Freedom, necessity, and post-capitalist society

For theoretical direction on Marx's concept of post-capitalist society, it would be difficult to overstate the importance Raya Dunayevskaya attributed to her May 20, 1953, philosophical letter to the philosopher Grace Lee Boggs on Hegel's Philosophy of Mind[1], and to Marx's post-Capital 1875 text, Critique of the Gotha Program (CGP)[2]. While space does not permit us to take up CGP's text, this essay will outline the concepts of necessity and freedom, which we argue are central both for how Dunayevskaya conceptualized the transition from capitalism to post-capitalist society and for the dialectic that links Hegel and Marx's ideas.

Some years after the fact, Dunayevskaya realized that she had begun her 1953 reading of Hegel's crucial Introduction to Philosophy of Mind just where Marx, in his famous 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, "broke off"[3] at the transition from nature to mind. To the young Marx, "Absolute Mind" appeared thoroughly (if not hopelessly) idealistic as he analyzed Philosophy of Mind's Introduction in 1844, that is, before the two decades that culminated in his greatest work, Capital.

After those two decades of development of philosophy and economics, Marx returned to Philosophy of Mind's categories, because he still had to confront the question of the various forms of the dialectic of nature and society, necessity and freedom, in the abolition of capitalism. (In Hegel's philosophic categories, Mind Objective refers to society and the state.) Most notably in Capital, Volume III[4] (passages from which we will quote and discuss below), Marx affirmed and deepened his idea of freedom inseparable from the concept of social necessity--and labor as the metabolic relation of man to nature--he had first broached in Capital, Volume I. In the latter, he had written that, "Labor...as the creator of use-values, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself."[5]

To develop these points, I argue in this essay that Dunayevskaya's work suggests that it was precisely in writing Capital that Marx picked up the threads he had laid aside two decades earlier in his 1844 reading of Philosophy of Mind. In the Capital, Volume III, passages, to which Dunayevskaya's 1953 letter points her readers[6], Marx returned specifically to where in 1844 he had "stopped" his analysis of Philosophy of Mind. From this perspective it makes no difference whether or not this return of Marx to Hegel was actually "textual." As I will demonstrate in the section below on Marx's "social translation" of Hegel's dialectic, Capital Volume III's still astonishing passages on freedom and necessity pick up conceptually exactly where Marx's 1844 "Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy" had "stopped" in his examination of Hegel's Introduction to Philosophy of Mind.

This essay argues that it is virtually impossible to discern the meaning, especially the societal relevance, of Philosophy of Mind's final paragraphs, without the more detailed account of the identical concepts Hegel provided in his Introduction to the work. Dunayevskaya discussed precisely these concepts in her May 20, 1953, letter, later identifying this discussion as central to the "philosophic moment" of her development of Marxist-Humanism.

WHERE MARX "STOPPED" IN A READING OF PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

The young Marx concluded his 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts with the essay titled, "Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy." Marx alluded to paragraph 381 and then paragraph 384 of Hegel's Introduction to Philosophy of Mind. Hegel's Introduction to Philosophy of Mind consists of 10 paragraphs, numbered 377-386, divided into three parts: he places no heading over the first part, the four paragraphs numbered 377-380, which survey various historical approaches to the "knowledge of mind...the highest and hardest, just because it is the most 'concrete' of sciences."

The part Marx commented on, numbered 381-384, Hegel had titled, "What Mind Is." In these paragraphs Hegel characterizes the dialectical relationship between mind and nature, arguing that mind is the "absolute prius," though it has nature for its "presupposition." The third and last part (which Marx did not and Dunayevskaya did comment on) falls under Hegel's heading, "Subdivision"; it consists of the final two paragraphs, 385-386, where Hegel describes Absolute Mind as the dialectic of subjective (freedom) and objective (necessity) Mind.

In examining Hegel's text prior to the Subdivision, Marx issues critical comments on Hegel's interpretations of nature and mind; these comments preface passages from Hegel's paragraph 381 (which Marx quotes in full) and Hegel's paragraph 384 (from which Marx quotes about half the text). The main thrust of Marx's critique here revolves around Hegel's notion of nature as externalization (of mind). Marx writes:

It [nature] has to be taken here [in Philosophy of Mind] in the sense of alienation, an error, a defect, that which ought not to be...For the abstract thinker, nature must therefore supersede itself, because it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being.[7]

Marx's argument is that Hegel's dialectic is itself limited in that it does not point the way to overcoming alienation in actuality. In respect to the "abstract thinker" [Hegel], nature as externality, "has something outside itself which it lacks...its being is something other than itself." According to Hegel, nature, as such, lacks freedom and freedom consists in overcoming nature, not in mind's living, dialectical relationship with nature. In any case, Marx's 1844 text, which ended with the statement, "The Absolute Mind, this is the highest definition of the Absolute," stopped at the threshold of the Subdivision and left Hegel's analysis at definition ("What Mind Is")--where Hegel appeared most idealistic and least socially relevant.

In contrast to Marx in 1844, the Subdivision was where Dunayevskaya's analyses began in her May 20, 1953, letter. Dunayevskaya's text began at the third part of Hegel's Introduction, where Marx had "stopped." She closely follows how Hegel explicated movement and development at the pinnacle of his "system," strongly suggesting development of the concepts of nature and mind and the societal relevance of the dialectic.

Hegel's paragraph numbered 385 (the first of the two comprising the Subdivision) begins with the statement: "The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages..." First is in the form of "self-relation," the "ideal totality of the idea," "self-contained and free," that is, "Mind Subjective." Second is in the form of "reality," mind "realized, i.e. in a world produced and to be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape of necessity," that is, "Mind Objective." The third stage is, "unity of mind as objectivity and of mind as ideality and concept, which essentially and actually is and forever produces itself," that is, "Mind Absolute."

Dunayevskaya's 1953 letter notes the final paragraph (#386) of Hegel's Introduction where he characterizes the very identification of these three stages (freedom, necessity, and the unity of the two) as a veritable process of liberation, in Hegel's own words, "finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it."

Dunayevskaya's 1953 letter, moving from Hegel's Introduction through Philosophy of Mind's concluding syllogisms, discerned the movement to post-capitalist society in the work's final three paragraphs. This essay argues that those three paragraphs spell out a dialectic of necessity and freedom that parallels the movement in the work's Introduction: (1) the logical system as the starting point (Subjective), nature as the middle term (or "finding a world presupposed before us"); (2) Nature as the starting point (or presupposition) (Objective), with Mind the "mediating agent in the process" (or "generating a world as our own creation"); and (3) Self-knowing reason as the middle term (Absolute), mediating subjective and objective (or "gaining freedom from [the world] and in [the world])."

MARX'S SOCIAL TRANSLATION OF HEGEL'S DIALECTIC OF NECESSITY AND FREEDOM

It is at (3) above, Philosophy of Mind's final syllogism--which Hegel had already detailed in Philosophy of Mind's Introduction Subdivision--where Marx's 1844 text had stopped. However, little more than 20 years later in Capital, Volume III, Marx fully returned to the concepts of freedom and necessity with which he had engaged with Hegel in 1844.

In the May 20, 1953, letter Dunayevskaya informs Grace Lee Boggs that while she was studying the Introduction to and the final three syllogisms of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind she had also been reading Part 7 of Marx's Capital, Volume III[8]; she mentions the final Part, "The Revenues and Their Sources." There, in a remarkable chapter titled "The Trinity Formula," Marx investigates how the "trinity" of capital-interest, land-ground-rent, labor-wages, "holds in itself all the mysteries of the social production process." In this analysis, Marx takes great care to bring to the fore that the crucial point is the precision that is required to distinguish capitalism from past social formations and hence also the potential of post-capitalist society. In the "hidden inner connections" of the trinity, "forced labor" is the underlying secret, despite how this labor appears as the "result of free contractual labor."

Marx writes that surplus labor exists as well in the earlier forms of slavery and serfdom, where it has an "antagonistic form and its obverse side is pure idleness on the part of one section of society." Nonetheless, this surplus labor prior to capitalism is not expressed in a surplus-value (p. 953). All capitalist labor is actually forced labor. However, the surplus, unpaid labor, expressed in the development of science, technology, and most importantly, human beings themselves, constitutes a universal, that is, is part of a historically new--post-capitalist--potential of reduced labor time, not for a particular class, but for each member of society. In Capital Volume III's famous passage on freedom and necessity (including a few prior sentences that elucidate value and its negation, but are rarely referenced), Marx writes:

It is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it extorts this surplus labor in a manner [surplus value] and in conditions that are more advantageous to social relations and to the creation of elements for a newer and higher formation than was the case under earlier forms of slavery, serfdom, etc. Thus on the one hand it leads towards a stage at which compulsion and the monopolization of social development (with its material and intellectual advantages) by one section of society at the expense of another disappears; on the other hand it creates the material means and the nucleus for relations that permit this surplus labor to be combined, in a higher form of society, with a greater reduction of the overall time devoted to material labor...The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it [the realm of freedom] lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper...Freedom, in this sphere [material production proper], can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it [labor in material production, realm of necessity], though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.[9]

The full Marxist-Humanist implications of the Capital, Volume III, passages only become apparent when we see that Marx provides a "social translation" of the concepts Hegel depicted in the Subdivision to the Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Mind: finding a world presupposed before us (domination as if by a blind power where freedom is abstracted from necessity); generating a world as our own creation (dialectic of freedom and necessity, collective control of nature, least expenditure of energy in material production); and, concretization of freedom as from and in nature and material production (establishing working and living conditions most appropriate for human nature, reduction of the working day--creation of the realm of freedom, and "free activity," on the basis of the humanized, liberated realm of necessity).

CONCLUSION

The key concepts necessity and freedom, the dialectic of what is and what can be, are developed in the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic of capitalist and post-capitalist society. Here, for the first time and in terms of this social relevance, we have explored Dunayevskaya's philosophic moment through the lens of the theoretic relationship of Philosophy of Mind's "Introduction" to the work's final three syllogisms. The most urgent theoretic task is to continue to work out today's relationships of necessity and freedom--inadequately examined concepts in sections of Marx's Capital, and in critical but neglected post-Capital works, like Critique of the Gotha Program.

NOTES:

1. This letter appears in Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity (Lexington Books), pp. 24-30.

2. See Dunayevskaya's "Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy," pp. 3-13 in The Power of Negativity.

3. See Dunayevskaya's "Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy," p. 8, and, "Not by Practice Alone," p. 282, both included in The Power of Negativity.

4. See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Tr. by David Fernbach (Vintage Books), pp. 958-959.

5. See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I., Tr. by Ben Fowkes (Vintage Books), p. 133.

6. See Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity, p. 25.

7. See the English translation of this essay in Erich Fromm (Ed.), Marx's Concept of Man (Continuum), p. 195

8. See Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity, p. 25.

9. See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Tr. by David Fernbach. pp. 958-959. Emphases added.

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