Angelus Novus wrote:
in discussing the
Hegelian influence on Marx, usually too much emphasis
is put on dubious concepts like "dialectical
materialism" and crude stagist conceptions of history.
But the real Hegelian aspect of Marx is the method of
depiction in the three volumes of Capital, the
development of single categories from each other, and
how each category necessitates the subsequent
categories developed from it.
Abstract labour and the value form are the objectified
subjectivity of human agency, "objective" economic
laws being merely an emergent property of discrete
activity.
The "dialectical" and "stagist" features of the Hegel/Marx philosophy
of history express the ontological idea of "internal relations."
They constitute history as a set of internally related stages in a
process of human development (of "bildung") through which the
"subjective and objective conditions" required for the full
actualization of "freedom" are created. The stages are internally
related in the sense that the "essence" of each requires for its
existence its relation to the earlier.
In Marx, the "essence" of its stage is its mode of production
primarily because domination within the labour process is treated as
positively developmental of human capabilities. The model for this
is Hegel's account of the master/slave relation in the Phenomenology
in which forced labour under conditions of deferred desire is treated
as positively developmental of the capabilities of slaves. This is
expressed by the development of means of production.
A relation of dominance and submission which develops the
capabilities of the dominated relative to those of the dominating is
"contradictory" because it makes the dominated capable of ending that
form of domination. Given that forces of production are an index of
the develoopment of capabilities, the "contradiction" can be
expressed equivalently as forces of production coming through there
development into contradiction with the particular relations of
production within which they are developing.
This explains the role Marx assigns to the working class in
capitalism. The capitalist/wage labour relation is treated as
positively developmental of the capability and will to overthrow the
relation.
The analytical use of the value-form is part of this approach. It is
used to demonstrate that capitalism necessarily leads to the
"imizerization" of wage labour.
