orientation to immanently economic goals and the
search for means to achieve them’.40 The economic is the dominant moment in
relation to social consciousness, and different economic and class relations will
contribute differently to the specificity of social values. For the same reason, the
institutional apparatus required for the articulation of social commitments ‘may
of course assume very different forms.. . (law, the state, religion, etc.)‘.4*
Lukics agrees with Marx that economic acts are objectively lawful in their own
right. He also understands Marx to believe that such acts possess ‘an
ontologically immanent intention towards the humanization of man in the
broadest sense’.42 The problem which he refuses to confront directly is this: How
does this ‘immanent intention’ guarantee that economic acts will be right as
opposed to technically correct or even merely useful to particular individuals at
the expense of others? The guarantee cannot, as Hegel would argue, be found in
the institutions of ethical life, for Lukacs is too much of a Marxist to grant that
politics is a part of social ontology. On the other hand, he is too much influenced
by Hegel to ignore the relation between ethicality and economics. As we shalisee
in the final section of this paper, it is this Hegelian sensitivity to the role of ethics
in social being which distinguishes Lukacs from Marx and compels him to
912 Richard B. Day

undertake his own mediation between Marx and Hegel. The conclusion that
emerges from his final treatment of these questions is that individual acts of
labour, as ‘the atom from which society is built up’,43 necessarily produce results
that were not present in the minds of their initiators; and for that very reason it is
ontologically necessary to attempt the impossible, that is, to endeavour to
subordinate economic activity to ethical rather than merely to economic ‘values’.
In reconstructing this dilemma, Lukacs concludes by denying that it is capable
of any systematic resolution. The centrality of the reflection determinations
means that economics and ethics can never be fully reconciled. The very fact that
he poses the problem as an ontological contradiction, however, is indicative of
Lukacs’ belief that Marx himself failed in his ambition to settle accounts ‘with
Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian philosophy as a whole’.44 With Lukics’ thoughts
in mind, let us now turn to our central theme, Marx’s appropriation of the
Hegelian dialectic, and consider why Lukacs came to this conclusion and why he
believes modern Marxists must reconsider problems of social ontology.

FROM THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL TO ‘MAN’ IN HIS IMMEDIACY

As we shall see at the conclusion of this paper, there is ironic significance in the
fact that Lukics’ work ended at exactly the point where Marx’s began-namely,
with Hegel’s treatment of the problem of ‘right’ (Recht). Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right represented his settled judgement of the French Revolution, which had
originated with the Rights of Man and led to the ‘absolute freedom and terror’
portrayed in the Phenomenology. 45Marx fully agreed with Hegel’s condemnation
of abstract rights while at the same time emphasising the obstacles to Hegel’s
ethical totality thrown up by the private property of bourgeois individuals in civil
society: ‘liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relation between man
and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man.. . . The practical
application of the right of liberty is the right of private property.‘46 In his Critique
of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ Marx claimed that Hegel’s real error had been
induced by his logic. Thus he had treated the merely historical distinction
between civil society and the state, a distinction arising from the market economy
and bourgeois individualism, as an ontological necessity. For Marx, the real
relation between society and the state was the opposite of what Hegel had seen:
civil society was not an ‘appearance’ of the ethical order, or the state in its
necessary externality; instead, the state was an appearance of civil society, with
the result that ‘the political constitution is the constitution of private property’.47
In Marx’s judgement, an actual human community would only eventuate
when society absorbed alien political institutions back into itself. In ‘democracy’
the laws would truly be ‘a self-determination of the people, and a determinate
content of the people’.48 Before this could occur, however, Marx already sensed
that a universal social transformation was in order. Political existence might be
the ‘true universal and essential existence’ of human community, but Marx
believed that it simultaneously involved dissolution of the political state as the
necessary ‘other’ of a civil society determined by private property. ‘Within the
abstract political state the reform of voting advances the dissolution [Aufliisung]
of this political state, but also the dissolution of civil society’ as the society of the
l%e Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 913

bourgeoisie.4q Hegel had said that the state is logically prior to civil society, that
property and private contracts presuppose law-making institutions. Marx
replied that prior to both is the people: ‘the people alone is the concrete’.50
With his claim that institutional mediation (or Hegel’s ‘objective spirit’) could
be replaced by ‘immediate’ and ‘direct’ political relations, Marx anticipated the
1844 ~a~~scyipts and a portrayal of ‘Man’ which was neither concrete in the
Hegelian sense nor in agreement with Lukacs’ emphasis upon the dialectical
heterogeneity of social being. The Manuscripts represented a dramatic departure
from Hegel by denying nature’s derivative existence as a product of thought; and
by treating man as a natural, or ‘species being’, they also significantly reduced the
space, provided both by Hegel and Lukacs, for human individuality. In his
reaction to the brutalisation of the worker in bourgeois society, Marx now
regarded species being as ‘essential being’ and human individuation as
‘estrangement of man from man’.s’ individual life, ‘in its abstract form’, had
become an expression of the estrangement of species life.s2
In contrast to the Hegelian odyssey of the World Spirit, of which nature,
human individuals, groups and entire civilisations are necessary moments, Marx
took nature itself to be the given and essential whole, of which man is inextricably
a part even in the condition of estrangement. s3 In reproducing himself, man was
nature’s conscious architect and used its resources as an extension of his own
limbs. Instead of being a vessel of the World Spirit, man was now nature itself
risen to the level of consciousness. ‘The universality of man is in practice
manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic
body.. . . Man lives on nature.. . with which he must remain in continuous
intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to
nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature.‘s4
Hegel had seen Nature as the Idea gone out of itself into otherness; Marx saw
nature as producing its own subjectivity in man. What distinguishes man within
nature is his natural need to make his ‘life-activity the object of his will and
consciousness . . . . Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal
life-activity.‘55 The result is that the human species, a part of nature, at the same
time ‘freely confronts’ nature as its own product, as anthropological nature.
Thus man possesses the ability to rework the materials of nature in accordance
with universal standards: unlike animals, who produce exclusively in response to
physical needs, man can produce according to the ‘laws of beauty’.56 But man’s
really distinctive need, as Hegel had shown in the P~e~omenoIogy, is the need to
find subjective selfhood and self-certainty through recognition from another
consciousness: man is by nature social, and his ‘relation to himself only becomes
objective and real for him through his relation to the other man’.57 It was this
essential human need which was denied to the man without property. In
bourgeois society recognition had become dependent upon ‘possessing’ and
‘having’, showing how ‘stupid and one-sided’ humanity had become.$* But when
it came to the question of how abstract individuality might be mediated into
communal being, Marx circumvented the concerns expressed by Hegel and
Lukacs by projecting the immediacy of family life as a social universal. Whereas
Hegel had seen the family as merely the first moment of ethical life, Marx thought
the need for recognition, as the ‘human nature of need’5q, could be naturally
914 Richard B. Day

satisfied within the man-woman relationship as a paradigm for the whole of the
human community. The form of the bond which existed between man and
woman served for Marx as a measure both of human estrangement and of human
emancipation.

The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man
to woman. In this natural relationship of the sexes man’s relation to nature is
immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his
relation to nature-his own natural function.. . . From this relationship one can
therefore judge man’s whole level of development.. . . the relation of man to
woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore
reveals.. . the extent to which man’s needhas become a human need; the extent to
which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need-the
extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.60

Hegel had thought of the family’s property (or capital) as the necessary
external embodiment of its ethical bond. Marx believed that the natural human
relationship would be beyond particular property, just as it would be beyond the
institutionalised bourgeois ‘prostitution’ of ‘possessing’ and ‘having’ another
human being. Object bondage would be replaced by the mutual recognition of
persons, in which satisfaction of the other’s natural need would at the same time
be satisfaction of one’s own human need for community with others. As the
‘positive transcendence of. . , human self-estrangement’,6’ the basis of which was
private property both in people and in things, the higher stage of communist
society would immediately replicate on a universal scale the spontaneous human
relation of a natural family. ‘Thus society is the consummated oneness in
substance of man and nature-the naturalism of man and the humanism of
nature both brought to fulfilment.‘62 Hegel’s analysis of the master-slave relation
in the Phenomenology provided the real paradigm of bourgeois society, but Marx
thought that the Hegelian outcome of that relation, mutual recognition,
constituted the essential truth of human freedom. Man would become truly
human when alienated labour, the fundamental cause of all private property, was
overcome. Marx summarised the real significance of Hegel’s contribution as
follows:

The outstandmg thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology IS that Hegel conceives the self-
genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as
alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of
labour and comprehends objective man-true because real man-as the outcome of
man’s own labour.

Hegel had implicitly read the relations of political economy into the cultural
history of the species. But he had done so from the mistakenly idealist standpoint
of ‘abstractly mental labour’, the labour of Spirit, and had thereby ended with the
‘dialectic of pure thought’.64 Insofar as Spirit could never actually overcome the
objectivity of nature, Hegel’s concrete universal arose from a dialectic of
‘absolute negativity’ and culminated in the merely spiritual appropriation of the
world-or a philosophical ‘affirmation of alienation’ and ‘the act of abstraction
which revolves in its own circle’.6s With the benefit of Feuerbach’s
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 915

anthropological critique of Hegel, Marx thought he had discovered the prospect

for a human community which would be ‘the self-supporting positive, positively
grounded on itself rather than on the externality of private property.66 Hegel’s
dialectic and his notional view of freedom was a ‘false positivism’,67 a purely
ideological transcendence of negativity, which could never arrive at the ‘last act’
but represented only Spirit’s ‘pure restless revolving within itself .@
What was now required was ‘resolution of the theoretical antithesis.. . in a
practical way’. Hegel’s work had pointed the way towards an interpretation of
history as a phenomenology of human labour, in which the history of industry
provided the ‘open book of man’s essential powers’.6g But the problem which
resulted from this conclusion was that history now had to be read dialectically,
with the emphasis upon historical becoming rather than essential being; and a
dialectical reading of history quickly revealed that the ‘family’ of man could only
properly be understood in terms of the growth of particularity and the
consequent Hegelian dialectic of individuation and mediation.

FROM THE IMMEDIACY OF ‘MAN’ TO ‘REAL INDIVIDUALS’

Hegel’s Phenomenology addressed the historical development of Spirit from

consciousness through self-consciousness to universal self-consciousness and the
Absolute. The Hegelian dialectic moved in a continuous spiral, an endless circle
of logical necessity. At each stage of Hegel’s thought, prior to the emergence of
the Absolute, the thesis is characterised by immediacy; the second term is
‘mediate’; and the third term is the merging of mediation in a new immediacy.
Immediacy is originally simple identity, the identity of self-certainty; mediation
brings difference, division through particularity; the final merging of mediation
in the Absolute results in self-mediated identity in difference, or the universal
identity of identity and non-identity, which Marx dismissed as ‘confirmation of
the pseudo-essence’.” Marx’s reference to the natural community as the ‘self-
supporting positive’ was his response to Hegel’s description of this dialectical
progression in the Logic. There Hegel had written that ‘Logical doctrine has three
sides: (a) the Abstract side, or that of understanding; (b) the Dialectical, or that of
negative reason; (c)the Speculative, or that of positive reason.“’ Hegel’s dialectic
was ‘speculative’ because its truth was the identity of opposites achieved through
positive reason. When Marx and Engels undertook to translate this speculative
dialectic into ‘real, positive science’ in The German Ideology, they formulated
their intentions in the following famous passage.

In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth,

here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say. . . . We set out from real, active
men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of
ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the
human brain . . . . have no history, no development; but men, developing their
material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real
existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined
by consciousness but consciousness by life.”
916 Richard B. Day

Because Marx’s project had now become an investigation of the material

preconditions for human community, rather than the potential for natural
ethicality, the first casualty of this new approach was the essential ‘Man’
portrayed in the Manuscripts. The concept of man as a nature-transforming (and
therefore revolutionary) being continued to inform all of Marx’s later writings,
but in the Theses on Feuerbach he had already written that historically, in the
concrete process of becoming, mankind both creates and particularises its own
nature as the ‘ensemble of the social relations’. It followed that the human
‘essence’ could no longer be regarded only as a ‘dumb generality which merely
naturally unites the many individuals’,73 but instead, as in Hegel’s logic,
immediacy must dissolve into particularity and then be reconstituted historically
as a universal. The German Ideology marked a turning away from the ‘essence’ of
man to follow Hegel into the historical phenomenology of the labour process and
its unconscious organisation through the class struggle. What men are at any
particular time, Marx now contended, is historically determined by ‘what they
produce and.. . how they produce’.74 Being must explicitly be comprehended in
the concrete terms of becoming.
The original need which set this life-process in motion was the natural need for
reproduction of human life. This meant that the second casualty of The German
Zdeology was Marx’s previously romantic vision of the family as the paradigm for
the immediate universality of the human species. Instead, the man-woman
relationship now appeared as a paradigm for the social division of labour and the
consequent struggle between individuals and social classes. The necessary
natural intercourse between individuals produced an increase of population, and
the result was ‘latent slavery’, in which ‘wife and children are slaves of the
husband’. This latent slavery, Marx claimed, was the ‘first property’, or the first
expression of one individual’s power to dispose of the labour power of another.75
Mankind now possessed both a ‘natural history’ and also an ‘historical nature’,
with the consequence that the original ‘unity’ with nature had become a ‘struggle’
both with nature and between human beings in developing the forces of
production. The ‘sensuous world’ of the Manuscripts had become ‘an historical
product’ and the objective expression of ‘changed needs’.76
Marx’s new emphasis upon the development and proliferation of material
needs circumscribed his awareness of the necessity for society’s normative
integration and at the same time generated deeper insight into the role of means
of production as the material mediators between human society and nature. The
movement from ‘natural’ means of production, through simple tools to ‘civilised’
means of production, both distanced individual producers from ‘property’ and at
the same time constituted capital as the universal abstraction which imposed the
rule of contingency upon the whole of society. The successive stages in the
development of the means of production gave rise to the particularity of social
classes and class consciousness; in the same process Marx found evidence that
emergence of universal means of production would break down particularity and
produce the proletariat as ‘the dissolution of all classes’ (recall here Hegel’s
comments on the universalising effects of tools). ” The division of labour through
modern industry, for Marx, represented ‘the development of individuals into
complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations’.‘* As in the
Manuscripts, the result of this dialectic would again be communism, but with
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 917

the noteworthy difference that communism now represented an economic

arganisation rather than the natural ethicality of humanism. ‘Communism _. .
consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men,
strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the
united individuals. Its organization is, therefore, essentially economic, the
material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions
into conditions of unity.‘79
The German Ideology translated Hegel’s Phenomenology of consciousness into
objective history, an attempt at an empirically verifiable story of human
becoming. However, the end of the story only partially represented a
methodological departure from the ~844~~~~scripts. The characters of the story
were threefold: individuals, particulars (social classes), and the universal (the
united individuals). But Marx’s new view of communist society was still notably
devoid of self-conscious social groups mediated by social norms and institutions.
The dissolution of class particularity implied emergence of an immediate
subjective relation between each individual and all others. ‘In the real
community’, Marx affirmed, ‘the individuals obtain their freedom in and
through their association.‘80 Association was singular. It consisted of individuals
who, freed from the division of labour, would no longer be anchored in one
‘exclusive sphere of activity’, but would be able to ‘hunt in the morning, fish in
the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as /they/ have
a mind’.81 The paradoxical result was to posit communist society as an essentially
economic organisation while at the same time providing no indication of how
individual activities would be either technically organised or ethically co-
ordinated. The German Zdeofogy, like the 1844 manuscripts, ended with a
Feuerbachian ‘self-supporting positive, positively grounded on itself, Natural
man, grounded in nature and natural history, had been replaced by historical
men, grounded in their own economic history. In both cases Marx saw no need
for the dialectic of mutual recognition through political or legal mediation. He
began The German Ideology with the premise that ‘society’ must regulate the
general forces of production. As in the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’,
he concluded with the declaration that in order for individuals to assert
themselves, they must first ‘overthrow the State’.82
Whereas the first principle of the world is for Hegel Reason, or rational
necessity, which is later reproduced in the rational and self-determined necessity
of the laws, as universal thoughts, for Marx it had become the economic necessity
which originates in the physical being of individuals who at the same time are
situated within social relationships. Only after investigating ‘the material
intercourse of men, the language of real life’83 and the natural cause of social
relationships, did Marx find individuals producing their social consciousness. In
The German Zdeo~agyhe and Engels declared that ‘The first premise of ail history
is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be
established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent
relation to the rest of nature.‘84 Contrary to Hegel, who believed physical
organisation presupposed subjective community, Marx and Engels deliberately
based their analysis upon what they called ‘real premises’ and ‘real individuals,
their activity and the material conditions under which they live.. . . These
premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.‘8s German philosophy’s
918 Richard B. Day

‘empty talk about consciousness’, as the reason of the world and the author of
history, had been replaced by the more mundane problem of empty stomachs:
‘life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing
and many other things’.86 Consciousness did not create the world; rather
production of the means with which to satisfy material needs produced
consciousness as an expression of class interests and an ideological rationalisa-
tion of inequality and private property.*’ A transformation of human
consciousness could only occur together with a transformation of the relations of
material production. How this social consciousness would be reflected back into
the production process was a problem which remained to be explored.
The German Ideology documents Marx’s departure from Hegel’s ontological
dialectic of Reason in clear and unmistakable terms. Marx’s dialectic is
historical, rather than ontological, because it commences with an objective
economic problem-scarcity and its articulation through the division of
labour-which Marx believed can ultimately be overcome. Human freedom, as
he would later argue in Capital, is that realm of activity which lies beyond
necessity (philosophising after dinner) and therefore beyond negativity. It is the
self-affirming self-development of human individuals, which in dialectical terms
is one-sided and abstract. What distinguished l7re German Ideology more clearly
than anything else, both from Hegel and from the Manuscripts, was the analytical
and historical primacy which Marx attached to individuals as the original vessels
of physical necessity and the subsequent authors of their own social necessity.
But having passed through the objective determination of social necessity,
Marx’s dialectic again issued in immediacy, this time the immediacy of radical
individualism-of individuals who hunt, fish, rear cattle etc., whenever they are
disposed to do so. The difficulty remains, however, that these same self-
determined individuals must also be the ‘united individuals’, whose communal
life presupposes some ‘rational’ as distinct from merely physical organisation of
production. In the Grundrisse and Capital Marx proposed to satisfy this
requirement by substituting the economic plan for Hegel’s political state and the
technical laws of the physical reproduction of things for Hegel’s laws of ethical
life.

FROM ‘REAL INDIVIDUALS’ TO SCIENTIFICALLY RECONSTITUTED

COMMUNITY

Marx’s social theory was now firmly launched in its own dialectical
progression from the abstract community of natural ethicality, through the
economic division of labour, towards a scientifically reconstituted community of
conscious labour. In his afterword to the second German edition of the first
volume of Capital Marx summarised his relation to Hegel in another oft-quoted
passage:
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 sublect,
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
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 919

than the material world reflected by the human mind, and transformed into forms
of thought.**

As Marx saw it, Hegel’s dialectic was ‘standing on its head. It must be turned
right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical
she11.‘89
Marx explained what he meant in the section of the Grundrisse which dealt
with the methodology of political economy. Here it became clear that the
‘mystical shell’ was Hegel’s ontology; the ‘rational kernel’ was the dialectical
epistemology set out in the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. For
Hegel, ‘science’ denoted knowledge of the whole in the part and the part in the
whole. Although Hegel had fallen into ‘the illusion of conceiving the real as the
product of thought.. . unfolding itself out of itself, 9ohe had nevertheless made a
decisive contribution to knowing. The concrete was not merely objective; rather,
‘The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations,
hence unity of the diverse.“’ Hegel’s Phenomenology undertook to explain how
we know, the Logic dealt with what we know. Marx replaced the ontology of the
Logic with the historical-economic categories of capital, wage labour and so on,
and in this manner proposed to follow the ‘scientifically correct method’ of the
Phenomenology, or to comprehend capitalist reality by ‘rising from the abstract’
to the universal. Marx’s subjective dialectic became a categorial reconstruction in
thought ofthe objective dialectic ofthe capitalist system. In the preface to Capital
he similarly argued that concrete analysis required ‘the force of abstraction’,
whereby the commodity appeared as the ‘cell-form’ of ‘an organic whole’.92
The simplest economic categories, according to the Grundrisse, already pre-
supposed a ‘given, concrete, living whole’.93 Labour, for example, was the ‘simplest
abstraction’, but it only achieved its full validity-labour as the universally
abstract labour of political economy-as a category of capitalist society.94 All the
economic categories were objective, in the sense of being expressions of ‘historic
relations’, but at the same time they also contained a subjective moment. It was
human society, rather than Hegel’s Idea, which dissolved itself into its parts. It
followed that ‘in the theoretical method too, the subject, society, must always be
kept in mind as the presupposition’.95 Political economy was bourgeois society
reflecting upon itself and inadvertently revealing its own contradictions,
Where Marx disagreed with the political economists was in their supposition
that the categories of their science were supra-historical and possessed eternal
validity. His disagreement with Hegel resulted from his conviction that hitherto
the real subjects of human history-human beings-had been merely the
unconscious authors of their own necessity. Hegel had described the system of
needs with the observation that unity was present ‘not as freedom but as
necessity’.96 Insofar as living men were the conscious embodiment of the World
Spirit, however, Hegel had seen the particulars of civil society being mediated
into the universal as a concrete expression of subjectivity. In 77re Poverty of
Philosophy Marx answered that real men must become ‘the authors and actors of
their own drama’,” which in turn demanded the self-conscious integration of
individual acts of labour into a labour process which would be rational in its
totality. In this manner abstract labour would be transformed into truly concrete
labour; the social necessity of the labour of each communal individual would be
920 Richard B. Day

recognized through the economic plan, as rational, self-determined necessity.

Economic planning would be an expression of necessity not only in the sense of
satisfying needs, but also in the sense of consciously articulating the objective
laws implicit within the existing mode of production. For Marx, economic laws
referred to necessary relations which, within any particular mode of production,
expressed both technological necessities and also the existing contradictions
between social classes. In Capital he declared that the ‘natural laws of capitalist
production’ (‘natural’ because they are external to the individual, like the laws of
nature), are ‘tendencies’, which work ‘with iron necessity towards inevitable
results’.9s Capitalism’s laws are ‘tendencies’ for Marx in two respects: on the one
hand they generate offsetting tendencies, so that the labour content of
commodities, for example, only approximately determines prices;99 on the other
hand, objective laws also implicitly articulate human subjectivity-they are the
external expression, through inter-sectoral economic relations, of inner human
needs-with the consequence that the ‘inevitable’ result of their contradictions
will be to create the objective and subjective preconditions for the negation of
capitalism through the proletarian revolution. In order that he might hazard a
more concrete view of communism than that given in the Manuscripts or The
German Ideology, Marx now had to try to anticipate what kind of economic laws
might prevail in a communist society and how they would come to be internalised
by the associated producers, upon whose consciousness their rational fulfilment
would depend.
As the transcendence of capitalism, communist society would have to grasp
the implicitly rational within the explicitly irrational. The laws of capitalism were
irrational to the degree that they expressed contradictory social relationships and
therefore operated ‘independently of the will, foresight and action of the
producers’.ioO The operation of market laws, in a class-divided society, meant
that ‘social reason always asserts itself postfestum’ and that ‘great disturbances
may and must constantly occur. ’ lo’ But these same laws also expressed the
technical necessity for correct input-output relations between the different
branches of industry. Capitalism could not preserve this objectively necessary
proportionality, for the erratic movement of prices spontaneously induced
individual investment decisions which paid no regard to the requirements of the
economy as a whole. The most concise outline of this argument occurs in the
Grundrisse.

(Capital exists and can only exist as many capitals, and its self-determination
therefore appears as their reciprocal interaction with one another). Capital is just as
much the constant positing as the suspension of proportionate production. The
existing proportlon always has to be suspended by the creation of surplus values
and the increase of the productive forces. But this demand, that production should
be expanded stmultaneously, and at once rn the same proportion, makes external
demands upon [each] capital which in no way arise out of it itself; at the same time,
the departure from the given proportion in one branch of production drives all of
them out of it, and in unequal proportions.‘02

In his economic analysis of capitalism, Marx saw the business cycle as the
objective foundation for Hegel’s philosophical ‘circle of necessity’. Like Hegel’s
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 921

‘cunning of Reason’, periodic crises played the necessary role in a capitalist

market of providing a ‘momentary and forcible’ solution of the existing
contradictions. ‘They are violent eruptions which for a time restore the disturbed
equilibrium.‘io3 Recurrent crises of relative over-production destroyed ‘redun-
dant’ capital and goods, but at the same time they reproduced the historic
dilemma of scarcity by prematurely destroying a portion of the instruments of
production when their use ceased to be profitable. In Capital and in Theories of
Surplus Value Marx suggested that a planned economy would overcome this
cyclical movement by co-ordinating investments and also through conscious
maintenance of inventories with which to redress unanticipated disproportion-
ahties. Over-production in capitalist society was an objectively necessary
‘element of anarchy’. In communist society the objective need for production
reserves would be expressed in the law of ‘continuous relative over-
production’,‘04 representing ‘conscious control by society over the material
means of its own reproduction’.‘05 Communism would be the dialectical
overcoming of capitalism’s unconscious dialectic, but as a higher universal it
would preserve the objectively necessary proportions of expanded reproduction
by raising capitalism’s laws of movement to a subjective level.
Marx’s second principal law of planning referred to the need for economy in
the expenditure of labour time. Whereas capitalism reduced socially necessary
labour time and appropriated savings in the form of relative surplus value and
private profit, Marx expected a planned economy to follow the ‘law of the rising
productivity of labour time”06 and gradually to transform savings of human
energy into ‘an increase of free time’. Labour savings would continue to be
‘invested’, but these investments would now be in a new form of fixed capital,
‘this fixed capital being man himself’. lo7‘Economy of time’, Marx wrote in the
Grundrisse, ‘along with planned distribution of labour among the various
branches of production, remains.. . economic law on the basis of communal
production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree’ than in capitalism.“’
Marx’s analysis in Capital abstracted from pre-bourgeois relations of
production in order to discern those laws which were unique to the capitalist
system. He also recognised, however, that every concrete capitalist society
necessarily contained ‘relations derived from earlier forms’,io9 which in turn
would influence the specific character of planning. Economic history developed
unevenly; it was not ordered in a neat hierarchy like the categories of Hegel’s
Logic; and for this reason Marx considered it methodoIogicalIy impossible to
provide an ‘absolute’ projection of communist society. The most that he could
hope to accomplish theoretically was to ascertain the potential for human
freedom which was veiled by the contradictions of the existing system. This was
the significance which he attached to the general principles of scientific planning:
in the most general terms they expressed the implicit rationality of capitalism
which would finally be comprehended and consciously deployed by free men.
That he was able to posit the universal internalisation of objective necessity was
due to his conviction that a fundamental universalisation of the workers’
consciousness was already being effected within the capitalist division of labour,
a universalisation which would be the subjective counterpart of the objectively
progressing dissolution of all classes into the proletariat.
922 Richard B. Day

In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right differences between social classes are differences

of consciousness and of the way in which particular groups of people grasp the
world in which they live. The agricultural class corresponds to the first phase of
thought, for this class lives in simple and direct contact with nature. The
industrial and commercial class uses its understanding to analyse and subdivide
needs and to mould materials. The universal class, or the civil service, represents
the moment of reason and works for the universal purposes of the community.
The division of society into classes is a logical necessity founded upon the Notion.
Social self-differentiation is then mediated into conscious community through
the institutions of objective spirit. In the 1844 Manuscriprs Marx had eliminated
social particularity by dissolving ‘Man’ into nature and nature into embodied
labour. The Grundrisse took an entirely different approach and radically
undercut Hegel’s ontology of social classes by incorporating Hegel’s own stress
upon the assertion of human reason. By this time Marx realised that ‘civilised’
means of production were transforming nature not so much through the
objectification of physical labour as through the embodiment of reason in its
technical expression.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-

acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material
transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation
in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand, the power
of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what
degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to
what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come
under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance wtth
it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in
the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real
life process.“’

Conscious self-determination of the labour process was already immanent

within capitalism. Its actualisation as scientific planning presupposed the
universal worker as the necessary product of capitalism’s universal means of
production. Abstract labour, subordinated to ‘the technological application of
science’,“’ was already labour which was implicitly posited as ‘suspended
individual, i.e. as social labour’.“’ Modern means of production had eliminated
the particular skills of handicraft producers and in this way had reduced labour
to a ‘pure abstraction’ in every sense. On the one hand, technological production
presupposed the growth of ‘general scientific labour’,1’3 in which industry had
become increasingly dependent upon ‘the general state of science and on the
progress of technology’.“4 On the other hand, in order to ‘work’ with
sophisticated instruments of embodied knowledge, the worker must himself
possess universal skills, which would enable him to superintend the means of
production which scientific labour-as the labour of thought and therefore truly
universal labour-had created. Capitalism had produced wealth through the
universalisation of need; but this very universality of need posited the need for
production of man himself as ‘the most total and universal social product’.115
Replacing physical toil with objectified knowledge, capitalism had proven itself
incapable ofconscious self-regulation and now required technologically cultured
i?e Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 923

workers as the self-conscious regulators of the social life-process. In the

Philosophy of Right Hegel had written that ‘the abstraction of one man’s
production from another’s makes work more and more mechanical until finally
man is able to step aside and install machines in his place’.**6 In the Grundrisse
Marx elaborated the implications of this tendency. The quantitative dispropor-
tions of capitalist production had now been reinforced by an even more salient
‘qualitative imbalance’ between proletarian wage labour and the powerful new
production processes for which the labourers were responsible.

Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process;

rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the
production process itself. . . . He steps to the side of the production process instead
of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour
he performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of
his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over
it by virtue of his presence as a social body-it is, in a word, the development of the
social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of
wealth.“’

In order that he might superintend complex systems of machinery, the worker

must comprehend them in their totality and their lawful interconnections. And
just as thought, for Hegel, was the universal bond which transcended
particularity, so Marx believed that scientific production would erase the
historical division between mental and physical labour, between the internal and
the external, by objectively requiring that all men become scientists. The ‘human
being who has become’, wrote Marx, would be one ‘in whose head exists the
accumulated knowledge of society’.“*
The problem at this juncture was twofold. In the first place, Marx’s formula for
the social self-determination of individuals implied the potential universality of
each and all, without which even ‘rational’ social processes would remain
externally determined. And secondly, in the course of the Grundrisse Marx had
replaced Hegelian Reason, as the philosophical science of human becoming, with
science-tout court. Scientific truth was objective truth. Disagreements over
objective truth raised questions of the correct and the incorrect; they left no space
for the autonomy of individual thought as to what the truth ‘ought’ to be. When
this type of technical reason began to be applied to the practical relations
between men, it necessarily followed that economic planning would remain
within the Realm of Necessity and could not yet represent the true Realm of
Freedom.

FROM THE REALM OF NECESSITY TO THE REALM OF FREEDOM

In the third volume of Capital Marx paused once more to summarise his
conclusions.

In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined
by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it
lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle
924 Richard B. Day

with Nature to satisfy his wants,. . . so must civilized man, and he must do so in all
social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his
development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at
the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase.
Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers,
rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common
control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving
this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to,
and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of
necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in
itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this
realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic
prerequisite.“’

Whereas Hegel had found the blossoming of human freedom in the ethical
community, where the instrumental reason of science was contextualised within
a higher determination of social purpose, Marx was now denying that our merely
communal existence could ever be truly free. The laws which governed
communal production were not like Hegel’s constitution of the state, which
perpetually sundered itself into the differences of the Notion and perpetually re-
created itself in its dissolution; rather the laws of planning expressed objective
truth and resulted in a ‘settled plan’.“’ The technically determined purposes of
planning were given by the historically created means of production and by the
objective need to maintain proportionality between branches of the economy, as
the articulation on a social scale of individual needs. Moreover, even when
technical necessity became self-evident, it would still not refer to freedom, but
only to the ‘mundane’ need to reproduce life. Economic laws, therefore, did not
yet posit the absolute, or the ‘end in itself, which absorbed all other ends and
constituted their truth. It was in addressing this final problem that Marx hoped to
accomplish his ambition of bringing the Hegelian dialectic to rest.
Hegel’s own thought ranged beyond objective spirit by emancipating
consciousness to pursue art, religion and philosophy, or thought reflecting into
itself as Absolute Spirit. But thought reflecting into itself was also logic; logic led
to the Absolute Idea; the Absolute Idea led to the philosophy of nature; the
philosophy of nature in turn pointed once again to the philosophy of spirit, etc.
Hence the ‘pure restless revolving’ which Marx originally criticised in the
Manuscripts. Unlike Hegel, who sought to establish the reason of the world
through speculative philosophy, Marx was convinced that the natural world and
human society must be made rational through science, which alone could dispose
of the veil of mythical representation. In the Grundrisse Marx’s thought
converged on Hegel’s to the extent that the predominant moment even of
material production had now emerged as the production of knowledge. The
difference was that Hegel took ‘science’ to mean knowledge of the Absolute; for
him the exact sciences of the understanding were exact only because of the
triviality of their content. Marx, in contrast, had taken the view as early as the
Manuscripts that scientific thought, unlike the fanciful self-indulgence of
philosophy, was at once both individual and truly universal. The scientific
thinker was the counterpart in a ‘civilised’ society of Hegel’s inventor of simple
tools.
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 925

. . . when I am active scientifically,etc .,-when I am engaged in an activity which I

can seldom perform in direct communication with others-then I am social,
because I am active as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a
social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active); my own
existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of
myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.. . . the
activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is my theoreticalexistence as a
social being.‘*’

Whereas Hegel had seen political activity as the highest form of human
endeavour apart from participating in the self-contemplation of spirit, Marx
considered scientific thought, as the production of productive knowledge, to be
the highest manifestation of human praxis. The self-supporting positive,
positively grounded upon itself, would be the emancipated individual, whose
thought in his free time would be grounded upon the embodied thought of all
previous generations, whose limited tools made physical labour the focus of
production and thus prevented them from achieving consciousness of their
universal interdependence. lz2 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right had been a philo-
sophical repudiation of the French Revolution and its abstract individualism.
Marx’s critique of Hegel now produced the theoretical culmination of the French
Revolution in the abstract individual, whose thought was assumed to be
immediately universal because grounded in objective scientific truth which could
and must be freely appropriated by all.
Through its displacement of living labour, modern technology was creating
the potential for a revolutionary extension of free time in which all producers
might participate in creative thought. ‘The free development of individualities ...
then corresponds to the artistic, scientific, etc. development of the individuals in
the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.. . real wealth [is]
“. . . disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual
and the whole of society.“‘123 Marx intended his dialectic to replace Hegel’s
contemplative ‘affirmation of alienation’ by demonstrating the necessity for real
individuals to participate consciously in the creation of a real world. He did not
doubt Hegel’s view that only the totality was concrete. The difference was that
Hegel saw the totality as an ethical community which included the process of
production, a world which Mind created for itself, while Marx saw mind as a
moment in the overall movement of economic activities. Hegel’s dialectic
gathered up all the categories of being into the internal unity of subject and object
in the Idea. Marx’s dialectic left real individuals to find the purpose of their
freedom in reference to externality. Thus the ‘universal development of the
individual”24 had to reflect back into the production process by multiplying
human productivity. ‘The saving of labour time’, wrote Marx, ‘[is] equal to an
increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in
turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest
productive power.‘L25 Individual self-development, as the projected ‘end in itself,
turned out to be the production of human ‘fixed capital’. The purpose of
freedom, for Marx, was production.
In communal production, he affirmed, ‘Mediation must, of course, take
place.“26 The kind of mediation he now had in view was the conscious plan,
926 Richard B. Day

which posited each individual’s labour in advance as ‘a link in general

production’ based upon general ‘property’.“’ In the Manuscripts Marx had
contended that by presupposing private property, the political economists had
merely ‘formulated the laws of estranged labour’.i2* In the Grundrisse he argued
that the positing of a new totality would redefine the parts in terms of the whole.
‘Communal production, communality. . . as the basis of production’, would
entail replacement of commodity exchange with an exchange of ‘activities’ and
the division of labour with the ‘organization of labour’.lz9 Specific activities
would be mediated through the plan, but these activities would no longer be
exclusive and particular. When every individual had the opportunity to engage in
any activity for which he might prepare himself, the practice of no activity would
any longer result in the exclusion and negation of other producers. As in the most
primitive clans, but now enriched by all the wealth of needs and skills which
capitalism had created, each individual would finally realise his ‘subjective-
objective existence’130 in his opportunity to objectify his creative powers and to
sustain his life-process by appropriating his ‘specific share of the communal
production’.i3’
Marx believed he had brought Hegel’s dialectic to a positive conclusion by
demonstrating that the lawfulness of communal life must become transparent
and by discovering the preconditions for realising each individual’s truth in the
truth of communal production. All possible ‘needs of the social individual”32
would be immediately satisfied-and the entire Hegelian problematic of ‘right’
would finally be laid to rest-when economic scarcity had been overcome. In his
Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx noted that ‘right’ can never be higher than
the economic structure of society and the cultural level determined by that
structure.‘33 The problem was that when he finally returned to the problematic of
‘right’, Marx subordinated it to a technically correct organisation of production
and a technological culture which would guarantee each individual his right to a
share in social consumption.
Hegel’s exaltation of right, as the highest expression of human freedom, was
reduced by Marx to a mere economic claim upon things. So long as it was
necessary, such claims could be quantitatively and scientifically measured in
terms of each individual’s contribution of labour time to the social product. By
revolutionising productivity, however, communist society would both elevate
and eliminate (or transcend) the ‘rights’ of all. The higher stage of communism
would be distinguished by economic abundance, enabling each individual to
draw upon the social product in accordance with his needs.‘34 There would be no
need for recognition of particular rights, for as scarcity receded, each could
spontaneously recognise the needs and rights of all. There would be no need for
politics, for there would no longer be any particular claim to right which needed
to be enforced by an apparatus of compulsion. There would be no need for a
state, for the end of economic contingency would remove the need to secure the
personality through external embodiment in private property. Transcendence of
right would at the same time imply transcendence of ‘duties’, as traditionally
understood. Communism would be beyond particular duties and would entail
only the general obligation to be human among humans. Society’s historical
preoccupation with ‘right’ would end when the ‘wrong’ of scarcity and capitalist
i%e Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 927

exploitation was eliminated. Resolution of the economic problem would resolve

all issues of human ethicality by finally realising mankind’s ‘essential being’.

FROM THE REALM OF FREEDOM TO ETHICALITY

Marx’s projection of communist society inverted Hegel’s dialectic not so much

by showing the ideological realm to be a reflex of production as by identifying
human freedom with the abstract individual. That this conclusion was
incompatible with Hegel’s dialectical epistemology was recognised by Marx
himself when he referred individual self-development back to the concrete life-
process of society’s material reproduction. As individual producers and
appropriators of knowledge, men would act within the Realm of Freedom; but as
‘real individuals’ they would continue to find the purpose of their activity in
scientifically coordinated economic endeavour. They would enjoy self-
determination within this necessity to the extent that, in choosing how and what
to produce, they would at the same time recognise the objectivity of economic
laws. Social relations would be planned; their scientific rationality was taken to
be self-evident and non-contradictory; and individual self-consciousness, from
this point of view, would be an abstraction from the totality.
Marx believed he had brought Hegel’s dialectic to an affirmative conclusion.
In fact he replaced Hegel’s ‘circle of necessity’ with another circular argument
uniquely his own. The purpose of production, he believed, was an increase of free
time; but the purpose of free time was an increase of production. This conclusion
became unavoidable when Marx attempted to locate the ‘end in itself in abstract
individuality. The ‘loose ends’ of individual freedom could only be reintegrated
through reflection back into the production process, conceived as the concrete
universal. But the problem here was that Marx’s concrete universal had ceased to
be concrete and had become merely objective. Objective needs had been detached
from ethical bonds, and rejection of Hegel’s yalse positivism’ had led to its
replacement by the new positivism of the physical sciences. In Lukacs’ terms,
Marx’s dialectic dealt exclusively (and abstractly) with the production ‘complex’
and dismissed the need for the ethical mediation of all human behaviour. Modern
means of production created the possibility of articulating the world of things in
an infinite variety of ways, yet Marx never posed the question of what these
articulations ‘ought’ to say in terms of the human purpose of a life beyond ‘vulgar
need’.135 Replacing Hegel’s spiral of logical necessity, Marx produced a flattened
circularity in which the real present, as Lukacs complained of Hegel, emerged as
‘the actually attained realm of reason’.‘36 The only difference is that Marx
substituted technical for practical reason.
Hegel’s dialectic necessarily results in the continuous reproduction of a
concrete universal because it begins with the conviction that the real is the Idea. If
the Idea is not to be an abstraction from existence, it can only find expression as
determinate being and therefore must contain negativity within itself. What this
means, in practical terms, is that the finite minds of individuals and particular
social groups must be mediated economically, politically and culturally into a
universal consciousness of shared purpose. Social purpose is real, not when it is
 Richard B. Day

imposed externally, but when it affirms the right of personality and makes
personal dignity concrete through recognition from others. For Hegel, all being
is being for consciousness. The being of a community of persons is
the being of a self-conscious community. By rejecting the ontological dialectic
of Hegelian Reason, Marx collapsed the political and the cultural into scientific
understanding of the economic.
It is precisely this central dilemma which Lukacs has apprehended in his
proposal for a Marxist ontology of social being. The fundamental difference
between Lukics and Marx is that Marx, once he posited the end of scarcity,
reduced to insignificance the need to choose. By conceiving of human action as a
humanly created ‘chain of alternatives’, Lukacs shows that the outcome of every
teleological act of labour is both a new determination of human potential and a
new limit. The cleared field emancipates us from the limit of the forest; but when
the field is seeded for a crop it cannot simultaneously be a children’s playground.
Having proclaimed the ontological necessity of choice, Lukacs could not escape
the question of how choices are made or fail to see that they involve both
technical and ethical dimensions. Because the end which informs all choice is the
human end of freedom in community with others, he insists that technology and
instrumental reason can only be the means to this end. Neither individual nor
social choices can be made on technological grounds alone: ‘no matter how high
the level of development of technology (its support by a whole series of sciences),
this cannot be the sole ground for decision between alternatives.“37 The most
that technical reason can establish is an ‘if . . . then’ sequence; it can never define
the ‘ought’ of the goal.i3*
Given the widening of subjective choice made possible by modern technology,
Lukdcs also sees that the actuality of social freedom presupposes mediation of
particular choices. Although he begins with the teleological positings of
individuaf labour, he adds that these must give rise in turn to ‘secondary goal
positing’, the object of which is no longer nature but ‘the consciousness of a
human group’. r39 The purpose of these secondary positings-which for most
readers wouid point to the domain of politics-is to ‘influence the consciousness
of other people so as to bring about the desired teleological positings on their
part’.r40 Secondary positings address desirable social ends, which, through being
shared, become objective in the social life of the individual. They are an
expression not merely of the ‘retreat of the natural boundary’i4’ to human
endeavour, but also of society’s spiritual growth. They represent social reflection
upon questions of dignity and a ‘meaningful life. ‘It is a matter of general
knowledge that man’s command over his instincts, emotions, etc., is the major
problem of all morality, from custom and tradition through to the highest forms
of ethics.‘142 Once the goal becomes that of influencing the consciousness of
others, then ‘the development of human relations eventually leads to the self-
transformation of the subject becoming the direct object of teleological positings
of an “ought” character. These positings, of course, are.. _qualitatively
distinguished . , . from those forms of the “ought” that we have discovered in the
labour process.‘i4’
Like Marx in the Grundrisse, Lukacs repeats the argument that technical
choices require knowledge of what is correct in terms of the efficacy of labour and
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 929

economy of human effort. 144But his criticism of reductionist Marxism is that

technical criteria must be contextualised by law (Recht) as the definition of what
is right and socially affirmative. And if law is to mediate social relations to this
end, then, says Lukacs, it ‘must receive a constitution independent from the
economy’.‘45 To ignore the dialectical simultaneity of the two forms of the
‘ought’ would be merely to arrive at ‘the kind of irrationality that indelibly marks
all forms of ‘6Realpolitik”‘. 146
From an Hegelian viewpoint, Lukbcs’ argument is flawed by the fact that he
begins with labour as the ‘model for social praxis’.147 Hegel would argue that all
human labour is culturally mediated at the very least by language, as a pretheory
of the world. Lukics’ insistence upon the heterogeneity of social being, from this
perspective, exaggerates the ‘independent’ constitution of Recht and the ‘closed
system’ of the economy. Lukacs is too much of a Marxist-as distinct from a
Stalinist-to accept what he takes to be Hegel’s ‘absolute and ideal supremacy of
the state’.‘48 Like Marx, he regards the economic as the dominant moment in
relation to social consciousness. He is, at the same time, too much of an Hegelian
to regard the economic as more than one moment of social being. The economic
cannot be separated from non-economic relations and normative commitments,
which contextualise production activities and contribute to ‘the raising of
consciousness from the standpoint of understanding to that of reason’.149 It is
this emergence of reason, in accompaniment with the developing forces of
production, which alone creates the possibility of abolishing such ‘real
complexes of objectivity’ as social classes.lsO
In the language of Marxist discourse, Lukacs’ proposal for a Marxist ontology
of social being fails in the famous ‘last instance’ to solve the problems posed by
Marx’s appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, he believes it is precisely
the ontological contradiction between freedom and necessity, a contradiction
arising from the relation between human purpose and natural objectivity, which
sustains the need for choice as the only real (i.e. historical) guarantee of the
participation of consciousness in creating a human world. It is the dialectical
simultaneity of primary positings in production, and secondary positings in
community with others, which allows reason to grasp ‘the ontological priority of
the dialectically structured complexes’i5’ and thereby to undertake a purposeful
ordering of social being which can never be fully realised. The complexity of
human society stands forever in the way of the triumphal march of Hegelian
Reason towards identity of the is with the ought. At the same time, implies
Lukacs, it is this very complexity which protects us against the imperial claims
both of economics and politics. This conclusion would clearly be inadequate
both to Marx and to Hegel. It nevertheless issues an important challenge to those
who would understand the problems of modernity. In particular, Lukacs
challenges fellow Marxists to rethink the contentious relations between science
and ethics in a technological society.

Richard B. Day
University of Toronto
930 Richard B. Day

NOTES

1. Georg Lukacs, HegeI’s False andHis Genuine Ontology (London: Merlin, 1978), p. 1
(hereafter cited as Lukacs, Hegel). Two previous essays of mine, which are partially
incorporated into this present work, may be of interest to the reader. They are ‘Marx
and Lukacs on Technology and the “Value” of Freedom’ and ‘Hegel and Marx:
Perspectives on Politics and Technology’ in Richard B. Day, Ronald Beiner and
Joseph Masciulli, eds, Democratic Theory and Technological Society (New York:
M.E. Sharpe, 1988), pp. 3654 and 184-203.
2. Ibid, pp. 20-21.
3. Ibid, p.4.
4. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 328.
5. Lukics, Hegel, pp. 61-62.
6. Ibid, pp. 67-68. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie
(New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 81 et seq.
7. Ibid., p. 3.
8. Ibid., p. 2. Cf. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967), pp. 15s 156.
9. Ibid., p. 4.
10. Ibid
11. Ibid, p. 11.
12. Ibid, p. 28.
13. Ibid, p.25.
14. Ibid, p.99.
15. Lukacs, Labour (London: Merlin, 1980), p. 33.
16. Lukacs, Hegel, pp. 43-46.
17. Lukacs, Labour, p. 26. See also Hegei, p. 53.
18. Lukacs, Hegel, p. 97.
19. Ibid, p. 111.
20. Lukacs, Labour, p. 115.
21. Ibid, p. 118.
22. Ibid., p. 33.
23. Ibid., p. 39.
24. Lukacs, Hegel, p. 25.
25. Ibid., p. 26.
26. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 156.
27. Ibid, p. 109.
28. Ibid., p. 156.
29. Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975),
p. 226. In the Phenomenology, p. 93, Hegel attributes freedom to ‘the portentous
power of the negative*. See also Philosophy of Right, p. 23.
30. Cited in Lukacs, The Young Hegel (London: Merlin, 1975), p. 220.
31. Ibid, p.330.
32. Ibid., p. 220. For Hegel, work makes the difference between merely natural and
spiritual consciousness. See Quentin Lauer, A Reading ofHegel’sPhenomeno!ogy of
Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 110 and pp.‘161169. See
also Phenomenology, pp.426431 and PhiIosophy of Right, pp. 46-49. In the
Philosophy of Right, p. 126, Hegel describes ‘work and effort’ as ‘the middle term
between subjectivity and objectivity’. On p. 194 he speaks of ‘the moment of
liberation intrinsic to work’. On p. 129 he refers to work as a ‘practical education’.
33. J.M. Bernstein, ‘From Self-Consciousness to Community: Act and Recognition in
the Master-Slave Relationship’ in The State and Civil Society, ed. Z.A. Pelczynski
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 36.
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 931

34. Taylor, Hegel, p. 382.

35. Luklcs, Labour, p. 39.
36. Ibid, p. 133.
37. Lukacs, ‘The Vienna Paper’ in Ernest Joos, Lukdcs’ Last Autocriticism: The
Ontology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983), p. 140.
38. Lukacs, Labour, pp. 89-90.
39. Ibid, p. 90.
40. Ibid, p. 87.
41. Ibid, p.99.
42. Ibid, p. 87.
43. Theo Pinkus, ed., Conversations with Lukdcs (London: Merlin, 1974), p. 76.
44. Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d. ed. (New York: Norton, 1978),
p. 68. In order to facilitate comparisons, whenever possible references to Marx’s
early writings will make use of this anthology.
45. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp.59%610. For Hegel, ‘absolute freedom’ is an
abstraction which means the death of freedom: ‘the most cold-blooded and
meaningless death of all, with no more significance than cleaving a head of cabbage’
(p. 605). See also Philosophy of Right, pp. 227-228.
46. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 42. In the Philosophy of Right, p. 134, Hegel also
speaks of the abstract universality of civil society as ‘the right of property’.
47. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, ed. Joseph O’Malley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 99.
48. Ibid, p.31.
49. Ibid, p. 121.
50. Ibid, p. 28. Cf. Luklcs, Hegel, pp. 17-20.
51. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 76-77.
52. Ibid., p. 75. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenofogy, pp. 509-512 et seq. For Hegel, the formative
process of culture involves ‘the estrangement of spirit from its natural existence’
(p.515). Merely natural or biological life must be negated in order for man to
become authentically human, i.e. spiritual and ethical.
53. Tucker, Marx-Engeis Reader, p.92.
54. Ibid
55. Ibid., p.76. Cf. Lukacs, Labour, pp.22-23; also Hegel, Philosophy of Right,
pp.226227. On p.292 Hegel remarks that ‘the principle of the modern state
requires that the whole of an individual’s activity shall be mediated through his
will’.
56. Ibid. Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 127; Lukacs, Labour, pp. 22-23.
57. Ibid., p. 78. Cf. Phenomenology, p. 226: ‘Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction
only in another self-consciousness’.
58. Ibid., p. 87.
59. Ibid, p. 84.
60. Ibid, p. 83. In the Phenomenology, p. 468, Hegel refers to the family as the ethical
order in the ‘element of immediacy or mere being’. The family is ‘a natural ethical
community’, but it stands in contrast to ‘the universal spirit’. Cf. Philosophy of
Right, pp. 111-116.
61. Ibid., p. 84.
62. Ibid, p. 85. Marx’s allusion is possibly to the Christian community of the Holy
Spirit in the Phenomenology, which follows the death of the individual (Jesus) and
through the resurrection reconciles man with the universal (God). See pp. 762-763.
63. Ibid, p. 83. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 229-240. In the Philosophy of Right
Hegel speaks of the wage contract as ‘alienation of my productive capacity’ (p. 63).
64. Ibid., p. 112.
932 Richard B. Day

65. Ibid., pp. 121- 123. In the Phenomenology, p. 81, Hegel refers to the process of true
reality as ‘the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its
beginning’. In the Philosophy ofRighr, p. 105, he speaks of freedom as ‘a circle of
necessity’.
66. Ibid., p. 108. In the Phenomenology Spirit is ‘the immovable and irreducible
[ground] and the starting point for the action of all and everyone’ while at the same
time being ‘their purpose and their goal’ (p. 458). In the Philosophy of Righr the
substantial community of the state is the ‘absolute unmoved end in itself (p. 156).
67. Ibid., p. 118. See Hegel on ‘positive freedom’ in the Philosophy of Righr, p. 260.
68. Ibid., p. 122. In the Phenomenology Hegel speaks of Reason as ‘purposive activity’
and of ‘concrete actuality’ as ‘movement and development unfolded. But this very
unrest is the self; and it is one and the same with that immediacy and simplicity
characteristic of the beginning.. . .’ (pp.83-84). For Hegel’s own critique of
‘thorough-going dialectical restlessness’, or restlessness without purposive activity,
see his comments on Scepticism and the ‘unhappy consciousness*, pp. 248-267.
69. Ibid, p. 89.
70. Ibid, p. 119.
71. HegePs Logic, p. 113.
72. Ibid., pp. 1% 155. In the PhiIosophy of Right Hegel sees the modern state as the
synthesis of the heavenly ‘realm of mind’ and ‘the mundane realm’ (p. 222).
73. Ibid., p. 145.
74. Zbid., p. 150. For Hegel, consciousness goes out of itself in ‘culture’ and in producing
culture produces itself as more than what it is by ‘nature’ (Phenomenology, esp.
pp. 509-512). Cultural production is a necessary process of human individuation.
The theme of the Phenomenology is that we grasp the world through thought
because the world is structured by thought. Marx believes we grasp the world
through thoughtful Iabour. Whereas Hegel believes we cannot know what we know
(the Logic) until we first know how we know, Marx replies that we cannot know
what we have created, including ourselves, until we first study how we have created
(economic history).
75. Ibid., pp. 159-160. See Hegel on the division of labour in Philosophy of Right,
pp. 129-131.
76. Ibid., p. 170.
77. Zbid., p. 193.
78. Ibid., p. 192.
79. Ibid., p. 193.
80. Ibid., p. 197.
81. Ibid., p. 160.
82. Ibid., p. 200.
83. Ibid., p. 154.
84. Ibid., p. 149.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., p. 156.
87. Ibid, p. 159.
88. Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957- 1962), I,
19.
89. Ibid., p. 20. In the Phenomenology, p. 87, Hegel acknowledges that to the ‘naive
consciousness’ philosophical science seems ‘to walk on its head’. See also his
comments on pp. 206207 concerning the ‘supersensible world’ and the ‘inverted
world’.
90. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans.
Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 101.
The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity 933

91. Ibid.
92. Marx, Capital, I, 8. Cf. Luklcs, Hegel, p. 74.
93. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101.
94. Ibid, p. 105.
95. Ibid, p. 101.
96. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 124.
97. Marx, The Poverty ofPhilosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963),p. 98.
98. Marx, Capital, I, 8.
99. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 137-141.
100. Marx, Capital, I, 15.
101. Marx, Capital, II, 315. Cf. Hegel’s reference to economic crises in thePhilosophy of
Right, pp. 147- 148 et seq. For a summary of Marx’s views of laws and cyclical crises
see Richard B. Day, The ‘Crisis’ and the ‘Crash’: Soviet Studies of the West
(1917-1939) (London: NLB, 1981), pp. 4-12.
102. Marx, Grundrisse, p.414.
103. Marx, Capital, III, 244.
104. Marx, Capital, II, 469. Cf. Theories of Surplus Value (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1951), pp. 359-360.
105. Marx, Capital, II, 469.
106. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 139.
107. Ibid, p.711.
108. Ibid., p. 173.
109. Ibid., p. 105.
110. Ibid., p. 706.
111. Ibid., p.699.
112. Ibid., p. 709.
113. Ibid, p.700.
114. Ibid, p. 705.
115. Ibid, p.409.
116. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 198.
117. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705.
118. Ibid., p.712.
119. Marx, Capital, III, 799-800.
120. Marx, Capital, I, 80.
121. Tucker, Marx-EngeZs Reader, p. 86. For Hegel the highest form of Spirit is self-
consciousness, where thought is the object of thought and therefore reflected into
self. Marx, in contrast, refers to science in the Grundrisse (p. 540) as ‘thisideal and at
the same time practical wealth’ (my italics).
122. Ibid, p. 191.
123. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 706.
124. Ibid., p. 542.
125. Ibid, p.711.
126. Ibid., p. 171.
127. Ibid.
128. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 79.
129. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 172.
130. Ibid, p. 492.
131. Ibid, p. 172.
132. Ibid., p. 708.
133. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 53 1.
134. Ibid.
135. Ibid., p. 90.
934 Richard B. Day

136. LukAcs, Hegel, p. 4.

137. LukAcs, Labour, p. 36.
138. Ibid., p. 66.
139. Ibid., p. 47.
140. Ibid., p. 89.
141. Ibid., pp.46, 118.
142. Ibid., p. 45.
143. Ibid., p. 73.
144. Ibid., pp. 83-85.
145. Ibid., p. 90.
146. Ibid., p. 133.
147. LukBcs, ‘The Vienna Paper’, op. cit., p. 139; cf. Labour, p. 3.
148. LukBcs, Hegel, p. 18.
149. Ibid., p. 112.
150. Ibid., p. 113.
151. Ibid., p. 112.