Post on 15-Jan-2023
CHANGING LABOUR RELATIONS, & REAL SUBSUMPTION – THE
HEGEL-MARX DISTINCTION [second draft]
Dr Debabrata Banerjee
Nov.20, 2009
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 1
INTRODUCTION
This work commenced in winter month, January 2006 in Delhi. I
accepted an assignment to write a report based on sets of pre-recorded
talk and interviews in recordable cassettes and DVD/CD writers, field
notes of little value though indicative of the context and loads of
legal literature. The focus of this project in South Asia, mainly
Pakistan and India was to investigate `bonded labour’. In the course
of my work it became obvious that the classification of `bonded
labour’ according to legal definition didn’t hold much water. Other
than government oversight, two other organizations were active in the
field after the passage of Bonded Labour Abolition Act of 1976. Both
the organizations were conceived as watchdogs and they were working on
identification of bonded labour in various sectors that involved pure
manual labour and perform actions to `free and rehabilitate’ them as
and when they were identified. As a matter of fact in 1980’s, after
1984 one of these Delhi based organizations, Bandhua Bachao Samiti’ had
already established a record of sorts by `voiding’ [ in legalese]
bonded labour in Delhi. However, it was mistakenly understood and
perceived that labour bondage had re-surfaced after the Government
policies shifted, somewhat seismically while implementing the `neo-
liberal agenda for globalizing the economy’, which is, to put in
common currency, intensive and expansive penetration of the production
, circulation and re-placement/ re-territorializing conundrum of
capital-labour relations on the international scale. There was no such
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 2
tendency towards labour bondage; just some cases of forced
subjugation. Capital-value expansion is uneven, consisting of capital
flights, relocation and profit driven investment shifts. The tendency
is towards historical acceleration of accumulation of capital value
with increasing ratio of circulating capital-value. The incentive that
incites the acceleration of capital value productivity, technological
advance is profit and ever increasing prospect of profits, thus
expanding its own sphere of vulnerability. This dynamic threatens the
asset-values of dominant fixed capital equipment and loan capital
which financed the build-up of fixed capital accumulation. The
tendency is also in the direction of increasing social productivity of
labour , which moves by a self-driven progression towards a net
expanding historical accumulation, ever richer, more elevated through
their struggles against capital value productivity that eventually
reaches a threshold of critical, dense social ontology. Once it is
crossed, the surroundings/environment appear as self-opposition, self-
interaction which builds up to the moment of self-reflection and then,
self-sublation 1. Since this threshold is a critical moment
[bifurcation] in social evolution, it appears as sharp opposition,
and the possibility of resolution from the outer to the inner in self-
1 Jantsch E, The Self-Organizing universe : Scientific and Human Implications of the emerging paradigm of evolution, N Y, 1980; Bhaskar S, Biotechnology and Ecological Perspectives for third world agriculture : An appraisal of technology and policy options – Part 1, Third World Science and Environment Perspectives, v.1, n.1, Delhi, 1989, p 14, 16
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 3
involution 2 has the potential to trigger a new breakthrough, a
revolution in social relations.
To be literate about this process is to simultaneously inquire
into/within self for the `human science residing self-reflexively in
inter-subjectivity, prospectively pre-constructed affectivity,
feelings, the stories, etc., and retrospective reconstruction of
cognitive contents, affectively sliding ideologies, culture and
phenomenology as opposed to the unilateralism of objectivity and
subjectivity since this opposition is resolved by grasping reality in
the transition to production of species essence.. The transition is a
self-release or letting go of reflexivity by the concept as it moves
to grasp the real in the very becoming of objectivity which is higher
than the pre and reconstituted predecessor states. It is higher since
now the immediacy of objectivity sublates abstractions/extractions,
hyper-abstractions and mediations, negating the self-identical ego of
idealism engaged in a never-ending struggle with the manifold world
continually engendering nature by depleting its reserves and
conversion to non-natural `waste’.3 Mediation is now converted to the
immediate self-relation of the concept that can account for historical
dialectics as a self-superseding systematic progression of ideo-
ontologies and progressive self-opposition or immanent self-
2 De Chardin P Tailhard, The Human Phenomena, Sussex, 2003, Human consciousness as `folded back upon itself’; `The consciousness of eachof us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon himself’., ChThe Modern Earth, p 218-222
3 Hegel G W F, SL, vol 2, p 505-507
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confrontation of historical human-social <mentalities>.4Variety in
history converts abstract unity as the possible sum total of all
histories to a `complex unity’ or dialectical synthesis of the first
contra thesis of the arche thesis – ancient and modern- and the second
contra- thesis of the first uni- thesis – the immanent critique of
modern humanity.
Autonomous historians, more aligned to enquiry rather than
professional duties are familiar by now as opposition to `new’
approaches to history coming up every now and then, but essentially
resulting from a fusion between a culture of the present that
privileges the present over past and future by a political radicalism,
and a species of `radical history’ just because it regards its
predefined `traditional’ history that would include most 20th c.
classics as `elitist history’. For them proper history would be the
history of all men alike, irrespective of social and class divisions.
Now I am not referring efforts to make family history, or history of
some contingent event or individuals as they are seen by the likes of
Zaldin or Cobb as the opposite end of the pole in recent
historiography. The source of concern is the sort of history that
4 This form of historical dialectic related to knowledge formations may be presented by Peanic-succession model [from Giuseppe Peano’s succession models, e.g. from line to plane]by taking the ancient archeas syncopated or generic unit of its mentality as the pure unquantified <monad> but also as the quantifiable qualifier in the arithmetike of Diophantus which includes the qualifier; the modern mentality steeped more perversely in the experience of exchange-valueexchange has its arche as symbolic number as generically abstracted, or hyper-abstracted `pure unqualified quantifiers which elides the qualifier
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cannot be differentiated from ethnology or anthropology or genres like
culture studies. African history is at risk by fusion histories,
between history and anthropology, culture history or ethnographic
history as an `Africanist genre’ or `oral history’ or histories
centred around binary `debates’ posed in terms of Africa/Europe, which
ends up recreating yet another Africanist version of European
history.’5 I am referring to the sheer irresponsibility that would
involve writing `ethnographic history’ and other such `invasions’ into
history, which is different from a historian referring to ethnological
studies since the coherence of evidence would have to be justified
from the side of history. Besides, it raises serious questions about
the methodological boundaries of a science like ethnography or
anthropology, like the ones raised by early Geertz that are left
unanswered.6 There has also been in recent past many revisionist
undertakings too, which is opposed above all by critical history.7
Many of these studies imply irrelevance of both past and future for
5 Nancy Rose Hunt, Wither African History? Review of John Iliffe’s Honour in African history, Cambridge, 2005, in History Workshop Journal, now Iliffe, who has also authored The African Poor : a History, builds his narrative as a historian first of all, sensitive to time, longue duree and place, sub-Saharan Africa to `forge a synthetic history’. He is a rarity and in spite of admitting that `no one researches and writes history like Iliffe’ [ that itself is a strong comment], Nancy Hunt finds this work `oddly out of step with the most experimental and important work of recent years. The contrastbetween Iliffe’s approach and these new ethnographic and anthropological histories is striking, as he is just about the only scholar’ to traverse `a vastly diverse continent over a longue duree to forge a synthetic history’, p. 262
6 Geertz C, Thick Description and other works, `For a science born in Indian tribes, Pacific islands and African lineage and subsequently seized by grander ambitions, this has come to be a major methodological problem and for most part a badly handled one’ `Ethnographic facts are not privileged, just particular..’, p. 20, 22
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present life by privileging or completely foregrounding the
sovereignty of `the living individual’ and ways of life. This is
actually the propagation of knowledge as deception of the obvious and
the immediate. Life is itself self-surrounding, the unity of immediate
and mediate, with its dimensions. But the business of privileging the
present or anything for that matter is like giving false sense of
achieving a `privileged epistemic position’, possessed by few.
Privilege is private knowledge and, in this case, a kind of
`historiophobia’ with which analytical philosophy is consciously
afflicted. This `private wisdom’ is deployed in the service of capital
as it seeks to privatize and monopolize knowledge by means of
proprietary instruments. It is increasingly getting clearer that
`knowledge privatization’, has determined a progressive fall in
investments as it raises `cost of investment’ particularly in
countries with `lower intellectual property intensity’. This went hand
in hand with a global division of labour where U S claimed
`intellectual leadership’ backed by intellectual property regime but
now the crashing `knowledge economy’ is seen to create the `current
economic crisis’.8 As thinking `is common to all’, knowing is not a
private affair. Any wo/man may be able to achieve the reason of
reality by thinking in the way it is encountered.
7 Krieger L, Time’s Reasons: Philosophies of history old and new, Chicago 1989, pp 1-3; in the interval of time, however, revisionist, `presentist’ and the radical variants about history appear to be retreating, but also `waiting’ for something newer. The rift within the profession of historians is the clearest sign of conflict.
8 Maria Rossi Alessendra & Ugo R, The Crash of Knowledge Economy, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol 33, no 4, 2009, pp 665-689
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Now, it needs to be stressed that terms such as self-referentiality,
self-opposition, and self-sublation have difficulties that are found
in the very heart of paradoxes, which have beset thought in the course
of recorded history. Recalling Heraclitus’ `you cannot put your foot
in the same river twice’ Plato introduced a so-called Heraclitan in a
dialogue to turn that into a paradox. This paradoxicality has been
wearing off with time so much so that now we may translate the saying
as the Heraclitan property of non-equilibrium, nonlinear system with a
proviso that that the river image may connote mere `turbulence’ a
random instance of change. We may even speak of `Heraclitan
continuity’ of non-linear systems to mean a pattern of growth of
systems to ever higher levels of self-organization and internal
connections. In general, we know little about solving non-linear
equations though here the meaning is not the usual one having to do
with the way we think of solving linear equations. There seems to be
an inbuilt bias of linearity, or a Parmenidean barrier that has
obstructed dialectical, speculative, non-linear ways of thinking and
grasping. But the language of mathematics grew out of natural
languages and everyday speech. The grammar of most native languages
commits us unconsciously to habits of thought that makes the non-
equilibrium quality of nature and its source in self-reference, self-
interaction difficult to grasp. The division between the noun and verb
in Indo-European languages of present vintage leads us to think of
`things’ or nouns as solid and inert substance which participate in
change and `events’ only externally. Though `the bat hits the ball’
both the bat and ball remain unchanged in substance. On the other
hand, most `primitive’ languages including old Chinese or old Indo-
European lack such sharp division that made the `thing’ divided from
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 8
change or action. As long as we think substance as inert, without
interaction, that would be an all-noun view of reality whereas if we
conceive them as unities of existence, of noun and verb qualities, we
get into to process. If things are processes, then existence must
include depletion of something on one hand and accumulation of
something on the other or transformation, e.g., by the action of the
future on the present.
More relevant, certain habits of thought have been deeply ingrained
in humanity due to its incessant and ever/over deepening placement of
money-exchange of commodities at the centre of everyday life process.
Money-activity per se as well as its deepening presence impairs or
numbs the mind profoundly – subconsciously as well as consciously - as
it becomes the primary mode to access life opportunities. Money
consciousness has primarily been put in the service of the moment of
Thanatos that uses human progress as a pretext to accentuate
increasing entropy-creating energy deployment, the increasing
distancing of life impulses and scattering of society into atomic
individuals. The money habit and praxis reinforces a widespread
anesthesia to the qualitative dimension of arithmetic and recreates
the idea of number as qualitatively homogenous or completely
unqualified pure, abstract quantity. Money subjectivity can condition
its subject to a loss of qualitative and dynamic sensitivity. `Just as
in money every qualitative difference between commodities is
extinguished, so too for its part as a radical leveler, it
extinguishes all distinctions. But… it is also capable of becoming
private property of any individual’, whereby social power gets
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 9
transferred to `private power’.9 Qualitatively, money is independent of
all limits as the universal representative that is directly
convertible to any other commodity. But any sum or as a sum, money is
limited in amount as a means of purchase. There appears a
contradiction between qualitative lack of limit and the limit on
quantity. Though this contradiction may have landed the hoarder to
return to his Sisyphean task, like a `world conqueror’ encountering
newer boundaries with each country he annexes there also runs its
`aesthetic form’, i.e., possession of things made of gold and silver
as a part of wealth of civil society following the maxim `let us
appear rich’ [Diderot]. With the further development of money as
capital value or value as capitalized money, abstract quantity of
money whose name is price which expresses the transformation of the
magnitude of the value of any commodity into money commodity, works
through blind averages. There appears another quantitative incongruity
between the magnitude of value and divergence of price from the said
magnitude. The price form also harbours a qualitative contradiction
when price formally speaking ceases altogether to express any value,
in `surds’, imaginary numbers, negative numbers, etc., which conceal
value-relations and derivatives thereof. Yet, capitalized money can
never become ends in themselves insofar as they are valuable to the
extent that they can be `cashed-in’ for the purpose of human life-
gratifying, self-reproducing use-value wealth. This is actualized as
long as social forces of production or social use-value productivity
of expanding human reproduction can be sustained at the expense of
capital-value /profitability productivity. This contradiction –
9 Marx K, Cap 1, pp. 229-230
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between expanding social use-value captures the inherent inadequacy
of capitalized value as an end-in-itself.
From the data made available `in situ’ or generated from field work
and interviews it became evident that the scope of the topic was
actually huge because employers no longer showed any record of
informal variants of labour and/or attached labour, though `kuccha’/de
facto payrolls, standard muster rolls and field observation indicated
an expansive trend toward informal sector economy. In fact many
employers, who were previously registered, had de-registered their
respective units because informalization meant privatization and
bigger short term profits given the virtual absence of any regulation
or even the presence of minimal oversight/inspection agency. These are
mostly `decentralized and subcontracted’ small production units.
Expansion of formal sector, on the other hand takes place under
producer driven `commodity chains [fast food outlets for instance]
though the labour deployed is mainly informal. What I could gather
immediately from the evidence on hand was that the size, composition
and distribution of casual, informal work force had begun increasing
in a big way from early 1990’s. This would indicate, provided one
accepts the veracity of data in general terms or on face value, a
rapidly unprecedented kind of a growing economy confined within the
National Capital Region of Delhi, which included some satellite
townships. Major part of this work force was engaged in consumer
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oriented manufacturing jobs for buyer driven commodity chains
[construction].What was going on in the world of work, was a
continuous and punctuated exponential growth dynamics in labour
supply and migration of work force, and their absorption through forms
of labour deployment by different parties. Viewed from the legal angle
contractors, `placement/recruiting agencies and private parties were
not bothered about legal implementation/compliance. Increase in the
size of child labour, legally banned, comes across very immediately
where one need not even see beyond the nose.. But this creates a
labour surplus situation and the increase in labour demand does not
increase wages. While capital accumulation raises productivity, owners
use the institutional networks of labour supply in order to depress
unit labour costs leading to lower prices and higher profits. Besides
this, the phenomenon of disguised unemployment had already transformed
to a typology of invisible workers scattered all over a growing, large
metropolis. 10
The study was no longer restricted to attached forms of labour. I
was viewing millions of informalized, casualized and unorganized work
force in almost all the records that I consulted except that now the
10 R Munck is basically correct in recognizing that `informalizationis a critical component of capitalist globalization today, particularly but not exclusively in global south’ though the situationis more advanced in critical terms. In some services trade union organization has already peaked and fallen [ food services in restaurants, hotels and the strange case of workers running Volga restaurant in the heart of Delhi, which could not be sustained despiteslashing of food and beer price], Munck R, Globalization and Labour, Delhi, 2003, p. 115-116
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judiciary seemed to have washed its hands off barring few exceptions
from the entire issue that came under legal purview.
Critical comments on Zizek & Badiou [excerpt from a draft written on informal labour
in Delhi]
A qualitatively different perspective is required to study and write
on the world of labour under conditions of `globalization’. Not under
the dimension of `territoriality’ or their `territorial character’
that creates a `new kind of proletarian position’, given their
`incorporation’ into the `global economy’, with many of them `working
as informal wage workers or as self-employed entrepreneurs’, as Zizek
drawing from Badiou’s perception of `slums as the few authentic
`evental sites’ argues.11 Though Zizek resists the temptation to
`elevate and idealize slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class’
where he finds a `mixture of charismatic miracles-and-spectacle-
oriented fundamentalism, together with improvised modes of social11 Zizek S, Nature and its Discontents, SubStance # 117, vol. 37,
no. 3,Wisconsin Univ., 2008, p. 40
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life, criminal gangs; but more than a refugee, the slum dweller is `a
homo sacer , the systematically generated `living dead’ or an animal of
global capitalism’12, Having sketched an imaginary dystopia, Zizek then
flip-flops seeing `slum dwellers’ as `the counter-class’ to the so-
called `symbolic class’, uprooted and who `perceives itself as
`directly universal’. Again hesitation enters with thinking
universality in terms of external identity markers [the N Y academic
having more in common with a Slavonic academic than Blacks in Harlem ]
because of which he settles for `destructured masses’, poor and
deprived of everything in `non-proletarianized urban environment’
[whatever that implies]. This is a confusing picture, unable to see
the excessive scale of mobility and circulation – which translates
into daily commuting and moving about – that informal workforce and
the poor, barely employed are into. Huge distances are covered and
tracked, akin to hunter-gatherers and foragers. Scattered work like
waste-picking is spread over a terrain that is similar to any
archeologist’s field of preliminary exploration and any housewife is
in a position to map most of the places she frequents as any
cartographer A number of displacements occur in Zizek’s essay, but it
is the `proletarian position’ that Zizek posits one sidedly as `the
emptied subject’, the `objectal counterpart to money’, whose `very
core of subjectivity is posited as equivalent to a thing’ that needs
to be looked into because it is profoundly mistaken, and handled in a
way to cause short-circuit. The proletariat does not relate to money
as wealth but as a consumer, as a scarcity field; though he finds the
`sphere of consumption’ quantitatively restricted, this is not a
qualitative limit as he is not bound by particular objects and
12 Ibid., p. 41, n. 3 p. 71
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satisfaction of his desire. As consumers they are freed of impositions
and restriction, a freedom not associated with slaves, serfs and kinds
of labour attachment still prevailing in `developing’ parts of the
world. Thus the subject is `empty’ in terms of immediacy and this
immediacy is the condition of the `possibility of beginning again from
beginning’ His/Her life is the source for this renewed beginning when
she/he has to `constantly confront capital’ to rekindle his daily
alienating capacities. His labour is purchased by the capitalist not
from the position of a consumer but as the source of wealth. Thus
labour is the contradictory unity of `absolute poverty as object’, if
he were to non-objectify himself constantly by confronting capital as
a seller and the possibility of general wealth corresponding to
disposed living [abstract] labour as `subject and activity.’13
Contrasted to food prices the manufactured items produced by the
slum dwelling informal worker has high range short term price
elasticity and so long as food prices [are scissored] stay below
`average’ wage in the workers abstraction, the worker replenishes
himself/herself for work and reproduction but the elasticity of food
prices tend to work out in longer time spans. When it exceeds
subsistence wage ceiling there is little chance that those prices are
going to come down soon. This is the further condition e reduce
workers to `objects of absolute poverty’. Distress loses its
transitory character as it becomes structural and permanent. Absolute
scarcity exerts the power of particularity against abstract freedom.`
Life, as the totality of ends, has the right in opposition to abstract
13 Marx K, Grundrisse, [tr/annot.] Tim Delaney, 1997-1998, pp. 239-289, www.marxists.org
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right’14 If life can be preserved by stealing food, it certainly
infringes someone’s property rights, but the action is `not common
theft’. Otherwise being deprived of life his entire freedom would be
negated…the only thing necessary is to live now; the future is not
absolute, and it remains exposed to contingency’.15 When right to life
and absolute freedom of each human being is faced with the danger of
complete loss then particular right disappears. The right of employer
and his cohorts, the immediate other of wealth disappears when the
demand arises from the consciousness of infinitely free against
infinite injury. It is in this collision of rights that the
possibility of revolutionary condition exists. The collision is
between the principle of abstract universality that stands behind the
employer embodied by the state and the infinitely negative judgment of
the person immediately threatened by complete loss of all rights.
It also follows accordingly that what is posited by subjectivity is
social wealth corresponding to social-spiritual-artistic and other
needs as they historically exist in the inverted world-order. At any
rate, what matters is the relation of labour to wealth and capital as
concretely contradictory while his own non-objectivity is the daily
emptying out. Informal workers are equally immediately universal as
any worker, whether it is factory, office, or services, but while
possessing the consciousness of rights they do not possess the right
that would formalize the process of daily renewal. Their demand
seeking formalization is very much a class demand against capitalists,
14 Hegel G W F, Philosophy of Right, § 244 Zusatz15 Hegel G W F, Philosophy of Right §127 Zusatz
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which can be viewed as the process of mediation by the conscious
negative. That makes them ideologically vulnerable. But their position
is proletarian, irrespective of whether they stay in slums or
peripheries or non-slumified areas in cities like Delhi. Now Badiou’s
inverted, negative obsession with `simple beginning’, `the speculative
concept of the beginning to which Hegel himself gave an unfinished and
divided criticism’ 16, against `absolute beginning’ is a critical
position to which not much time can be given here for doing `justice’
to Badiou’s critique except that his `shift’ from subject of ontology
to logic as the science of appearing or the `being-there’ of the world
carries the unresolved phenomenological residue , the diagonal into
logic. Simple immediacy in Hegel’s Greater Logic is being-for-self in
its otherness, or being having disappeared into the ground; by sinking
the negative being falls into the ground’ while essence mediates the
negativity of ground and self-sublates the mediation to emerge without
ground. Assuming the diagonal, which Badiou means as the `site,
fidelity, forcing, etc, that is already the self-sublated mediation of
the negative of the being-there, e.g., the first leaf that sprouts
forth has its existence rooted in the activity of solar radiation, in
affirmative though the scope of our instrumental reason remains
limited in terms of receptors that may well show, in experience, the
sprouting of the first leaf. But it has political implications for
Badiou and others in the `ideologies of workerism and unionism’ which
is defined as the `conflation’ of the being of the worker and its
social practice as `revolutionary proletarian activity’.17 This is in
no way derived from Marx; it needs to be said that Marx does not
16 Bosteels B, Post-Maoism : Badiou and Politics, positions, vol 13,no. 3, Duke Univ, 2005, p 611-625
17 Ibid, p. 620
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 17
provide any `ontological’ equivalence and the moment of untruth for
free wage labour corresponding to its concept. In the perspective of
scientific method wage labour emerges as pure beginning in opposition
to capital as non-objective self in the objective form, as simple
immediacy separated from `entire objectivity’, `stripped of all
objectivity’. But this does not turn him into a subject because the
sole objectivity that is a possibility is his use-value as labour and
this `objectivity’ is not separated from its person. This is where it
differs from earlier forms of dependent labour. But this objectivity
too it an `objectivity co-inciding with his immediate bodily
existence’; it `is purely immediate, just as much as direct non-
objectivity’.18 Thus, as pure immediacy, wage labour exists in
opposition and this opposition does not relate to a worker but only to
the worker as the possibility of alienating living labour for meeting
social, artistic, scientific, etc needs. Badiou does not see the
manner in which the worker encounters capital everyday in the
`production process’ as say C L R James viewed the `labour process’ as
the process of necessary education of the worker, socially not
individually. This is confounded by political economists with the
phenomena of accumulation, which is analogous only to some extent,
though it belongs distinctly to pre-capitalist epochs of production.
Because it is only under capital that degradation of the worker is
complete and the historical conditions create the possibility for
workers to overthrow the system of real subsumption under capital and
associatively acquire for themselves the intellectual potential for
the material process of production’.19
18 Marx K, Grundrisse, Op Cit, pp. 293-22319 James C L R, Polemic against IKD, 1946, CLR James internet
archives, www.marxists.org ; it may be of some interest to mention
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 18
C L R James may have sounded deterministic, which turns the
formulation to positive assertion, but then he belongs to the
marginalized tribe of Marxists caught up in the cold war that had
essentially shut out the organon of dialectic, whose Marxism was the
result of an effort of scientific cognition of its reason, free,
embracing universal objectives that can be actualized by the
revolutionary principle as one recollects a future. Hegel had shown
that the speculative philosopher is a man/woman whose thoughts are
appropriate to a future age and that is the way of encountering reason
and `spirit’. Hegel’s infinite is always aufheben, the passage, the
drive beyond, the urge, the running through, transcending, which in
the absolute completed non-transitional state or moment as it
`releases’ itself into the applied and transitional sphere. This is
also the future provoking and challenging the present like the foam
spilling from the chalice, the active inhering `spirit’/reason rather
than shadow that Paul Ashton implies, carries with it the predilection
of tragedy.20 Hegel’s `spirit’ is also revolutionary insofar as this
that C L R James read Hegel prior to Marx, when he was given Hegel’s Logic by H S Harris, the American Hegelian. That particular version ofthe logic in English , since no English translation was then availablethen, had been the result of an unfinished translation of H Brockmayerwho founded the first Hegel society in America
20 Ashton P, The Beginning before the Beginning, in Nikolakopoulos T, et al, Spirit of the Age – Hegel and the Fate of Thinking, Melbourne, 2008, p. 339; to say that `trying to encounter Hegel philosophically’ is `like a human that has realized their nature in the achieved community of minds’ besides `the subject of address of great philosophers is the subject of future’, thus `the place where weencounter Hegel…’ etc. is stating the impossible. There cannot be any such encounter with somebody long dead and if by the person is impliedthe shadow cast into future, the only encounter can be metaphysical.
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 19
form could see that the world before the revolution was marked by the
absence of spirit/reason. The entire standpoint of phenomenology is to
reveal that all shapes of consciousness at home with itself was also
marked by the absence of spirit just as much as reason passes through
the fingers in the grasp of understanding [verstand]. But the
revolution had not actualized itself as an achieved principle in the
world, which is why the labour in the realm of shadows was called the
`absolute culture and discipline of consciousness’21 or Bildung, or the
work of science remained to show, or externalize, make appear that the
spiritual element belonged to it. Hegel disclosed the revolutionary
principle in education or Bildung and we know that many Hegelians,
including his students, not only risked their livelihoods and vocation
in the defence of the revolutionary principle [Breuer] but also
participated in the revolution of 1848.It is this revolutionary
inheritance that Marx stood back on its feet. Instead of a chimera or
a transcendental that one chases, the revolutionary principle was
immanent in the real opposition in the very core of life activity, not
some privileged position in the possession of either the philosopher
or scientist or in the abstract sphere. Marx was able to find the
principle in concrete proletarian position. The elaboration of this
view is certainly a landmark moment of reason’s absolute culture and
In this sense, the self labours in the shadowy realm, because this is the labour free of sensuality or the work free of anything sensuous, like representations. Hegel calls this the absolute culture of education. Ashton seems to have bypassed this in his essay on the tragic encounter, which is not possible, unless he admits to inner communion the spirit world, which was spelt out by Max Stirner, exceptthat this was not the spirit world of divinities or god but more spooky. It is a travesty to consider Hegel as some demigod or the manner in which he spells out the consideration of science as in any way exclusive.
21 Hegel G W F, SL, p. 58
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 20
it is in the Franco-German yearbook [Franzoschie-Deutsch
Jahrbucher], suggested by Feuerbach to Marx and Ruge, of 1844 that the
principle of Marxian theory as the practical moment irrupted. This was
the `partition principle’ or scission stipulating 18th c. French
materialism as the arche moment of human thought – rather than
mythopoeia or primitive animistic religion – and by the identification
of 19th c. German idealism culminating in Hegel as its contra
ideogram, dialectical, determinate, concrete self-negation, self-
supersession and self-appropriation in the context of historical
dialectics. In the German Ideology, Marx develops the notion of human
activity as practical-critical activity in a changing world. But what
is generally overlooked is the critique of `materialist doctrine’ that
divides society in two parts’ and cannot see the `coincidence of the
changing of circumstances and human activity as self-change’ that can
be `rationally understood.’22 As Marx would say `we know only one
science, the science of history’.
Returning to the working on informal, disorganized, scattered and
other such forms of labour subsumption in NCT/NCR, it soon became
clear this work had already encompassed much more than what is
regarded by the voluntarism’s `professional’ criteria. What is going
on pertains to ```weltwirtschaft’, the economic world, under the term
`globalization’. C Chase-Dunn writes:
22 Marx K, Thesis on Feuerbach, § 3, 6 & 10, German Ideology, Moscow, 1976
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 21
The world-system has certainly become more integrated in the latest wave of globalization. The current high degree of economic integrationis already higher than the peak in the 19th century, but we should also remember that waves of globalization have always been followed byperiods of deglobalization in which long-distance interaction decreases, and this is likely to also be true of the future even though most analysts find this difficult to imagine.
The process involves
…For most of these former rural residents migration to the megacities means moving .to huge slums and gaining a precarious livingin the `informal sector’ of services and small-scale production. Many public health experts believe that new disease vectors similar in scope and lethality to that of the infamous 1918 disaster may occur inthe near future’ though this is only a rough conjecture. Most of the national governments have failed to adequately prepare for such an eventuality, which exposes informal and disorganized labour to unprecedented catastrophes. Like most disasters, the lethality would obviously affect the poor in very large numbers, `especially in the megacities of the Global South (Mike Davis 2005).
Peter Taylor (1996) points to the important fact, which he calls `world impasse,’ that it is an ecological impossibility for the globalpoor to catch up with the global rich. ... Thus global equalization will require that the rich go down to meet the poor who are coming up.This is a big problem that no one wants to discuss, especially in the core countries’ inasmuch as `people’ or ordinary thinking turns its back on contradiction. `Mentioning this in polite conversation is usually considered to be in poor taste.’
It is not clear what `de-globalization’ really means, other than a
cyclical assumption. It may imply contraction of the world economy
after a period of expansion but as capital expands at one level, there
is simultaneous contraction going on elsewhere. Histories are not
founded on cyclical logic; and units of time-abstraction measuring
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 22
times past like an invariant that can be projected into the future
implies no activity of the future on the present. On the time of
history, it may do well to recall Sartre, who says that `dialectical
future’ is alone capable of justifying prediction; in order to be
other and the same.’23 Of greater import, however, is that world-
economies shift on a geographical scale. Each new shift is self-
similar up to a point. While the business of prognostication is an
interesting game, making forecasts remains something else.
History is not about making forecasts but offering insights. Strands
of time are as self-related as they differ. Some frequencies within
cycles are more easily predictable and in some cases, their amplitude
of variation/fluctuation may not be so easily forecast. But cycles and
intercycles or K-waves/H-waves from dismal sciences, like economics or
demography have little to offer by way of insight.24 The H-wave or the
hegemonic long cycles, which has ideology as a significant component-
23 Sartre J-P, Critique of dialectical reason, vol 2, [tr] Hoare Q, London, 1991, 406; Marxism caught a glimpse of `true temporality’ whenit criticized the Cartesian notion of time as a homogeneous continuum.; `To me history can only be conceived in n dimensions. This generosity is indispensable; it does not dismiss onto a lower plane, i.e., outside the explanatory area, the cultural insight or the materialist dialectic, or any other analysis.’ Braudel F, On the concept of socialhistory, On History, p.131
24 Li M, Xiao F & Zhn A, Long waves and institutional trends: A study of long-wave movement of the profit-rate in capitalist countries, JWSR, vol VII, no. I, 2007, p 33-54; K-Cycles denote 50 year economic cycles called Kondratieff cycles and H-Cycles, what succeeds phases of long hegemonic wars among core countries, or Hegemonic-cycles with a mean duration of about 150 years
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 23
`globalization ideology’, `nationalist/indigenous ideologies’ – 25is
also the most problematic, not only because it lacks any unit of
understanding, unless something like say `ideologeme’26 [derived from
`mythologeme’] is specified as one, but even more is its usage in a
purely pejorative sense. Ideology is made thoroughly evaluative
without any consideration of its more paradoxical, `nonevaluative’
[ Mannheim] and precarious condition, unlike religion, myths and
25 Friedman J, Culture and its politics in Global System, in Proto Sociology, vol 20, 2004 indegenist ideologies = `fourth world ideologies’= ideologies `harboured’ by `New Right movements in France,Italy, Germany’ = anti-universalist, anti-imperialist, against universal religion and exceedingly multi-culturalist; however, since there is a plethora of nationalist/indegenist ideologies at odds with each other, the terrain of contestation [ Sahlins] is seen as `contested cultural politics’. Globalization ideology is found articulated by Hardt and Negri, ``considered `popular [ `Empire’ was on its 6th reprint in 2004] among the cultural and political elite `who do not communicate’, in formulations like, `Nomadism and miscegenation appears here as a figure of virtue, as the first ethicalprocess on the terrain of Empire’ as opposed to `celebration of the local can be regressive and fascistic when they oppose circulation andmixture and reinforce the walls of nation, ethnicity, race, people andthe like.’ [ Empire: 2000, 362] In every instance, except that considering Globalization as ideology was always highly problematic and suspect, though as a real historical process of capitalist world market expansion, it turns out to be conceptual, but precisely for thesuspect reason, as an ideology it occurs in the pejorative sense. As adisplaced, metaphysical and/or romantic term, `Nomadism’ is more like a roving ideological term, suited for the purpose.
26 Schrider Y & Muskhelishvili N, Parable and initiation of living knowledge, Social Sciences, Vol XXI, 1990, Moscow where the authors introduce the `ideologeme’ as an intended transformation of idea whichcannot be defined but found in the pragmatics and semantics of ideological texts : the ideologeme is `prescriptive’, `unambiguous’, `authoritarian’, `literal’, `sign expression’, `recommendatory’, `binding’, `non-deviating’, `copy’/ reduplicable’, ``clichéd’, `suggestive’, etc.; however, each of them should be read in oppositionto correspondingly intentional semantics of parable, p. 139-141
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 24
doctrines with entrenched prescriptive codes, memes, semiotic
structures/symbolic orders and rules of everyday behavior. We are
given to assume ideology as a function of hegemonic power, thus in the
pejorative sense, as deluding, misleading, harmful, like some abstract
topos that emerges after the `destruction of a system of places’ a
construct from Badiou. 27But Badiou is hardly proposing anything new
other than making ideology the result of `ethical failing’, `untrue
subjectivization’ or as `the question of imaginary’ as some prop
comforting the `anxious subject unable to sustain the uncertain
discipline of courage and undecidable measure of justice’ in the face
of `terror exercised by the superego’. He wishes to confront what he
sees as the `current ideological nemesis’ in `democratic materialism’,
akin to Tronti’s later reflections on democracy exercising the
`tyranny of the average man’ churning out `reactionary novelties’ as
they incarnate themselves spurred by the backlash of revisionist
historiography and new age renegade philosophies.28 Badiou does offer a
typo graph of subjects `incapable of justice’, like `the resigned
fatalist’ who has succumbed to the service of goods, the `passive
nihilist’ as an `after-subject’, the `real nihilist’ without the
`safety of scepticism’, the `obscure subject’ negating the existence
of `new present’ as distinct from the `reactive subject’. The latter,
27 Tuscano A, The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or the Other Subjectsof Politics, Cosmos and History, v.1. nos 1-2, 2006 , p. 21, 25, 26; Smith B A, The Limits of the subject in Badiou’s Being and Event, Cosmos and history, v. 1, # 1-2, pp. 137-138
28 Tronti M, Towards a Critique of Political Democracy, Cosmos andHistory, vol 5, no. 1, 2009, p. 71-72, 74 ; Tronti thinks that the `common’ we speak of today is what is `in-common’, which has started exercising self-dictatorship or of tyranny over oneself, voluntary servitude. For Tronti the nemesis is the `democratic empire’ that imperils the political subject. Tuscano A, Op Cit, p. 25
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 25
though repressive is also engaged with his conspecifics and cohorts
`to give up’ but secure the rewards from a diminished `present’
whereas the `obscure subject’ [`opaque subject’ conveys the sense
since obscurity is a correlate of rarity, eclipse, etc, better left to
itself otherwise it would no longer be obscure but distinct] exceeds
the reactive anti body by invoking a `transcendental body’ as a fetish
in order to occlude and silence novelty.
Now these subtly distinct non-universal subjectivities -
`intellectuals perverted by rancor, illiterate muscle bound youth,
desperate unemployed workers, rancid couples, bachelor informants,
atrabilious professors, envious academicians, vicious priests,
cuckolded husbands, dried up matrons, shopkeepers ruined by capital –29form a totality that exceeds ideology but not the real conditions
that produce these subjects insofar as they are `objectively’ real ;
their one-sided, pure non-objective shape coincides with their
existence as abstraction from the historical moments of actual
reality. Badiou’s `obscure subject’ can be seen to emerge in
proletarian conditions but what separates them is that their non-
objectivity is also an abstract negation, like the masters, that
vanishes before `the immediate presence [Dasein]’ of their individual
body as the possibility or the power of collective practice. This is
the consciousness that falls outside `the material forces of human
social conscience’ –30 of collective human psychology. Their presence
is more opaque, not obscure but blanketed which cannot be understood
29 Tuscano A, Op Cit, p. 2830 Marx K, Grundrisse, pp. 239-289, Chapter on capital
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 26
by the aggregate of symptoms or the main split that divides them in
extremes, and accordingly, they are repelled by immediacy, here the
present is abstractly negated. Badiou brings in imagination as the
`site’ creating untrue, unjust subjects, but it is indeed a starkly
empty imagination that cannot even compensate neglect and overpowering
psychic turbulence. Badiou does not seem to think that disturbance
comes from the real, i.e., not in the sense of the subject’s negating
the real [present] as Badiou has it but because of the negation by the
real of these subjects. `Each individual is an animal precisely
because he is such an animal’.31 The source of `lethal disturbance’
that is experienced in the unconscious does not pertain solely to
Badiou’s characterological types. Thought is itself unconsciously
busy. The unrest of unconscious, oscillating between life and death
has the dialectic at work surpassing the rise of the shapes in that
region by relating negatively to them, experiencing collapse and
rebirth in the structure of `both-and.’ `Death is the most dreadful
and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength…But
life of the spirit is not life that shrinks from death and keeps
itself untouched by devastation’; life endures it and maintains itself
in the unconscious. Life wins its truth by finding itself in its
dismemberment.32 Likewise the concept is not the abyss; it is rather
absolute negativity that it shapes and creates, maintaining itself
utterly sublated. When finite reason suspends its finititude and
`sinks’ its negative moment, as `downfall’, this abyss, negative
`ground’ where it has fallen is also a positive ground for the
31 Hegel G W F, SL, pp. 36-3732 Hegel, Philosophy of Spirit, § 32 cited in Mills J, The
Unconscious Abyss – Hegel’s anticipation of psychoanalysis, N Y, 2002,p. 34
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 27
emergence of the affirmative as immediate self that has mediated the
ground to emerge self-sublated, emptied of self-alienation.33Badiou’s
`other subjects’ cannot relate to the present, or are absent in the
present not because of the filling up of a monster body in imagination
but because `thoughtless understanding’ [verstand] results when
abandoned by the dialectic in the moment of great misfortune or a
violent upheaval which put the time of the world `out of joint’, the
scission [end of oscillations] covering by undialectical understanding
or private thoughts, the abyss of deranged unconscious. Badiou sees
the ontological limit in indeterminate and the `something’ that
separates the [true] subject from ontology so that the `something
indeterminate’ remains to be `accessed and utilized’ by the subject.34
What does elude Badiou is the `objective grasping’ that is higher and
richer than ontological `something’ to be accessed and the `same’
[metaphysical] `void’.35 In his Phenomenology section on lordship and
bondage, Hegel shows that the lord has desire for the object and he
enjoys it by using it up, by vanishing it as abstract negation. But
because he did not work on it his object of desire, he is not pure
being-for-self but remains a dependent object as the work of the
bondsman. The bondsman works and shapes the object, so his work has a
contrary effect. His work gives him the sense of personality, his
being-in-self because the object of work stands in an independent
33 Hegel G W F, SL, vol 1, p. 48334 Smith B A, Limits of Subject in Badiou’s Being and Event, Cosmos
and History, v. 1. # 1-2, 2006, p. 13835 Hegel G W F, SL, p. 76; Badiou translates Parmenides `the same,
indeed is at once to think and to be‘ in Badiou A, What is a philosophical institution? Or Address, Transcription and Inscription, Cosmos and History, Journal of Natural and Social philosophy, v. 1, nos., 1-2, 2006, p. 12
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 28
relation to him. One will see how in the Grundrisse this objective
grasping formed the presupposition in Marx’s comprehension of wage-
labour.
One last point: as a whole this is a work of general history. A
general history that attempts to account for the concrete moments of
the universe of work/labour, freed of empiricism without unnecessary
concern for trifles and scrupulousness. What is missing in general
history, detailed data structures, sequences, sources and more
historiographically extensive referencing is sought to be made up by
considerations of larger frameworks such as civilizations [ a term or
an ensemble that has simply dropped off from Annales journal on history
without justification because if historians abandon seeing the past in
terms of civilizations, it may turn out to be too bad for history]
though by civilizations < in plural> we also mean the irreducible
principle of unity that emerged in time, but open to perishing and
ceasing to be, though the principle would also pass over / aufheben
into a higher unity. We do not speak of civilizations as hypostatized,
exhibiting the principle of particularity, insularity, in brief the
number of `bad uses’ that it has been subjected to. But these so-
called `bad uses’ themselves inhere in civilization, whether it is
related to `cultural areas’ or as a `structure’ `weighed down with the
enormous and a priori inconceivable weight of so many ancient elements.’36
It presents a contradictory reality, uniting regression and
progression within its destiny. Yet civilizations are transient, even
in terms of synchronicity and if this period is suggestive of its 36 Braudel F, The history of Civilizations, the past explains the
present, On History, Chicago, 1980, p. 208
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 29
transiency, historians need to have another look at it. As the range
of possibilities increase, the constraints imposed by civilizations
are pushed back, till such a limit when these boundary conditions can
no longer impose themselves, when the `envelope’ bursts. Culture can
no more be the substitute for civilization in singular, which is
itself a vanishing moment for the plurality. Globalization is not the
becoming of capital but its vanishing moment, as the moment that is
apprehended by education and universal person because the principle of
abstraction of this singularity is justice, which annuls all local,
cultural, natural and indeed civilizational differences.37 We also take
up perspectives of comparative history, though due to constraints, it
has not been possible to take it up systematically. But there are two
main types of historical comparisons: one, pertaining to probing
themes like empires, production, revolutions, religions for observing
and deducing a/symmetries and two, showing that comparative studies
provide methods and instruments that increases the visibility and
coherence of the thematic of study or for validating hypothesis on
macro-phenomena, which in the absence of a comparative frame of
reference may not work out to the fullness of understanding
[vernauft].38 Globalization propitiates constructing `connected
37 Karin de Boer, Hegel today: A tragic conception of intercultural conflicts, Cosmos & History,no 2-3,2007
38 Maria Ligia Coelho Prado, Repensando A Historia Comparada Da America Latine, Sao Paolo, Revisita Historia, NO 153, 2005 ; the practitioners referred in the corresponding order are : Eric Hobsbawm;Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, Barrington Moore Jr; the author, who has practiced comparative studies in Latin American history points to theuncertainties of its procedures, methodologies on borderlines, effectiveness of results and biases like `Eurocentrism. She says that the relative scarcity of comparative history is also because the forces of nationalism are entrenched in the university system where `the main hegemonic idea seems to be to `test’ your national vision.
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 30
histories’ [Serge Gruzinski] , `hardwired histories’ that help
dissembling traditional European historiography [Sanjay Subramaniam],
borderline/contact point’ histories and other developing branches of
fruitful research. Though the significance of moving away from
national vision and space is definitely an advance, these are
presupposed in this study. The long duration as the main axis is
visible only in relation to social evolution, production forms, and
general history of labour, inter-related ecosystems, human geography
and so forth. Besides, almost all the places as of now are organized
under the nation signifier, with their own national hegemonies. A
critical attitude towards these visions also implies the moment of
supersession as well as recognition of their necessity. But here, one
object of criticism happens to be the `topos’ or space, national,
regional, local or whatever, unless they are not seen in terms of a
dialectical constellation or an inner framework [zussamenhang], these
cannot be sublated. It is for the historian to show the
epistemological difference of a general history. This work owes much
to Marx and Hegel among many others and I do not claim any elevated
plane other than that of the manner of encountering some of the
worlds.
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 31
1.1
Here we are making some general remarks in terms of speculative
thinking of both Hegel and Marx. We also understand the dialectic as
the mode adequate to speculative thought. This study does not so much
prioritize the validity of `Marxist [political] economics’, much of
that kind of work is carried out in the academia, but considers Marx’s
critique of political economy, as the negative, opposed position to
capitalist production process as a whole. The basic assumption is the
`trinity formula’ expanded to rent-interest/
profit-circulation/tonnage-value addition / wages-incomes-
compensation. The profit-rate may be expressed as
Value added - total wages, salaries + supplement
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 34
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Capital stock
If there are moments when even a complicated society like this
subcontinent finds itself polarized between two classes then the
element of time is present, even if not very precise and clear yet
conditions demand and urge the self towards unprecedented thinking
activity, trans-praxis at least in meristemal / vanguard population
segments. Here, we offer a critique as the negative moment of simple
immediacy, as it is expounded in Hegel’s Greater Logic, which runs
through the entire course of the work of presentation, from the first
to the last and this itself gives lie to the widely recurrent notion
about the work, Capital, as an unfinished one. To say that the
dialectical requirement is ever present in Marx does not preclude the
analytical side of investigation, which is found as an antinomy in a
`historical materialist’ attempt at `re-founding’ Marx[ism] [ Bidet’s
study].39In the case of so-called realism, the subjective
concept/notion is an empty identity that receives and transforms the
given material into logical determination. Analytical `cognition’ that
is seen to be at work shows up as a `positing that determines itself
as presupposition’. But these two should not be seen separately as the
logical form that analysis raises in abstract is found in cognition
39 Bidet J, Exploring Marx’s Capital – Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions, [tr] Fernbach D, Leiden 2007
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 35
but seen conversely, it is not something posited but possesses being
in itself or immediacy.40
The negative moment is both the historical becoming and its
dialectical conceptualization. It is in the concrete historical
dialectic that Marx sublates Hegel’s ideal conceptualization of the
concept and method/dialectic as it’s absolute. This is not a question
of whether it is a complete or incomplete open system needing further
`construction’ nor is the method under the grip and domination of
absolute eternal idea but precisely a free release out of the absolute
in the Hegelian sense other than the self-moving moment of the
negative for any dialectical movement that results in a work of
aesthetic unity that Marx wrote to Engels as a statement of intent of
sorts in 1865.All the moments [movement + momentum] reconstitute
themselves in the historical flux. The negative as simple beginning of
the dialectic is itself a synthetic unity of concept and method. It is
a concept insofar as the point of departure is immediately universal,
what lies before is the immense accumulation of commodities and as
method the negative is already a negation of the positive, two
positives to be precise, that of immediacy of being and thought, the
transparent Cartesian ego, and the opaque, inverted world of things.41
40 Hegel G W F, Science of Logic, Bk II, 793; [tr] A V Miller [hereafter SL]
41 Inversion, at times `Conversion’ is defined as the `actualizationof labour into loss of actuality’, which is a real phenomena, not resting in the imagination of worker or capitalists. The process of inversion is a historical necessity but in no way an `absolute necessity of production’; it is rather `a vanishing one, a point of departure’.
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 36
Among the central `synthetic notion’ employed in this work is that
of social capital or labour productivity expressed by the ratio of
constant/fixed capital value in the course of private capitalist
accumulation to its opposed moment. Constant capital-process is the
part of capital laid out for machinery, tools, plant, and technology
while variable capital value-process is the part laid out for the
workforce involving the blue and white collar, casual/contract labour
and permanent employees, as populations are subjected to a social
division of labour. The ratio of capital lay out for constant and
variable capital-values denote `organic composition of capital’. With
the development of productivity of labour accumulation of social
wealth grows faster than private accumulation of capital-value because
here accumulation is accompanied by the centralization of its
individual elements. Yet with the growth of total capital, though the
labour incorporated in it increases; it does so through diminishing
proportion/ the process of `emanation’.42 This is the dynamic phase,
when constant part of the organic composition of capital increases and
the variable part diminish; in the more tangentially drawn to linear
equilibrium phase of growth, capital lay-out increases in a higher
scale on the side of existing technical or the constant part of
itself; thereby it attracts additional labour-power, or makes possible
the variable part to increase. Thus owing to the increase in the scale
of production of social capital and large numbers of workers set in
42 The `oriental’ conception of emanation not only illuminates itself but also emanates,. Its emanations are distancing [Entfrenungen] from its undiminished clarity; the successive products are less perfect than the preceding one’s…The process of emanation is only taken as a happening..’ Hegel G W F, SL, p. 538-539
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 37
motion and owing to the development of labour productivity, `there is
also an extension of scale on which greater attraction of workers by
capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion…The working
population produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by
which it is itself made superfluous’, as a cumulative process of
negative feedbacks.43 The insight offered by Marx at this level is that
such is the `law of population’ peculiar to capitalist mode of
production. A growing mass of unemployed including migrant, casual,
part-time or semi-employed, disguised, attached and unwaged/unpaid
labour constitutes the `reserve supply of labour’. The law of
population is not conceptualized in the abstract but in relation to
different historical production forms there corresponds special laws
that are valid only for the historical duration of that production
form.
Surplus population is produced by social accumulation that
`conversely’ becomes the lever for the existence of capitalist mode.
It is an `immanent contradiction’ of capital with machinery being
applied for producing surplus value under a given amount of capital
when the rate of surplus value can only be increased by decreasing the
number of workers. Large scale machinery [dead labour] is forced by
the tendency of falling rate of profit to revolutionize itself
continuously by technology of labour process. This more or less
defines the conditions of relative surplus value production – relative
to the rate of profit – or when labour is really subsumed under
capital, then capital effectively seizes the whole of society in
43 Marx K, Capital, vol 1, p. 783; [tr] Ben Fawks [hereafter cap 1]
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 38
extent and changes it in depth. `Capital itself is a moving
contradiction in that it possess to reduce labour time to a minimum
while it posits labour-time as the sole measure of wealth’. On the
`one side it calls to life all powers of science and of nature, social
combination and social intercourse in order to create wealth
independent of labour time deployed in it; on the other, it wants to
hold labour time as a rod for giant social forces and to confine them
to value limits.’44
The very motion of industrial/technological capital depends on
constant transformation of workers into technologically unemployed and
semi-employed. Productivity cycles or cycles of social production
moves like the movement of heavenly bodies, a movement of `expansion
and contraction’. When the technical basis of production expands,
productivity of labour increases and then capital increases the supply
of workers rather than demand for workers. Intensification of work,
incentives that come with bargains by working higher number of hours,
overtime, over-work, rationalization of work schedules, etc., was
seen by Marx more in terms of submitting to dictates of capital,
though the latter half of 20th c. shows another pattern. However, in
macro terms, the swelling numbers of `supply side of labour’ also
makes regular work vulnerable, increasing the possibility of hire-and-
fire given the increasingly abstract mechanical nature of labour at
the workplace, de-skilling to a large extent enables employers to use
both direct and subliminal forces on workers to submit. The supply of
labour through intensification becomes to an extent independent of the
44 Marx K, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 706
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 39
supply of workers. Although any combined action between the unemployed
and employed disturbs the `law’ though as long as there were colonies,
it worked adversely for any such combination, but under conditions of
real domination the economic world appears inverted, stands on its
head that is money, which are precisely the conditions for increasing
worker dependency on capital, the rule of things over men, and the
rule of the product of labour over labour value and use-value.45 But
then, rationalization working upon abstract content makes the
capitalist just as enslaved by relationships of capital as its
opposite pole, the workers. Whereas the capitalist is satisfied with
the other of inverted world, the worker has to sublate these
conditions to perpetuate a process of the withering away of necessity
– the time of capital.46
Yet capital employs labour. It embodies a force that creates the
situation of submission by labour. With increasing complexification in
capital-relations, these take on increasingly mysterious forms.
Inversion of relations that accompany mysteriousness make `things…
rise up on their hind legs’ 47 Thus social forms of labour appear as
forms of capitalist development and productive forces of labour
including collective unity in co-operation, combination in division of
45 Marx K. Capital, vol 1, Results of the Immediate process of Production, Appendix, London, 1976, p. 990
46 The first index of `sublation’ would be negation of exchange value, value expressed as abstract labour , the `essential difference’consists in a different form of measure of exchange-value other than labour-time., or `the free development of individuals made possible bytimes freed and means created’ Marx K, Grundrisse, p. 706
47 Cap v 1, p. 1054
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 40
labour at the shop floor and intra-plant level, use `of forces of
nature and sciences, appear as productive forces of `capitalism’., as
forces of domination. In this network of relations, intensification
and rationalization of labour – power gets modified in a way that
renders its independent autonomy impotent. Technological conditions of
labour dominate labour by replacing it, suppressing, excluding and
rendering their independence superfluous. Technologically driven
machines themselves take on the appearance of masters, embodying the
powers of capital. Socially applied labour on science appears as means
of exploitation of labour. Reified expression of forces of labour that
exerts compulsion implies that social and natural labour does not
develop within the valorization process, but they do in the actual
labour-process. Capital takes them as attributes intrinsic to
capital-thing, as its use value. It can then represent itself as
social productivity of labour while workers represent productive
labour as no more than individual worker for capital.48 Capital
emerges from the process of production as something different from the
way it entered.
Marx presents the network of capital relations through thinking that
grasps relations as contradictions. Because these relations contain
contradiction, the resultant concept shines through them. These are
not manifold, indifferent relations or differences in reality for the
dialectic. Difference develops into opposition and then into
contradiction so that, following Hegel’s Logic, it can be said that
`the sum total of all realities become absolute contradiction within
48 Cap v 1, pp. 1055-1056
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 41
itself.’49 The stage of `ordinary thinking’, in contrast to
speculative thinking abhors contradiction that it resolves to nothing
or not-being because it fails to recognize the positive in the
negation, contradiction, where it is absolute activity, akin to the
motion of heavenly bodies. Consequently, the determinate essential
differences, in their display of the force of domination and
compulsion over labour and inversion of the real into a further
regression to nothing for the capitalist is intelligently seen as an
advance that passes over to contradictory moments. Besides, all the
appearance forms under condition of real subsumption of labour under
capital imply that the contradictions are grounded in a higher reality
of appearance, in the sense of appearance of essential relations of
existence.50 The notions of actuality and necessity employed by Marx
can arise in the absolute unrest of becoming that is contingent. When
raised above ground-relations, contingency is free, essential and
[inherently] necessary actuality. It is a unreflected [ reflection
less] freedom, whose `essence is light shy’ that breaks forth as
negated `free otherness’, their self- based shape, as content
indifferent to form. The becoming now are immediate self-negations of
determinate actuality and necessity, which they blindly destruct in
otherness, breaking forth as illusory showing. Now contingency in this
affirmative becoming is a transition to a unity that is an advance to
substance as expansive, but as positive self-relation, whereas the
blind transition is a retreat to interiority where the exposition
reveals movement as a return to ground relations and its further
sublation/aufheben to passive substance.51
49 SL, p. 44250 SL, p. 49951 SL, p. 553
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 42
This is not a study that sees a theoretical level marked out as
Marxism and another level marked as empirical reality as a testing
ground for the theories or to provide a rationale for demonstrating
the validity, rather a continuing validity of the theory. The validity
of the book, Capital consists in the movement of critical-negative as
the active self-movement of the method through the entire course of
enquiry into capital. While the subject of study involves its
systematic comprehension this is a critical knowing of the subject of
study in motion together with self-motion. This motion resembles the
movement of the planets only up to a certain extent because the
subject is a human- social one, not pertaining to astronomy. The
subject of the critique is also capable of self-transformation through
inversion when it is equally the object. However, both the subjective
and objective sides fall within the social realm. This is where the
stronger moment of the critique appears to break up capitalist
production as though it was eternal by showing up different moments in
the synchronous plane when history enters as well as positioning
capital as a level/stage of human history, which contains within
itself the previous stages of social production going far back in
historical time. They exist as negative moments that the system
carries within its own dynamic by showing them through deployments
under specific conditions. Here one can say that the past that is
negated are also kept as positive moments, to be used under certain
conditions by making that past to be its own as if all that ever
existed was capital and all that will exist is the same. History is
incorporated in order to negate the historical conditions. But by
doing so it also exhibits its own conceptual banality and fixed,
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 43
static kind of thought upon which capital depends. This is the moment
for the intervention by intelligible, thinking activity of the
critical-negative. Not only is the object of enquiry de-mystified of
its fixed, fetishistic, reified forms of appearance, but the negative
is restored back to history. This means that capital itself is
historically conditioned leading on the one side to a enquiry or a
study of the social forms preceding the system of capitalist
production but also to reveal its inner working and tendencies that
renders this system prone to periodic crisis, breakdowns and collapse
and in these moments only the activity of classes in struggle, locked
in heightened combat becomes decisive for overthrowing and going over
by transiting to the successor level. Thus history is not merely a
study of the `prehistory’ of capital but something that inevitably
enters in the present through the human agency of classes who want to
make their own history. But making history should also have as its
prerequisite an alternative historical process at work. In this way,
duration breaths life into the dead bones of the past which means the
real empirical past accessed by the self-same method though the
initial conditions are not the same.
Thus the theoretical level is far from resolved considering the
actual breakthroughs made by Marx. If it were a settled issue as
variants of Marxist ideology have it then there would hardly be any
need for this theory. It is the dynamic, process-subject/objects,
recursive/non-recursive relations and unities of an open-ended finite
system in indeterminate flux that makes Marx’s critique so amenable
for the study.
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 44
2 Informal, unwaged, irregular, attached labour as social forms under Real Domination
The following placing of legal forms is actually meant to show that
even legal terms have made the notion of `unfree labour’ untenable and
nondescript. Capitalist expansion/contraction on a global scale has
interest only in abstract labour which can produce commodities and
`create value’. The capitalist is a `practical man, and although he
does not consider what he says outside his business within his
business he knows what he is doing.’52 Capital knows that it can only
obtain large quantity of labour in the sphere of circulation, or the
labour market. He is interested in the size of simple labour, for
procuring them through contractors, middlemen but mostly as a result
of economic forces, for which forecasting and analysis has been paid
for. He is primarily interested in the sphere of circulation whose
boundaries protect innate rights of man, freedom, liberty both with
regard to himself as a purchaser and labour that has come to sell
itself. All entry into contract is free for both parties, each paying
heed to his own interests, not bothered about others as if working to
`mutual advantage’ under `omniscient providence’. As this sphere of
circulation is `left’ behind, there will be a `change in physiognomy’
or so it appears, a `certain change takes place’ in the `character
armour’ of both parties. He who was the purchaser now strides out `as
a capitalist’, `self-importantly intent on his business’ while the
seller, the possessor of labour-power, `is timid and holds back, like
someone who has bought his hide to the market and now has nothing else
52 Cap v 1, p. 330
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 46
to expect but- a tanning’.53 Now he is not just free in terms of
selling his labour power but also free of all the means needed to
realize his labour process. But this is the empty freedom of Person as
the result who not only creates value but also is the object of
definition, classification and determination by apologetics,
professors and moralists. In essence labour is an imposed necessity
under all forms of capitalist domination. This is a discussion on the
historical specificity and a consideration of legal forms.
There is considerable work on breakdown of slavery and `unfreedom’ /
unfreiheit, especially in German historiography ranging from the use
of `merit’ in cases of `allocating’ dependent permanent labourers in
Pharonic Egypt to subordinate beneficiaries to Stoic thinking on
slavery with its emphasis on `inner freedom’ [Epictetus] to Roman
legal terms for enslavement – contra naturum and libertatis – to Roman
legislation curtailing freedom of specific groups like tenant farmers,
city-councilor’s and members of professional collegia. Though most of
these studies are compartmentalized none have unearthed texts that
betray any doubts about intrinsic legitimacy of chattel slavery.
Instead there are studies showing the justification of bondage in
medieval scholastic thought, resurgence of slavery in medieval
Mediterranean, discussion on the `legitimacy of unfreedom in German
medieval literature though there are interesting surveys like the
argument that states that Marx and Weber’s `observation on ancient
slavery was coloured by concerns about contemporary slavery’, though
53 Cap v 1, p. 280
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 47
they are not as thorough about such generalizations. 54 This is only
empirically correct and conceptually wide off the mark. Weber’s
`Ideal type’ of `plantation slavery’ which served as the model is not
given for its analogies with Roman latifundia inasmuch as to show how
the ideal represented the most advanced and perfect form, containing
within themselves all the past, discrete types of slavery. Marx
viewed slavery in terms of long historical duration, but he was clear
that `in epochs preceding the bourgeois epoch, in slave relation, the
slave belongs to a particular individual or a specific owner as his
laboring machine. He is no more than a thing [sache] in the totality of
his laboring capacity or the work done. Nothing resembles living
labour under such conditions.’ On the other hand `the serf appears as
a moment of property in land itself, as an appendage to land. Now `en-
serfment is the process encompassing the moment in its totality over
which the lord exercises his domination.’55 There is considerable
conceptual overlap here between Marx and Hegel. Hegel saw slave as a
`thing’ or `thing hood’ is the essence of slave consciousness’56
Hereafter though a difference arises that has hardly received the
due attention. Marx remarks that slave becomes self- conscious from
the moment of understanding that he cannot be the property of any
other; he becomes aware of himself as a Person. This consciousness is
to Marx the condition that `relegates slavery to merely artificial
54 Elizabeth Herman-Otto, Unfreie Arbeits und lebensverhaltnisse vonantike bis in die Gegenwert, Eine Einfuhrung, Georg Olms, 2005
55 Grundrisse, www.marxists.org 56 Susan Buck-Mors, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Enquiry, vol 26, no.
4, Chicago, Summer 2000, p. 829
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 48
existence.’ The `Person itself makes the condition of production to
regress to passive, vegetative mode, degradation, etc.’57 Hegel says
on the contrary that the `slave himself is responsible for his lack of
freedom by choosing life over liberty and this freedom cannot be
granted from above…It is solely by risking his life that freedom is
attained’. Further, the individual who has not staked his life may be
recognized as a Person; `but he has not attained the truth of
recognition as an independent self-consciousness.’58 The difference
shows the advance of Marx over Hegel when the former does not sound as
voluntaristic and equally naive as Hegel on this subject while at the
same time, Marx was not just an abolitionist who thought that the
American civil war had Personhood of the slave, and abstract morality
as the main agenda. The internal history of slave insurrection from
1683, `conspiracies’ in Virginia, south Carolina [1711], rebellions
[1722-Virginia; 1730 Carolina], the insurrections of 1739 that led to
the Negro Act [1740] followed by the plot of 1741 in N Y, and the more
remarkably insurrections led by Denmark Vesey [ 1822] and Nat Turner
[1831] besides the insurrections and mutinies at sea are not merely
indicative of an unfolding consciousness beyond abstract right and
morality, though the institutional recognition of personhood as
citizens turns to be the foundation.59 Marx knew how direct slavery is
compatible with capitalist economy, in pre-Bellum American south and
his own involvement with the state of affairs in Kansas at the time of
American civil war is hardly needed to illustrate his concrete,
historical standpoint, something that needed to be found out in
57 Grundrisse, www.marxists.org 58 Hegel G W F, Phenomenology of Mind, Jena 1807-08; Encyclopedia Pt
3, Philosophy of Mind cited by Susan Buck-Mors, Op Cit, pp 831-83559 Brawley B, A social history of American Negro, N Y , 1921
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 49
Hegel’s case by contextualizing the revolution in Haiti and Hegel’s
not too direct involvement with the historical situation. Marx saw the
movement away from slave consciousness into new forms as developing
from within the antithesis of of `existing development of production’60
as results of historical specificity not merely as an instance of the
motion of the passive substance after having suffered the necessary
violence from the active substance. History not only makes men but one
also has to attend to history for unveiling its inner dialectic. That
has to do with the withering away of the institution of slavery over
spans of historical time. This phase of `withering’ is similar to the
conception of emanation, which is light that illuminates and also
emanates through successive distancing, or successive production where
the next is less perfect that the previous. In other words, with
emanation there is a process of recursive scaling down instead of
accumulation by self-scaling through conversions and/or alterations.
Hegel sees this process as a `happening’, which is `becoming-as-
increasing-loss’.61These phases have already been suspended in history
as `past presuppositions’ in their `disappearance’, vanishing’ as
historical conditions suspend themselves in the process of becoming.
Historical investigations enter when capitalist economy `points
beyond itself to proceeding, earlier’ forms of production for making
`correct’ observation and deduction. It is not `necessary to write
the real history’ of production relations but observation of processes
having become in history for making accurate deductions leading to
60 Marx K, Grundrisse, pp. 239-24061 Hegel G W F, SL, p. 538-539
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 50
grasping the dynamics of their disappearance, an accuracy as close to
`empirical numbers’. A study of this nature could not be made for its
own sake but for developing a view that can be lead to `points at
which the suspensions of present forms of production relations
indicate the signs of its transitoriness/ becoming. Just as history
appears suspended by the present production relations to the point
where the `circular nature of arguments correspond to historical
development of capital’ 62, so do contemporary conditions of production
appear to be `engaged in suspending themselves and positing at the
same time the presuppositions for a new state of society’. What
suspends and posits itself at the same time are conversions of freedom
`as the subject converts the object into determinations of
concept/notion’ so that the `concept becomes active in the object and
relates to itself by giving itself a reality’. 63 The recognition by
the worker of its alien objectivity, its product, instruments and
materials that `appear as alien property’ though it is `its own’
estranges/destroys the object from becoming an active moment of
workers conceptualization. These exist as capital’s objective element,
the content of `objectified labour’, the consumption of capital by
labour in the production process into which capital does not enter in
its living capacity. The conditions and presuppositions of the
`arising’/ becoming of capital are not determinations of being.
Consequently, they disappear as `real capital arises on the basis of
its own reality’ as it gives itself its own presence and proceeds to
create its own reality for its `conditions of maintenance and growth’.
It proceeds as a `determinate being of objectivity that is alienated
62 Marx Cap 1, Results, p. 49463 Hegel G W F, WL, pp. 782-783
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 51
from its suspended presuppositions, the historical preludes of its
becoming, `lie behind’ though by no means extinguished.64
Marx finds the limits of bourgeois economic thought that restricts
itself to thinking this historical process of becoming as abstract,
analytical, external and discrete moments as though re-formulating the
process of becoming for contemporary process of capitals realization.
So we find that Marx is not in the least abstracting capital, as it
were from the historical process. He is showing that historical
process of becoming themselves give rise to the `process of
abstraction from the side of capital. Capital presupposes the
immediate process of production by seeing it from the outside and
reducing the products – raw materials, labour expenditure, instruments
– to `ingredients’ and thereafter to commodities. The ingredients are
included in calculations as `sums of monies’, or outlays in the
valorization process.65 Capital makes an inner separation between
labour process and valorization process. It is by this process of
differentiation and suspension that capital becomes a process. `Labour
is the yeast thrown into it which starts fermenting’. The subjectivity
of labour is suspended on one side and objectivity is the manner-in-
which-it-exists-to-be-worked-on. Capital is `passive’ towards the
first suspension, just as non-being has an abstract determination.
Only when a `particular substance’ arises, or particularity is
separated from passive subjectivity, would the substance now be the
process of forming activity of labour. It now relates to 1] formless
64 Marx K Grundrisse, www.marxists.org 65 Marx, Cap vol 1, Results…
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 52
matter [raw materials] to be formed as the `purposive activity’ of
labour and 2] instrument of labour or the objective means into which
subjectivity inserts itself as a conductor and the object or the
objective function of instrumentality. The distinction made in the
first instance consists within capital as money, `idealized money’
freed of particularities and `substances of exchange’ and realized in
the result of two relations in the product. It now is capital’s
concept-product. In the production process capital distinguishes money
as form and substance. It is both the aspects at once and equally
related. Capital-form appears distinct from the internal relation
while it realizes this ideal-form from all substances or every mode of
objectified labour. In the later, second process capital is posited as
`egotistic value’, something to which money could only aspire. Capital
in its `being-for-itself’ is the capitalist – capital is indeed
separated from a capitalist but not from the capitalist who as such
confronts the worker, similarly an individual worker may cease to be a
worker [ by inheritance, stealing, etc] though as a labourer nothing
more than the `being-for-self’ as the worker. But money, in its third
adequate form, as a value that does not enter circulation but remains
as potential capital value, independent and relating negatively
against circulation is at the same time its own reproduction in which
one part, wages, is consumed and reproduced but profits do not
reproduce and are addable/ additions of surplus value66 This potential,
already posited in money gets recursively transformed into capital
through the working of `blind averages’
66 Marx K, Grundrisse, www.marxists.org , Chapter on Capital; otherwise page reference to Grundrisse omitted in previous footnotes is of a rough order, p. 100-101, 247-250-252, 275, 304, 310, 331, 449-450
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 53
Consequently, in analytical terms capital/capitalist finds itself
caught up in Kant’s antinomies of reason, within the `third conflict
of transcendental idea. The antithesis is: there is no freedom but
everything happens according to natural laws. But explanation needs
causality through freedom as well. Considering the causality of
freedom any beginning presupposes a state that does not have causal
connexion with predecessor thereby contradicting the `law of
causality’. Assumption of freedom cannot be made because of this
contradiction. Here Kant puts a middle term between individual
intuition [assumption of freedom] and universal reason [ natural law
causality] that is ascribed as `reflective judgment’ which is further
distinguished from `determining judgment’ for subsuming the particular
[reflective] under the universal in the structure of `formal
syllogism.’
However, Kant does not run through the argument when the middle term
brings in the means. As the formal middle term it is against both the
extremes of subjective and objective results. It is only in the
contrast with extreme subjectivity that means as immediate objectivity
does exist in universality that `the subjective individuality of the
end still lacks.’67 As means stands with ends and acts toward it,
objectivity returns to the concept through alteration. Now end turns
to be a mediated relation with the object, it interposes another
object between itself and it, which Hegel regards as `the cunning of
67 Hegel G W F, SL, p. 744
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 54
reason’.68 Reason is finite in that the end relates with the
presupposition which opens it to chance and contingency and loss of
itself. The cunning consists in putting the means forward as object
allowing it to wear off in its own place, exposed to attrition, wear
and tear while it shields behind the means [mechanical/chemical]
process. Thus reason can be found in the means maintaining it
`through’ an `external other’. This is what makes means `superior to
finite ends of immediate enjoyment since it lasts whereas immediate
enjoyment is ephemeral, forgotten. Through the instrument/tool, man
passes power over to nature.
Kant pursues the subjective side and proceeds to consider the
metaphysics of `empirical psychology’ where discrete / random
phenomenal reflection would make any determination of reflection
inadequate. So he concluded that the smallest addition from
observation would mar the purity of rational psychology. Basically he
followed Hume’s skepticism by holding fast to the `I’ of self-
consciousness. Here the cognizing `I think’ can omit everything
empirical. This `I think’ as pure phenomenal accompanying all
representations would leave nothing for any conceptualization. It is
basically fixed general idea [vorstellung] and stops with the name.
The odd bit here is the I making use of I in order to judge the `I’.
This `I’ then calls it a fallacy of thinking of that I which omits the
I as subject or calls that thinking defective in which the intuition
is lacking from the `I’. 69 This is as shallow, meager and empty that
68 Ibid., p.74669 Hegel SL, p. 737, 751,776-777
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 55
bourgeois egoity can get. The middle term is introduced and subsumed
by abstract universal and the individual that is an abstract, fixed,
empty `I’ of empirical psychology correspond to the nature of inner
distinction made of labour activity and labour subjectivity. The `I’
that stops with a name is reserved for itself, as one-sided
abstraction, completely devoid of dialectic and bereft of concept. It
also satisfies the basic condition of analytical cognition in that it
takes the transformed result as a positing which determines itself
immediately as presupposition by suspending the middle term. In this
immediacy it calls the `sciences of discrete magnitude’ as analytical
sciences. All the book-keeping, accounting and calculations about
outlays, etc belong to its horizon of analytical science. In
algebra/arithmetic, the principle of this discrete magnitude is the
one, `arithmos idetikos ‘ , relation-less atom, un-cuttable atomicity,
that can only be increased to plurality, external sums. This does not
lead to immanent relations as in the analytic while remaining
contingent as the datum for cognition. There is no trace of mutual
transition or passing into the other. Kant’s `5 + 7 = 12 ‘does not see
that the count of 5 could have continued as too with the 7 but were
arbitrarily cut off. Numbers are concept-less material whose
operations are external. There is just continuum without any advantage
of analytical cognition which at least has the benefit of deducing a
construct from the problem. Synthetic cognition would have either some
question or residua – like a homeomorphic defect – from a system that
cannot provide the solution as it does not have the terms of reference
but they get solved by succeeding / successor system.70
70 Hegel refers to Gauss’ sine curves as synthetic since the terms employed to explain the sine residua are not the terms of the problem,requiring mediation, Hegel G W F, SL, p. 782-783, 790
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 56
We may now offer the conclusion that Marx not only did sublate Hegel
but advanced the dialectic in historical durations, both as complete,
self-identical shapes and as the contra-Boolean action of pure
negativity in resistance to history. It is in the latter when
resistance shows up in the process of becoming that Hegel’s Person
Absolute appears mystical, ecstatic and neo-Platonic. The historical-
phenomenological dialectic of Hegel is limited to Aristotelian
primitive’s [ Prior Analytics, Topics] and labour of the negative
whereas with Marx the dialectic of struggle is expansive, time-
dependent, recursive, trans-Hegelian and a richer, fuller social
dialectic as it unifies by raising freedom to concrete universality. 71
This freedom develops intensively and expansively by opposing the very
means that reproduces as result the other of itself [labour-time],
i.e., the realm of necessity is that `objectified other of self’ that
must begin to deplete, wither, degrade with least expenditure of
energy.’72 Whether this translates to advance of method is not tenable.
Hegel’s dialectical being is not merely a self-changing process; it is
self-changing all the way to the point of termination and self-
sublation. The finite not only changes, it perishes’ for it is in the
very being of finite that they contain perishing but this is related
71 The main advance in terms of historical dialectics of struggle ismissing or suppressed in Chris Arthur’s studies that tend one-sidedly towards an existentialist reading, following Kojeve and Hyppolite; Arthur C, Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and the myth of Marxology; somewhat surprising is meager references – just a couple of quotationsfrom both Marx and Hegel for constructing his argument which is worthwhile. Sometimes even 2-3 quotations clarifies the nature of the devil in detail
72 Marx Cap. Vol 1, p. 820, N Y International Publishers
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 57
to a self-supersession which inheres in `all finite beings’.
Accumulated self-change also leap beyond themselves and change to
something else. This is what forces us to recognize the non-eternity
of the present.
A misconception that prevailed in 20th c. regarding Marx was to see
him as `appropriating ‘Hegel’s master-slave dialectic’ and graft it on
to his theory or notion of class struggle like some metaphysical
interior of existing subsistence. Kojeve started developing Hegel’s
ideas like `recognition’, `desire’, `warlike masters and working
slaves, aufheben, terror’ in his lectures in historical conditions
when such a reading, of Hegel’s Phenomenology, BB IV ( Spirit ) B.
( Spirit in self-estrangement ) III ( Absolute freedom and Terror ) to
end the class-struggle dialectic was `forced’ and transmitted like a
doctrine after his lectures were published in 1946.73 There have
subsequently developed critiques and refutation of Kojeve’s
interpretation of Hegel, mostly un-necessary or misplaced, skirting
the centrality of Kojeve’s reflections on the master-slave dialectic.74
73 Kojeve’s attitude was `in harmony with German theorists of `Posthistoire, such as Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt..’, Niethammer L, Posthistoire – Has history come to an end, [tr] Camiller P, London 1993, pp. 65-68, gives a reasonably hard hitting account of Posthistoire theorists of 20th c.
74 Such as the author and others cited by him like Ludwig Siep, Vincent Descombes, George A Kelly, Judith Butler, etc Williams R R, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, London 1997, pp. 366-371; to take up asillustration Judith Butler says that Hegel claimed `ontological harmonies that subsist in and among intersubjective and natural world’which cannot be reconciled with `experiences of disjunction’. By rejecting ontological harmony Kojeve is apparently `free to extend Hegel’s doctrine of negation. P.367; now when I read this I wonder
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 58
But to have wormed its way through ideological trapdoors in Marx
studies and critiques remains a bit of mystery since none of it can be
substantiated by reference to Marx’s writings of 1840’s. There is
scarcely any reference to Hegel’s Phenomenology in Marx’s writings
during those days and least of all was he a metaphysician, which is
Kojeve’s presupposition as also Susan Buck-Mors’s. Marx had sublated
Hegel radically in this terrain when he talks of class struggle
between formally free yet antagonistic classes in modern civil-society
which is way ahead of the older types of struggles for recognition.75
Most important though, Marx never claimed any credit for having
discovered class struggle in modern history. It was becoming more and
more openly explicit under the factory system. In a letter to
Wy[den]mayer, March 5, 1852, Marx calls `Ricardo as the most classic
representative of the bourgeoisie and the most stoical adversary of
the proletariat, as a man whose works are an arsenal for Anarchists,
socialists, all enemies of bourgeois system’. Very explicitly, it was
not Hegel but `long before bourgeois economists had described the
history of class struggle’ and `what I did new was to demonstrate 1]
existence of classes is linked to particular historical phases in the
development of production.. .’76 We would be taking this up in the
third chapter.
whether Judith Butler has understood Hegel’s `disjunctive syllogism’ that captures the static, timeless dialectic of ontological species and ontologically genus relationship in the inferential structure, dubbed `disjunctive syllogism, where individual moment excludes the two other moments and asserts itself as fact [sache], superseding formal logic in the first section on subjectivity in the Science of Logic
75 Stillman P, discussion thread of Hegel Society of America76 Marx to Wydenmayer, 5/3/1852, M-E Correspondence
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 59
To repeat, the advanced, sublated moment of Marx over Hegel is the
historical moment [movement + momentum], [event + entity], social
evolution, duration and the revolution [subject + project] as the only
adventure remaining. Marx had the most amazing comprehension of
history that he made the basis for constructing historical models and
the historical dialectic. Class-struggle was already the real movement
of history. The historical demonstration Marx alludes to could be
related to the dissolution of slavery as the historical result.
Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction Page 60