Comments on the relationship between capital and Hegel's logic of essence (Wesenslogik)

by Hans-Jürgen Krahl

The basic concept of the Marxian critique of political economy, the commodity form of the product in its most general validity for the capitalist social formation, is inexplicable without Hegel's dialectic of essence and appearance. Lenin rightly stated that the concept of commodity is not only the most abstract concept of the Marxian critique of the system, but that the commodity form of the product contains, so to speak, all elements of Hegel's logic of essence.
According to Marx, the transfer of the categories of Hegelian logic detached from their metaphysical context to the categories of political economy first constitutes the critique of political economy. According to Marx, Hegelian logic is the metaphysical disguise of the self-movement of capital. Marx has made the difference between essence and appearance the epitome of critique. He then differentiates once again between value and exchange value in the value category itself and says: exchange value is the appearance of value. The classical economists have not grasped this, and because they have not grasped it, they have understood neither reification nor false consciousness, fetishization and mystification. According to Marx, the dialectic of essence and appearance as the epitome of critique is attached to the self-understanding of a science that wants to appear as science. This is an antipositivist program that was directed against Saint-Simon to Comte and that still affects modern positivists today. The study of Hegel's logic is basically a logical, not a chronological prerequisite of Marx's critique of political economy.
Being is what is, and insofar as it is, it is appearance. Concrete nature is only the otherness of the idea, the expression of the concept. What is is the spirit that does not know itself as spirit, or the appearance that does not know itself as appearance. Being is the appearance that does not know itself as appearance. The essence, on the other hand, as reflection is the being that knows itself as appearance. Reflection is the appearance that knows itself. In this respect, being has aufgehoben itself and, as it were, lost its material heaviness, being becomes pure thought.
With Marx there are two moments of critique of idealism from which the form of his revolutionary theory is founded: epistemological critique of idealism and the inclusion of the concept of abstraction.
In the early writings Marx unfolds a critique of idealism in principle, as it is presented above all in the Feuerbach theses. He says that Feuerbach's materialism, too, still shares the shortcomings of traditional materialism, namely to have looked at reality not from the aspect of subjective revolutionary practice, of human activity, but from the aspect of the object, of contemplation, of mere sensuality. By this Marx means that although traditional materialism, as it has been handed down since Democritus, recognizes, in contrast to idealism, a material reality as reality and does not hypostasize the ideas of the actual reality, it is still attached to the idealistic tradition in so far as it regards material reality only from the aspect of perception. Traditional materialism is contemplative to material reality. Reality seems unchangeable to him because he cannot see through it as man-made. From an ideology-critical point of view it can be said that this is the point of view of the slave-owner society or the serfdom society; for the producers of these forms of society cannot see themselves as producers; there are two reasons for this: 1.the means of production are predominantly part of natural communities; i.e. they are not transparent as products of human beings. 2. in the basic peculiar (grundeigentümliche) form of organization, slaves and serfs, in contrast to the free wage worker, belong with body and soul to the slave-owner or the feudal master. They can understand themselves only as objects. This in turn is reflected in the consciousness of the philosophising masters, since material reality is not recognized as a product.
The same applies to traditional idealism, which sets the idea instead of the sensual view. Marx says in the first Feuerbach thesis: In contrast to traditional materialism, bourgeois modern idealism has developed the active side, the practice, but not as a human-sensual activity. In contrast to the classical feudal lords, the bourgeoisie is involved in production, but primarily in circulation. It understands work not as a concrete metabolism between human beings and nature, but as purely mental work, as abstract work that is abstracted from this metabolism, so that the concrete physical work of the wage earners can be discredited and mental work can be presented as real work. Here the principle of production is recognized because, in contrast to feudality, the means of production themselves have become products, and because the relationship of the free laborer to the capitalist is no longer a personal slave or serfdom relationship, but one that is regulated by free contract.
There is a separation between means of production and free labor, so that only pure subjectivity, in abstraction from matter, pure labor, in abstraction from nature, can be seen through as a productive force. The concept of intellectual labor (the activity of the concept in German idealism) is both the idealization of the free worker and the autonomous, individual entrepreneur.
Traditional materialism, which contains the recognition of material reality as the only reality, has a passive concept of social objectivity; it does not understand it as produced. Marx synthesizes this concept with the concept of intellectual labor; social objectivity is thus actively understood as produced.
From this synthesis of materiality and ideality, of intellectual labor and non-produced object, carried out not only within philosophy but also on the basis of Feuerbach's concept of practice and the experience of real class struggles, Marx derives one of the most important concepts of historical materialism: that of concrete labor.
In Hegel's work, people are marionettes of a consciousness superior to them, but according to Marx, consciousness is the predicate and quality of finite, mortal human beings. This is the reversal that Marx makes of Hegel in the early writings as a systematic critique of premises. From here he can then take up again Hegel's logic of being. The existence of a metaphysical consciousness superior to man is a semblance, but a real semblance: capital. Capital is the existing phenomenology of the mind, it is the real metaphysics. Capital is a semblance, because it has no real thing structure, yet it dominates people.
Does this conception denote a continuation or a critique of idealism?
With the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the question arose as to whether God, if his concept was the product of human thought, was still reality at all. Spinoza says: If all general concepts represent mere subjective abstractions, then God does not exist in a positive transcendence, in heaven. The absolute is then something that exists in the world itself; God exists only as creator in his creature. God became the totality itself.
According to Kant, the Absolute is not something positively infinite, but that which transcends all finite things and yet is not infinite: time. In it all things shall pass away, but it itself shall be unchanging.
The concept of dehistorized time is a concept of capital. The religious time of the Middle Ages was qualitative time; only the working time presents itself as unchangeable and dehisto-rised. Capital is the concept of commodity that unfolds in time. Time becomes the concept of the absolute, time becomes money.
This reification, which took place in the intellectual history of bourgeois modern times, is constitutive for Marx's analysis of capitalism. It takes place, as it were, in a gigantic movement of thought from Thomas Aquinas to Hegel and transforms itself into the analysis of commodities.
Capital is not a positive concept of the being, but the being is that which does not exist positively anywhere. The being is a subjective abstraction, but it should have reality. Hegel therefore says: the being is subjectivity, but this subjectivity has reality, because all objects identify themselves as thinking subjects. The essence is the reflection of being in itself. Marx calls this reflection reification, money hedging money.
The metaphysical consciousness that suppresses us in our individuality is capital, the exchange value that is a mere abstraction. Hegel is the metaphysical thinker of capital. He is the first to stand on the standpoint of the logic of capital; his philosophy is the idealistic and metaphysically disguised form of production.
Hegel's philosophy assumes that the pure concept creates matter out of itself; that every thing is nothing other than alienated concept. Marx agrees with this and at the same time reverses this thought, because according to him the concrete use values, which are produced daily, are destroyed to the pure concept of the work product. This submission of matter to the pure concept has alienated reality. What Hegel understands as realization is in truth the un-realization of human beings.
The essence that Hegel means is a negatory; Adorno rightly insisted on this. To differentiate between essence and appearance means that I do not take the facts as they are, but understand them on the basis of what justifies them. In this reflection the facts change, at least according to the mental possibility, and the better society emerges as the possibility of thinking. Reflection, which is the essence, can only break through the natural-law appearace of social facts. Hegel's critique of essence and appearance becomes a critique of the existing society if the essence is materialistically historicized and not referred to in a transcendence, as it still happens with Hegel. This mode of critique is laid out in Hegel's logic, and therefore Hegel is right when he says that being is the immediate, and that is an appearance. The immediate is that which is not mediated. What is not mediated is that which is not produced by us, appearance. If being is seen through as mediated, it is seen as a product. This is why Hegel formulates the first approach to the dissolution of fetishized reality. Hegel's concept of the being is the dissolution of a socially set reality that appears as natural-law reality.
Capital is the self-movement of the concept of commodity as the progredient contradiction between use value and exchange value. This concept has reality, it does not exist like "the tree" in the Platonic heaven of ideas and "the God" in the aquinatic heaven of fire, but it is a negative phenomenon; it only manifests itself in exchange; it subsumes the material, materially existing use values. Marx transfers two systematic processes of reflection to the critique of political economy. 1. The absolute (and the value is the absolute, because in the concept of value it is abstracted from the concretely working subject and from the concretely worked object) unfolds as capital, referring to itself as pure identity. Profit is the identity of capital with itself. 2. There is a being behind the immediate manifestations of money and products. This being is the value, an existing abstraction. I cannot see, hear, feel, taste the value anywhere, it has no empirical perceptibility, but it subsumes the use values among itself. In social intercourse, value reduces concrete things to the mere abstraction of value. Value is the abstraction of concrete use values, individuals, needs and interests; value is therefore repression.
Hegel's logic provides a model of emancipated intersubjectivity and emancipated forms of intercourse, for according to it, subject and object are to be reconciled with one another. This model of interaction, of social mediation of intercourse free of domination, is metaphysically laid out in Hegel's logic.
On the one hand, Marx can gain the realization from Hegel that social intercourse is an alienated one because the subjects do not recognize themselves as subjects, but as objects. On the other hand, it can read the alienated logic of essence of capital from Hegel's logic. When Hegel says: Being is the immediate, and that is an appearance, Marx can read out of it the product character of reality. From Hegel, however, this emerges alienated, if he argues so: Being is seen as the most concrete of all in philosophy, but being is only the general concept of everything that is. Being says nothing about everything that is but that it is, and all things have that in common. He therefore abstracts from the special, which is just concrete. Being is the most general, because it abstracts precisely from the specific conditions of things. But if it is the most indeterminate, according to Hegel it is nothing. But that is wrong, because something indefinite is not nothing, indefinite matter is not nothing. Hegel is therefore forced to transfer the indeterminate into the category of indeterminacy. This is the dialectical dissolution that Marx undoes. Nevertheless, Marx stands on the ground of Hegel's philosophy. He only introduces a systematic critique of Hegel's idealistic premise that men are men of consciousness and consciousness is not a consciousness of men. This is the only correction Marx makes.
Reality is the determinate, the determinate is the special, and the special is what distinguishes it from everything else. Thus being should be that which is different from everything else. But being is only the concept of that which is everything. But a table, for example, has in common with a chair that it is, but that is what it has in common and not what distinguishes it. So being is precisely the indiscriminate, the pure identity, the indeterminate. The definite at the table is not that it is because the chair is also at the table, but the definite at the table is that it has a special being that makes it a table. Being abstracts precisely from all differences and thus from all determinations; therefore being is the indeterminate. The indeterminate is the indeterminacy, and that is an equivocation that Hegel makes. Being, because it is the indeterminate, is nothing. So nothing is completely indeterminate. That it is the indeterminate is its destiny. Therefore the nothing is a being. The determination of the indefinite is to be an indefinite. Thus the indeterminate is a determinate thing, a finite thing, an existing thing; thus it has concrete reality.
This is by no means a formal logic that represents a system of statements in which all variable elements of a sentence can be replaced by symbols. Nevertheless, the above argumentation is on a certain one. Hegel has to reduce all concepts to the empty formula of the consciousness being itself. Marx would say: This is the formalization of capital, the abstraction of the formal exchange value from the material use values. What Hegel is doing here is metaphysics, which has become real. General capital is the essence of Hegel's being.
The Hegelian dialectic of essence and appearance corresponds to Kant's differentiation between thing itself and appearance, with the difference that Kant has asserted that the thing itself does not appear. But Hegel says: the being must appear. What is in itself, we recognize, insofar as it becomes for us.
To be in-itself always means that something exists independently of the relation to a consciousness, that something does not stand in a subject-object relation. What is not in relation is absolute; the itself is the absolute. But Hegel says: consciousness knows something, e.g. I know that this is a chair, and I take it as independent of my consciousness. Then the consciousness realizes that I only know this chair because I have related to it. That which I think is in itself, without relationship to me, is basically just for me. If I realize that what is in itself is for me, then that is a new in itself for me. That is the way of reflection. That which is in itself is that which is independent of consciousness; but that is an ideology. Because when I say something that is in itself, it is always in relation to a consciousness, in relation to a reflection. In itself is only what is in and of itself, because "for itself" is a category of consciousness. Being in itself is only independent of consciousness when it has become for itself, i.e. consciousness. Consciousness is therefore being. That which is in itself is in and of itself. The activity of knowledge is the movement of being itself.
When Hegel says that being reache being in and for itself, that being becomes essence, it is not a temporal but a logical process. Logic, Hegel says, is the thought of God before the creation of the world, in a logical and not a chronological sense. Also the memory of this being is not meant temporally. Therefore Hegel speaks of the "timeless past being".
The movement of the concept is history. Insofar as history is understood, history has become pure logic, the movement of thought instead of unfolding in time. Since Parmenides, thinking and being are identical, but what moves, what passes and develops, what dies and lives, does not have the dignity of reality. Hegel assigns the dignity of the real to movement, but at the price that movement at him does not move. This non-moving movement is in principle capital, the de-historicized manifestation of contemporary society. Hegelian logic is God's class struggle with itself.
Hegel transforms concrete history into logic; aufgehobene history is history aufgehoben. It is history that has become the pure movement of thinking, so that at the beginning of thinking stands that which comes out at the end, namely the absolute.
Marx describes capital and its process in categories of Hegelian logic. Capital is the selfvalorisating value (sich verwertende Wert), the value is regarded as a logical abstraction category. Capital is an abstraction unfolding in time, it is the apparent dehistorization of time in itself, for capital presents itself as an eternal necessity of nature, it is always "timeless past being.
Hegel is capable, and this expresses an objective contradiction, of linguistically expressing the self-movement of the concept in temporal succession, although he means the logical consequence. But this is a contradiction contained in Hegel's philosophy itself still reflected upon, for logic is supposed to be the aufgehobene historical succession. According to Marx, this also applies to capital, only that here this fact is an appearance to be broken through, for capital is the successive process of value reproduction, which, however, due to the abstraction of use values and needs, presents itself as if it were not carried out in time, but as if capital were the set from eternity. This is the idea that Marx had on the basis of the representation of the idealistic bourgeois economy, which anchored capital in natural law. The movement of capital takes place in time, and yet it is a movement that always only emphasizes the identical, namely the exchange value and the added value as categories of identity. This movement is history without history. That is, basically, Hegel's apologetic position, he wants to transform the entire history into history-less history, into the history of the one and the same concept that expresses itself.
Hegel says in the introduction to logic that here he reproduces the phenomenology of the mind from the point of view of the object. Phenomenology is a theory of consciousness as the appearing knowledge, while logic only begins where phenomenology ends, namely with absolute knowledge. Logic has freed itself from the sphere of appearances, but already this sphere of appearances was in turn a pure concept, a pure for itself. On a certain level Hegel is indeed closer to concrete history in the phenomenology of the mind, because, as he himself says, he is in the sphere of appearing knowledge.
The difference between historical and logical approach, the differentiation of genesis and validity, reflects a reality. The exchange value, logically speaking, is constituted in the sphere of production, genetically speaking in the sphere of circulation, through the contact of the communities at their borders. The Genesis stands, so to speak, in reverse to the logical validity. Hegel's science of logic behaves similarly to the phenomenology of the mind. In the phenomenology Hegel describes a genesis, that he aufhebt in the logic valid-logically, or as Marx says: just as capital is historically preceded by land property, so value precedes it immanently in the system.
With Hegel the identity of validity and genesis is set by the fact that also the phenomenology of the spirit as the genesis of appearing knowledge systematically presupposes the absolute as absolute knowledge. The absolute, which Marx presupposes only with the capitalist formation of society, namely the value, is presupposed in Hegel's species history. With Hegel, the immanence of the system is not that of a historically limited capital system, but that of the entire species history. What precedes species history is what precedes Genesis, before the five books of Moses. These are the thoughts of God before the creation of the world in a logical sense. What Hegel wants to deliver in logic is ultimately a logical reason for Genesis: the Aufhebung of God. Hegel makes the system of capital the entire genre history. Marx also always logically presupposes the value of all possible systems, because it determines history from the perspective of the capitalist social formation.
In money, validity and genesis coincide, inasmuch as, on the one hand, it has arisen from the contact of the communities at their borders, and, on the other hand, from the commodity. Money is this being concept. (daseiender Begriff)
With Hegel Genesis is aufgehoben in validity. Marx distinguishes between Genesis and validity, but he says: Genesis is constitutive of validity, for the Genesis of the development of land property constitutes the capital-forming classes.
The becoming of something does not presuppose that it applies when it is. The validity presupposes historical recognition in social relations. That also means constitution, just as constitution is a legal constitution, in the sense that we speak of constitutional monarchy or of the Grundgesetz. The recognition of something that has become presupposes social agreements; only then does it apply. The fact of mere becoming does not yet constitute validity. Therefore Hegel can rightly say that in 1789 the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI was the unreal, but the revolution the real. Validity is a social concept of organization. If something is not recognized, it is not real.
The being that understands itself is not in reality in itself, because it does not recognize that it is set by consciousness. It is only independent of consciousness when it perceives itself as dependent on consciousness, when it perceives itself as set by consciousness. Being is in and of itself only when it has become for itself. If it has become for itself, it means that being relates to itself, reflects itself. Then the being has become consciousness. Consciousness is what is in itself; the only consciousness independent is consciousness itself.
Without a doubt this is also a reality, because according to Marx capital should be nothing else than unconscious consciousness. The blindness of Hegel's concept of consciousness is a reflection of the constitution of a restored state and of the accumulative formation of capital in Germany.
When something refers to another, it recognizes itself in the other, insofar as it recognizes the other as it recognizes itself. The other object always proves to be only the same subject. The dualism of the observing subject and object is abolished. One recognizes something not as an empirically thinking individual, but as an incarnation of philosophical abstraction. Something is recognized as pure consciousness, and this realization elevates this something into consciousness, so that the something becomes something in itself. This Something is not aufgehoben in your consciousness, the consciousness does not belong to you at all, rather you belong to the consciousness.
We only ever talk about the experienced reality in general concepts (allgemeine Begriffe) that probably never take into account the speciality of this reality. The idealists did not try to prove that the outside world had no material reality, but they just wanted to to understand the reality of the outside world. They wanted to make it clear that we only speak in categories that subsume our empirical speciality among themselves, that the individual speaks only in general categories that do not express his special individuality, that we also subsume the entire social reality under these categories. And then the idealists ask whether there is any access at all to this reality. And they come to the conclusion: If the outside world is real, but we can only communicate with these categories about the outside world, then this outside world is categorically structured.
Marx adopts this fact as a negative fact. He says: this is the wrong existence (Dasein). There are abstractions, imaginations, fictions, institutions, religions, fetishizations, mystifications that block the concrete development of human beings or only allow an alienated development.
Hegel could only save the reality of the outside world at the price of claiming that the outside world was categorically structured in itself. Fichte and Hegel are consistent continuators of Kant's Theory of Appearance, for for Kant the phenomenon (Erscheinung) is not an appearance (Schein), but the real. Fichte and Hegel go further and say: the appearance is also unreal, the appearance that knows itself as appearance is the real. Our categorical structure does not meet the particular constitution of reality, the term is derived from it, but we think and operate only in this categorical structure, and that is a reality. According to this, the categorical structure is real.
If we only communicate in categories, then in fact our whole reality is categorical, then reality itself is a category. According to Marx, we can only get out of this immanence of consciousness if social relations are created in which categories such as value no longer prevail, if the abstraction structure of thinking itself has changed.