Abstract
In this paper it is shown that in his conception of value, published in the first volume of Capital, Marx relies on Hegel’s concept of pure recognition to organise the relations between use- and exchange-value on the one hand and the relation between the social relations between things (goods) and actors (sellers) on the other hand. Establishing this thesis is important in three respects: Firstly it demonstrates that there is a strong continuity in the philosophical thought of Karl Marx, making visible an essential relation between his Economic-philosophical Manuscripts and his later writings. Secondly it helps to better understand Marx’s conception of value; and thirdly it shows that “recognition” is an important conception in his critique of political economy.
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Notes
As will become obvious in the Section 3 of this paper, Marx also relies heavily on Hegel’s conception of “Reflection-determinations” (Reflexionsbestimmungen) developed in his Logic. Among Hegel scholars there is an ongoing debate how the Phenomenology and the Logic are related to each other. In this paper I stay agnostic concerning this topic: Since Marx could refer to both at times we don’t have to discuss whether or not Hegel already had worked out his logic of reflection when he wrote the Phenomenology. Marx himself didn’t address, as far as I can see, this problem of Hegel-exegesis; for the purpose of this paper nothing hinges on this question. Therefore I ignore this complication in the following. Interestingly Marx explicates the meaning of Reflexionsbestimmungen by using an instance of recognition as example: “There is something special about such reflection-determinations. This man here is (e.g.) only King, because other men behave towards him like subjects. They believe, however, that they are subjects because he is King.” (CO, p. 24, fn 3)
Although I think that this thesis is true I will not try to achieve a definitive statement of it in this article.
Marx wrote this text for the first version of Capital, but didn’t include it in the end; see MEGA2 II, 4.1, pp. 9*–40* and 449–456 for more editorial information.
A’s and B’s I-intentions are mutually entangled because the content of B’s I-intention is represented in the content of A’s I-intention (and vice versa).
Although the translation has many weaknesses I have used this edition since it is the most widespread widely cited in the English literature. In particular a strict terminological distinction between “alienation” (Entäusserung) and “estrangement” (Entfremdung), accepted in this article, has been maintained by the translators of the English edition of the Paris Manuscripts; the reader should bear in mind that in Marx’s text the corresponding concepts aren’t kept distinct in such a strict way as the translators’ decision might suggest.
Marx found this model in Hegel’s account of self-consciousness; for details see Quante (2010a).
Here is the passage in full: “Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two different ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.
Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.
This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours.” (ibid., p.227 f.)
Here is the passage in full: “Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition: My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life. Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation of my individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active property. Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one. My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond all doubt.” (Marx and Engels 1975, p 228)
Translation altered since Marx uses Hegel’s category “Wesen” in the original.
See von Magnis (1975) for a detailed analysis.
In the literature there is some debate whether Hegel uses two or three viewpoints in his Phenomenology (the viewpoint of the philosopher, the viewpoint of the reader and the viewpoint of natural consciousness) and how these are related towards each other. Since the main difference between the Phenomenology and the Logic is that there is no such difference in the latter I ignore this question of Hegel exegesis concerning the structure of the former in the following; but see Quante (2008) and (2010a) for some discussion.
In the first edition the Hegelian structure of this is even more explicit, since Marx describes capital here as an “automatisches, in sich selbst prozessirendes Subjekt” (MEGA2 II, 5, p 109).
This footnote (number 9 in the German original) has been omitted in CO.
Thereby he can demonstrate that symmetrical relations can have different content if one takes into account the direction of the action and the role of the agent (this happens if the form-content is expressed as the structural intention of the commodity within exchanges); cf. Quante (2006, p 596 f.).
That Marx’s aim is to analyse the content of the form of exchange as such (beyond what the real intentions of the real agents are) and that he is applying Hegel’s Logic in doing so is evident from his footnote: “It is scarcely surprising that economists have overlooked the form-content of the relative value-expression (subjected as they are to the influence of material interests), if professional logicians before Hegel even overlooked the content of form in the paradigms of judgment and conclusion” (CO, p. 22, fn. 2). In standard terminology of classical logic “form” is taken to be content-neutral so that different contents can have the same form. Marx credits Hegel for having discovered that form as such isn’t neutral but has material effects (one famous application in Marx’s account is his thesis that money isn’t a neutral medium of exchange but generates important social effects).
See Schampel (1984).
Chitty (2009) shows that that Marx conceives capital as alienated species-being in his early writings.
Marx uses the Hegelian Term “Reflexionsbestimmung” here (MEGA2 II, 5, p 34 fn 21). In the rewritten version of this analysis, published as “Anhang zu Kapitel I, 1. Die Wertform” in the first edition of Capital, Marx uses the term “fetishism” to describe this structure; cf. FV, p 60.
“The commodity is immediate unity of use-value and exchange-value; thus of two opposed entities. Thus it is an immediate contradiction. This contradiction must enter upon a development just as soon as it is no longer considered as hitherto in an analytic manner (at one time from the viewpoint of use-value and at another from the viewpoint of exchange-value) but is really related to other commodities as a totality. The real relating of commodities to one another, however, is their process of exchange.” (CO, p. 40)
My aim is to make plausible the claim that Marx’s conception of value includes an irreducible social dimension which is modelled along the lines of recognition. It is not the aim of this article to argue for the — very different — claim that Marx’s conception of value can be reduced to individual preferences of single actors. This subjectivism in the theory of value, dominant in contemporary political economy, should be kept miles apart from Marx’s version of a socially constituted conception of value.
In these passages Marx once more draws a strict parallel between his critique of political economy and the programme of the critique of religion (in the 1840s). Not only is it “Christianity that is the most appropriate form of religion, with its cult of the abstract man”, but the “religious reflection of the real world can only disappear as soon as the relationships of practical work-a-day life represent for men daily transparently reasonable relationships to one another and to nature.” (ibid., p. 38)
It is social grammar, including rules, norms and values as constitutive elements. This means that at the heart of Marx’s philosophy of recognition we find an ‘idealistic’ element; see Quante (2011) for details.
There has been much discussion concerning Marx’s theory of justice which mainly was concerned with his theory of exploitation and distribution; see Buchanan (1982), Sweet (2002), Peffer (1990), the papers in part I of Cohen et al. (1980) and the contributions to Nielsen and Patten (1981). If my diagnosis in this paper is right, the source of Marx’s theory of justice lies in his conception of recognition.
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Quante, M. Recognition in Capital . Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 713–727 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9410-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9410-y