Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Failure: war

Small wonder, then, that the spheres of exchange, production, market
relations and occupational hierarchy are for Hegel the most promising
areas for the existence of self-estranged minds. Had Hegel attached any
ultimate importance to the level of morality civil society exemplifies,
his argument on war - to give one prominent example - would have
taken a very different form. Hegel’s argument as it stands amounts to
a telling denial that war can be justified by the utilitarian motives of
the defence of life and property. Hegel was one of the first political




theorists to point out that it is absurd to demand that men sacrifice, in
the act of war, the very things towards the ‘preservation’ of which it is
waged - their lives and their property.¹⁵ This absurdity would base war,
not upon the states that actually wage it, but upon civil society. Hegel’s
justification of war not only identifies it, fairly and squarely, as the
province of state action; it also puts forward the argument that war is
ethical (sittlich) inasmuch as it exposes - not expresses-the accidental,
the arbitrary, the contingent, the finite in everyday life. War, in other
words, is politically integrative; it can solve the problem of fragmen-
tation that civil society poses.

Hegel, however, puts the issue more forcefully; not only is war an
integrative device, it is the fundamental integrative device that the state
provides. However uncomfortable this may be to Hegel’s liberal com-
mentators, Hegel himself does not rest content with indicating that the
state supplies the materials of integration; he also reminds us how states
do so. The bureaucracy cannot of itself supply the moral and political
integration men so desperately - and increasingly - need (except perhaps
for the individual bureaucrat). War can supply it; it alone provides us with
access to one another. Its effect of highlighting, of casting into sharp
relief, the relativities of civil society is not an incidental by-product of
its incidence. Force is a moment of right, as the master-slave dialectic
in The Phenomenology reminds us. The internal order upheld and
guaranteed by the state is connected to and dependent upon the
likelihood of outer chaos. This outer chaos is not at all a sphere of
irrationality defeating the solid achievements of reason in civil society.
The opposite is the case. The possibility of war, says Hegel, serves to
dry up potentially stagnant pools of irrationality in civil society; war,
which ‘preserves the ethical health of peoples’, is compared to the
‘blowing of winds preserving the sea from the foulness which would
be the result of a prolonged calm.’¹⁶ War does what the French Revol-
ution wanted to do but failed to do until (with Brissot’s curdling
declaration of a ‘revolution for export’) it turned to war. Earlier French
revolutionaries had thought - wrongly - that popular participation
could conjure up the mutuality that in fact can be provided only by
war, which gives the internal order upheld by the state something to
define itself against.

Hegel’s defence of war - like so much else in The Philosophy of
Right - is a hit at Kant. It is perpetual peace, Hegel insists, that leads
away from morality to corruption. Increasingly settled expectations
in a liberal market society where not all injustices are obvious, but
where pauperism and class differences are rampant, will lead to unjust
privilege and abuse on the part of the rich; wealth might feed directly
into political power - which was one of Hegel’s greatest fears - an
eventuality which the institutional structure outlined in The Philosophy
of Right was designed, inter alia, to prevent. War should not be considered




apart from this structure. Orderly expectations in civil society are
undermined, and need to be undermined, by the ‘ethical moment’ in
war. Hegel, on the surface of his argument, is criticizing the Friedens-
bund of Kant - Kant who had believed force may accompany justice
but has no power to create it, and that an internally just society is
impossible unless the problem of war is solved. Yet Hegel in effect
went much further than this, as can be seen from the evidence adduced
by Albert Hirschmann in a recent study (which does not deal with
Hegel), The Passions and the Interests. Theorists such as Hobbes, Locke
and Kant -to name only the most prominent -all, in their various ways,
contribute to a certain liberal vision of ‘the sublimation of politics’
(to use Sheldon Wolin’s happy phrase). The argument, in broad terms,
is that commerce is inherently peaceable; Schumpeter’s idea that
imperialism is nothing but the outcome of a residual, pre-capitalist
mentality (while capitalism, being rational and calculating, is by its
very nature averse to risk-taking on the scale that is implicit in heroic
imperialist antics) is merely the argument’s ultima ratio.¹¹

Commerce, we are told (but not by Hegel), brings peace; the market
is peaceable. Because of this the dilemmas of politics are solved. The
state, standing in between the promise of justice and social order, on
the one hand, and the menace of war, on the other, becomes integrated
into a set of social relationships more comprehensive than the merely
political - relationships based on the model (or the reality) of the
peaceable market. A world governed by self-interest - not passion - is
a world characterized by predictability and constancy. Expansion of
domestic trade would create more cohesive communities, while ex-
pansion of foreign trade would help avoid wars among them. Love
of gain - unlike the passions which are what Hobbes called ‘divers’,
capricious, easily exhausted, suddenly renewed - is perpetual; it may
be insatiable; but at least it remains constant. The pursuit of wealth
is in this way rendered innocuous. Those who pursue it cannot, by
definition, share in the heroic ‘virtues’ or violent passions of the aristo-
crat. ‘The spirit of commerce’, said Montesquieu (who was not un-
critical of it), ‘brings with it the spirit of frugality, of economy, of
moderation, of work, of wisdom, of tranquillity, of order, and of
regularity. In this manner, as long as this spirit prevails, the riches it
creates do not have any bad effect.’ Again, ‘the natural effect of com-
merce is to lead to peace. Two nations that trade together become
mutually dependent; if one has an interest in buying, the other has
one in selling; and all unions are based on mutual needs.’¹⁸ Sir James
Steuart, like Montesquieu, considered that the regularity of commerce
limits the arbitrary power of governments, and ultimately renders it
useless; Adam Smith considered that economic progress was possible
regardless of political (or human) improvement (thereby possibly over-
playing his invisible hand). While earlier thinkers had pitted economic


self-interest against the other passions -including the libido dominandi,
the lust for power - Smith collapsed the distinction in his belief that the
material welfare of ‘the whole society is advanced when everyone is
allowed to follow his own interests’. In Rousseauian terms, amour
propre and the very different (because limitless) amour de soi are
meshed into one by Smith; all non-economic drives - ‘interests’ and
‘passions’ alike - reinforce that of enrichissez-vous.

Smith - who was aware of the human costs this collapse involved -
may have been more realistic than the author of a more recent passage
which restates the more traditional view.

Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively
harmless channels by the existence of opportunity for money-
making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this
way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal
power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement. It is
better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over
his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced
as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an
alternative.¹⁹

What is striking about Hegel’s response to this remarkably long-lived
way of thinking - which those disinclined to mince words would call an
ideology - is that he attacks it at its very foundation. Commerce cannot
sublimate politics; the market simply is not peaceable, in the required
sense, in the first place. It may be orderly, regular and systematic -
though there are limits even to this - but order and regularity should
not be confused with significant morality. Love of gain is anything but
innocuous. What is required is not that dangerous political passions be
sublimated by the provision of economic channels; what is required is
exactly the opposite. The hypocrisy of the liberal model, Hegel is
telling us, caricatures the moral possibilities of social existence. Com-
merce does not sublimate politics; it exemplifies conflict. It depends
upon the moral and social fragmentation implicit in the exhortation
to enrichissez-vous. Neither does politics in any everyday sense subli-
mate commerce. But war does. Commerce is shown up, and torn from
its illusions of peace by war - war that is with Hegel (as class war was
to be with Marx) a moral resource. It establishes - as commerce can
never establish - the identity of a people, by indicating the relativity
of life as it is lived. It serves the purpose of an integrative rationality;
‘under its agency the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their
indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions’. War undermines
complacency. ‘Property and life’, says Hegel, ‘should definitely be
established as accidental. . . [in wartime] the rights and interests of
individuals are established as a passing phase.’ War ‘deals in earnest with


the vanity of temporal goods and concerns’.²⁰ Faced with it, we become
present to one another.

It may be that morality deserves better than war; but Hegel’s point is
that in a world like this one, with its compacted tendencies towards
fragmentation, anything more integrative than war is - to put it mildly
-unlikely.

Hegel, like the ancients he so admired (and ceteris paribus like
Marx), was sanguine about violence - force, to all of them, is a moment
of right - on the straightforward grounds that it is part of our life, and
cannot be wished out of existence. Relationships of economic depen-
dency are not free from violence in this sense. As to war, a primary end
of the state, its defence indicates forcefully that Hegel resolutely
refused to make the state an expression of the interests of civil society.

Hegel’s discussion of war, for all its sanguine ‘realism’ about the
existence and avoidability of violence in our social and political exist-
ence, also indicates - presumably to anyone but Hegel himself - the
moral failure that so often characterizes this kind of ‘tough-mindedness’.
The point here is not to sweep the discussion under the carpet, or to
avert one’s eyes from what is a central characteristic of Hegel’s political
philosophy; it is to admit its importance and to criticize it for the moral
failure it exemplifies. It may be that, historically, ‘force is a moment of
right’, just as it has proved true that men under arms display a rare
comradeship; but to justify force, arms, violence and war, however
carefully, because of the effects it might have in stimulating community
is the merest dialectical trickery. This issue was joined by Marx, particu-
larly in the course of his dispute with Bakunin - whose own justification
of the most extreme and indiscriminate revolutionary violence has
some specifically Hegelian roots. That is the subject of a later chapter.

Failure: poverty and pauperism

Hegel’s picture of civil society is, above all, dynamic; it contains the
seeds of its own dissolution unless it is complemented from above, by
the state. These sources of dissolution prominently include the creation
of what the English language translator of The Philosophy of Right calls
a ‘rabble of paupers’. The emergence of this mass of those deprived of
all the benefits of civil society accompanies the concentration of wealth
in a few hands. The two tendencies are directly related and reinforce
each other: the more luxury, the more penury and dependence. Hegel’s
fear that wealth would breed political power was counterbalanced by
his point that complete lack of wealth would breed powerlessness,
lack of the barest personal autonomy, among the propertyless. The
one process is the obverse of the other. The ‘rabble of paupers’ - Hegel’s
own term was die Pdbel - is not some accidental or coincidental by-




product of civil society: it is the other side of the coin of luxury.
Poverty, according to Hegel, is not a feature of civil society when it is
in a state of decline or disintegration; it is a feature of civil society in
its normal, everyday operation, when everything is running smoothly
and ‘civil society is in a state of unimpeded activity’.²¹ Poverty is an
endemic and ineradicable characteristic of civil society, and it means
not simply the level of physical deprivation suffered by the poor but
also the social attitudes of those who are deprived. The level of poverty
in Hegel’s presentation is not fixed by some neutral or objective standard;
it is relative to what is needed to be a functioning, integrated member
of society with a specific standard of living. Poverty in Hegel’s strikingly
modern characterization is relative deprivation, and there are social
attitudes that characterize its onset and deepen its impact. Men become
cut off from the various advantages of society - the acquisition of
skills, education, the access to justice and to religion: all the mediating
institutions and activities that link men to the social order, like work
itself. In the absence of these mediations, men become estranged from
this order. ‘Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble’, says
Hegel, ‘a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a
disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against
society, against the government. . ,’²² Poverty - an inevitable by-
product of the normal functioning of society - in this way feeds on
itself, and is insoluble; organized charity or taxes levelled on the rich
might alleviate physical deprivation but can do nothing to counteract
the cast of men’s minds, the loss of self-respect. Such measures are
more likely to deepen the decline in self-respect; and public works
would be ineffective, since Hegel considered that unemployment was
caused by overproduction in the first place. Hence, ‘despite an excess
of wealth, civil society is not rich enough, in that its own resources are
insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious
rabble’.²³ Hegel even does more than toy with imperialism (‘colon-
ization’) as a way of solving (or exporting) the problem of indigence
based on overproduction;²⁴ but because of the psychology of the
problem - it is Hegel to whom we owe the concept of the ‘culture of
poverty’ - even this expedient could do little. The implications are
far-reaching. The state cannot solve the problem: in other words it
cannot provide a home for all its members. Yet the test of the Hegelian
state is precisely its inclusiveness, its generality, its provision of com-
munity and the overcoming of alienation and estrangement. On all
these counts the Hegelian state fails and Hegel himself fails as a social
philosopher. Yet his portrayal of poverty is prescient in the extreme.
Marx, when he insisted in 1843 that ‘the class in need of immediate. . .
concrete labour forms less a class of civil society than the basis on
which the spheres of civil society rest and move’,²⁵ was merely ex-
tending what Hegel had said about pauperism.




The numbers of the poor were enough to cause Hegel-and others-
considerable concern. In Prussia alone the ‘unincorporated poor’ were
beginning to constitute a numerical majority of the population.²⁶
‘Against nature’, said Hegel, ‘man can claim no right, but once society
is established poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done by
one class to another. The important problem of how poverty is to be
abolished is one of the most disturbing problems that agitate modern
society.’²⁷ Hegel did not present poverty as a natural condition but as a
social fact needing social redress; nor did he blame penury as a social
problem upon the supposed fecklessness, or want of moral fibre, of
the poor themselves. On the contrary, ‘the formless mass’ is brought
into being, and its ranks filled and re-filled by the same social process
that resulted in ‘the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a
few hands’.²⁸ While the poor cannot be held responsible for their own
degradation, society, for its part, is in no position to redress what it
must create and recreate. Hegel considered that any attempt to solve
the problem of poverty - even within the institutional setting expounded
in The Philosophy of Right - would merely compound and exacerbate
the problem. Marx - who was led to his critiques of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right by two articles, his earliest, that had investigated the plight
of the propertyless - could not but concur. He had only to add the
point that in modern society the poor alone might embody community
to clinch an early stage of his argument. Marx, indeed, first identified the
proletariat - which at the time he did not sharply distinguish from the
unpropertied masses - as the agency of revolutionary change at the end
of his second critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843—4).

The proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as a result
of the rising industrial development. For it is not the naturally
arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human
masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society but the
masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society. . .that
form the proletariat. . . By proclaiming the dissolution of the
hitherto existing world order the proletariat merely states the
secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that
world order. By demanding the negation of private property the
proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society
what society has made the principle of the proletariat.²⁹

By being deprived of all the benefits of civil society, the proletariat
is outside and beyond civil society, even though civil society without
the participation of the proletariat could not - and, Marx hastened to
add, would not - persist.

Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?

... In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil




society that is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the
dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character
by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no
particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it;
which can no longer invoke a historical but only a human title;
which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences
but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the German state;
a sphere, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating
itself from all other spheres of society; which, in a word, is the
complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the
complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society as a
particular estate is the proletariat.³⁰

That the language of these well-known passages is Hegelian in the
extreme is evident; yet the content, too, amounts to what is mere
extension of Hegel’s argument on the poor. Marx was meeting Hegel’s
points.

Hegel, in dealing in The Philosophy of Right with the transfer or
alienation of property, says that

the reason I can alienate my property is that it is mine only in
so far as I put my will into it. Hence, I may abandon as a res
nullius anything that 1 have or yield it to the will of another and
so into his possession, provided always that the thing in question
is a thing external by nature.³¹

This proviso is extremely important. ‘[Those] goods or rather sub-
stantive characteristics, which consitute my own private personality
and the universal essence of my self-consciousness are inalienable and
my right to them is imprescriptible.’³² That is to say, I can alienate
only what has been at some time not mine. Hegel immediately applies
this doctrine to labour.

Single products of my particular physical and mental skill and of
my power to act I can alienate to someone else and I can give him
the use of my abilities for restricted periods, because, on the
strength of this restriction, my abilities acquire an external
relation to the totality and universality of my being. By alienating
the whole of my time, as crystallized in my work, and everything
I produced, I would be making into another’s property the
substance of my being, my universal activity and actuality, my
personality.³³

This is precisely what Marx holds must happen under capitalism.
The entirety of the proletarian person becomes an object alien to that




person’s being. Hegel himself had admitted that one can of one’s own
free will ‘externalize’ oneself and sell one’s performances and services.
‘Mental endowments, science, art, even. . .matters of religion. . .inven-
tions, etc., all become objects of a contract; they are recognized and
treated in the same way as objects for purchase.’³⁴ Such alienation
(Verdusserung), Hegel continues, must have some limit in time, so that
something remains of the universality (the personality) of the person.
But if I were to sell ‘the entire time of my concrete labour, and the
totality of my produce, my personality would become the property of
someone else; I would no longer be a person and would place myself
outside the realm of right’. This, said Marx, is precisely what com-
modity production under capitalism involves and must involve; it is
as though Marx were prompted by Hegel.

While this is not the place for any detailed analysis of Hegel’s re-
markably acute and prescient discussion of labour and the dialectics
of labour, mention must be made of some of the elements in these
discussions. Hegel believed that a man comes to a sense of self-conscious-
ness and freedom not by merely consuming what is already to hand but
by transforming what is at hand, by imposing his will on it and, in so
doing, coming to know more about the world of objects which con-
fronts him. At the same time he utilizes that knowledge to humanize
the objective world. Hegel in making these points - which he did re-
peatedly -was not merely re-stating Vico’s point that, as men, we can
fully know only that which we have made; he was adding a certain
kind of substance - of social substance - to Vico’s perception, which
Marx was to make programmatic. Hegel believed that labour is crucial
to human history, labour inaugurates human history as the record of
man’s transformation of his environment, and that labour distinguishes
man from animal and human history from the evolution of merely
natural forms; and it is for this reason that he so contemptuously
dismissed naturalistic explanations of human behaviour, whether these
proceeded from French philosophe or from German Romantic.

What is particularly relevant for our purposes here about Hegel’s
discussions of labour is that in seeing it as the seed of personal autonomy,
he specified that labour is the province of some men, not others. In
what is probably Hegel’s most celebrated depiction of the dialectics of
labour, the ‘master and slave’section of The Phenomenology of Mind,³⁵
Hegel’s specification of where the historically generative principle lies
is clear. It lies not with the master {Herr) but with the slave (Knecht).
The slave’s being is his work - his alteration and transformation of the
status quo. While the master’s ideal is necessarily preservative, the
slave’s is (equally necessarily) non-preservative. His relationship with
the external world is that of reducing its externality; that to which he
relates changes as a direct result of his activities. He transforms the
world, and thereby the self which interacts with the world; and, ironically,




the slave’s structural and ontological superiority to the master consists
in this dynamism, the momentum he is forced to sustain. The slave
alone embodies the possibility of self-development. He is integral with
his surrounding reality in a way the master cannot be. He can strive
for an external embodiment which expresses him, as the master cannot.
In this sense the slave has integrity and authenticity on his side.

There is no need to leap across the centuries and transform - crudely
and illegitimately - ‘slave’ into ‘proletarian’ and ‘master’ into ‘capitalist’
to see the relevance of Hegel’s set-piece on ‘lordship and bondage’ to
Marx’s subsequent emphases on alienation in the labour process and the
fetishism of commodities. Hegel’s paradigmatic emphasis on the world-
transforming and self-transforming character of labour does not need to
be overdrawn for us to see its striking relevance to Marx’s thought.
Indeed, Marx himself refers us to it. He described The Phenomenology
as a whole as ‘the true birthplace and secret of the Hegelian philosophy’
and reserved his objections for the ‘uncritical positivism and equally
uncritical idealism’ of Hegel’s later works; he finds elements of these
uncritical characteristics in The Phenomenology.³⁶ With respect to
Hegel’s treatment of labour, when Marx criticizes Hegel in the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 for perceiving labour ‘only in an
abstract way’,³⁷ he does not mean that Hegel sees labour merely as
contemplation, for it is clear from The Phenomenology that he does
not. Hegel, indeed, regarded labour as man’s ‘universal activity’ {allge-
meine Tatigkeit); that he did so ‘in an abstract way’ implies - if we use
the term ‘abstract’ to mean what Hegel meant by it, ‘partial’ or incom-
plete - that Hegel is afraid of the possible social consequences of his
own analysis. Hegel’s remarks about pauperism in The Philosophy of
Right bear witness to such a backing-down; his analysis of lordship and
bondage, similarly, all too readily raises the question of what would
happen should the bondsman develop, from his self-awareness, self-
consciousness. ‘The outstanding achievement of HegeYs Phenomenology',
wrote Marx,

. . .is. . .that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process
. . .that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends
objective man - true, because real, man - as the outcome of man’s
own labour. . . He grasps labour as the essence of man. . ,³⁸

In so doing, Marx goes on, Hegel has laid the groundwork for future
theoretical developments.

Within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man’s
act of self-genesis - conceives man’s relation to himself as an alien
being and the manifestation of himself as an alien being to be the
emergence of species - consciousness and species - life.³⁹




For Hegel and for Marx, labour is an activity in terms of which man
succeeds in transcending his merely biological existence, and thus in
becoming man in his true notion. Labour, in other words, is - or should
be - a moment of freedom. If freedom consists in giving human form to
inhuman objects, then labour (ceteris paribus) makes men free, even if
men have yet to learn that this is so. To labour is to do away with the
stubborn, intransigent independence of nature, of the conditions of
life. It is to consciously transform these conditions in accordance with
a preconceived purpose (even if this purpose is coerced, not spon-
taneous). In order to assert himself and to emerge from the realm of
necessity, man has to transform the world in such a way that he can
recognize himself in something that had been originally independent
of him. The goal, for Hegel and for Marx, was that of self-realization
by, for and of men; man, for both of them, was the outcome of his
own labour. It is true that Hegel’s paradigm furnished Marx with a
prolegomenon altogether unwittingly (Marx ignored the specifically
ancient placement of his ‘struggle for recognition’ - the outcome of
which was the Stoicism shared by Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus);
but such is the cunning of reason; and in any event, Hegel’s attempted
solution, according to Marx, amounted to something less than self-
realization. Man in Hegel’s civil society is not the outcome of his own
labour, and cannot recognize himself in the world his labour creates,
except in the inhumanly restricted sense Marx was to investigate
throughout his life. Self-realization is inadequate if it depends on
pauperization and war, together with the admittedly less extreme but
also severe social and moral shortcomings that characterize even a
smoothly running economic realm. Marx, even in his critiques of
The Philosophy of Right, took issue not with the aims of Hegelian
political philosophy, the ends of integration and community, which
to Marx, too, were vital human needs. He took issue with Hegel’s view
that these aims could be provided for, and men in their social being
satisfied, within the framework of a modern state that met Hegel’s
own specifications.

It is for this reason that Marx’s criticisms of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right - which raise several themes Marx was to take up again in his
later writings on the state, as we shall see - are of vital importance to
an understanding of the theory of the state Marx was to counterpose
to those of the anarchists. Marx and the anarchists, it can be shown,
are in the first instance answering different kinds of questions. What
underlies Marx’s investigations of various contemporary state-forms
- investigations Marx undertook throughout his career - is a question
posed originally (and starkly) by Hegel: what are the characteristics of
the modem state, as opposed to earlier forms and as opposed to a
specifically modern form of society, with specifically modern character-
istics? The point here is not that anarchist theoreticians were necessarily




unaware that the modern state differs from earlier state-forms, or that
what helps characterize the modern state is its relationship with civil
society - itself a product of relatively recent times. It is that the mod-
ernity of the state-form and the question of its relationship to civil so-
ciety are questions that to an anarchist pale into insignificance alongside
the presence of the state as the central enemy of freedom; to Marx, on the
other hand, what makes a state-form identifiably modern, and how it
relates to the civil society that underlies and penetrates it, are not
incidental questions but central ones. Without answering them - as
Hegel himself had recognized, whatever the shortcomings of his rec-
onciliation may have been - we cannot, according to Marx, identify
what the state is. To claim to understand the nature of the modern
state without understanding the character of civil society - which is
what Marx considered all his anarchist interlocutors to have claimed -
is a futile and potentially dangerous pretension. Awareness of mod-
ernity and the existence of civil society is simply not enough; what is
required is what Hegel himself had made possible and necessary: real
investigation, that is to be speculative and empirical all at once, of what
the state and civil society comport. Community - Marx’s (and Hegel’s)
Gemeinwesen - is not simply something that can automatically replace
an ill-investigated state;Marx recognized that after Hegel’s investigation,
community could in no sense be seen as automatic. Community, if it is
to come about, must emerge from the structure of the present, its
proximate forerunner; to know its shape we must know the contours
of the present and of the threats to, as well as promises of, community
it contains.

From the point of view of Marx’s early essays - not to mention the
way these are connected with his later writings on the state, which will
be examined in the following chapter - we can see that Marx’s stand-
point differs from any anarchist standpoint not because Marx lays more
emphasis on a commonly perceived problem, that of the contradiction
between state and civil society, but because this contradiction is the
point d’appui of all Marx’s subsequent investigations - investigations
that in all their breadth and depth would seem to an anarchist to be
simply unnecessary. What matters to the anarchist, above all, is what
the state does', what mattered to Marx is what no state can do. That
no state, the Hegelian included, can embody community is a proposition
the anarchist can take as read, or consider proven; to Marx, it was a
working hypothesis, the basis of his subsequent investigations of the
contours of capitalist society.

If Hegel’s solution - which makes of citizenship in the modern state
what Marx called ‘the scholasticism of popular life’⁴⁰ - was, as Marx
thought, a mystification, the problem it was supposed to resolve, the
contradiction of state and society, of economic and political action, is
real enough. Man’s political significance, in his capacity as a citizen, is




detached from his real private being, as an economic actor. Hegel had
recognized this, in his own way, clearly enough; yet the mediating
institutions that are supposed to ensure the resolution of the split
between private and public being in The Philosophy of Right - the
sovereign, the bureaucracy, the Estates, the Legislature - Marx demon-
strates to his own satisfaction are incapable of effecting any meaningful
reconciliation. Hegel’s state, far from being exalted above the play of
private interests, and far from representing any real general interest,
is itself a false universal. Its claims to a kind of transcendence are
demonstrably without substance.

Marx, in so characterizing the Hegelian state, makes a peculiarly
deft and telling observation, since Hegel himself had constantly criticized
Kant’s Rechtsstaat for being an abstract universal which rests on the
margins of civil life. Yet Marx was not concerned simply to hoist Hegel
neatly on his own petard; there is a good deal of substance to his claim
that a modern state that met Hegel’s rather extreme conditions would
nevertheless unavoidably correspond to an illusory ‘citizenship’ that
itself would stay on the edges of everyday life. Worse still, its presence
there effects in those men to whom it supposedly applies an ‘essential
schism’ between man in his capacity as economic actor and man in his
capacity as abstract citizen.

In his political role, the member of civil society rids himself of
his class, of his actual private position; by this alone does he
acquire significance as man. . .his character as member of the
state. . . appears to be his human character. For all his other
characteristics in civil society appear to be unessential to man,
the individual.⁴¹

Yet, if we ask what these supposedly ‘unessential’ characteristics are,
the inventory that answers the question becomes disquietingly long.
These ‘unessential’ characteristics are precisely what make us individ-
uals, what distinguish each one of us from everybody else. This
paradox, which is a monstrous one, is worth dwelling on, for it is one
that any sensitive reader of Marx encounters again and again through-
out his writings. It is clear from a reading of The German Ideology
alone - as we shall see in considering Marx’s attack on Max Stirner,
which takes up the greater part of the book - that Marx was much
more concerned to investigate what is involved in the concept of
individuality (individuality as opposed to individualism, much as
Hegel had distinguished the two) than is usually believed. Indeed it
must be emphasized that Marx is much more concerned to synthesize
individuality, so considered, and community than is often believed.
It is because of these concerns that the question of Marx’s itinerary
from Hegel is so significant; for Marx was one of the very few people




to recognize that Hegel’s own investigation of what is involved in the
notions of community and individuality had made all discussion in
pre-Hegelian terms (such as that of the anarchists) irrelevant to the
point of being nonsensical.

Returning to the question of citizenship in the modern state with
the question of individuality (in its true notion) in mind, we can
specify in what respects it falls short of any such individuality. Citizen-
ship in the modern state abstracts those features of individual existence
that distinguish one person from another; in its need to treat all men
equally and indiscriminately, citizenship takes the form of a least
common denominator rather than something that can be said to express
human diversity - even though, or precisely because, this diversity under
modern conditions is going to find no other outlet. Because ‘civil
society and state are separated’, Marx writes in his ‘Critique’ of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right,

the citizen of the state is also separated from the citizen as the
member of civil society. He must therefore effect a fundamental
division within himself. . . [In] order to behave as an actual
citizen of the state and to attain political significance and
effectiveness, he must step out of his civil reality, disregard
it, and withdraw from this whole organization [of civil society]
into his individuality; for the whole existence which he finds
for his citizenship of the state is his sheer, blank individuality,
since the existence of the state as executive is complete without
him, and his existence in civil society is complete without the
state. . . The separation of civil society and political state
necessarily appears as a separation of the political citizen, the
citizen of the state, from civil society, from his own, actual
empirical reality; for as a state-idealist he is quite another being,
a different, distinct, opposed being. . ⁴²

But even this is not all. Once the individual’s ‘sheer blank individ-
uality’ is separated or abstracted by citizenship from his ‘actual em-
pirical reality’, we are still left with the question of what this reality
ultimately can consist in under modern conditions. Marx’s answer
is still startling in its implications. The essence of a particular personality,
he insists, ‘is not its beard, its blood, its abstract physical character but
its social quality’;⁴³ but what remains of this ‘social quality’ if its
ostensible arena, civil society, is as Hegel described it? That precious
little remains can be seen if we examine so basic a feature of modern
civil society as the division of labour. Adam Smith’s well-known charac-
terization of the division of labour in modern society differed from
earlier accounts by virtue of the fact that with Smith production was
emphasized at the direct expense of any personal differences in aptitude,




character or talent, rather than being seen as an expression of these
differences. To see what was distinctive about Smith’s approach we
need only indicate a rough comparison with Plato.

Plato, in his belief that each constituent of society should perform
social tasks appropriate to his nature, shows the division of labour - the
basis of society - to be a development following from the manifest
needs and talents of the individual. Even if the talents and aptitudes
are regarded one-sidedly, any production in Plato’s Republic (pro-
duction which will be severely restricted in scope) will be for the
purpose of satisfying human needs - needs which, like the talents
employed to satisfy them, are specific to determinate individuals.
Plato’s approach differs markedly from that of Adam Smith, to whom
the division of labour was a means of increasing the quantity of ‘wealth’
- a much more abstract, less determinate category than needs - and
speeding up the accumulation of capital. Smith meant two things by
the division of labour - a phrase that seems first to have been used by
Mandeville. Smith’s division of labour means, first, the splitting up of
the process of manufacture in a particular way - its segmentation into
minute, regularized operations, into more or less identical, homologous
cells. On the basis of this segmentation Smith employs the term ‘division
of labour’ in its second signification as the separation of different
trades and employments throughout society as a whole. But what is
basic and problematic is the original segmentation which involves not
different tasks’ devolving on different people, but similar tasks’ devolving
on people who are likely to be different in skill, aptitude, personality,
etc., but who for the purposes of production can be considered equal.
In other words, whatever is specific to the individual worker - his
personal, human qualities, his inclinations, aptitudes, and talents - is
in Smith’s division of labour not catered for but disregarded and
abstracted, as irrelevant to the production of wealth.

Smith believed that people’s similarities outweighed their differences,
and that human nature is ultimately invariant and independent of
historical and social context. He has as his starting-point an equalizing,
non-specific and ‘abstract’ conception of human nature, of human
labour, and for that matter of production, which is undertaken for
the sake of an abstract ‘wealth’. Marx recognized that the concept of
labour, abstracted from any actual manifestations it may have, pre-
supposes social conditions in which individuals are no longer identified
with their social status - in contrast with earlier justifications of occu-
pational inequality according to which one’s place within the overall
division of labour was said to correspond to an intrinsic personal
quality - that of being ‘slavish’ or ‘churlish’, for example, in the case
of slaves or churls. Under capitalist conditions, Marx was to point out
in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, individuals are for the first time
considered as equal political beings regardless of their actual social




status; the same kind of abstracting of individual qualities and charac-
teristics takes place at the specifically political level as takes place at
the level of manufacture. Hegel, who did not subscribe to the ideology
of ‘the rights of man’ and its homogenized notion of citizen, strove to
avoid its political expression; and, even at the level of civil society,
Hegel was concerned not to minimize but certainly to circumscribe the
degree of ‘abstraction’ of personal qualities that could conceivably take
place. He insisted - as though he was afraid of some of the consequences
of his own (and Smith’s) analysis - that man’s most personal attributes,
his skill, his knowledge, his beauty, are not alienable on the market.
Marx in the Economic and Political Manuscripts was to insist that these
very attributes under capitalism do and must become alienable com-
modities, services that can be bought and sold on the market just like
everything else. Each person is relevant only as the seller or the pur-
chaser of some commodity or commodities - and the notion of com-
modity , when applied to labour, implies a reduction from what is specific
to a worker or an act of labour to what these all share, and to what can
be measured along a common axis (that of the production of wealth).

This reduction or restrictiveness has political as well as economic
implications. Relations in society from the point of view of production
are not among men with various personal qualities but among producers
and consumers - men, that is to say, who are formally ‘free’ and ‘equal’
and distinguishable only in what they have to offer or want to buy. The
distinction between individuals that comes to be operative is one that
manifestly disregards any real differences one from the other they may
exhibit; it is reduced to a difference in the quantity of values, the
difference in the amount of wealth, owned by each of them. The
process, as Hegel was all too unhappily aware, was one of wilful ab-
straction; and it follows from the will to produce abstract ‘wealth’:
quantities of value, that is to say, measured in terms of money and
not by the desire to directly satisfy human needs (or, in the language
of Marxist economics, to produce for the satisfaction of ‘use-values’).
Men in civil society act as dissociated beings, as disconnected singulars,
not despite their reduction to the common level of producer but
directly because of this reduction. What men have in common - their
status as producers and consumers - does nothing to unite them or to
forge bonds among them; on the contrary, it is an expression, a social
manifestation of their separation one from another. One crucial pre-
requisite of community is not only lacking but is actually structurally
prevented from emerging. Civil society, in other words, is not only
‘ethically incomplete’; it must arrest the moral development of its
human components.