Do Marxists still need Hegel?

In brief: Marx himself answered the question, and with yes. His first substantial work is a paragraph-by-paragraph critique of the Groundlines; the analysis of civil society that he later developed he found already in Hegel. What is interesting today is less where Marx contradicts Hegel than where Hegel already sees the same thing – and has no solution.

What Hegel sees before Marx

§ 243§ 245 are the place. § 243 describes the simultaneous accumulation of wealth and „the dependence and want of the class tied to this labour“. § 244 calls the result the rabble and notes that its production „brings with it, at the same time, the greater ease of concentrating disproportionate wealth in a few hands“. And § 245 ends not with a solution but with an admission:

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

This is written in 1820 and claims: the contradiction is not a malfunction of the system but its product. For the rest of the book it is never resolved – the corporation mitigates, colonial trade displaces, the state looks on. Whoever wants to know where Marx takes hold will find the fracture here.

Where Marx contradicts

In the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843, on § 261§ 313) the charge is, in essence: Hegel turns the real relation upside down. Not the families and estates are the subject that gives itself a state; in Hegel the Idea becomes the subject and actual human beings its appearances. The point of attack is not chosen at random: Marx takes up § 279 and the derivation of the monarch – the weakest passage of the book, in the judgement of many who otherwise follow Hegel.

In this edition Marx’s remarks are attached to the paragraphs concerned as a layer of their own. One can therefore read § 279 and the objection side by side instead of reading about it.

Where Hegel asks back

Two of Hegel’s objections have accompanied the Marxist tradition through its whole history. The first stands in § 303 note and holds against any politics that appeals directly to „the people“:

The many as individuals – what is commonly understood by the people – are indeed a togetherness, but only as the multitude – a formless mass whose movement and activity would, for that very reason, be merely elemental, irrational, wild, and terrible.

Groundlines, § 303 note

The second is the warning of § 258 note against the attempt to begin a constitution „entirely afresh, from thought alone“. Both sentences were written against the French Revolution and were quoted in the twentieth century by people who otherwise rejected Hegel.

And the charge of glossing over

It is old and not entirely wrong. Hegel’s book ends with a state that does not resolve the contradictions of civil society but arches over them. Whether that fulfils or misses the task of thinking depends on what one expects of philosophy – see on this „What is rational is actual“ and The Owl of Minerva.

Sources. Groundlines § 182§ 187 (civil society), § 198 (division of labour), § 243§ 248 (wealth, poverty, rabble, colonisation), § 279 (sovereignty of the monarch), § 303 note. – Karl Marx, Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts (manuscript 1843, MEW 1, 203–333); Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung (1844). – The Marx layer of this edition is attached directly to the relevant paragraphs. – In the glossary: Civil Society, Poverty, Alienation.

DE