Was Marx a Hegelian?

 Firstly, there is a continuous underlying tone to Hegelian-Marxism - the Marxian disagreement with economism, with Engels vulgarization of Marx, with the authoritarianism attributed to Marx - is that Marx emerges with the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (of Right)” and other critiques. In that work, Marx’s asserts that the head of emancipation is theory, is philosophy, and the heart is the proletariat, the passive proletariat: the material basis which finds its material weapons in philosophy.

Examine Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ for his discussion of the ‘rabble’ which he was unable to rationalize! Is this rabble not the proletariat uplifted as peasants and skilled factory workers!?

Here, Hegel is important for Marx who describes the ideological problem as ‘the challenging of the institutions and conventions of society!’ For Hegel, the rabble challenges society while the bourgeois exploit and dominate this lower class. Hence, Marx posits “ideology-critique” as critique, as Critical Marxism, in contrast to economism which views ideology as a distorted reflection of the world - self interest inverts the world. 

The critical Marxist accepts that the mask of ideology conceals domination behind the elements of reason and reasonableness!

The Hegelian Marx emphasizes alienation. The older Marx breaks from Hegel and German Idealism by accentuating ‘structure,’ the base-superstructure relations, and science as distinct from ideology and criticism. 

The key difference between the Hegelian Marx and the later scientific Marx (Capital and the texts around it) regards historical change. Critical Marxism is grounded in Hegel where change involves the activity of the knowing subject and her knowledge. The scientific Marxist focuses on object-centered Darwinian change as the succession of a series of ‘natural’ forms.

Hegelian contradiction involves aufhebung: a process of synthesizing which produced a more encompassing whole that preserved the past and the objects while overcoming the ‘impossibility’ of a form of thinking or value orientation. Aufgehoben, however, produces a rupture: the object is dropped and forgotten along with the past. Here, the forces of production, science and technology, result in modernization: the modern world. Hegelian Marxism, critique or critical Marxism is humanistic but no less arrogant.

Critical Marxism has an Hegelian affinity which stresses sectarian internal conviction and authentic belief in contrast with reliance on the institutions, on conformity, on what is called today normativity or emotivism.

The relation of Marx to Hegel can be found throughout his oeuvre in different ways; perhaps the early emphasis on alienation, exploitation and domination serves as the motivation for Capital, Grundrisse, Theories of Surplus Value, and the historical commentaries ‘Class Struggles in France,’ ‘The 18th Brumaire,’ and ‘Notebook on the Paris Commune’ (when 6,667 people killed and counted while estimates ran as high as 20k), and on his journalism which described events in the American Civil War - over slavery, he noted!

I would not cut Marx in half as Hegelian or as economist, I would instead try to see these two “Marxisms” as sides of a dialectic.

Hegel posited work and labor as liberating, whereas Marx posited work as negative: the locus of alienation for Marx was the mode of production of work products and use values, commodities.

Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ explicates the authoritarian institutions as pushing contraception and promiscuity, marriage and family! Marx seems to miss this important aspect of (re)production but he comes around to Morgan’s analysis of kinship structures in his last work, “Ethnological Notebooks.” 

Hegel’s externalization and total alienation of man in Christianity is truncated into political economy where labor is the site of alienation. Marx accepts Hegel’s autonomous subject as the locus and agency of action. But, Marx moves the analysis of alienation from the anthropological level to the concrete societal level. 

Alienation for Marx refers to alienation from the products he produces and from the means of production which hinge on property relations. The ownership of the means of production sets up the difference between owners and workers and by extension between employers and employees. 

Marx relativized (watered down) and historicized (designated Hegel’s version to an earlier epoch) Hegel’s theory of alienation. The problem of alienation for Hegel was an insoluble tragic discourse, but for Marx there was a solution via politics, in the discourse of ideology!