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View submission: Communism as a derivative of Hegal
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 But this is the young Marx in unpublished manuscripts, and the importance of these texts in Marx’s overall philosophy is heavily debated.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*.
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