Marx and the Struggle for Human Emancipation: What’s Recognition Got to Do With It?

Marx and the Struggle for Human Emancipation: What’s Recognition Got to Do With It? ¹
Igor Shoikhedbrod, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

[Draft: Please do not cite or reproduce without the author’s permission].

My objective in this paper is threefold. First, I outline the evolution of Marx’s understanding of recognition from his formative Comments on James Mill to his historically-grounded account of recognition among socialized individuals in the Grundrisse, as well as in Capital. Second, while I acknowledge and commend Professor Honneth’s influential revival of Hegel’s philosophy in a philosophical context that has largely been dominated by neo-Kantianism, I take issue with his interpretation in The Struggle for Recognition that the mature Marx replaced his earlier, Hegelian-inspired formulation of recognition with an interest-based and economistic theory that no longer emphasized the struggle for recognition as such. Third, drawing upon the lesser known work of Georg Lukács—The Ontology of Social Being—I maintain that when Marx’s account of recognition is viewed through the prism of Lukács’ later work, it is neither too demanding nor unrealistic to warrant dismissal by critical theorists in light of the complexities facing modern capitalist societies. On the contrary, Marx’s radical formulation of recognition provides a necessary corrective to dominant theories of recognition that have been held captive by a reified and proprietary conception of personhood. Moreover, Marx’s ‘mature’ account of recognition does not eclipse the emancipatory significance that he attached to work—an emancipatory significance that Axel Honneth correctly saw as being displaced in contemporary social philosophy.² In this regard, my paper can also be read as an attempt to unearth the emancipatory relevance of Marx’s radical theory of recognition for contemporary critical theory. A radical reformulation of recognition is all the more necessary for a critical theory of society that has not given up its sights on the struggle for human emancipation.

The struggle for recognition has become a catchphrase in contemporary moral and political philosophy, particularly with the influential interventions of Charles Taylor and, to an even greater extent, those of Axel Honneth³. It should not come as a surprise that the most vocal exponents of the recognition approach have been neo-Hegelian philosophers, who have found in recognition theory a critical framework for contesting various forms of domination and misrecognition in contemporary liberal-capitalist societies. To be sure, the theoretical inspiration for this approach can be traced back to the master himself, namely, G.W.F Hegel, who insisted in one of the more famous sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it also exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”⁴ Hegel went on on to show how domination becomes futile as a means of obtaining recognition because genuine recognition can only be obtained from another free and equal agent of freedom. Intersubjectivity is already part of the picture at such a rudimentary level of self-consciousness, and for good reason. The presence of another ‘ego’, ‘person’, and at a more developed stage, citizen, is an inescapable feature of the human condition, whether one ends up dominating another ego for the sake of achieving self-certainty (the Lord), whether one trembles at the spectre of pure nothingness (the Bondsman), or whether one wishes for their legal rights to be acknowledged and respected in the context of a liberal democratic polity.

When approaching the topic of recognition, it is helpful to make a conceptual distinction between two types of recognition that are not always distinguished, even if they are related. In the first case, recognition can be used to describe a process of cognitive awareness or realization pertaining to an individual`s environment or circumstances that does not in and of itself lend moral respect or concern for the freedom and well-being of other individuals.⁵ For instance, I might recognize an old acquaintance passing by on the street. However, my recognition of a perceived fact about the state of the world, including persons I encounter in this world (leaving aside objects for a moment), does not necessarily translate into an acknowledgement of, and felt concern for, another individual’s freedom and moral worth. In another sense, one can speak of relations of mutual recognition that are informed by symmetry, reciprocity, and non-domination. I draw this distinction because in many cases (the most obvious ones for Marxists are class consciousness and struggle) cognitive recognition or the awareness of a wrong can actually lead to antagonism, conflict, and even violence. Cognitive recognition is therefore not synonymous with relations of mutual recognition. The former is illustrated by Hegel’s observation that through the process of labouring and transforming nature for the Lord, the Bondsman becomes aware of his freedom as a person: “in fashioning the thing, [the Bondsman] becomes aware that being-for-self belongs to him, that he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right”⁶ It only takes a cognitive recognition on the part of the Bondsman to bring an end to the condit.ion of bondage. It turns out that the ‘mature’ Marx makes an analogous claim in the Grundrisse about the experience of the wage-labourer under capitalism, which should already cast some doubt on Axel Honneth’s claim that Marx was no longer concerned with recognition in his later writings. After outlining the dynamics of capitalist production that give rise to alienated labour, Marx writes: “The recognition [Erkennung] of the product as its own, and the judgment that its separation from the conditions of its realization is improper—forcibly imposed—is an enormous awareness [Bewusstein], itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital and as much the knell to its doom, as with the slave’s awareness that he cannot be the property of another, with his consciousness of himself as a person, the existence of slavery becomes merely a artificial, vegetative existence, and ceases to be able to prevail as the basis of production.”⁷ I do not wish to belabour the significance of this passage in Marx’s work as a whole because there has been a problematic tendency among scholars of Hegel and Marx, the most notable being Alexandre Kojève, to argue that Marx simply appropriated Hegel’s dialectic of Lordship and Bondage and transposed it onto the arena of class struggle.⁸ Although it would be difficult to deny that Marx had Hegel’s Phenomenology in mind in the above-cited passage, it is equally dubious to conclude that this passage encapsulates the entirety of Marx’s social theory. In any case, my point is that cognitive recognition of one’s freedom as a person—or that the present capitalist order is improper—does not amount to achieving relations of mutual recognition. The latter presuppose reciprocity, mutuality, and non-domination that have to be acknowledged on all sides. In other words, relations of mutual recognition presuppose that the freedom and moral worth of each individual are acknowledged by all. This insight becomes all the more relevant when considering Marx’s radical theory of recognition and the sense in which his account moves beyond the recognition of the proprietary and juridical person.⁹

As has rightly been noted by Axel Honneth and others, Marx’s most explicit reflections on recognition are to be found in his formative Comments on James Mill, where recognition is intricately tied to the process of associated and un-alienated production.¹⁰ I read Marx’s comments as an important supplement to his account of alienated labour in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, except that the focus here is on exchange relations between mutually disinterested commodity owners. Exchange is taken to be a key medium of recognition in capitalist society insofar as individuals relate to one another as juridical persons and respect each other’s rights in their transactions on the market. However, Marx shows that recognition in this sphere is characterized by the exclusive ownership of commodities between mutually disinterested and atomitisic persons. In other words, social relations between persons are transformed into relations between things:

Thus, exchange is brought about necessarily on both sides by the object of each man’s production and possession. The ideal relationship to the mutual objects of our reproduction is of course our mutual need. But the actual and true relationship, the one that has a real effect, is simply the mutual exclusion possession of mutual production.¹¹

Whereas exchange is taken to be the acknowledgement of freedom and equality among persons by political economists in capitalist society—after all it remains, at least formally, a sphere of equivalence, Marx likens relations between commodity owners to those of mutual exploitation, plundering, and servitude:

Our mutual recognition of the respective powers of our objects, however, is a struggle, and in a struggle the victor is the one who has more energy, force, insight, or adroitness. If I have sufficient physical force, I plunder you directly. If physical force cannot be used, we try to impose on each other by bluff, and the more adroit overreaches the other. For the totality of the relationship, it is a matter of chance who overreaches whom. The ideal, intended overreaching takes place on both sides, i.e., each in his own judgment has overreached the other.¹²
And he continues:
if this mutual enslavement to an object [the commodity] at the beginning of the process appears now as in the relationship of lordship and slavery,that is only the crude and open expression of our true relationship...Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects. Thus man, himself is for us mutually worthless....¹³
Marx contrasts these relations of recognition under capitalist private property with those that would follow under associated production and social property. He regards the institutions of private property in the means of production and market exchange as contributing to a broader process of domination and misrecognition, whereas Hegel, for example, saw variations of these institutions as integral mediums for recognition in any modern society.¹⁴ Marx’s account of recognition here is based on the idea of producing for others, which is supposed to foster the reciprocal realization of human needs and the objective validation of an individual’s personality through the production and consumption of use values. Needless to say, Marx’s concept of species-being also takes centre stage in this final passage of his Comments on James Mill:

Supposing we had produced as human beings; each of us in his production would have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow man. I would have: (1) objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed an individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realizing that my personality was objective, visible to the senses and thus a power raised beyond all doubt. (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment of realizing that I had both satisfied a human need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned for another human being the object that met his need. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged and felt by you as a completion of your own essence, and a necessary part of yourself and have thus realized that I am confirmed both in your thought and in your love. (4) In my expression of my own life I would have fashioned your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity have realized my own essence, my human, my communal essence...Thus, in this relationship what occurred on my side would also occur on yours.¹⁵
Marx’s Comments show how what is initially taken to be a sphere of mutual recognition among equally worthy persons in capitalist society is informed by relations of domination and plundering. To be sure, Marx’s thinking undergoes extensive change by the time he formulates the major premises of the materialistic theory of history. The concept of recognition, like his formative, Feurbachian-inspired distinction between authentic and inauthentic human essence, loses its ahistorical character and becomes grounded in the critique of political economy, particularly in the struggle of the working class to bring an end to class domination in capitalist society. According to Axel Honneth’s account in the Struggle for Recognition, Marx replaced his earlier, Hegelian-inspired formulation of recognition with a utilitarian, interest-based, and economistic theory that no longer emphasized the struggle for recognition as such.¹⁶ However, when Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital are read along with his Comments on James Mill, we see a recurring thread, both in his presentation of commodity exchange, as well as in his conclusions. Here, ‘the struggle for recognition’, to use Honneth’s formulation, is transformed into a class struggle for human emancipation. One can already discern this insight in Marx’s formative work, where he claims that “A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.”¹⁷ Thus the proletariat’s struggle for recognition becomes a universal struggle for human emancipation.

In the Grundrisse, the famous rough draft to Capital, Marx emphasizes that capitalist production is based upon relations of recognition between legally free and equal persons, which is a marked change from all pre-capitalist social relations:

The first presupposition [in capitalism], to begin with, is that the relation of slavery or serfdom has been suspended. Living labour capacity belongs to itself, and has disposition over the expenditure of its forces, through exchange. Both sides confront each other as persons. Formally, their relation has the equality and freedom of exchange as such. As far as concerns the legal relation, the fact that this form is a mere semblance, and a deceptive semblance, appears as an external matter.¹⁸
And, in Capital, Marx elaborates that
In order that these objects [commodities] may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must, therefore, mutually recognise [my emphasis] in each other the rights of private proprietors.¹⁹
Marx begins with commodity exchange as a sphere of mutual recognition between juridical persons, but he will demonstrate, as he did in his Comments on James Mill, that commodity exchange masks deeper relations of domination in capitalist production, where the freedom and equality of the workers, who are otherwise free and equal in the exchange relation, disappear. Marx writes, for instance, that “in present bourgeois society as a whole, the positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear”.²⁰ And in Capital Marx’s point is made even clearer with reference to the worker’s

transformation from contractual exchange to the sphere of production:
It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered...The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no ‘free agent,’ that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it.²¹
Although Marx exposes the domination and asymmetry that lies beneath the realm of exchange, it isimportant to caution against the simplistic assertion that Marx rejected the concept of the juridical person outright, as many Marxists and liberal commentators have wrongfully concluded; nor does Marx long for some kind of return to pre-capitalist relations of personal or, for that matter, communal dependence. On the contrary, Marx points out that

when we look at social relations which create an undeveloped system of exchange, of exchange values and of money, or which correspond to an undeveloped degree of these, then it is clear from the outset that the individuals in this society, although their relations appear to be more personal, enter into connection with one another only as individuals imprisoned [my emphasis] within a certain definition, as feudal lord or vassal, landlord and serf, etc., or as members of a cast etc. or as members of an estate.²²
Moreover, Marx is not being ironic when he argues that formal exchange in capitalism embodies a form of recognition among persons, even if these relations are then subverted in capitalist production. In the Grundrisse, Marx still sees the exchange of equivalents as a process of mutual recognition:

Regarded from the standpoint of the natural difference between them, individual A exists as the owner of a use value for B, and B as owner of a use value for A. In this respect, however, they are not indifferent to one another, but integrate with one another, have need of one another; so that individual B, as objectified in the commodity, is a need of individual A, and vice versa; so that they stand not only in an equal but also in a social relation to one another. This is not all. The fact that this need on the part of one can be satisfied by the product of another, and that each confronts the other as owner of the object of the other’s need, this proves that each of them reaches beyond his own particular need etc, as a human being, and that they relate to one another as human beings; that their common species-being is acknowledged by all. It does not happen elsewhere-that elephants produce for tigers, or animals for other animals.²³
Where does all of this leave us with respect to Marx’s radical understanding of recognition and Axel Honneth’s claim that the mature Marx dispensed with his youthful Hegelian understanding of recognition? For starters, Marx’s continued reference to recognition in the Grundrisse and in Capital attests to my thesis that he did not disavow his earlier understanding of recognition. On the contrary, Marx’s insight in Capital, his life work, is that capitalist production is defined by relations of class domination rather mutual recognition between free and equal persons, although, as we have seen, this escapes the parameters of formal exchange. Aside from the fact that Marx makes repeated references to recognition in the Grundrisse and in Capital, it is regrettable that Honneth does not take up Marx’s and Engels’ famous assertion in the Communist Manifesto that “in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”²⁴ Marx’s radical theory of recognition is based on the premise that the recognition of the unhindered development of each individual, including the recognition of his or her needs, is the precondition for the free development of all individuals. However, Marx did not think that relations of mutual recognition could be achieved under capitalist production because capitalism remains—in spite all of its historical advances—a non-reciprocal political-economic system based on the domination of the many by the few.²⁵ It is to be recalled that relations of mutual or intersubjective recognition presuppose that an individual’s freedom and moral worth are validated only when they are given reciprocal acknowledgement or confirmation by another agent of freedom. In other words, the latter presuppose relations of reciprocity, mutuality, and non-domination that must be acknowledged on all sides, but capitalist production—at least for Marx—is everything but that.

To be sure, recognition in communist society would no longer take place among atomistic individuals but among social individuals, which is why Marx and Engels write in the German Ideology that “only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”²⁶ The implication of Marx’s radical theory of recognition is that we must go beyond the proprietary understanding of recognition that informs exchange between mutually indifferent commodity owners in the market because this exchange relation hides the deeper reality of domination and misrecognition. The moral of Marx’s radical theory of recognition for contemporary critical theorists is that productive relations have to be radically transformed and classes abolished for relations of mutual recognition to become a reality.

Marx was also a dialectician, which is why he did not posit associated production as some kind of utopian ideal that society should strive to achieve. Instead, he saw glimpses of this new mode of production as developing within capitalist society itself, leading him to view the joint stock companies and worker cooperatives, for example, as representing “within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation, all the shortcomings of the prevailing system”.²⁷ In the same context, Marx wrote that “the capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one”.²⁸ Although Marx would also point to the defects and constraints of these ‘sprouts’ within existing capitalist production, he viewed them as empirically existing transitional forms to a post-capitalist society. These passing remarks in Capital suggest that Marx’s reflections on ‘social property’ and ‘associated production’ are far less distant and utopian than some might suppose. Nor did Marx think that ‘producing for others’ was somehow confined to craftsmanship, which was already dwindling in his lifetime. Marx’s brief remarks on cooperatives also provide another way of looking at the ‘Marx problem’ that Honneth outlines in his most recent book.²⁹

Having said all that, I do not doubt that contemporary critical theorists will still find Marx’s account of recognition unpersuasive, dated, or just too demanding for our contemporary political-economic horizons, that is, if they grant that he has a theory of recognition at all. It is for this reason that I wish to conclude with George Lukács’ reflections in the Ontology of Social Being as a promising step forward. The Ontology was Lukács’ last (and, regrettably, unfinished) attempt to elaborate Marx’s understanding of social ontology, that is, the nature of social being in Marx’s social theory. Lukács’ Ontology was the product of a lifelong intellectual reflection of bearing witness to the trials and tribulations of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the 20^th century.

Lukács views social ontology as the movement from 1) nature to 2) its transformation through individual acts of labour (praxis) to 3) relations between socialized individuals with reference to what he calls ‘secondary teleological positings’. Lukács’ clearest departure from Hegelian dialectics is his rejection of the ‘negation of the negation’ that also informed Marx’s thinking about the revolutionary transformation of capitalism. As far as Lukács is concerned, there is no final resolution or determinate negation following the revolutionary transformation of capitalism:

Lukács writes:

An ontological abolition of such reflection determinations is impossible, for even if there is a de facto abolition of a really given objectivity, the form-content relation will simply renew itself in the new objectivity, or new objectivities, that thus arise, with corresponding variations; there will always be a form-content relation.³⁰
While the ‘abolition of contradictions’ can be resolved in logic, the same cannot be said in the realm of social ontology because Lukács thinks that every individual act of labour, which becomes social in and through labour, is always characterized by the presence of alternative choices and values, thereby introducing new complexities that could not have been fully anticipated in advance by socialized individuals: “the development of labour, therefore, brings it about that the alternative character of human practice, the behaviour of man to his environment and to himself, [my italics] comes to be based ever more strongly on decisions between alternatives”.³¹

While Lukács agrees with Marx that the development of the productive forces is a necessary technical precondition for communist society and relations of mutual recognition between socialized individuals, it is by no means sufficient. Lukács builds upon Marx’s claim in Capital that human freedom is to be understood as the associated producers rationally governing their interchange with nature and with one another in a manner worthy of their human nature.³² For Lukács, Marx’s usage of the word ‘worthy’ speaks to considerations of value rather than mere technical efficiency. Every individual act of labour always poses a value-laden choice between different alternatives, whereby individual labourers also seek to “influence the consciousness of other people so as to bring about the desired teleological positing on their part.”³³ I do not think it would be an exaggeration on my part to claim that the late Lukács appears here to have anticipated Jurgen Habermas’ emphasis on reason giving, though it is important to note that he does so within Marx’s materialistic framework and with reference to relations of mutual recognition between socialized individuals producing for each another in the context of associated production.

The idea of secondary teleological positing suggests for Lukács the social-ontological need for legal mediation between different individual acts of labour in post-capitalist society. Secondary teleological positing points to the necessity of recognizing an individual’s right to be heard (or not to be excluded) and to participate in the process of choosing between alternatives. There is therefore a need for an institutional form of mediation that is related to the economy but that is also distinct and autonomous from it, and for Lukács this institutional form of mediation is the law (Recht):

It is clear ... that certain … rules, which acquire a position of autonomy in the course of history, are by their actual nature forms of mediation... We can refer to the sphere of law in the broadest sense (Recht).... this mediating function must receive a constitution independentfrom the economy, and heterogeneously structured in relation to it, precisely in order to fulfill its task in the optimal way.³⁴
Although death prevented Lukács from fully elaborating what he took to be Marx’s social ontology, he provides contemporary critical theorists with resources for thinking about relations of mutual recognition that are sensitive to the complexities facing modern societies, such as the prevalence of diverse values and points of view, the conditions of labourers globally, and the degradation of the earth’s environment, while still holding firmly to Marx’s conclusion that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. I set out to provide a sketch of Marx’s radical theory of recognition by showing how Marx’s formative account of recognition in his Comments on James Mill is further developed in the Grundrisse and in Capital. Against Axel Honneth’s interpretation, I argued that Marx did not dispense with his account of recognition in later writings. Quite the contrary, Marx demonstrates why relations of mutual recognition cannot be realized under a political-economic system that is characterized by class domination. I argued that when Marx’s account of recognition is viewed through the prism of Lukács’ later work, it is neither too demanding nor unrealistic to warrant dismissal by critical theorists in light of the complexities facing modern capitalist societies. Critical theorists must therefore move beyond the mere recognition of juridical persons as bearers of equal legal rights. To do otherwise would mean turning a blind eye to the systemic forms of domination that continue to afflict working people and other marginalized groups on a daily basis. When all is said and done, capitalism remains a political-economic system that is based on structurally-induced coercion, exploitation, and domination, even if it rests on some degree of legitimacy. The legitimacy of capitalism has been and will continue to be shaken so long as human suffering prevails and freedom is not given its rightful due.

1^ *Different versions of this paper were presented at the International Critical Theory Conference of Rome, the Marx and Philosophy Society’s 11^th Annual Conference on “Marx, Reification and Recognition” in London, and at the workshop on “Anerkennung und Sozialismus” at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. I would like to thank Eleonora Piromalli for thoughtfully bringing to my attention the relevance of Axel Honneth’s earlier work on “Work and Instrumental Action, which gave me a more balanced glimpse into Honneth’s treatment of Marx, labour, and recognition. I would also like to thank Professor Richard Day for his insights on the significance of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being. Last but not least, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Simone Chambers, for her support and encouragement.

2^ Honneth writes “Under the pressure exerted by the experience of this rapid industrialization of work in the form of Taylorism, social philosophers and social scientists since the turn of the century have gradually come to overemphasize the technical and economically functional aspect of the concept of work, thus draining it of the emancipatory significance which Hegel and Marx had claimed for it and allowing these aspects of its meaning to emigrate into the realm of cultural criticism.” See Axel Honneth. “Work and Instrumental Action”, New German Critique, (26), 1982, 38.

3^ See Charles Taylor. “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition”. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Axel Honneth. The Struggle for Recognition, Trans. Joel Anderson (New York: Polity, 1995).

4^ G.W.F Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit,Trans. A.V Miller (Oxford: New York), 1977, §178.

5^ I agree with Daniel Brudney’s thesis that Marx’s formative account of recognition is premised on the idea of moral concern rather than relations of cold respect or love. However, I think it is more appropriate to conclude that Marx’s overall account of recognition is centred on the idea of solidarity between ‘socialized individuals’. See Daniel Brudney. “Producing for Others”. The Philosophy of Recognition. Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher F. Zurn (eds.) Lanham: Lexington, 2009. In response to Max Stirner’s charge that communists preach altruism and self-sacrifice, Marx writes: “Within communist society, the only society in which the genuine and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase [my emphasis], this development is determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces... The individuals’ consciousness of their mutual relations will, of course, likewise become something quite different, and, therefore, will no more be the ‘principle of love’ or dévoûment, than it will be egoism...[my emphasis]”. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. “The German Ideology”. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 199.

6^ G.W.F Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit, 196.

7^ Karl Marx. Grundrisse, Trans. Martin Nicolaus (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 463.

8^See Alexandre Kojève. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Alan Bloom , Trans. James Nichols, Jr (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1980), 64 and 159.

9^ Heikki Ikäheimo thoughtfully brought to my attention that a further distinction should be drawn between intersubjective recognition and institutionalized forms of recognition for a more precise understanding of both Hegel’s and Marx’s accounts of recognition. The distinction between intersubjective and institutional recognition is outlined in Heikki Ikäheimo’s forthcoming book, Anerkennung (2014).

10^Axel Honneth. The Struggle for Recognition, trans. Joel Anderson (New York: Polity, 1995), 149-50.

11^ Karl Marx. “On James Mill”. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 131.

12^ Ibid, 130-31.

13^ Ibid, 132.

14 Andrew Chitty. “Recognition and property in Hegel and the early Marx”.Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 16 (2), (2013).

15^ Ibid.

16^Axel Honneth. The Struggle for Recognition, 149-50.

17^ Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, (New York: Norton, 1978), 64.

18^ Karl Marx. Grundrisse, 464.

19^ Karl Marx. Capital Vol. 1, 84.

20^ Karl Marx. Grundrisse, Trans. Martin Nicolaus, 247.

21^ Karl Marx. Capital Vol. 1, 301-2.

22^ Karl Marx. Grundrisse, 163.

23^ Karl Marx. Grundrisse, 242-243.

24^Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, The Marx-Engels Reader, 491.

25^ There is reason to believe that Honneth would agree with my conclusion. See Axel Honneth. Freedom’s Right, Trans. Joseph Ganahl. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 51.

26^Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. “The German Ideology”, The Marx-Engels Reader, 197.

27^ Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III, 440.

28^ Ibid

29^ Axel Honneth. Freedom’s Right, 180

30^ Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Hegel's False and his Genuine Ontology, Trans .D. Fernbach, (London: Merlin, 1978), 113.

31^ Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labour, Trans .D. Fernbach, (London: Merlin, 1980), 35.

32^ Karl Marx Capital Vol. III, ed Frederick Engels. (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 920.

33^ Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labour, 89.

34^ Ibid, 90.