Real Subsumption and Hegel-Marx Distinction

CHANGING LABOUR RELATIONS, & REAL SUBSUMPTION – THE

HEGEL-MARX DISTINCTION [second draft]

Dr Debabrata Banerjee

Nov.20, 2009

Real Subsumption & Hegel Marx Distinction

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


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


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


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


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 Àfricanist genre’ or òral 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 èthnographic history’ and other such ìnvasions’ 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 òddly 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 à 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’ Èthnographic facts are not privileged, just particular..’, p. 20, 22


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

ìncorporation’ 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

èvental sites’ argues.11 Though Zizek resists the temptation to

èlevate 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


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


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 èmpty’ 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 àbsolute 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

àverage’ 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 òbjects 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


http://www.marxists.org/

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


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


provide any òntological’ 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 èntire 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 òbjectivity’ is not separated from its person. This is where it

differs from earlier forms of dependent labour. But this objectivity

too it an òbjectivity co-inciding with his immediate bodily

existence’; it ìs 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



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.


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


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


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


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


`globalization ideology’, `nationalist/indigenous ideologies’ – 25is

also the most problematic, not only because it lacks any unit of

understanding, unless something like say ìdeologeme’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 [ Èmpire’ 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 ìdeologeme’ as an intended transformation of idea whichcannot be defined but found in the pragmatics and semantics of ideological texts : the ideologeme is `prescriptive’, ùnambiguous’, àuthoritarian’, `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


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 èthical failing’, ùntrue

subjectivization’ or as `the question of imaginary’ as some prop

comforting the ànxious 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 ìncapable of justice’, like `the resigned

fatalist’ who has succumbed to the service of goods, the `passive

nihilist’ as an àfter-subject’, the `real nihilist’ without the

`safety of scepticism’, the òbscure 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 ìn-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


though repressive is also engaged with his conspecifics and cohorts

`to give up’ but secure the rewards from a diminished `present’

whereas the òbscure subject’ [òpaque 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 -

ìntellectuals 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 òbjectively’ real ;

their one-sided, pure non-objective shape coincides with their

existence as abstraction from the historical moments of actual

reality. Badiou’s òbscure 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


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


emergence of the affirmative as immediate self that has mediated the

ground to emerge self-sublated, emptied of self-alienation.33Badiou’s

òther 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 òut 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 àccessed and utilized’ by the subject.34

What does elude Badiou is the òbjective 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


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


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.


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.


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


--------------------------------------------------------------------

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


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 àctualizationof 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 àbsolute necessity of production’; it is rather à vanishing one, a point of departure’.


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 òrganic 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 èmanation’.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 òriental’ 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


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]


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


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


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


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


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,


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.


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 ùnfree 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 òmniscient 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 às

a capitalist’, `self-importantly intent on his business’ while the

seller, the possessor of labour-power, ìs 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


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 ùnfreedom’ /

unfreiheit, especially in German historiography ranging from the use

of `merit’ in cases of àllocating’ dependent permanent labourers in

Pharonic Egypt to subordinate beneficiaries to Stoic thinking on

slavery with its emphasis on ìnner 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 òbservation on ancient

slavery was coloured by concerns about contemporary slavery’, though

53 Cap v 1, p. 280


they are not as thorough about such generalizations. 54 This is only

empirically correct and conceptually wide off the mark. Weber’s

Ìdeal 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 ìn 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 èn-

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



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



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


grasping the dynamics of their disappearance, an accuracy as close to

èmpirical 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 èngaged 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

às 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 àppear as alien property’ though it is ìts own’

estranges/destroys the object from becoming an active moment of

workers conceptualization. These exist as capital’s objective element,

the content of òbjectified 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

àrising’/ 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


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…



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



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


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 èxternal 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 èmpirical 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 Ì’ of self-

consciousness. Here the cognizing Ì think’ can omit everything

empirical. This Ì 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 Ì’.

This Ì’ 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 Ì’. 69 This is as shallow, meager and empty that

68 Ibid., p.74669 Hegel SL, p. 737, 751,776-777


bourgeois egoity can get. The middle term is introduced and subsumed

by abstract universal and the individual that is an abstract, fixed,

empty Ì’ of empirical psychology correspond to the nature of inner

distinction made of labour activity and labour subjectivity. The Ì’

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, àrithmos 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


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


to a self-supersession which inheres in àll 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 àppropriating ‘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 ìn 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 òntological harmonies that subsist in and among intersubjective and natural world’which cannot be reconciled with èxperiences 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


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


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 and Hegel-Marx Distinction

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