https://www.reddit.com/r/hegel/comments/1alp005/communism_as_a_derivative_of_hegal/
created by Ok_Blackberry5982 on 08/02/2024 at 06:08 UTC
0 upvotes, 9 top-level comments (showing 9)
My simple argument is that the Master/Slave dialect that Hegel posited is pretty much a simplified version of Marx's position of relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But of course if people learned about communism through Hegel instead of Hegel to Marx, people would revolutionize much quicker if they saw themselves as Slaves to the Masters rather than working class and capitalist.
Comment by chakrakhan at 08/02/2024 at 13:28 UTC*
22 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Well the master-slave dialectic doesn’t resolve with a revolution by the slaves and the elimination of the master class, so I’m not sure I see how communism could follow from it alone. Neither Marx nor Hegel invented the notion of one group of people dominating another; there’s something much more specific to both of their work. Obviously Hegel was an influence on Marx, but that does not mean that communism follows from that bit of Hegel. In fact, I think it would be easier to argue that Hegel naturalizes that kind of subjugation instead of arguing that it is destined to collapse.
Comment by iunoionnis at 08/02/2024 at 15:44 UTC*
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Marx only alludes to the master-slave dialectic once in *Capital*, when he says that in the same way that the “I” can only be self-conscious by becoming an object for another consciousness, the value of commodities only appears when it expresses its exchange value in terms of a quantity of some other commodity.
Marx was influenced by lots of different aspects of Hegel’s philosophy and was a member of a group of young Hegelians who called themselves “die Freien,” a group that included Engels, Stirner, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Ruge.
But as far as Marx’s masterpiece goes, he is mainly influenced by Hegel’s Logic and his method of expanding upon contradictions. He studied the Logic deeply before writing Capital, and the influence of this work is especially clear in *Grundrisse*, one of Marx’s early drafts of the work.
Of course, the master-slave relationship involves one person exploiting another for their labor, so one cannot help but see that there is a connection to the current relationship of the proletariat under capitalism. Yet it wouldn’t be correct to see this as directly influencing Marx—if it does, he doesn’t say much about it.
Indeed, the young Marx frequently talks about alienation, yet he takes this theme more from Bauer’s reading of “Absolute Knowing,” where the worker is alienated from labor in a way similar to how consciousness is alienated from its object in the Phenomenology. But this is the young Marx in unpublished manuscripts, and the importance of these texts in Marx’s overall philosophy is heavily debated.
Fanon, on the other hand, explicitly takes up Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in *Black Skin, White Masks*.
Comment by gsisjsissusush at 08/02/2024 at 14:06 UTC*
16 upvotes, 1 direct replies
what....? Marx's argument about capitalism isn't related to master-slave dialectic. Marx's main argument was categories of use-value and exchange-value ultimately lead to many contradictions, one of which is the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This is the ultimate argument of the late Marx and his economic work (or as he calls it 'materialistic argument')
hegel's argument is about how self-consciousness comes to understand itself and of her freedom through contradictions directly in the consciousness in itself (or what Marx called, "idealism").
Comment by M2cPanda at 08/02/2024 at 10:08 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Hegel ist kein Kommunist, bitte lies dafür seine Rechtsphilosophie durch.
Comment by jhuysmans at 08/02/2024 at 21:27 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Hegel's master-slave dialectic is metaphorical and is about consciousness itself. To understand how to even get from Hegel to communism we need Marx. Unless you want to create your own idealist communism.
Comment by Presto-2004 at 08/02/2024 at 09:38 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It depends what you mean by "people" in this case. If by "people" you mean the general population of the world, then I guarantee you that not everyone knows about those guys.
If we would have a public/universal reading of Hegel/Marx, then of course that the overall World Spirit would change its course towards progress and inevitably revolution. The problem is that we don't, as simple as that. We have some particular readings of Hegel and Marx here and there, and some individual readings, but that's it. As long as we don't have a universal knowledge of those emancipatory philosophies, then I'm afraid that it is impossible to enlighten the proletariat.
Comment by throwawayprn00 at 08/02/2024 at 06:48 UTC
-9 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Communism in the purest Marxist sense has never existed and has failed when attempted, because that communism only exists when there is no government
Comment by Agreeable_Bluejay424 at 10/02/2024 at 00:48 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I think the biggest influence of Hegel on Marx has to do with the notion of capital itself as sort of a self-mediation. Like money turning into comodities and turning into money again.
Comment by OkSoftware1689 at 10/02/2024 at 21:19 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Jay Bernstein’s article in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno argues that master and slave are transcendental and empirical consciousnesses, which means that here Hegel is basically talking about Kant. And the rest if his work on the Phenomenology shows convincingly that this take on it helps to make sense of everything else going on in the text.
So I would ask you, if Hegel means primarily class struggle, how does that affect our reading of the rest of the book? Eg i can see how we might then go into the rest of the self-consciousness chapter; along the lines of Kojève who says that unhappy consciousness, skepticism, etc are slaves’ ideologies/false consciousnesses, but then why would Hegel go from there to Reason? In Bernstein’s view, we can makes sense of this: through and through the Phenomenology is about the struggle between judging consciousness (Creon, the transcendental self, Metaphysics, the master) and acting consciousness (Antigone, the empirical self, idealism, and the slave).