Shedding Self-Externality

Marx, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, builds on the Hegelian dialectic of the master and slave (which the Norton retranslates as lord-bondsman). While Hegel asserts that the self-consciousness of the laborer allows him to find an independent identity through his work. Marx says that this cannot happen under the conditions of “forced labour” (655). Work falls into the category of forced labor for the following reason: “[Political economy] expresses in general, abstract formulae the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulae it then takes for laws” (652). This means that while capitalism seems free, the process becomes like law to us, meaning that revolution is necessary to overthrow the “fortuitous fact” of the capitalist laws of economy. The worker cannot be satisfied and find identity in work because the work does not satisfy his own needs, “it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” (655). Marx agrees with Hegel to the extent that work can belong to man’s “essential being” (654). He does not say this directly, but implies it when he says, “The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that is, in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself” (654-55). In this sense, the distinction that Marx makes requires further clarification from Hegel.

I believe that Hegel would disagree with Marx’s assertion. He would say that even under the conditions of forced labor one could find his or her identity in that labor. The material circumstances of a bondsman leave two options for identity depending on the self-consciousness of the bondsman, not on material change. Hegel would not mind the assertions that the forced laborer is under “false consciousness,” for he says, “The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self- consciousness” (543). Hegel and Marx also line up in the assertion that the worker’s “essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘other’, or as Marx puts it, “the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs not to himself, but to another… in his human function he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal” (655). Thus we can correlate the terms “animal” and “other.” They would even agree that the worker or bondsman “is outside of itself and must rid its self of its self-externality” (543). But is the ridding of self-externality come from within or from material change? Hegel, of course, would suggest not, because in order to do so, the bondsman would have to become lord and the lord is inevitably insecure in his identity. The worker, however, is either a “pure being-for-self” or “and absolute negation” (543). Worker’s choice.

In this sense Hegel is friendly to faith, because the worker in God’s kingdom and make God’s work as satisfying and necessary aspect of his own identity. For Marx any participation in any system will always take something away from the one who labors within it. If I bought everything Marx said, I would certainly be afraid to contribute anything to the world for fear of losing more of myself and my value.