In brief: The phrase about turning Hegel the right way up comes from Marx himself and describes less than it promises. What Marx takes over is Hegel’s procedure; what he changes is the object. And the objection that Hegel did not know about immiseration strikes precisely the chapter in which the book is least at rest.
1. Idealism and materialism
Hegel’s idealism does not mean that the world exists in one’s head or is steered by a God beyond it. It means that actuality is conceptually structured – that it develops according to determinations of its own and is therefore knowable. What Marx takes over is exactly this: the assumption that an economic order has a logic that can be set out. It is no accident that Capital begins with the commodity and develops money and capital out of it; that is the form of exposition of the Science of Logic, applied to a different object.
The image of the head and the feet conceals this closeness. It says that Marx changes the starting point – not that he discards the procedure. Hans Friedrich Fulda has shown how far the method of exposition in Capital remains Hegelian.
2. Did Hegel not know about immiseration?
He made it his subject. § 241–§ 245 describe not a misfortune that befalls civil society but a result that it produces: in § 243 the accumulation of wealth on the one side and, on the other, „the isolation and limitedness of particular labour“ together with „the dependence and want of the class tied to this labour“. The transcripts show that Hegel knew the reports from England and discussed them in the lectures.
The rabble is in him not simply the poor person but the one who, along with poverty, loses recognition and with it the ethical bond to society – in substance what is later called alienation, and what Hegel already treats in the Phenomenology of Spirit under the title of self-externalisation.
And then the sentence with which the chapter ends:
It becomes evident, here, that, in the face of the excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough – that is, does not possess enough, of its own peculiar resources, to check the excess of poverty and the production of the rabble.
Groundlines, § 245
Hegel offers no solution for this. He works through the obvious means – support without labour, labour without demand – and shows that both enlarge the problem. Marx did not refute this diagnosis; he took it as his starting point.
3. Interpreting and changing
The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is not an objection to Hegel but a decision about the task of philosophy. Hegel’s counter-position stands in the Preface: philosophy „always comes too late“, because it recognises a shape of life only once that shape is finished – the owl of Minerva begins its flight with the falling of dusk.
That is a claim about the reach of cognition, not about the permissibility of action. Whoever denies it denies that philosophy can be separated from practice – and that is exactly the dispute between Hegel and Marx. Quoting it does not settle it.
4. And the dialectic?
Marx applies it without explaining it; Hegel explains it. In the Groundlines one can watch it at work: property is a shape of the will that cannot sustain itself, because it presupposes the other will which it does not contain; wrong is the shape in which this lack comes out; punishment is not its removal but the restoration of right upon it.
What one does not find there is the scheme thesis–antithesis–synthesis. It comes from Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus (1837) and was fastened on Hegel from outside; he himself speaks of determinate negation and of sublation. The difference is not terminological: a determinate negation is the negation of this matter and retains its content; a scheme into which anything at all can be inserted retains nothing.
Nothing is lost for understanding Marx by seeing this. Whoever reads Hegel finds an „idealist“ who judged civil society more soberly than most of the materialists of his time.
See also Hans Friedrich Fulda, „Dialektik als Darstellungsmethode im ‚Kapital‘ von Marx“, in: Ajatus, Helsinki 1978, pp. 180–216 (full text, in German) – as well as:
Sources. Groundlines § 189–§ 208 (the system of needs), § 241–§ 245 (poverty and the rabble), § 41–§ 71 (property), § 82–§ 104 (wrong and punishment). – Karl Marx, Capital I, afterword to the second edition, 1873 (the phrase about turning it right way up) · Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, Historische Entwickelung der spekulativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel, 1837 (origin of the thesis–antithesis–synthesis scheme) · Hans Friedrich Fulda, op. cit. – In the glossary: Dialectic, Determinate Negation, The Rabble.