Does Marx's philosophy merely add materiality to Hegel’s ethereal understanding of the driving forces of history?

Rather than seeing Marx’s additions to Hegel’s ethereal understanding of the driving forces of history as a mere substitution of the ‘x’ in the equation, i.e. changing the Hegelian Geist for the Marxist forces of production, this essay argues that, as Hegel said of Kant’s philosophy in relation to his own, Hegel’s philosophy constituted for Marx not just a basis but a point of departure for his own philosophy. Hence, Marx not only added materiality to Hegel’s philosophy but in many ways went beyond it, as the case study of Marx’s Eighteenth of Brumaire will show.

Hegel giving a lecture

But let’s start with a basic outline of Hegel’s philosophy, especially his view of history and its driving forces. The importance of history for Hegel resides on his understanding of reality not as a given state of affairs but as a historical process of perpetual change. The driving force behind this historical process is the ethereal, ambiguous and much-debated Geist (mind/spirit), which is the ultimate reality and is above matter. As developed in his Phenomenology of Mind, history is the development of Geist, the progress of the consciousness of freedom. This Hegel sees as the goal of history: the realization of human freedom, understood not in the the liberal, Anglo-Saxon sense of ‘freedom to do as one pleases’ but rather as freedom to choose rationally, free of manipulation. The realization of human freedom leads to absolute knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the world as it really is (rather than knowledge of everything), because freedom entails having a free mind and thus being in control of everything else. Moreover, Geist is closely tied to the notion of self-consciousness, but this self-consciousness hasn’t been fully realised until Hegel’s writings according to himself. The reason behind historical change is for Hegel the unfulfilled awareness of the Geist, which meant humans had lived in a state of ‘unhappy consciousness’ or alienation. Alienation occurs at a non-material level: humans see reality as alien to themselves, and thus develop a love-hate relationship (desire) between themselves and the external object. They aspire to be independent of the material world, to resemble God and be eternal and purely spiritual, but at the same time recognise that they are part of the material world, that their pains and pleasures are real and inescapable. What the alienated mind does not realise is that the spiritual qualities of God which it worships are in fact qualities of its own self, which have been projected into an external object. Geist becomes fully developed when it understands the nature of reality, i.e. when it realises that what it seeks to know is itself. That realisation comes about through a dialectical movement of unity, differentiation and reintegration (reminiscent of the Christian innocent-fall-redemption movement). The dialectical method thus serves Hegel to solve the problem of evil and to see struggle as necessary for progress to happen.

Young Marx

Together with other ‘young Hegelians,’ Marx saw Hegel’s philosophy as a demand for a better world, where the opposition between individual and society would be overcome. Marx saw Hegel’s acceptance of Christianity, the Prussian state and the general conditions of their time as Hegel’s failure to carry through the radical implication of his own philosophy, and followed Feuerbach's call to go beyond the realm of thought. Marx borrowed from Hegel the idea that reality is a historical process which changes according to a dialectical movement and is going toward the goal of a conflict-free society. Furthermore, before we reach that goal we are condemned to live in a state of alienation. But whereas Hegel saw all these things happening to Geist, Marx dismissed Geist as an speculative, German metaphysical abstraction and saw all the things mentioned above as happening to something material, i.e. the forces of production. Productive forces determine the relations of production which in turn determine the superstructure (religion, politics, etc.), the latter only acting as the ‘unconscious tool’ of history, similar to Hegel’s notion of ‘cunning reason.’ Marx aimed to bring Hegel down to Earth by using Hegel's methods to attack the present condition of human beings. With this in mind, Marxist philosophy could be seen as a rewriting of the Phenomenology of Mind in terms of the path to human liberation. Economic life becomes the chief form of human alienation of workers and capitalists: like Hegel, Marx regarded labour as a process in which the worker puts his own thoughts and efforts into the object of his labours. The worker thereby objectifies himself, or externalizes himself. This alienation cannot be overcome by mere criticism and philosophical theory but by a more practical force provided by the artificially impoverished working class. When the working class become self-aware of their own productive force and the productive power of co-operation, they will bring the actualization of philosophy as predicted by Hegel completing the dialectical process in which humans have emerged, grown estranged from themselves, and become enslaved by their own alienated essence. Thus Marx combined the idealist dialectical method with the materialism of Feuerbach, seeing the (material) basis of the dialectical movement as the economic imperatives that flow from the existence of private property. Practical human activity, rather than thought, plays the crucial role in world history. By replacing the liberation of Geist by the liberation of real human beings, the driving force of history becomes the development of human productive forces by which human beings free themselves from the tyranny of nature and fashion the world after their own plans. This is why, in opposition to Hegel, Marx’s materialism impeded him to properly convey the end of history in writing or theory.

The picture of Marxist (and Hegelian) philosophy presented so far owes much to the writings of Peter Singer, but seeing Marxist philosophy as a mere material inversion of Hegel’s ethereal understanding of the driving forces of history may be too narrow of a claim. When writing history himself, as in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx traces the effects of ideas and personalities, and makes less deterministic general statements. Although the traces of Hegel are still present in Marx’s historicism and dialectical view of history, his well-known view of history as leading to a conflict-free society shines for its absence in the text. Proletarian revolutions are seen to ‘engage in perpetual self-criticism,’ without an apparent end. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, class struggle is not a triumphant march through history but a more complex process of advance and retreat in which economic classes are not always the principal agents. Class becomes more complicated, being determined by more than economic factors, and social categories are held together by ideas as illustrated by the different royalist factions intriguing against one another, a split of the bourgeoisie into landed property and capital. The material interests of the bourgeoisie become intertwined with the maintenance of the machinery of the state, ultimately creating its failure in its own success. Moreover, the non-material superstructure becomes more than an ‘unconscious tool’ of history, and language comes to the front when Louis Bonaparte borrows the language of the bourgeoisie (‘respectable, moderate in its hypocrisy, virtuous in its commonplaces’) to legitimise his own discourse, which has led some to claim that the Eighteenth Brumaire is one of the places Marx comes closest to postmodernism, as politics is construed through language. The application of historical materialism in the Eighteenth Brumaire is thus not strict: there is a considerable degree of autonomy and independent effect granted to ideas, ideologies and other elements of the ‘superstructure.’ There is a highly developed politics of reading around Marx, and stressing his materialism and indebtedness to Hegel are readings done in specific circumstances, given and inherited. The Eighteenth Brumaire can thus be read not as a simple assertion that people make history albeit under material-economic constraints, but as conceptualising the performative side of revolution-making in emotional terms, and with an invective and sarcastic language.

Hegelian philosophy not only provided the basis for Marx’s theory but also a point of departure. Marx did not merely inverse Hegel’s ethereal understanding of the driving forces of history by stressing the material over the ideational but, in works such as the Eighteenth Brumaire, he provided original and nuanced thoughts on the relationship between the economic infrastructure and the ideational superstructure, not a one-sided relationship but a much more complicated, less deterministic one.