Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 21:24:36 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: MARX, HEGEL, & MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC


In message <2.2.16.19970920024546.2eb74974-AT-pop.igc.org>, Ralph Dumain
<rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> writes
>I can't remember whom I discussed this topic with before, so I'm posting it
>to the entire list in case the persons in question are on it. 
>
>It is commonly assumed that Hegel's master-slave dialectic had a big impact
>on Marx.  However, the following article denies there is any evidence at all
>for such a popularly accepted assumption:
>
>Arthur, Chris.  "Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology",
>NEW LEFT REVIEW, no. 42, Nov-Dec 1983, pp. 67-75.

Well, Arthur is a great Hegel-Marx scholar so it would be foolhardy to
disagree, but I think there is something of the master-slave dialectic
in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. 

I was looking at Kojeve's treatment of the Master-slave dialectic
recently and was struck by the fact that the persistence of the
categories of self-other (which are the substance of the master-slave
dialectic, or its logical re-working) in contemporary social theory
(existentialism, varieties of pomo) must say something about Hegel's
premature resolution of the master-slave dialectic with the emergence of
liberal capitalism and the end of feudalism (to impose alien categories
on Hegel). Why, if the interaction of self and other describe relations
of serfdom and lordship, should they seem so evocative in discussion of
contemporary relations of the sexes, first and third world, child and
adult etc etc? Surely categories developed to encapsulate one discrete
epoch ought not to have any hold on another.

Tempted by Axel Honneth's (rather conservative, but well written) book
The Struggle For Recognition I went to Hegel's earlier draft of the
Phenomenology 'System of Ethical Life'. Lo and behold the parallel
passages on master and servant are not to be found in a discussion of
feudal society, but in a discussion of trade, that follows his reading
of English political economy. So on page 124 (Harris and Knox edition)
Hegel is talking about contract and the subject of the contract, the
person, but by page 125, inequality between such individuals (ie
constituted by the contract) has transformed itself into 'the relation
of lordship and bondage'.

So what? Well, I suggest that Hegel's categories of lordhsip and
bondage, and the dialectic that operateds between them is not as it
purports to be a discussion of lordship and bondage, but one of Capital
and Labour, fetishistically relocated into a mythical past. The reason
that they seem to have explanatory power, is because - even if they do
not announce themselves as such, they are categories developed in the
analysis of capitalist society. Hegel developed them in the attempt to
logically appropriate the terms of political economy, but, unwilling to
draw the conclusion that capitalism leads to endemic inequality,
projected them into the past.

That's why I tend to think that what Marx was doing in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts was reintroducing the real empirical content
to those categories that Hegel had censored out. But I must admit I
haven't re-checked the 1844 manuscripts. 
-- 
James Heartfield


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