Hegelian Dialectics in Marxs Capital Cha PDF

HEGELIAN DIALECTICS IN MARX’S CAPITAL,
CHAPTER ONE
!
!
!
By
John Feldmann
!
!
!
Submitted to
The Wilf Family Department of Politics
New York University
!
!
!
in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
!
!
!
Project Sponsor: Professor: _______________________
!
!
Signature: _______________________
!
(For Departmental Use Only)
!
MA Project Committee:
Professor: _______________________
!
Professor: _______________________
!
!
!
New York City, USA
!
2014
!
!
!
!
ABSTRACT
!
The first chapter of Marx’s Capital reads as if it were impenetrable. Marx does not
manifestly disclose the logic at work in this first chapter, but leaves it implicit, hiding in the
background. The solution to the problem of reading chapter one of Capital is understanding the
Hegelian dialectic. Firstly, through discerning the evolution of dialectics in Hegelian Marxism,
and secondly, through understanding the basics of Hegelianism, chapter one in Capital becomes
much more penetrable. Through the Hegelian Marxism of Mehmet Tabak, the idea is developed
that Marx posits man as the absolute for his social ontology in much the same manner that Hegel
postulates God (or, the Idea) as the Absolute of all ontology. Chapter One is a negation of the
concept of man. This is precisely the activity of labor, the essence of man. Value, use-value,
exchange-value, the commodity, money, fetishism, etc. are demonstrated to be further
determinations of the absolute category, labor. Man is the absolute subject that is self-
determining, which unfolds into the concrete totality of the social world as an expansion of his
own being through activity. The social is nothing but the continuing development of man through
himself, through his own labor.
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!ii
!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
!
The postmodernist Christian preacher, Peter Rollins, once wrote that, "Books are
authored by countless people and credited to only one. They each represent little kingdoms of
thought built from the toil of others that gratify the tiny tyrant who chained the disparate ideas
together."1 A similar sentiment can be raised here. Firstly, this thesis would not have been
possible without Bertell Ollman. His tireless teaching of Marxism for almost 50 years at NYU
has been an inspiration. I am deeply indebted to him for instilling within me the roots of a
dialectical understanding in the philosophy of Karl Marx. Without his class on communism, and
his teachings, I would never have considered an M.A. thesis of this kind.
Instrumental in forming this M.A. thesis and shaping my graduate education was the
mentorship of Mehmet Tabak at NYU. The sound portions of this essay are more his than they
are mine. All the invalid judgements and misunderstandings belong solely to me. Out of his
generosity, he took much of his personal time to teach Hegelian and Marxist philosophy to
myself, and any other students who were willing to listen. Through study groups on Hegel’s
History of Philosophy and his Encyclopedia Logic, along with writings of the Young Marx and
the Mature Marx, he greatly enriched my understanding of idealist and materialist dialectics, and
gave me the deepest appreciation for power of dialectics. I could not have asked for a better
mentor.
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
1 Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (Brewster, Paraclete Press, 2006), viii.
!iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
!
INTRODUCTION 1
!
CHAPTER I: HEGELIAN MARXISM 3
A. The Thing-Determinists 5
B. The Whole Without a Subject 6
C. Henri Lefebvre 7
D. Karel Kosík 9
E. Mehmet Tabak 11
!
CHAPTER II: HEGELIAN DIALECTICS 13
!
CHAPTER III: MATERIALIST DIALECTICS IN CHAPTER ONE, 17
THE COMMODITY
!
A. Section 1. The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use Value and Value 17
B. Section 2. The Twofold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities 25
C. Section 3. The Form of Value or Exchange Value 27
D. Section 4. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof 29
!
CONCLUSION 33
!
REFERENCES X
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!iv
INTRODUCTION
!
"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 subject, is the demiurgos of the real world,
and the real world is only an external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’.
With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world
reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought."
— Afterward to the Second German Edition, Capital Vol. I, Karl Marx2
!
The Specter of Marx continues to haunt the capitalist world. Yet, an equally menacing
specter haunts Marxism itself—the Specter of Hegel. This specter rises from the grave whenever
we are faced with the problem of how to read Marx’s Capital. Particularly mired in obfuscation
is Chapter One of Part One. Here, Marx compacts so much of his theory into so few pages that
Louis Althusser advises that we, "[B]egin with reading Part II of Volume I... It is not possible in
my view to begin (and only to begin) to understand Part I without having read and re-read the
whole of Volume I from Part II onwards."3 Chapter One thus stands as an enigmatic testament
which has bewildered Marxists ever since it was first committed to print.
The connection between Marx and Hegel has perpetually been the source of great
controversies. There exists a strange interplay between attraction and repulsion to the Specter of
Hegel within the Marxian tradition. Few Marxists want to wholly abandon the genetic ties to
Hegel and dialectics. In the block quote featured above, Marx markedly declares his loyalty to
dialectics. It is merely the case that his dialectic is the inversion of Hegel’s dialectic. However,
Marxists cannot seem to agree on what this inversion of Hegel entails.
Many mechanical readings do not offer a wholly satisfying exegesis for reading Marx’s
Capital. These exegeses divorce themselves too far from the Hegelian dialectics and, therefore,
encounter difficulty in satisfactorily explaining crucial aspects of Capital. Value, for example,
permeates the whole breadth of Capital and, thus, it is not proper to reduce it to a mere
determinant among a sea of other determinants, simply another factor. Value is an essence that
moves throughout the economy, negating itself many times while also maintaing itself in the
process. Marx pens the words, "In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in
which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same
time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus value from itself; the
original value, in other words, expands spontaneously."4 It is difficult to sufficiently
conceptualize this metamorphosis of value with a mere organic, systems theory approach.
Moments such as these in Capital cry out for a return to the Hegelian dialectic. The
solution to the problem of reading Capital is precisely this return. Reading Marx through the
Hegelian dialectic provides the most coherent and structured interpretation of Capital. Instead of
2 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Edit. Friedrich Engels
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), 19.
3 Louis Althusser, "How to Read Marx’s Capital," Marxism Today (1969): 302-305.
4 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, 165.
!1
a disjointed collection of factors that (over)determine each other in a mere reciprocal
relationship, the return to Hegel provides the possibility for an ontologically structured totality in
Capital that can create a unity between all of the diverse moments found within its pages.
The solution to the problem of reading Capital requires clarifying the relationship
between Hegel and Marx. The first chapter of this essay seeks to elucidate the Hegel-Marx
connection through a survey of the Hegelian Marxist tradition. It begins with an analysis of the
thing-determinism found in the philosophies of G.A. Cohen and Georgi Plekhanov. While neither
Cohen nor Plekhanov are aligned with Hegelian Marxism, their writings provide a necessary and
vital contrast to the Hegelian tradition in Marxism. By understanding what Hegelian Marxism is
not, it becomes easier to comprehend what it is. Thereafter, a short section discusses the tradition
of materialist dialectics without a subject in the persons of Bertell Ollman and Louis Althusser.
This movement from vulgar to thing-determinism to dialectics without a subject, should help to
further elucidate the unique contribution of Hegelian Marxism. The first Hegelian Marxist
examined in the chapter is Henri Lefebvre. His writings represent the least explicit and least
systematic for the purpose at hand. An analysis of Karel Kosík follows as the next logical step.
Kosík’s dialectical investigations are posited in a more concrete form than that of Lefebvre.
However, his dialectical structures are still inchoate and not properly systematized, which leads
him to poor dialectical thinking. Lastly, the Hegelian Marxist tradition becomes fully concrete in
the writings of Mehmet Tabak. His achievement is the creation of an interpretation of materialist
dialectics that is as true to the Hegelian spirit as it is true to the spirit of Marxism. Tabakian
Marxism exists as the unity and sublation of the pervious determinations of Hegelian Marxism. It
is from the perspective of Tabakian Marxism that the essay will therefore proceed.
Materialist dialectics, properly understood, involves the negation of an absolute. Unlike
Hegelian dialectics, this absolute is not an ontological, metaphysical Absolute, or God. Marx
restricted himself to a study of social ontology, but in that social ontology there is an absolute.
Man is the absolute for Marx.5 Every moment of the social totality is a negation of man. Labor
exists as the activity of negation. Labor is the activating process of determination (negation) that
creates the moments of the concrete totality. The solution to the problem of reading Capital
comes about through the positing of man as the absolute.
Nonetheless, the intent of this essay is not to abstractly describe the development of
Hegelian Marxism. A unity has to be established between what is written here and what is
written in the pages of Capital. In order to accomplish this, a comparison needs to be effected by
an exposition of Hegel and Marx. Chapter Two provides an exegesis of the fundamental aspects
of the Hegelian dialectic. Chapter Three demonstrates the genetically similar dialectic unfolding
in Capital, Chapter One. The final aim of this paper is, then, to demonstrate that the dialectical
logic in the first chapter of Capital mirrors that of the Hegelian dialectic. This mirroring is
demonstrated through a close textual analysis of sections 1-4. References to the other parts of
Capital and the other parts of the Marxian corpus are limited as much as possible. The hope is
5The word "man" is written here without any sexist intent. It is a word that English translations commonly deploy as
a translation for the German "mensch" that Marx used. Writing the word "man" is merely intended to give the text a
Marxist flavor for those who are familiar with the common English translations.
!2
that, through a careful reading of the first chapter of Capital, a Hegelian interpretation of the text
will prove itself.
CHAPTER I: HEGELIAN MARXISM
!
According to the tradition of Hegelian Marxism, Marx develops his materialist dialectics
as an internal relation between human being and Nature. However, man himself is a part of the
natural world. Nature has two basic moments, in this reading: the inorganic body of nature as the
physical world and the organic world as human being. Human being is not outside the totality of
Nature, but rather exists as its conscious, dynamic moment. Norman Levine states this as:
Nature for Marx was a totality. It included a conscious, active, sensate, modifying part
—the human species—and an unconscious, inorganic insensate, inactive part—that part
of nature external to man. The two, however, could not be separated. They were both
parts of an encompassing unity and process. To speak of man was by definition to speak
of man’s productive praxis, his modification and influence on insensate nature. To
speak of insensate nature was by definition to reflect on how and in what fashion this
passive material was altered and humanized by the activity of men. The stress was
always on the active, practical activity of men, the changes wrought by them in their
environment, or their attempts to extract from their surroundings, objects that fulfilled
their needs.6
In other words, for Marx, Nature splits itself into a static moment and a dynamic moment. There
is no Idea in his materialist dialectics, but Nature is not a dead nothing as it was for Hegel.7
Nature contains within itself the active principle in human nature. Human being is a product of
Nature, which then becomes subjective and develops in conscious form. In Marx’s own Paris
Manuscripts, this is expressed as, "Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, insofar as it
is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must
remain in continuous interchange 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 a part of nature."8 Il n’y a
pas de hors-nature—There is nothing outside Nature. Nature is a closed circle, the totality of all
that exists.
Nature gives birth to human being that becomes the non plus ultra9 moment in Nature.
The same basic structure was present in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, if only in idealistic terms,
"[E]stranged from the Idea, Nature is only the corpse of the Understanding. Nature is, however,
only implicitly the idea and Schelling therefore called her a petrified intelligence, others even a
frozen intelligence; but God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise
themselves to Spirit."10 The dominant moment in this totality of Nature, for Marx, is human
6 Norman Levine, The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (Santa Barbara, Clio Books, 1975), 1.
7 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 17.
8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 3: Marx and Engels 1843-1844, Trans. Jack Cohen, Richard Dixon,
Clemens Dutt, Alex Miller, Martin Milligan, Barbara Ruhemann, Dirk Struik, and Christopher Upward (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 276.
9 A latin phrase meaning, "nothing further beyond".
10 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 14-15.
!3
being. It is human being which is self-positing, self-negating. The human being takes charge and
becomes its own genesis for Marx. He writes that:
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in
which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions
between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces,
setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order
to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting
on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.11
This statement from Capital reads as if it came out of the writings of the young Marx. It is
manifest in Capital that (the mature) Marx retains the same dialectical interplay between Man
and Nature—that this dialectic still remains the basis of his thinking.
Yet, this is a crucial point of contention in the history of Marxism. The humanist
consequences drawn from it are also deeply antagonistic. The Structuralism of Louis Althusser
strongly rejects the materialist philosophy penned by Marx in the Paris Manuscripts.
Althusserian Marxism posits a dialectical materialism without a subject, and scorns all talk of
humanism as theological waste left over Hegel and Christianity. It is not the proper place of this
essay to refute the Althusserian structuralist approach point-by-point.12 It will suffice us, here, to
critically analyze the Hegelian Marxist tradition, and then subsequently demonstrate the veracity
of that tradition as it is borne out in the pages of Capital. It has been the tradition of Hegelian
Marxism that has kept the spirit of Hegel alive in Marx—and which likewise purports that Marx
himself never moved that far away from the German Idealist tradition, but kept the basic rational
structure in tact. Levine, who situates himself within this Hegelian Marxist tradition, writes:
The objects that men produced not only cultivate men’s sensual existence, but also
altered their mode of consciousness and thus their rational behavior. The different
technologies that praxis brought forth, the different socioeconomic structures produced
by human labor, also brought forth different modes of consciousness and different
forms of relating to the world. Man thus created his own consciousness, his self... If
ontologically man was process, then history could be nothing but the manifestation of
that process, the continuous self-creation of man by man.13
Thus, the foundational concept in Hegelian Marxism is that human beings’ practical activity
transforms nature and human nature; that the social world is wholly a product of human beings.
Hegelian Marxism is therefore a humanism—it is a Marxism of the Paris Manuscripts. It is a
philosophy of the subject of human beings, or of human beings as the subject-non-plus-ultra.
A limit soon appears in the writings of most Hegelian Marxists, however. While in
platitudes these writers place human being and human labor at the center of their philosophy, it
becomes apparent that they rarely build their systems in such a way that the primacy of human
praxis (being) is acknowledged as the undisputed center of materialist dialectics. In other words,
there exists a contradiction between their praise of human praxis and the actual conclusions they
draw from this in their analyses.

12 For a brillant critique of Louis Althusser and his interpretation of Marx, see: Norman Geras, Marx and Human
Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983).
13 Norman Levine, The Tragic Deception, 5.
!4
Before the Hegelian Marxists can be discussed, however, it seems proper to first begin
with a brief examination of vulgar Marxism to provide a vivid contrast. It might be difficult to
understand what exactly sets Hegelian Marxism apart from other Marxist traditions without
actually positing that distinction. Thing-Determinism provides the starkest contrast to the
Hegelian tradition in Marxism, so it is felicitous to begin with a brief survey of it.
A. The Thing-Determinists
Thing-Determinism can be defined as a particular branch of Marxism that reifies things
and gives them power over and above human social ontology. This thing-determinism can be
understood as the inversion of Marx’s fetishism.14 It grants the status of the fundamental
determinant to the productive forces understood as means of production, as things. The means of
production as things—machines, tools, raw materials, natural resources, etc.—are the primary
moments that determine the social relations of production, and the superstructure of society. The
material controls the social. The productive forces are hypostatized as independent, external
determinants of the human social reality.
Georgi Plekhanov provides one of the first and most lucid accounts of this thing-
determinism in his Fundamental Problems of Marxism. Plekhanov is known for being one of the
first and most influential Russian Marxists. He created a reciprocal interactionist model between
the base and superstructure. The first, fundamental moment for Plekhanov was the productive
force:
We now know that the development of the productive forces, which in the final analysis
determines the development of all social relations, is determined by the properties of
the geographical environment. But as soon as they have arisen, the social relations
themselves exercise a marked influence on the development of the productive forces.
Thus that which is initially an effect becomes in its turn a cause; between the
development of the productive forces and the social structure there arises an interaction
which assumes the most varied forms in various epics.15
The Plekhanov model, therefore, begins with the most facts of natural resources specific to a
geographical location. So, for example, one region has more earth-given resources, and of a
different kind, than another region which is poorer in natural wealth. This natural distribution
gives rise to different sorts of productive instruments—e.g., a region rich in iron will develop
ferrous metallurgy. The particular development of productive forces then engender certain social
relations. Once the social relations have been developed, there is a reciprocal determination back
upon the physical productive forces. An example might be capitalist competition leading to rapid
advancements in technology.16
Plekhanov does not render social relations meaningless through fully hypostatizing the
productive forces, as if they are the only factors which are determinants. Yet, his Marxism is one
that is marked by a fetishization of things as being dominant over and against the social, human
reality. Things determine the social and the human. Man is not the producer of things. Man is a
product of his geography and of the productive things. Things produce man.
14 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol I., 81-94.

15 George V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 52.
16 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol I., 489-491.
!5
The analytical Marxist philosopher, G.A. Cohen, continues in the tradition of thing-
determinism in his magnum opus, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. Cohen gives
primacy to the technological developments of the productive forces. Thus, his theory of history
has been commonly referred to as technological determinism. He reifies technology progress in
the forces of production as the dominant moment that explains history and the structure of
society. The relations of production are controlled by the technological stage of the productive
forces. Cohen’s "Primary thesis is that the nature of a set of production relations is explained by
the level of development of the productive forces embraced by it."17 Social relations are the
(epi)phenomena of the essential forces of production. The level of the development of the
productive forces structure the social reality.
Cohen also explains proletarian class consciousness in terms of the technological
development of the forces of production. In a short essay responding to criticism of his theories,
he states, "Suppose that it becomes more and more plain that capitalist relations of production
are inhibiting the optimal use and/or development of the productive forces, so that a transition to
socialist relations of production is widely perceived as desirable."18 Class consciousness is a
product of the realization of inefficient economic use of the force of production. The products,
the dead things, themselves cry out to be used for more production. Cohen, like Plekhanov,
ultimately reduces Marxism to a philosophy that posits the domination of man by things.
Thing-determinism, therefore, presents itself as a strictly anti-humanist interpretation of
Marxism. It has to, by necessity, reject placing man at the center of the social universe. Man is a
product of things, dead matter, beyond his control. In the last instant, the forces of production are
the ground of social ontology.
B. The Whole Without a Subject
Another non-Hegelian interpretation of materialist dialectics bases itself on a totality
without a subject. It distinguishes itself from thing-determinism in that there is not one dominant,
economic moment that externally controls the process, such as the forces of production.
Dialectical materialism as a whole without a subject treats the social totality as a mixed soup of
determinants.
Bertell Ollman develops a reading of the materialist dialectic that stresses its separation
from the Hegelian dialectic, even though it has some family resemblance. In his Dance of the
Dialectic, he criticizes what he calls "Systematic Dialectics." Ollman writes that, "As regards
Capital I, it seems clear that Marx had other aims besides presenting the dialectical relations
between the main categories of political economy. The short list would have to include
unmasking bourgeois ideology (and ideologists)... and raising workers’ consciousness, and all of
these aims required strategies of presentation that have little to do with Hegel’s conceptual
logic."19 Without rejecting, the materialist dialectic’s connection to Hegelian dialectics, Ollman
envisions a Marxist dialectic that bears greater resemblance to systems theory than Hegelian
17 G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 135.
18 G.A. Cohen, "Base and Superstructure: A Reply to Hugh Collins," Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 9, (1989):
98-99.
19 Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 183.
20 Ibid, 38-39.
!6
negation.20 The destruction of bourgeois ideology and the class struggle are not negations, or
determinations, of the truths of radical political economy, but exist independently from them.
Althusser presents a similar sentiment in his first major work, For Marx. He critiques the
Hegelian dialectic for its ontological holism, for its absoluteness, and for believing that such a
philosophy does not do justice to the parts as independent of the whole:
That is to say, the Hegelian whole has a ‘spiritual’ type of unity in which all the
differences are only posed to be negated, that is, they are indifferent, in which they
never exist for themselves, in which they only have a semblance of an independent
existence, and in which, since they never manifest anything but the unity of the simple
internal principle alienated in them, they are practically equal among themselves as the
alienated phenomena of this principle.21
In place of this spiritual dialectic unity, Althusser posits the principal of overdetermination.
Essentially, this overdetermination is where each part of the whole is determined by an
innumerable number of other parts of the whole.22 The best illustration of this concept is those
detective walls full of pictures connected by a mishmash of thumbtacks and strings on mystery
films. Althusser, like Ollman, tries to distance the materialist dialectic from the dialectical
negation of the concept in Hegel. The materialist dialectics is said to be something other than this
Hegelian negation—a mere primordial soup of determinants.
C. Henri Lefebvre
The first representative of Hegelian Marxism in this survey is Henri Lefebvre.23 Lefebvre
remains a stalwart of Hegelian Marxism for his detailed engagement with both Hegel and Marx
in his Dialectical Materialism, written as a response to Stalinism and vulgar economism in 1938.
In explicit contrast to thing-determinism, Lefebvre locates man at the center of the social reality.
Criticizing fetishism, he asserts the primacy of man, "Man’s activity can be alienated only in a
fictive substance. Men make their history. It is an illusion that the historical reality should appear
external to living men, as an historical, economic or social substance... Yet around and above him
the abstractions acquire a strange existence and a mysterious efficacy; Fetishes reign over him."24
It is improper in Hegelian Marxism to reifying economic factors, or substances outside man. The
human being is the progenitor of the social world, and like the Jewish God, tolerates no idols.
From the Hegelian vantage-point, Lefebvre is infinitely more valuable than the vulgar
thing-determinism that claims the title of "Marxism". While his Dialectical Materialism is an
overall wonder when compared to the broad swath of tawdry Marxist literature, there is a
perceivable lack of total coherence. The concepts are not particularly well developed in the book.
So much appears implicit rather than explicit. He often goes through a laundry list of Marxist
concepts, without ever satisfactorily demonstrating their internal relationships.
21 Louis Althusser, For Marx, Trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2005), 169-170.
22 Ibid, 63-70.
23 This author is not aware of Levine carrying on a deeper systematic analysis of structure and human praxis—if he
has, my apologies are in order. Therefore, besides his framing the centrality of human praxis in materialist dialectics,
his work will not be featured further.
24 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 84-85.
!7
Lefebvre is a tireless critic of any sort of fetishization or reification of things that are the
creation of human hands. His book can be read as a piercing critique of the thing-determinism,
and vulgar economism of Stalinist Sovietism. Lefebvre penetratingly advances the idea that:
[T]o get to know economic phenomena is... to study their objective and substantial
process, while at the same time destroying and denying this absolute substantiality by
determining it as a manifestation of man’s practical activity, seen as a whole (praxis).
Because the actual content, and the movement of this content, consists in the living
relations of men amongst themselves, men can escape from economic fatalities. Once
they have become conscious of it they can transcend the momentary form of their
relations; they always have resolved and still can resolve the contradictions of their
relations ‘by practical methods, with practical energy.’25
Here, his critique hinges on the Marxist concept of fetishism. The problem he identifies is that
economic phenomenon (economic relationships) have become reified, ossified and made into
permanent objects of stone. The appearance of bourgeois relations have been mistaken for the
underlying truth of social reality, the essence of social reality. What is the reason for why these
bourgeois phenomena are not concrete realities? Lefebvre locates the answer by an appeal to
practical human activity. These bourgeois relations are only pseudoconcrete, because they do not
represent the underlying reality of human praxis. In themselves, they have no independent
existence. They are contingent because praxis could formulate them differently. Once we become
conscious of this, capitalist relations no longer remain made of stone, but rather transmutate
before our eyes into a molten plastic.
Lefebvre commits a mortal sin when he goes on to locate the center of capitalist society
in the category of exchange-value, "Yet it [exchange-value] remains the basis, the fundamental
‘moment’ which is perpetually being reproduced. But for the perpetual exchange of commodities
there could be no world market, no commercial, industrial or financial capital... Like it or not the
activity of individuals is exercised within this framework, collides with these limits, and assists
in the continual creation of this fundamental category."26 It is not quite clear what Lefebvre
intended to convey with this passage. With a charitable reading, he appears to have a sense of
human activity as a crucial moment. However, he also seems to be exalting exchange-value (the
product of the process) as the dominant and determining moment, rather than the act of
producing. Lefebvre says as much when he writes, "The study of economic phenomena is not an
empirical one, it rests on the dialectical movement of the categories. The basic economic
category - exchange-value - is developed and, by an internal movement, gives rise to fresh
determinations: abstract labour, money, capital. Each complex determination emerges
dialectically from the preceding ones."27 Lefebvre is then charged guilty of hypostatizing the
concept of exchange-value, reifying it as an actual power over human beings.
Exchange-value is not reified in the vulgar, bourgeois sense that it is an eternal law of
nature, but Lefebvre writes as if exchange-value is a hypostatized form over and against the
activity (of alienation) that produces it. A few sentences before the passage quoted above, he
25 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 82.

26 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 81-82.
27 Ibid, 83.
!8
states, "At particular points in time it [exchange-value] has been the dominant and essential
category..."28 Therefore, we find the separation between the acknowledgement of human praxis
as the foundation, the essence, and the system that develops in Lefebvre. His writing disconnects,
at crucial points, man as the central foundation from the structure of capitalist society. Certain
aspects of capitalist society take on a hypostasized, fetishized existence.
Lefebvre’s writing contains all the basic elements for a coherent Hegelian Marxism.
Nonetheless, their internal coherence remains in an abstract form. The elements are present, but
they are not made moments of the social totality, through a coherent development into an organic
whole. Lefebvre expounds upon alienation, fetishism, praxis, total man, etc., but their internal
relations are not posited dialectically.29 Without proper systematization, he lapses into poor,
mechanistic thinking, and ends up reifying what should not be reified given his own
presuppositions.
D. Karel Kosík
Another giant in the Hegelian Marxist tradition is the Czech philosopher, Karel Kosík.
The structure of the dialectic is developed further in his writings than in Lefebvre. However, his
writings still are an inchoate presentation of materialist dialectics regarding the whole and the
parts. To his praise, a poignant insight in Kosík’s Dialectics of the Concrete is that dialectical
materialism is not merely an epistemology or a methodology, but rather an ontology:
Concrete totality is not a method for capturing and describing all aspects, features,
properties relations and processes of reality. Rather, it is a theory of reality as a concrete
totality. This conception of reality, of reality as concreteness, as a whole that is
structured (and thus is not chaotic) that evolves (and thus is not immutable and given
once and for all), and that is in the process of forming (and thus not ready-made in its
whole, with only its parts, or their ordering, subject to change), has certain
methodological implications...30
The concept of totality, for Kosík, was not a dead product of abstraction. Totality is not merely a
cognition of the world. The process of the concrete totality is itself a negative ontology. Reality,
itself, proceeds as the negation of the whole to its parts and the negation of the negation from the
parts to the whole. It is a living dialectical process. Cognition merely reproduces that ontology in
the consciousness of the human being. "Dialectical thinking, by contrast, grasps and depicts
reality as a whole that is not only a sum of relations, facts and processes, but also the very
process of forming them, their structure and their genesis."31 There is a structure which permeates
throughout the parts. Dialectical ontology is structure in its development—otherwise said,
structure in its negation.
Kosík also locates the foundational concept of materialist dialectics in the human being.
His writings on the topic bear a near identity to that of Lefebvre. "According to materialism,
social reality is known in its concreteness (totality) at the point when the character of social
reality is exposed, when the pseudoconcrete is abolished and when social reality is known as the

29 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 136-154.
30 Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing
Company, 1976), 19.

31 Ibid, 23-24.
!9
dialectical unity of the base and the superstructure, with man as its objective, socio-historical
subject."32 What abolishes the world of fetishism (or the pseudoconcrete) and allows us to
penetrate into the essence of the concrete totality is understanding human beings to be at the
center. It is the human being which forms the substance, the stuff, of the totality. We read:
[T]he totality of the base and the superstructure is abstract when it is not demonstrated
that man is the real historical subject (i.e., of praxis), and that in the process of social
production and reproduction he forms both the base and the superstructure, that he forms
social reality as a totality of social relations, institutions and ideas, and that in this process
of forming the objective social reality he also forms himself as an historical and social
being with human senses and potentialities, realizing thereby the infinite process of
‘humanizing man’.33
What characterizes Kosík as a Hegelian Marxist and a Marxist Humanist is that he ultimately
wants to subsume all determinations of the concrete totality under the idea of human practical
activity and human being. He recognizes that humankind is itself the object and the subject of
history. However, the limits of Kosík’s dialectic becomes apparent with his treatment of the
concrete totality. While there is much fecundity to be gained from his discussion of the whole
and the parts, it becomes self-evident that there is no explicit concrete movement (negation) from
the whole to the parts in Kosík.
Kosík is guilty of not properly demonstrating the negation from the center to the
peripheries, and the negation of that negation—the same cardinal sin as Lefebvre. His writings
remain vague on what exactly the essence of the concrete totality is. In other words, Kosík
definitely states that there is an essence behind the phenomenal appearances of the social world,
and he accepts that human praxis is critical to understanding the whole. However, he does not
actually tie the whole thing together. There is a dearth of concrete development, beyond merely
stating that the pseudoconcrete is abolished by reclaiming man as the crucial component. He
merely states it. He does not show it. While Kosík is able to grasp human practical-activity as the
subject of history, he is not able to properly connect this with the structure of bourgeois society.
Said differently, he appears to have continually slipped into poor dialectal thinking when
incorporating human practical-activity into the larger dialectical system. This becomes manifest
in his discussion of the absolute:
Marx’s Capital begins - and this fact has since become trivial - by an analysis of a
commodity. But the knowledge that a commodity is a cell of the capitalist society, an
abstract beginning whose unfolding will reproduce the whole internal structure of the
capitalist society - this origin of the exposition results from an investigation, from a
scientific appropriation of the subject matter. A commodity is an ‘absolute reality’ for
the capitalist society because it is the unity of all determinations, the germ of all
contradictions, and as such can be characterized in Hegelian terms as the unity of being
and not-being, of the differentiated and the undifferentiated, of identity and non-
32 Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, 25.

33 Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, 30.
!10
identity. All other determinations are but richer definitions and concretizations of this
‘absolute’ of the capitalist society.34
Kosík could not understand an absolute in Marx that is pan-historical. He equates the absolute
with the specific historical incarnation of the commodity in capitalist society. Kosík could not
fully recognize human praxis, itself, as the absolute which negates itself and gives birth to the
social world, creating the world in its own image—including commodities, which are parts of
this world. For all his platitudes about the human subject being the driving force of history,
Kosík breaks off his analysis just as it is about to reach its logical end.
Kosík cleaved Marxist philosophy in half with this reading of the commodity. He creates
an external relation between the commodity as absolute and human productive activity. The
commodity does not appear as a negation of human being through activity, but rather, all of
human praxis becomes subsumed under the negation of the absolute commodity. Kosík probably
thought that in the fetishized world of capitalist production, it could be said that the commodity
(as exchange-value) became the dominant moment of which all human labor is working to
reproduce. While there is certainly truth in that interpretation, it remains one-sided and
undialectical. For Kosík, it is the commodity which exists as the abstract beginning, negates
itself into its manifold determinations, and returns to itself in greater, concrete unity. Yet, such a
philosophical position involves a reification of an externalized other. The commodity as other
sets itself up against human praxis, as an external other, instead of its internally related,
dialectical other. The trouble is that a commodity cannot be the subject of the historical or social
process without falling into vulgar reification, and history and structure a need a subject.
The commodity could never serve as the absolute. The absolute has to be that abstract
indeterminacy that has within itself the power to become concrete determinacy. A commodity
cannot, of its own power, become all things in the capitalist society. Can it produce and
reproduce itself of its own accord? The commodity is not the absolute, but a something. It cannot
be absolute, if it is a "somewhat," a particular35 The commodity is dependent upon human labor.
It is a product of human hands. The logic of dialectics necessitates that we understand the
commodity as a determination of human labor.
E. Mehmet Tabak
Hegelian Marxism finds its concrete expression in the writings of Mehmet Tabak. What
was implicit in Lefebvre and Kosík becomes explicit in his philosophical hieroglyphics. The
crucial victory Tabak creates for us is in taking the potential inherent in the abstract,
disconnected ideas found in previous Hegelian Marxist philosophers and making them actual,
internally related concepts of a concrete total structure. His accomplishment is not so much its
originality, but rather, the satisfying synthesis of a Marxism read through the dialectical structure
of Hegelianism.
The primary relationship Tabak posits is that between essence and existence. It is the
essence which develops itself into the phenomenal form of existence. "The essence is the active
subject responsible for the process of self-determination, of its own particularization and
34
Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, 16.
35
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Trans. William
Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 136.
!11
negation in existence... This process, in the Hegelian parlance, may be called the objectification
of the subject..."36 The subjective, internal essence becomes, through its own activity, the
objective, external phenomena. Yet, the mere recognition of essence and existence in Marx’s
philosophy can be found in Kosík, even in David Harvey.37
What differentiates the notion of essence and existence in Tabak from others is the way
he relates it internally to the concept of human nature and its activity (labor). Essence, ultimately,
becomes identified with human labor. Tabak declares, "In Hegel’s dialectic, this subject-essence
is the Idea... In Marx’s rendition, it is humanity, and objective activity (production, labor, etc.) is
the essential human characteristic responsible for the concretization of human essence in and
through nature... Human labor constitutes the essence of all aspects of the changing social
universe as much as it explains why this change occurs."38 Tabak explicitly locates the essence
behind the pseudoconcrete as human nature, as human essence and demonstrates its negation in
history and the structure of bourgeois society. There is no alternative, competing essence behind
the social processes that forms the social structure. All difference finds its identity in human
essence.
Everything in the social structure has its ground, its ultimate prius, in human nature
which is also human labor as the power of negation. The essence that structures the concrete
totality, the one pulse throbbing through the social whole, is the human being in his objective
activity. Instead of leaving the structure disconnected, Tabak internally relates the determinations
with the center of the concrete totality. So for example, Tabak grounds the concept of fetishism
in the alienated activity. He writes that "All instances of fetishism are, thus, instances of
alienation not only of a human being from other humans but also of humans from their
products... The essential origin of commodity fetishism, then, is alienated labor and the peculiar
social character it assumes."39 Here, Tabak grounds fetishism in the essence of alienated labour.
Fetishism is a determination of alienated labor. The blood and circulatory system of capitalist
society is alienated labor. Capitalism is a particular historical structure that receives its identity
from the historical negation of human labor as alienated labor. Alienated labour is the essence of
capitalist society. All of the determinations of capitalist society are further determinations of the
one central process of alienation (alienated labor). "Thus, the predominance of exchange value
presupposes the historical ‘dissolution’ of community (alienation of a human being from other
humans) into ‘the society of free competition.’"40 Without alienation, there could be no exchange
value in the sense that it exists in capitalist society. It is the very separation of the laborer from
his (or her) products that engenders exchange-value as a dominant τέλος (end) of social
production—for sale on the market. It is the internal connection between alienated labor and
exchange-value (as the negation of alienated labor) that lays their truth bare. If one is separated
36 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012), 4
37 David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010), 38-47. I say "even in David Harvey," not
to disparage him as a Marxist or a thinker, but because he has said before that the German philosophical tradition
that Marx emerged from is a weak point of his. He has said that he feels more comfortable discussing the political
economy tradition and the French radical tradition.
38 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy, 4.
39 Ibid, 89.
40 Ibid, 90.
!12
from the other, the concrete totality decays into an externally related accumulation of parts
instead of the ontological negativity of the concrete totality that Kosík revealed, but could not
properly demonstrate systematically. 
!13
CHAPTER II: HEGELIAN DIALECTICS
!
Rather than prattle on about Hegelian Marxism, it is much more apropos to simply
provide a short presentation of the basics of the Hegelian dialectic. This chapter has to
accomplish two things. First of all, Hegelian Marxism needs to be justified with an exposition of
Hegel’s dialectic. Everything in the previous chapter is mere idle chatter if it is bears no relation
to the Hegel’s actual dialectical philosophy. The aim is not to create an independent Marxist
dialectic as Ollman and Althusser try to but to ground that dialectic firmly in the heritage of the
Hegelian dialectic. Hegelian Marxism represents the flesh and bones of Hegelianism, but the
pure theory that it draws its life from needs to be fleshed out by itself. Secondly, the precise
nature of the Hegelian dialectic has to be developed if that selfsame dialectic is to be shown to be
at work in the first chapter of Marx’s Capital. It is not enough to demonstrate Hegelian Marxism
living and breathing in Capital, since the former comes after the latter. The Hegelian dialectic
has to be shown as the spirit which gives the breath of life to Marx’s radical political economy.
Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy provides the most crystal-clear description
of his dialectic. In its most basic sense, dialectic is development. Hegel writes, "The first is what
is known as capacity, power, what I call being-in-itself (potentia, δύναµις); the second principle
is that of being-for-itself, actuality (actus, ένέγεια)."41 Being-in-itself is also called the abstract,
and Being-for-itself is named the concrete. Hegel writes in the Encyclopedia Logic that "[T]his
mere Being [Being-in-itself], as it is mere abstraction is therefore the absolutely negative: which,
in a similarly immediate aspect, is just Nothing."42 Being-in-itself is simply a formless,
potentiality. It is Nothing in-itself. Yet, it is the absolute potentiality of everything. Being-in-
itself is the germ which has the potential to become the concrete totality. However, it only
becomes the totality in so far as it is being-for-itself, so far as it is actualized and becomes a
concrete, determinate.
Hegel uses the illustration of the germ and the plant as a sensuous aid for understanding
the relationship between potentiality and actuality. The germ is potentially the plant, but in-itself,
it is only a mere potential. "The principle of this projection into existence is that the germ cannot
remain merely implicit, but is impelled towards development [becoming the plant], since it
presents the contradiction of being only implicit and yet not desiring so to be."43 There is a
bursting asunder within mere potentiality that seeks actuality. In the Hegelian vernacular, being-
for-itself is the other of being-in-itself. Hegel describes dialectic in the Encyclopedia Logic as a
passing over into the other. He writes that, "We are aware that everything finite, instead of being
stable and ultimate, is rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by the
Dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly other than what it is, is forced beyond its
own immediate or natural being to turn suddenly into its opposite."44 It is not necessary to show
here exactly why Hegel believes that a determination passes over into its other. The explanation
41 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. I: Greek Philosophy to Plato, Trans. E.S. Haldane
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 20-21.
42 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Trans. William
Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 127.

43 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. I, 22.
44 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 118.
!14
would be too great a detour. The basic notion is that there is an emptiness, a lack in potentiality
in the subject that requires negation. There is a lack in the germ that demands movement. Tabak
writes that, "It is precisely this inner, or “inward,” contradiction between the abstract and the
concrete that makes dialectical development possible and necessary. In its abstract state, being is
the undifferentiated unity of many implicit determinations. In its process of development
(actualization or concretion), it faces self-differentiation or “distinction,” that is, explicit
negativity and contradiction."45 A helpful illustration is perhaps the air within a spacecraft and
the void of space. If the airlock is opened, the air within the spacecraft naturally rushes out into
the void. Dialectic is the natural movement that populates the void of being-in-itself, or absolute
potentiality.
Beyond the concepts of potentiality and actuality, the notions of permanency and change
and their dialectic are crucial in understanding Hegelianism. Hegel teaches, "[T]hat which is
received is changed, and the material that worked upon is both enriched and preserved at the
same time."46 The adult represents a change when set against the child. Yet, there is something
that remains the same in the adult that was also present in the child. The adult is the child-that-
once-was. Hegel demonstrates this dialectical truth in his example of the germ and the plant:
"Because that which is implicit comes into existence, it certainly passes into change,
yet it remains on and the same, for the whole process is dominated by it. The plant, for
example, does not lose itself in mere indefinite change. From the germ much is
produced when at first nothing was to be seen; but the whole of what is brought forth, if
not developed, is yet hidden and ideally contained within itself."47
The plant is the realization, the actuality, of the self-same germ. There is a continuity of being
between the germ and the plant. Development is self-development. The change comes from
within, not from a mere externality. The plant is certainly other than the germ, but the germ
exists as its other. Tabak concurs that, "[C]hange does not annihilate the original simple being,
which is retained as the identity, or essence, of that which changes, or becomes. It is this self-
preservation that makes change development, for development is precisely the movement of the
same subject."48 The single subject has the power to hold itself in its identity in difference. The
plant expresses difference from the germ, and yet, the plant is still held in the relationship of
identity with the germ. It is the same subject that posits itself as both germ and plant.
Reality for Hegel is a concrete totality. This concrete totality is also the Absolute. In the
German philosophical tradition, the Absolute is, in the words of J.N. Findlay, "[S]omething
whose existence is both self-explanatory and all-explanatory..."49 It is the germ that develops into
the whole of reality. In Hegelianism this Absolute is God or the Idea. It is Pure Being, which is
also Pure Thought. It is only from the vantage-point of the Absolute that the concepts of
potentiality (being-in-itself) and actuality (being-for-itself) begin to become coherent and
systematic. The movement from potentiality to actuality, is in its essence, the movement of a
45 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectic in Hegel’s History of Philosophy: Volume One (New York: Pranga Inc., 2013), 25.
46 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Vol I., 3.
47 Ibid, 22.
48 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectic in Hegel’s History of Philosophy: Volume One, 30.
49 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Being Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
ix. This quotation comes from Findlay’s introduction.
!15
single subject, the singular Absolute. The concrete totality is the differentiation and change of
the one Absolute subject. The Absolute negates itself, develops, from its mere being-in-itself,
becoming the concrete, actual totality:
"[I]t is one Idea [the Absolute] in its totality and in all its individual parts, like one life
in a living being, one pulse throbs throughout all its members. All the parts represented
in it, and their systematization, emanate from the one Idea; all these particulars are but
mirrors and copies of this one life, and have their actuality only in this unity. Their
differences and their various qualities are only the expression of the Idea and the form
contained within it. Thus the Idea is the central point, which is also the periphery, the
source of light, which in all its expansion does not come without itself, but remains
present and immanent within itself."50
Every particular determination (actuality) exists as a moment of the Absolute. The
determinations are its determinations. The Absolute is the ultimate germ which sprouts and
develops a concrete plant that is the whole of everything. Every determination is merely a further
determination of the Absolute. The Absolute is the permanent that maintains itself in all of the
changing determinants. The development of the Absolute is always auto-negating and auto-
developing. Nothing external causes its development. Its own internal oscillation is the prius of
negation.
Perhaps this will become more lucid with the Hegelian internal relation between the
universal and the particular. For Hegel, the universal and the particular are two sides of the same
coin. The universal cannot exist without the particular, it would remain an empty abstraction, but
the particular, likewise, has no being, no reality, without its ground in the universal:
[I]n speaking of some definite animal we say it is (an) animal. Now, the animal, qua
animal, cannot be shown; nothing can be pointed out excepting some special animal.
Animal, qua animal, does not exist; it is merely the universal nature of the individual
animals, while each existing animal is a more concretely defined and particularized
thing. But to be an animal—the law of kind which is the universal in this case—is the
property of the particular animal, and constitutes its definite essence.51
It is here that we find the precise relationship between abstract and the particular, the permanent
and the changing. The permanent has no form without the changing, and the changing has no
reality without the permanent. The universal is not hypostatized against the particular. Neither is
the universal a mere phantasm of the particular. The universal, in its truth, is not an externality
set up against the specific. The specific exists as the actualized other of the universal. The
universal is indeterminate and the particular is determinate. The animal is not the enemy of the
horse. There can be no animal that exists without further determination, being this and that
particular animal. All existence involves determination of a indeterminate potentiality. It is, in
the words of Hegel, "[N]ot an essence that is already finished before its manifestation, keeping
itself aloof behind its host of appearances, but an essence which is truly actual only through the

52 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Vol. I, 3.
!16
specific forms of its necessary self-manifestation."52 The universal does not lose itself in its
particularization, but rather, there finds its actuality.
There are no reified, substantial externalities that pervert the Absolute in Hegelianism. It
is not the external, independent substances and their singularity which act as the subject, but the
Idea. What occurs is its own property, its own body, its own self-negation that moves within
itself to development.53 It is the universal that might become, as St. Paul the Apostle said, "all in
all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).54 Such a reified particular would be a one-sided abstraction and not a
concrete determination. Dialectics itself rejects such a bizarre and reified conception of
independent factors that exists outside the whole.
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
53 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectic in Hegel’s History of Philosophy: Volume One, 14.

54 King James Version.
!17
CHAPTER III: MATERIALIST DIALECTICS IN CHAPTER ONE,
THE COMMODITY
!
The materialist dialectic found in Marx does not represent a fundamental break with its
Hegelian parent. The Hegelian dialectical logic has merely been shifted and revamped for a
materialist social ontology. Instead of being a theory of the whole of reality, materialist dialectics
contents itself with being an explanation of the social totality. Tabakian Marxism—as the
concretization of Hegelian Marxism—provides the mediation through which a marriage of Hegel
and Marx can be officiated. Human nature has to be shown to be posited by Marx as the absolute
essence of his social ontology and alienated labor as its determined incarnation in capitalist
society.
All that has been written above about Hegelian Marxism and the Hegelian dialectic
means next to nothing if it cannot be shown to be the spirit that animates the pages of Capital.
This analysis begins, not with Part II as Althusser preaches, but with chapter one of Part I. The
first chapter of Capital contains the germ that will be shown to develop and become a concrete
whole. The germ is human essence itself as absolute negativity (potentiality) which blossoms
into the concrete social whole. According to Hegel, "[T]he Idea as concrete in itself [potentially],
and self-developing, is an organic system and a totality which contains a multitude of stages and
of moments in development."55 For Marx, it is the human essence as human practical activity
(labor) that has the potential to become the social totality. Labor is what determines the social
world, as an artist gives determinacy to a sculpture. Marx states in the Paris Manuscripts, "[F]or
the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man
through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible,
irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis."56 Contra Althusser,57 the spirit of
human labor from the Paris Manuscripts remains alive and active in Capital. In truth, the first
chapter contains exactly this concept in the form of value as the manifestation of human labor
which serves as the foundation for the rest of Capital. Value is the pulse that pushes blood
through every section of the book.
A. Section 1. The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use Value and Value
Marx begins Capital by positing the commodity as a fact of bourgeois society. He also
takes for granted the fact that a commodity serves to satisfy a human want—that is, a commodity
possesses a use-value. He purported the fact that, in bourgeois society, commodities are
exchanged for one another, and that they, therefore, are possessors of an exchange-value. None
of these presuppositions are contentious. Yet, Marx was the one who discovered a contradiction
between use-value and exchange value. Use-value is qualitative, while exchange-value is merely
quantitative. "As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange
values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use
value."58 The question arises of how a particular commodity—with a particular quality and

56 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 3: Marx and Engels 1843-1844, 305.
57 See: Althusser, For Marx, citation #21, above.
!18
therefore, particular use-value—becomes exchangeable with another commodity. The absence of
a universal (substratum) cries out to be found. Just as in Hegel the particular has to be the
negation of a universal,59 Marx finds it necessary to ground the particular in a universal. In
Marx’s words, "[I]n 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists equal quantities something
common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the
one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this
third."60 Exchange value cannot be the universal itself, since exchange value merely expresses
the commensurability of commodities. It cannot tell us what grounds that commensurability
between commodities. "[E]xchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the
phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it."61 Marx did not leave
this a mystery, but distinctly spelled it out for us—whoever has ears to hear, let him hear
(Matthew 11:15).
Exchange-value is an abstraction from use-value. In other words, in exchange-value we
bracket out the qualities particular to each commodity that determines its use-value. It is an act of
mental abstraction that divides the concrete totality for analysis in such a manner that it
temporarily creates externality in the internally related whole.62 Yet, at the same time we abstract
from use-value to get to exchange-value, we find ourselves at the threshold of labor. Exchange-
value passes over into its other. "If then we leave out of consideration the use value of
commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour."63 The
commodity in general, at its most abstract level,64 is simply a concretization of human labor. The
commodity is the something that is produced by human hands. "There is nothing left but what is
common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the
abstract."65
In dialectical philosophy, the abstract as implicit is the αρχή, the origin. If Marx is a
dialectician, then we cannot hold to a belief that the abstract and the concrete are separate and
distinct. The abstract is not externally and independently distinct from concrete as in the caput
mortuum of the Understanding. Rather, as seen in Hegelianism, it must be maintained that the
abstract becomes the concrete.66 A distinction exists between the potential and the actual, but it is
a dialectical distinction that is internal and marked by dependence. This is precisely what we find
in Marx’s critique of political economy. The labor that congeals itself as the value of the product
is not destroyed, but preserved and carried to a more concrete determination in use-value and
exchange value. Value becomes understood as the essence of the phenomenal exchange-value.
Marx summated, "Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value
of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value."67 Value is the substance that
59 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 226-228.
62 Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method, 73-86.
64 Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method, 86-99.
!19
permeates all commodities. It is their essence. In capitalist society, value takes the phenomenal
form of (manifests itself as) exchange value. Value stays hidden behind it as the universal
(substance) that allows one commodity to be exchanged for another; value itself issuing from the
actualization of labor power, i.e. labor. We read in Capital:
Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same
unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogenous human labour, of
labour expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things
now tell us is, that human labour has been expended in their production, that human
labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this substance, common to
them all, they are— Values.68
Marx refers to labor as an "unsubstantial reality," firstly, because it is indeterminate. It is a
formless potentiality that remains nothing until it takes the concrete incarnation of a somewhat.
The essence ossifies itself into a definite product, this-and-that, all the while bearing the
universal within itself. The universal is that which is strong enough to maintain itself in its other.
Secondly, it is "unsubstantial" because it is a social reality and not a physical property of the
thing. Marx writes later in the chapter that, "[T]he coat, in the expression of value of the linen,
represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely their value."69 This
social reality is precisely a human reality. It is an expression of the human essence.
Therefore, we must discard with the notion that Marx is a philosopher who rejected the
idea of essences and concepts. Marx, however, tried to distance himself from any belief that he
was working with mere concepts. In the German Ideology, we find him criticizing Hegelianism
for the mere negation of concepts:
[I]t is very easy to abstract from these various ideas "the Idea", the thought, etc. as the
dominant force in history, and thus to consider all these separate ideas and concepts as
‘forms of self-determination’ of the Concept developing in history. It follows then
naturally, too, that all the relations of men can be derived from the concept of man, man
as conceived, the essence of man, Man.70
Yet, the fact remains that, in Capital, Marx’s critique grasped at concepts and sought to discover
their negations. Marx worked with "value" and "human labor" as universals, not their
particularities as the ground of negation. Tabak reinforces such a reading of Marx, when he
writes, "In his discussion of human nature in general, Marx often emphasizes the collective
human agency in history; history and society are determined by the productive activity of
humankind... humans are collectively the ultimate subject of history."71 Whatever Marx believed
about the metaphysical relationship between essences and existents, his critique of political
economy clearly works through the negation of concepts. In fact, it is proper to say that Marx’s
critique is the negation of a concept, or the concept, which is human essence as human labor.
Here, we find the dialectical expansion of the concept that Marx shares with Hegel. Once
we reach the essence of value, the process of investigation reverses itself and the logical process
68 Ibid, 48.
69 Ibid, 67.
70 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 5: Marx and Engels 1845-1847, Trans. Clemens Dutt, W. Lough and
C.P. Magill (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 61.

!20
of negation reveals itself. That is, Marx began his investigation with the phenomenal form of the
commodity. He plunged himself into the commodity to get behind its appearance, in order to find
its essence. Marx states that, "[W]e started from exchange value, or the exchange relation of
commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it."72 It then becomes manifest
that it is value that negates itself into a use-value and an exchange-value. Lefebvre supports such
a reading, "The duplication of value into use-value and exchange-value therefore develops into a
complex dialectic..."73 Use-value and exchange-value are moments of value, which is itself the
objectified, congealed form of human labor. The commodity becomes the sublation, the unity of
use-value and exchange-value. Whereas, at the beginning, the commodity was an abstract,
phenomenal appearance, but at the conclusion, the commodity becomes a concrete determination
of (alienated) human labor.
Use-value maintains an independent existence in nature, "virgin soil, natural meadows,
&c."74 However, in the social production of social reality, value (as objectified, alienated labor)
exists as the dominant moment of use-value in capitalism. The social world as a whole is a
product of human labor. It is difficult to name substantial use-values that are not somehow a
product of our labor. Marx makes a similar argument in Part VII, chapter xxiii on simple
reproduction. He began with the premise that the capital advanced in the production process was
the result of previous labor on the part of the capitalist himself—a clear reference to John
Locke’s labor theory of property. Through the process of capitalist reproduction, within a certain
time period, the original value is wholly consumed and nothing remains but the extracted, unpaid
surplus value produced by the proletarian workers.75 Something analogous happens in the
relationship between value and use-value. In capitalist society, virgin resources do not represent
the dominant moment. Use-values have to be produced by human labor to satisfy our human and
social needs.
Products are produced to fulfill needs, in so far as they satisfy a need, they have use-
value. Marx writes that, "Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the
thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore
creates no value."76 Or as he wrote in the Grundrisse, "A railway on which no one travels, which
is therefore not used up, not consumed, is only a railway δυνάµει [potentially], not in reality."77
Use-values are necessary, and it is right to say that use-values exist as the τέλος of human labor.
Yet, use-value cannot be the dominant moment in the dialectical process of production and
reproduction. Use-value is consumed and cannot give birth to anything beyond its own horizons.
There is no activating energy within it. We only find the dynamic energy present within the labor
process itself. Therefore, Tabak states that, "This makes productive activity the ‘dominant
moment,’ not merely because it is the point of departure of realization, but also because it is its
active energy... the activity of production is constituted as the essence of every moment within

75 Ibid, 568-569.
76 Ibid. I, 51.
77 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 28: Marx 1857-1861, Trans. Ernst Wangermann (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986),
28-29.
!21
the whole. It thus imposes its identity on the rest."78 In the social world, we can picture
production without consumption, even if this would not be real production. We can even
physically touch the potential railway. We cannot sense, touch or begin to consume something
that has not been first produced by the activating force of human labor.
Therefore, in the capitalist social reality, we locate use-values as a negation of value.
Use-value, which exists in the virgin forests of Nature, becomes dominated by human labor and
becomes subjected to it, a product of its essence. It is in the nature of the human being to produce
everything as a moment of its own negation and totalize everything under its own structure. "So
far therefore," Marx penned, "as labour is a creator of use-value, is useful labour, it is a necessary
condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal
nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and
Nature, and therefore no life."79 The commodity has to be produced by labor (the logically prior
moment) before it can acquire a use-value and an exchange-value. Use-value and exchange-
value are further determinations of the concept of human labor.
An objection could be raised that Marx’s method is not sufficiently Hegelian, because it
does not proceed on a structure of abstract, negative and concrete moments.80 Marx has four
classically recognized concepts of: value, use-value, exchange-value and commodity. It does not
move so smoothly from an abstract, to its negative other and then to the sublated unity of the two
previous terms. So for example, in the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel moved from the abstract
concept of quality, discovered the contradiction within the one that naturally negates itself in its
other as the many, and thus reached the negative as quantity. The negation itself has to become
negated, (the negation of the negation), so that quantity reunifies with quality to form the
concrete determination of measure.81 There is a neat progression from quality, quantity to
measure. John Burbidge writes that, "Hegel’s achievement... lies in his being able to connect
them [concepts] in a systematic way, so that the thought of one requires and leads on to the
thought of something more sophisticated. They are all part of an attempt by thought to think
through its own functioning."82
If we begin a process of negative ontology with the Marxian concept of value, and arrive
at the concept of use-value, following the Hegelian logic, the next term should be the unity of the
previous concept. That is, the commodity should be the unity of value and use-value. Yet, the
form of exchange-value haunts this perfect triad. Exchange-value is the other of value, the
phenomenal appearance with which values are exchanged. For the sake of continuing the
expansion of the concept, we can say that Marx simply did not find it necessary to follow a
Hegelian structure in his materialist development.

79 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I., 53.
80 The division of the logical process into abstract, negative and concrete is an attempt to make Hegel’s divisions of
Understanding, Dialectic and Speculative in chapter six of Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences (see pages: 113-122) more comprehensible to the reader.
81 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 141-145;
157-161.
82 John W. Burbidge, The Logic of Hegel’s Logic (Petersborough, Broadview Press, 2006), 52.
!22
This potential objection falls apart when we take a step back and realize how Hegel made
his transitions. And to do that we have to understand how the Hegelian concepts have an innate
capacity to collapse. The idea of the collapse features prominently in the movement from
Becoming to Being Determinate. "In Becoming the Being which is one with Nothing, and the
Nothing which is one with Being, are only vanishing factors; they are and they are not. Thus by
its inherent contradiction, Becoming collapses into the unity in which the two elements are
absorbed. This result is accordingly Being Determinate (Being there and so)."83 Becoming as
the unity of being and nothing, collapses into a more determinate unity. The same collapse occurs
in the transition from Measure (the final, concrete stage of Being) to Essence. "In the process of
measure, therefore, these two pass into each other: each of them becomes what it already was
implicitly: and thus we get Being thrown into abeyance and absorbed, with its several
characteristics negatived. Such Being is Essence."84
The collapse is how we solve the conundrum presented to us in Marx, once we realize
that value is a unity that collapses into the concept of use-value. Building off of the Tabakian
insight, we situate the human essence as the first term. This is the absolutely negative germ, the
subject of history. The human essence negates itself as human labor, human activity. Labor is
negativity, the principle of movement. The inner has to become the outer. Human essence cannot
stay shut up within itself, but must make itself explicit. This is the very nature of the dialectic.
Yet, activity does not remain a mere activity. It becomes necessary for that activity to become a
somewhat. That is, the subjective becomes the objective. The dynamic energy of labor becomes
ossified, "as crystals of this substance, common to them all, they are— Values"85 Value is the
unity of human essence and human labor. The same is said in the Paris Manuscripts, "[P]-
roduction is his active species life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his
reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he
duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and
therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created."86 Labor exists as the mediating moment
between human essence (species-being) and the product. The potentiality and its negation (labor)
finds itself in the objectified actuality of the product, which becomes determinate value in
Capital. Value contains within itself the previous indeterminate determinations, of human
essence and labor-power, as its truth within the thing as dasein.
The dialectic does not cease its agitation with value, however. Marx collapses the concept
of value into the concept of use-value. If value is the congelation of human labor, then the
product can be equated with value, in so far as that immaterial substance is present within it.
And, if use-value only exists in so far as it is used (the railway example Marx deployed), then it
is fair to identify use-value with the act of consumption. "Use values become a reality only by
84 Ibid, 161.
86 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 3: Marx and Engels 1843-1844, 277.
!23
use or consumption."87 Use-value becomes fully actual at the moment of consumption at which
point it returns to another cycle of production. Use-value is consumed value which "furnishes the
urge to produce."88 In the Grundrisse, Marx creates an identity/difference relationship between
production (value) and consumption (use-value). "Each of them is not only directly the other, nor
does it merely mediate the other, but each of the two, by the fact of its taking place, creates the
other, creates itself as the other."89 Production and consumption are not identical in that
consumption proceeds forth from production, as Christ proceeds forth from the Father in the
Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. Marx stated this clearly when he wrote, "An individual produces
an object and by consuming it returns again to himself; he returns however as a productive
individual and an individual reproducing himself. Consumption thus appears as a moment of
production."90 A difference exists between production and consumption, yet they have identity as
two sides of the same human process. They presuppose each other internally.
The identity exists also in the sense that consumption is always directly "consumptive
production" and production is always directly "productive consumption."91 In consumptive
production, something needs to be consumed before something new can be produced. At the
87 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, 46. Though, it is proper to say that use-value has the two moments of
potential and actualized use-value. A perishable good such as an apple might be said to have use-value before it is
eaten, in potentia. Use-value is caught in this twilight between potentiality and actuality, that also afflicts production
and haunts the concept of value.
88 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 28: Marx 1857-1861, 29.
91Ibid, 30. It has to be noted that Marx appears not to use these two terms as distinct definitions, but conflates the
two through the section.
!24
simplest level, raw materials have to be consumed into order to produce a product out of them. In
productive consumption, the consumer is herself (re)produced—"the object created... personifies
itself."92
The same relationship, therefore, exists between value and use-value. Value becomes the
dominant moment and use-value appears as a moment of value. The concept of use-value
proceeds forth from the concept of value. Value as production precedes use-value in its logical
priority in the social process of production and reproduction. Since use-value is intimately linked
together with consumption, this draws itself as a necessary consequence.
Exchange-value establishes itself as the negation of use-value. Exchange-value is, then,
said differently, a potentiality inherent within the abstract concept of use-value. By virtue of a
product of labor having a use-value, it also possesses the ability of exchange as quantitative
distinction. "Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the
proportion in which value in use of one sort are exchanged for another sort, a relation constantly
changing with time and place."93 In other words, nobody would exchange a bushel of wheat for
another one equally identical. A bushel of wheat may, more intelligently, be traded for a pair of
pants. Use-value presents itself as the immediate impetus for the concept of exchange. Yet, a
limit presents itself when two qualitatively different products have to be exchanged. Marx
insisted that there must be a common mediating moment between the two products in order for
exchange to be effected. Thus, the dialectic naturally looks back towards the concept of value
that acts as the mediation.
Value does not merely disappear in the collapse to use-value. Value as human labor (or
human essence) still persists as the animating spirit of the whole dialectical development. Use-
value and exchange-value present themselves as further determinations of value. Value exists as
the identity of use-value and exchange-value in the capitalist mode of production. Use-value and
exchange-value are the difference of value. Value becomes more concrete in its difference as
these two moments, but these two moments only have their ground, their identity, as moments of
value.
It must be noted that exchange-value only becomes a prolific moment with the dawn of
alienated labor. Exchange-value is not a trans-historical, essential negation of use-value, but one
concomitant with the alienation of man. In Part VII , Chapter xxiii, Marx writes that, "The
separation of labour from its product, of subjective labour power from the objective conditions of
labour, was therefore the real foundation in fact, and the starting-point of capitalist production.
But that which at first was but a starting-point, becomes, by the mere continuity of the process,
by simple reproduction, the peculiar result, constantly renewed and perpetuated, of capitalist
production."94 "Separation", here, could also be called, "alienation." While peasant communities
might exchange values with one another, or with outsiders, it remains a tangential act in the
social process of production and reproduction. In communism, it should cease to exist altogether.
It is only with the separation of the worker from the means of production, his exploitation and
alienation, that exchange-value becomes a predominant form in society. In other words, it is a
92 Ibid, 28.
94 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, 570.
!25
particular kind of human labor, which unfolds into the determination of exchange-value. This
form of labor is none other than alienated labor. What else could it be composed of? Alienated
labor exists as the (historical) essence of capitalist society, since it is a necessary precondition for
negation into exchange-value—the quality of exchange-value being a necessary definition of the
product as commodity.
The unity of use-value and exchange value is what Marx called the "commodity". It is the
sublation of use-value and exchange-value, presupposing the alienation of labor. Marx insisted,
"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use
value, by means of exchange."95 The commodity carries all of the previous determinations united
within itself. It is, therefore, a concrete moment of the whole of capitalist society. Yet, it is
doubtful that Marx intended the commodity to be the final, absolute determination
(concretization) of capital. The commodity is itself a moment in the service of capital
accumulation. Use-value haunts exchange-value from the vantage-point of the capitalist. The
use-value of the commodity for the capitalist is its exchange-value. An identity becomes created
with the unique social position of the capitalist. Tabak confirms this reading, "Exchange-value,
then, is an an intermediary medium through which the use value of the product is obtained by the
capitalist..."96 However, the capitalist does not merely exploit for personal consumption. The
logic of the capitalist system creates a drive towards accumulation. The final concretization,
could then be said to be the accumulation of capital. Tabak deduces that "The ultimate purpose of
obtaining use value in a capitalist society is capital accumulation. By means of an exchange,
commodity production must ultimately succumb to the process of capital accumulation."97 Value
begets value. Without the realization of capital accumulation, the process decays and the
structure collapses.
B. Section 2. The Twofold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities
Hegelianism shows itself acutely in Marx’s analysis of abstract and concrete labor in
chapter one. As seen in the previous section, production (the activity of labor) remains the
determinant moment of the process. So, for example, the τέχνη (craft) of tailoring and weaving
take predominance over the tailor and woven product. Therefore, whereas in section one, Marx
placed the product in the foreground, he probably felt it mandatory to devote the short section
two, to a proper treatment of activity as activity, not seen primarily from the vantage-point of the
objectified product.
Each particular act of human labor is marked by a differentia specifica. There is no such
thing as an act of general labor expended without distinction. Each act of labor remains
qualitatively distinct, "As the coat and the linen are two qualitatively different use values, so also
are the two forms of labour that produce them, tailoring and weaving. Were these two objects not
qualitatively different, not produced respectively by labour of different quality, they could not
stand to each other in the relation of commodities."98 An act of labor is always a particular craft.
It cannot escape from this fate. Actual labor is always also a concrete form of labor, but
95 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I 51.
97 Ibid, 92.
!26
homogenous universal labor is already always in the particular labor. "[O]nly in so far as both
possess the same quality of being human labour, do tailoring and weaving form the substance of
the values of the same articles."99 It is the universal (abstract) labor that becomes value in the
objectification process. Every act of labor consists of a duality of homogenous and heterogenous
labor existing simultaneously within it.100
Marx ensures that we should not confuse this dialectic between abstract and concrete
labor with a mere historical condition of capitalism. He states that, "There are, however, states of
society in which one and the same man does the tailoring and weaving alternately, in which case
these two forms of labour are mere modifications of the labour of the same individual, and not
special and fixed functions of different persons..."101 A medieval peasant does not labor in the
same narrow task of activity that is demanded of his (or her) in capitalism. The peasant has to
produce his (or her) own shoes, shirts, and food. The peasant has to practice the craft of
shoemaking, weaving and farming. Marx conveys this most strongly when he writes:
To all the different varieties of values in use there correspond as many different kinds of
useful labour, classified according to the order, genus, species, and variety to which
they belong in the social division of labour. This division of labour is a necessary
condition for the production of commodities, but it does not follow, conversely that the
production of commodities is a necessary condition for the division of labour. In the
primitive Indian community there is a social division of labor, without production of
commodities.102
The division of labor exists as a social reality. Homogenous and heterogenous labor exist in
every activity of labor. Labor is the unity of the genus and the species. So long as human beings
live as social creatures (which is in their nature), no single individual will be able to labor in each
and every craft. While communism is based on the principle of holistic, many-sided labor where
a person can, "[h]unt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise
after dinner..."103, it does not appear Marx ever intend to say that the division of labor will be
completely abolished in communism. Rather, the compulsory division of labor will be abolished.
Someone who is an Olympic ice-skating champion, might choose to devote 12-hours of every
day to practicing on ice. From this, the conclusion is drawn that the differentiation into "species"
of particularized crafts is an eternal condition of being human, a part of our human essence.
Marx carries over the concept of crystalized labor as value from section one and
immediately proceeds to reinstate this concept in the activity of labor. It is not merely abstract
labor embodied in the product of labor that has significance, but also the activity of that abstract
labor. Homogenous labor is the possibility of a concept of labor that is formless without
distinction within itself:
Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special forms, viz., the useful character
of the labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and

100 Mehmet Tabak, "Processes of Alienation and the Production of the Structure of Bourgeois
Society," (forthcoming), 11.
101 Ibid, 53.
102 Ibid, 52.
103 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 5: Marx and Engels 1845-1847, 47.
!27
weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive
expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour.
They are but two different modes of expending human labour power. Of course, this
labour power which remains the same under all its modifications, must have attained a
certain pitch of development before it can be expended in a multiplicity of modes.104
Labor-power is another way of saying universal, homogenous labor. The activity of labor
empties itself of all its concrete craft, just as Christ emptied Himself of His original divinity in
the incarnation. Regardless of whether a craft is tailoring or weaving, it is still a craft, and as a
craft, as an activity, it is an act of labor. The activity of labor, in the abstract labor, is the
universal genus under which all specific, particular determinations of labor find their essence.
Here, the genetic identity with Hegelian dialectics is unmistakable. The abstract for Hegel
is also a nothingness, a formlessness that could not be concrete so long as it remains in-itself.
Homogenous, universal labor is the mere category of animal (see Chapter II, above). It is not this
or that animal, but merely the idea of the animal. Marx does not believe labor can exist as
abstract labor without also being a heterogenous, concrete labor, a particular τέχνη. It is always
this or that animal, which is a particular-for-itself. The concept of labor in general cannot hold
together in-itself before its walls are broken down and it negates itself in the form of a particular,
concrete form of activity—tailoring or weaving. Similarly, the concept of a particular, concrete
form of labor cannot maintain itself in its externality. By its very notion, it reaches up toward the
universal, abstract labor. Heaven and Earth are two sides of the same reality. Abstract labor has
the logical priority in the dialectic. It persists as the permanent essence, but it is in the nature of
that essence to make itself concrete and to populate an empty set with the greatest abundance of
diversities.
C. Section 3. The Form of Value or Exchange Value
The concept of dialectical development as permanency and change is greatly illustrated
by Marx’s treatment of exchange value and the money form. Marx takes the simple expression of
value as exchange-value (the relation between values) and unfolds these concepts until their
dialectical determinations become the form of money. He writes that his is, "[T]he task of
tracing the genesis of this money form, of developing the expression of value implied in the
value relations of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling
money form."105 Drawing the specific dialectical moments of this process should make the whole
movement translucent.
The value of a commodity remains hidden until it is placed in relation to another
commodity. "The value of the linen can therefore be expressed only relatively — i.e., in some
other commodity. The relative form of the value of the linen presupposes, therefore, the presence
of some other commodity — here the coat — under the form of an equivalent."106 The value of
the commodity that is to be expressed is called the relative form and it is expressed in another
commodity that acts as the equivalent form—so, for example, 1 coat (relative) = 1 dress
(equivalent). The value present within each commodity is what allows for their

106 Ibid, 59.
!28
commensurability. Marx states that, "The value of the commodity linen is expressed by the
bodily form of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use value of the other. As a use value,
the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is the same as the coat, and
now has the appearance of a coat."107 Since the relationship between value, use-value and
exchange-value had already been fleshed out in the previous sections, Marx merely repeats
himself here, and their internal contradictions are not the catalysts of development in this section.
However, this should not be taken to mean that value, use-value and exchange-value are not
carried over and preserved. The whole analysis would be baseless without these previous
determinations.
Marx uses the contradiction between the relative form and the equivalent form to unfold
the potential inherent in the concepts that is not yet posited explicitly. He writes that. "The
antagonism between the relative form of value and the equivalent form, the two poles of the
value form, is developed concurrently with that form itself."108 In any particular comparison, a
specific commodity cannot be both a relative and an equivalent at the same time. A commodity
acts as either a relative or an equivalent. Yet, the contradiction is clearly posited, because the
relationship can effortlessly be reversed. Since an equivalency exists between two commodities,
the commodity that was first the equivalent form, now becomes the relative form.
The elementary form of commensurability is merely between two commodities,
commodity A = Commodity B. "We perceive, at first sight, the deficiencies of the elementary
form of value: it is the mere germ, which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can
ripen into the price form."109 Once it is realized that this relationship holds true in an analysis
between coats and dresses, for example, the concept cries out for expansion. Commodities are
also values. "The equation, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth one coat,
implies that the same quantity of value substance (congealed labour) is embodied in both..."110 If
all commodities contain a certain quantity of value within them by their nature as products of
labor, and this is what allows for their commensurability and exchange, then the elementary
value form logically has to become a general form of value.
Since a relative form is equally an equivalent form when looked at from a different
vantage-point, this necessitates the notion that each commodity is (in theory) exchangeable with
every other commodity. With the general value form:
The value of a single commodity, the linen, for example, is now expressed in terms of
numberless other elements of the world of commodities. Every other commodity now
becomes a mirror of the linen’s value. It is thus, that for the first time, this value shows
itself in its true light as the congelation of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour
that creates it, now stands expressly revealed, as labour that ranks equally with every
other sort of human labour, no matter what its form, whether tailoring, ploughing,
mining, &c., and no matter, therefore, whether it is realised in coats, corn, iron, or gold.
107 Ibid, 62.

109 Ibid, 72.
110 Ibid, 63.
!29
The linen, by virtue of the form of its value, now stands in a social relation, no longer
with only one other kind of commodity, but with the whole world of commodities.111
Value is the social substance that allows for one commodity to be commensurable with another
commodity. However, it is only with the full development of exchange relations that this
essential truth becomes comprehensible in our cognition. It is only with the exchange relation of
one commodity with every other commodity in an expansive market, acting as a universal
equivalent, that the essence reveals itself:
The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities,
converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part
of equivalent — here the linen — into the universal equivalent. The bodily form of the
linen is now the form assumed in common by the values of all commodities; it therefore
becomes directly exchangeable with all and every of them. The substance linen
becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human
labour.112
In the general form of value, the internal relation of value becomes explicit, whereas in the
elementary form of value it was merely implicit. The value inherent within the product of labor
creates the potential for its exchange with every other product of labor. However, this exchange
of every product for labor with every other product of labor only becomes actual with the full
development of exchange relations.
Yet, Marx quickly negates this determination of the general form of value. The general
form naturally passes over into the concept of money. In other words, the concept of the general
form develops into the notion of a specific commodity that acts as the universal equivalent. Marx
finds this universal equivalent commodity in gold as money—gold as the universal equivalent.
Money becomes the next logical negation of the general form, because of the nature of the
contradiction between the relative form and the equivalent form develops the necessity of a
singular, universal equivalent. "It [money] becomes the special social function of that
commodity, and consequently its social monopoly, to play within the world of commodities the
part of the universal equivalent."113 Instead of positing each commodity as the universal
equivalent of every other commodity, all relative forms find their equivalent in the one
commodity—all commodities find their relative form in the price form of money.
Money develops as the mediating moment between commodities. Assume that all
commodities have equal values of congealed labor in them. A certain quantity of commodity A =
a certain quantity (price) of money B, Commodity C = a certain quantity (price) of money B.
Money then exists as the mediating moment that established the transitive law of commodities. A
= B, and B=C, therefore, A = C. Money thus sublates the barter relationship that exists as an
abstract stage of the exchange (value) relationship. Money exists as the rational, concrete stage
of the expression of exchange-value. The value relation is carried on from its implicit and
abstract beginning to its explicit, concrete realization. Value does not disappear at any point in
the process, but is the substance that is continually being further determined.
111 Ibid, 73-74.

112 Ibid, 77.
!30
D. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
Every Marxist understands the basic concept of fetishism in the radical political economy
of Marx. However, the implications of fetishism for the whole of materialist dialectics is not
comprehended very well, if at all. Fetishism is commonly abstracted out of the concrete totality.
Placed in an external relation, the concept of the fetish forfeits its essential truth. The secret of
the commodity fetish is that its essential nature (its prius) is found in the human being, in human
practical activity.
Fetishism had already been mentioned in the discussion of Lefebvre and Kosík. Fetishism
is reification—the transformation of a concept into an external, independent thing. The two
words are practically identical. Fetishism is merely a term drawn from religious discourse. It is
similar to the concept of idolatry, the "work of man’s own hands-they are things, and man bows
down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself."114 Reification literally
means, "‘to make a thing.’"115 It turns the negation of human labor, a social process, into a thing
that exercises power of man. The thing-determinists stand guilty of the gross fetishization of the
forces of production as the dominant moment of social reality. Ollman and Althusser only reify
things in a limited sense, since their reified concepts only represent a few determinants among
many others in a cesspool of (over)determinacy.
Marx establishes the concept of commodity fetishism by drawing attention to the notion
that value is not a natural property. He writes that, "[T]he existence of things quâ commodities,
and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have
absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising
therefrom. There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the
fantastic form of a relation between things."116 There is no physical substance within a
commodity that a natural scientist could find with an instrument. It is a social substance and that
persists as the social and human ontology of value within the commodity. The immaterial spirit
of value haunts the product in the form of the commodity.
Marx tells us that commodity fetishism is also a historical product. It cannot be the
natural state of labor in general. "This Fetishism of commodities has its origin... in the peculiar
social character of the labour that produces them."117 It is a product of the capitalist mode of
production. The essential quality of capital is alienated labor (see section A, above). Marx
reiterates this in section 4, writing that, "[A]rticles of utility become commodities, only because
they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their
work independently of each other."118 Private labor exists as a peculiar expression of capitalism,
that is not commonly found in other modes of production. That is, the worker labors as a "free
labourer"119 in a private contract with the owner of capital to sell his labor-power in exchange for
a wage. This separation is nothing but another expression for alienated labor.
114 Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Human Nature (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2011), 44.
115 Encyclopedia of Marxism, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed April 29, 2014, http://www.marxists.org/glossary/
terms/r/e.htm#reification.
117 Ibid, 83.
118 Ibid, 83.
!31
Fetishism takes the form of a phenomenological mystification, based on the fact that
producers act as private individuals and only recognize the social character of their labor through
a mediation. Marx states that, "[P]roducers do not come into social contact with each other until
they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not
show itself except in the act of exchange... It is only by being exchanged that the products of
labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence
as objects of utility."120 Capitalism is marked by this inversion. The value of commodities
appears as a moment of exchange, rather than the other way around. The phenomena of the
transaction is mistaken for the essence, which is the process of dialectical negation from human
labor. Marx reiterates his point:
[W]hen we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is
not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogenous human
labour. Quite the contrary, whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different
products, by that very act, we also equate as human labour, the different kinds of labour
expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.121
The essential relation continues to exist underneath the mystified phenomenal relation, whether it
is brought into consciousness or not. The phenomenal form is not a mere illusion. The
phenomenal form is precisely how the relations present themselves to the vantage-point of the
workers. "[T]he relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not
as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material
relations between persons and social relations between things."122 In other words, there really is a
separation between private and social labor. This alienation is not a mere phantasm. Value is only
posited through the commodity-thing in capitalism. Value, which is a social relation, becomes
subordinated to a mediation through a thing, a dead inanimate object. The thing precedes the
value-form in this inverted logic of alienated labor.
The products’ natural qualities, therefore, become reified. Value becomes a negation of
the thing-itself. Value exists in a dependent relationship to the thing. Value becomes an
expression of the natural property of the thing-commodity. Marx writes that, "When these
proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of
the products, so that, for example, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to
be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron... appear to be of equal weight."123
Power is given over to the dead, natural thing and taken away from the living human being. Man,
in his relation with other men, is dominated by the intrinsic external quality of the commodity-
thing. "To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the
producers instead of being ruled by them."124 The commodity is exalted as an idol. It is given the
authority as opposed to the hands which crafted it. Yet, Marx declares that "to stamp an object of
utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language."125 The words men create are
120 Ibid, 83-84.

121 Ibid, 84-85.
122 Ibid, 84.
123 Ibid, 85.
124 Ibid, 85.
125 Ibid, 85.
!32
human inventions, not natural products as the Cratylus argues in the Platonic dialogue.126
Likewise, it is the same with commodities. In the essential relationship, men have dominion over
the products of their labor. A dead product only has as much power as men give to it.
Men have power over commodities, because the commodity is merely a determination of
labor. The commodity is a negation of that one self-developing substance that structures the
concrete social totality. Therefore, those who posit a whole-without-a-subject cannot sufficiently
explain why the fetish is a fetish. The concept of the fetish only becomes possible through the
positing of an externality that is independent of the absolute subject. Bourgeois ideology
alienates the commodity from the lifeblood of the one living subject that constitutes social
reality. That is precisely what fetishism is. It is an external, mechanical division of the social
ontology. The commodity is not one determinant among others, but has its reality only as a
moment of the absolute subject of man.
It is only with communism that the essence of labor becomes one with its existence,
without obfuscation. Marx writes that, "The life-process of society, which is based on the process
of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by
freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan."127
The labor process becomes fully real when it becomes immediate, posited as labor qua labor.
The mediating moments that are set up have to fall away and their unsubstantial existence
brought into consciousness. The abolition of commodity fetishism acts as a moment of the
negation of the negation in Capital. It reminds us that every moment of the concrete social whole
ultimately finds its reality in the universal subject of human labor.
!
!
!
!
126 C.D.C. Reeve, trans., "Cratylus," in Plato: Complete Works, Edit. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1997), 101-156.
!33
CONCLUSION
!
The aim of this essay has been to demonstrate the presence of the Hegelian dialectic at
work in Marx’s Capital, chapter one. The first chapter has so much of the overall Marxist
philosophy compacted into so few pages that it presents a daunting endeavor. The space
limitations meant that sometimes thorough and detailed study had to be traded for brief
exposition and analysis. In taking on the task of unraveling its mysteries, it becomes apparent
that answering questions merely leads to many more questions that likewise have to be solved.
Such is the nature of dialectics. Since every moment of the whole is internally related, each
determination naturally leads to a discussion of further determinations. Therefore, it is clear that
many statements made above remain abstract, one-sided and incomplete. If this paper has
demonstrated the plausibility of the presence of the Hegelian dialectic (the negation of an
absolute subject forming the concrete totality), as the logic animating the materialist dialectics in
the first chapter of Capital, it will have accomplished its purpose.
Chapter One (this essay) tried to develop a logical history of Hegelian Marxism. It began
with the non-Hegelian thing-determinism of Plekhanov and Cohen. Their thing-Marxism reifies,
or fetishizes, the forces of production into external determinants of the human social reality. This
thing-determinism represents the clearest Marxian antithesis to Hegelian Marxism. Dialectics as
a whole-without-a-subject, purported by Althusser and Ollman, represents a less antagonistic
theory. It moves closer to the Hegelian spirit, but maintains its distance by adopting a mechanist,
systems approach to the social totality. The products are still reified in a one-sided manner.
Lefebvre and Kosik recognize man as critical for understanding the social whole, but fail to posit
man as the absolute, self-developing subject that unfolds into the concrete totality. Mehmet
Tabak is the first to develop a truly Hegelian Marxism with man as the absolute subject that
negates itself in history and into the structure of society. The objective of Chapter One (this
essay) was, therefore, to locate the absolute subject within the already existing tradition of
Hegelian Marxism that constitutes a bridge between this tradition and Hegelianism proper.
Chapter Two provided a short exposition of the essential features of the Hegelian
dialectic. Whereas the concepts of Hegelianism were merely implicit in the discussion of
Hegelian Marxism, the fundamentals of the Hegelian dialectics here were posited explicitly. The
self-negation of the Absolute subject was shown to be the impetus of dialectical motion.
Dialectics exists as the movement resulting from the contradiction between being-in-itself
(potentiality) and being-for-itself (actuality) of one and the same Absolute subject that gives
itself determinacy. The Hegelian dialectic is marked by permanency and change; change because
the subject develops difference and distinction, and permanency because it is the same subject
which changes.
Chapter Three proceeded as an inquiry into the development of the concepts in Capital’s
chapter one. It was demonstrated that the first chapter of Capital could plausibly be read as the
development of human activity (labor). In this reading, human labor is the ontological absolute
of the social world. Every determination of the social in chapter one was shown to be subsumed
under the notion of labor and its dialectic. The commodity is the unity of use-value, value and
exchange-value. Use-value and exchange-value are but further determinations of the concept of
value, which is itself the negation, the congelation of human labor power. Every determination is
!34
but a more concrete determination of the absolute subject of man and his self-activity. This
appears quite vividly in the notion of fetishism, through which Marx critiques the bourgeois
economists for not realizing the essential activity of labor as the substance underlying all
economic reality.
The limitations of this investigation are plainly obvious. The scope has been limited to
only the first chapter of Marx’s Capital. While the Hegelian reading demonstrated has been
shown to be plausible, it is also plausible that the rest of Capital is better understood through the
framework of Ollman and Althusser. Ollman has a point that it would be difficult to show the
political aspects of class-struggle, such as the struggle over the working day, as dialectical
determinations of human labor.128 Such is not to say it cannot be done. Further research on the
rest of Capital and its dialectics is required to demonstrate the validity of either Tabakian
Marxism or overdetermination of the whole-without-a-subject. Grounding the above
interpretation in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism gives it greater credibility, but it does not
make it conclusive.
The benefits to be gained from this analysis of Capital’s chapter one is the possibility of a
more fruitful dialogue between Hegelianism and Marxism. Marxist scholars tend to pay lip
service to the dialectical tradition of Hegel, but few take the time to comprehend the insanely
difficult philosophical system he developed over the course of his lifetime. On the other hand,
Hegelian scholars tend to brush aside the insights of dialectical materialism and relegate Marx to
a fate of vulgar irrelevancy. He is commonly seen as someone guilty of bastardizing the idealistic
philosophy of Hegel.129 Through critical-textual analyses such as this, it becomes more likely
that Hegelians find rewarding insights in the writings of Marx, and that Marxists (re)discover the
abiding power of the Hegelian dialectic.
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
128Bertell Ollman: Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method, 183.
129Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005),
10. Houlgate, for example, reduces Marxism to the fetishized thing-determinism of Cohen.
!35
REFERENCES
!
Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2003).
C.D.C. Reeve, trans., "Cratylus," in Plato: Complete Works, Edit. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1997), 101-156.
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010).
"Encyclopedia of Marxism," Marxists Internet Archive, accessed April 29, 2014, http://
www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/r/e.htm#reification.
Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Human Nature (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2011
G.A. Cohen, "Base and Superstructure: A Reply to Hugh Collins," Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies 9, (1989): 95-100.
—, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
George V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (New York: International Publishers,
1969).
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
Trans. William Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
—, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004).
—, Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. I: Greek Philosophy to Plato, Trans. E.S. Haldane
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
John W. Burbidge, The Logic of Hegel’s Logic (Petersborough, Broadview Press, 2006).
Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World (Boston: D.
Reidel Publishing Company, 1976).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 3: Marx and Engels 1843-1844, Trans. Jack
Cohen, Richard Dixon, Clemens Dutt, Alex Miller, Martin Milligan, Barbara Ruhemann, D i r k
Struik, and Christopher Upward (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975).
—, MECW Vol. 5: Marx and Engels 1845-1847, Trans. Clemens Dutt, W. Lough and C.P. Magill
(New York: International Publishers, 1976).
Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 28: Marx 1857-1861, Trans. Ernst Wangermann (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1986).
—, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Edit.
Friedrich Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996).
Louis Althusser, For Marx, Trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2005).
—, "How to Read Marx’s Capital," Marxism Today (1969): 302-305.
Mehmet Tabak, Dialectic in Hegel’s History of Philosophy: Volume One (New York: Pranga
Inc., 2013).
—, Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012).
—, Mehmet Tabak, "Processes of Alienation and the Production of the Structure of Bourgeois
Society," (forthcoming).
Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983).
Norman Levine, The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (Santa Barbara, Clio Books, 1975).
!36
Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (Brewster, Paraclete Press, 2006).
Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2005).
!37

Hegelian Dialectics in Marxs Capital Cha PDF

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Hegelian Dialectics in Marxs Capital Cha PDF

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

HEGELIAN DIALECTICS IN MARX’S CAPITAL,

11 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, 187.

14 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol I., 81-94.

25 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 82.

28 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 81.

Company, 1976), 19.

32 Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, 25.

Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 127.

ix. This quotation comes from Findlay’s introduction.

50 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Vol I., 28.

53 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectic in Hegel’s History of Philosophy: Volume One, 14.

55 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Vol I., 27.

C.P. Magill (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 61.

72 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, 57.

78 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy, 74.

two through the section.

99 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, 55.

104 Karl Marx, MECW Vol. 35: Capital Vol. I, 54.

107 Ibid, 62.

111 Ibid, 73-74.

120 Ibid, 83-84.

Вам также может понравиться