辩证法的神话——马克思与黑格尔关系的再解读（节选其一）

        本篇文章由我翻译，原文附于末尾，红色标注为原文附带的注释，蓝色标注为我添加的补充和注释。由于我不懂哲学，黑格尔文本不作翻译。

The Myth of Dialectics

Reinterpreting the Marx-Hegel Relation

辩证法的神话——马克思与黑格尔关系的再解读

第四部分

经济学的对象

        现在我们已在德国中心！我们一方面谈论政治经济学，同时又要谈形而上学。

（马克思，《哲学的贫困》）

（《马克思恩格斯全集》第一版第4卷第138页）

第13章

对“新”黑格尔马克思主义的附带评论

        从前文的讨论中我们已经可以清楚地认识到，马克思所说的黑格尔的主谓之间的“倒转”(‘Umkehrung’)实际上也被认为是主谓之间的“颠倒”(‘Verkehrung’)：一种扰乱了主谓关系中合理内容的“倒装”(‘reversal’)，因此是一种“倒置”(‘inversion’)。事实上，为了强调这一点，马克思在他1873年的“跋”(‘Afterword’)中使用了这样一个比喻，并因此广为人知。“这也是不言而喻的。”他写道，“正确的方法被颠倒了（wird auf den Kopf gestellt——字面意思是：‘戴在头上’）”(CHDS, 99-100/242)（《马克思恩格斯全集》第二版第3卷第52页）。然而，马克思1843年的批判在这里给我们带来的困惑是，它显然与马克思在“价值形式”(‘the Value-form’)中强调的“主语”(‘subject’)和“谓语”(‘predicate’)之间的颠倒(Verkehrung)相同。但在“价值形式”中，“颠倒”(‘Verkehrung’)似乎不再被视为神秘化理论所处理的一种虚假产物，而是属于所考虑对象本身的真正本性。那么，我们是否可以得出这样一个结论：老年马克思（成熟马克思，mature Marx）已经接受了他曾经花费了如此多精力来揭露的倒置，也就是说，他接受了他早期批判中黑格尔的所有神秘主义内核？

        幸运的是，马克思对经济学中价值的“颠倒世界”(‘inverted world’)的发现——或者更确切地说，对构成这个“世界”的现象中的“颠倒”(‘inverted’)现象的发现——并不要求我们得出上面这个不可能的结论。如果只有一些对象在问题中展现出其特殊性的话，如果它确实正好是它们的特殊性的话，那么黑格尔的形而上学主张，由于它应当关注客观现实的特征，因此只能是错误的。简单考虑的特殊(particulars)本身实际上并不从属于普遍(universals)（更不用说“一般”(‘the universal’)），因为前者的本质存在仅仅为后者的表现提供了材料(material)。(1)我们非常熟悉这一主张在黑格尔语境中的神秘意义。重申：既然事物作为特殊仅存在于经验中，那么它必然与“一般”相背离，因此它们必然失去经验实体，必然消亡，“因此”它们的消亡证明了它们的所谓独立性只不过是一种虚幻的性质以及“一般”超越它们的真实力量。正是在这种——极其深奥的——意义上，黑格尔宣称作为一个整体的特殊领域，即感性现实(sensuous reality)，是“表象世界”(‘world of appearance’)：在这个世界中，也正是在这个世界中，“一般”，即“精神”(‘Geist’)能够“将自己表现为”永恒的本质。[1]

        在本书的一开始，我就评论了黑格尔对“表象”地位在经验具体(the empirical concrete)方面的“贬损”对马克思主义经济学家的吸引力，以及后者甚至愿意采用传统哲学的“表象”类别，即“本质”(‘essence’)，这与他们自己（实际上基本一无所获）尝试采用新古典主义的方法论关系很大。在支持经济学家在这一问题上的“自发”哲学冲动的过程中——通过阐述“辩证逻辑”(‘dialectical logic’)等方式——我担心他们哲学系的“马克思主义”同事只会让他们自己成为坏科学的奴仆。我在这里不想深入讨论这些对科学的哲学“帮助”。与这一趋势相关的许多工作都是临时性的，不值得仔细检查：如果确实值得仔细检查的话，那也只是因为其中具有代表性的特定问题，而非其内在的智力因素。

        鉴于这一判断的严肃性，实际上最好避免引用任何特定的引文。但是，为了那些还不熟悉我想使用的那种语言风格的读者，我先提供以下的典型例子：

        “具体(concrete)和物质(material)的可理解性只能通过主张思想过程优先于具体和物质的给定表象来把握。具体和物质在其表象的表面(surface)层次之下还有一个深度(depth)层次。思想的首要任务是先穿透表象，达到深度层次（以劳动时间而非价格计量的‘价值’层次），然后进入将深度层次与给定表象层次联系起来的中介。为了完成这项任务，思想仅仅保持其独立性是不够的，它必须维护其对实际过程产生的表象的首要地位。概念的辩证重建允许这样做。在这方面，黑格尔和马克思没有原则性的区别。两人都断言，只有在思想和理论中，世界的可理解性才能被把握。”[2]

        人们找不到任何一个不同意“只有在思想中、在理论中”世界的可理解性才能被把握的理论家。哪里有这样的理论家？！但这和思想的“优先性”又有什么关系，或者说，和暗指的神秘“深度”有什么关系？（确切地说，价值比价格“更深入”的维度是什么？以及在任何意义下，价格的物质性是什么？）因此很难严谨地认为，长期以来在哲学中不受信任的“表面”和“深层”的隐喻有助于澄清已经模糊了的“表象”和“本质”的说法。

        顺带提一句，马克思自己有时候也会写资本主义经济“表面”上发生的事件和现象。然而，对于这些“表面”，马克思并没有系统性的与任何在其“之下”的任何“深度层次”作对比，而是与隐藏在它们背后的社会活动领域作对比。[3]这种用法与与现实“层次”的任何形而上学划分完全无关，更不用说是被认为特别适合把握现实各层次之间联系的“辩证逻辑”的规则了。事实上，马克思自己关于“表面”的论述基本不应该视为一种隐喻。发生在资本主义经济生活“表面”的行为非常简单，就是那些发生在市场中的行为，而与后者相关的客观“现象”则是价值现象(value-phenomena)：最根本的是价格，以及在马克思倾向于使用这种修辞的背景下，最关键的是利润。发生在资本主义经济生活“表面”背后的事情非常简单，就是那些发生在私人领域的事情：尤其是在马克思的理论目的下的消费，包括对劳动力的消费。

        回想一下《资本论》中马克思将讨论从资本/雇佣劳动之间的交换转移到劳动过程的论述：

        “劳动力的消费，像任何其他商品的消费一样，是在市场以外，或者说在流通领域以外进行的。因此，让我们同货币占有者和劳动力占有者一道，离开这个嘈杂的、表面的、有目共睹的领域，跟随他们两人进入门上挂着‘非公莫入’牌子的隐蔽的生产场所吧！在那里，不仅可以看到资本是怎样进行生产的，而且还可以看到资本本身是怎样被生产出来的。赚钱的秘密最后一定会暴露出来。” (CI, 279/189)（《马克思恩格斯全集》第二版第44卷第204页）

        在完全领会了马克思在划分上毫无特别的性质后，对它的任何宏大的形而上学解释不但是完全错误的，而且老实说是十分滑稽的。无论如何，哲学家们可能已经做了很多工作来帮助学术界的俗人正确理解黑格尔语境下的“本质—表象”对偶，从而使他们在模仿后者时至少保持一定的谨慎，例如可以注意以下段落：

        . . . essence does not lie behind or beyond appearance, but it is rather the infinite goodness that releases its show [Schein] into immediacy and grants it the joy of existence. The appearance which is thus posited does not stand on its own feet and does not have its being in itself, but rather in another. God as the essence, just as He is the goodness that creates a world by lending existence to the moments of His inward showing-forth [Scheinen], proves Himself at the same time to be the power over this world and the righteousness which, inasmuch as the content of this existing world wants to exist on its own, reveals the latter to be mere appearance. (En.L, §131, add.)(2)

        尽管如此，证明马克思对价值关系中感性具体(sensate-concrete)只能算是抽象普遍(abstract-universal)的“表现形式”(‘form of appearance’)的观察——除此之外，还有一种在某种意义上并不完全恰当的说法，“表达方式”(‘mode of expression’)——与黑格尔对感性具体的贬损因而对“一般”的现象形式(phenomenal form)的贬损毫无相同之处依然是十分简单的。

        公正地说，“新”黑格尔马克思主义中一些精明的代表不仅承认，甚至特别强调黑格尔的“范畴”(‘concept’)与马克思价值分析的特定对象之间的同构性。[4]然而这并没有阻止他们继续相信黑格尔有一套独特且合理的“方法”（如果不去深究的话，至少是有关“表现”(‘presentation’)的方法），并认为马克思在特定情况下应用它。因此，他们开始在《资本论》中用黑格尔方法发现范畴“转变”，甚至更糟糕的，在默认这种“转变”实际上并不存在的情况下，主动代表马克思设计了它们。例如，C. J. Arthur写道，“作为隐藏在背后的东西，价值只是一种消失的假象。要成为真正的本质的话，它必须变成它自己；它必须在它表现形式的进一步发展中取得现实性。这就是使货币成为必然的原因。”[5]这种对货币形式必然性的“推导”被视为黑格尔式“解释”中精彩的一部分。然而，它并没有证明货币形式的形成是如何因作为一种社会结合机制的商品交换中的某些特质而成为必然，只是证明了它作为黑格尔“逻辑”的一部分是如何通过黑格尔“本质论”(‘doctrine of essence’)的一些鲜明特征而成为“必然”。

        类似地，Jairus Banaji在对马克思经济学的黑格尔式重新解读的这一类型的开创性著作中自信地断言，《资本论》中从简单商品流通到资本流通的叙述手法表明了一种“辩证逻辑推导”(‘dialectical-logical derivation’)[6]。然而，回到实际文本中，我们不能从中发现任何“辩证推导”(‘dialectical derivation’)，只能发现一种谦逊的并列。“商品流通的直接形式，”马克思写道，

        “是W—G—W，商品转化为货币，货币再转化为商品，为买而卖。但除这一形式外，我们还看到具有不同特点的另一形式G—W—G，货币转化为商品，商品再转化为货币，为卖而买。在运动中通过这后一种流通的货币转化为资本，成为资本，而且按它的使命来说，已经是资本。”(CI, 247-8/162)（《马克思恩格斯全集》第二版第44卷第172页）

        马克思之所以这样表达资本流通，并不在于Banaji的开创性观点中所提及的这种所谓的必然性：价值克服了它在商品中的纯粹直接存在并“使自己成为”“根本背景”(‘essential ground’)（原文如此！），而在于这个更一般的事实：货币在现实中确实以这种方式流通。马克思注意到这种流通在现实中确实发生了且被经验感知，并确定只有价值在两极上发生数量的变化才能推动与之关联的社会活动（即为卖而买）。然后，他给自己设定了两个任务，即解释通过流通(1)价值增殖是怎么可能的和(2)价值增殖是如何与统治简单商品流通的基本“价值规律”（即商品应在价值相等的情况下相交换）相兼容的。马克思并没有从价值“范畴”中“推导”出资本流通，他也做不到，因为资本流通实际上并非所说“范畴”的必然结果（在通常的意义上而非在黑格尔的意义上）。事实上，正是前者与后者表面上的不一致构成了马克思试图解决的问题。

        即使在《政治经济学批判大纲》这样马克思自己对黑格尔论证风格的“兴致”远在《资本论》之上的文本中（实际上，用Wal Suchting的话来说，这种“兴致”有时会导致真正的鲁莽），即使在马克思发现自己受到黑格尔引诱的最为严峻的考验的段落中，他依然坚持了足够长的时间，并打断道：“有必要对唯心主义的叙述方法作一纠正，这种叙述方法造成一种假象，似乎探讨的只是一些概念规定和这些概念的辩证法。” (Gr., 151/85-6)（《马克思恩格斯全集》第二版第30卷第101页）这些“新”黑格尔马克思主义者们基本都没有注意到这个警告——结果，他们倾向于仅仅用以“辩证”为名的伪解释来替代马克思对经济学形式的复杂解释。[7]

        注：

        1. Cf. En.L, §131, add.: 'Merely to be appearance, this is the proper nature of the immediate objective world itself, and insofar as we know it to be so, we recognize at the same time the essence which remains neither be hind nor beyond appearance, but rather precisely manifests itself as essence in that it derogates this world to pure appearance.' Cf. too En.L, §50, add.: ' . . .it lies in the very fact that the world is contingent that it is merely something transitory, phenomenal and in and for itself null'.

        2. Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx's Capital (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 37.具有代表性问题地，引用的段落出现在“马克思著作中的辩证逻辑”(‘Dialectical Logic in Marx’s Work’)一章。

        3.《政治经济学批判》一书的所谓“初稿”(‘Urtext’)，即《政治经济学批判》的一篇1858年草稿中有一段不恰当的话，在这篇文本中，马克思写到了隐藏在简单流通领域的“表现形式”背后的“更深层次过程”(cf. Grundrisse, [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953], pp. 922-3)，在《政治经济学批判大纲》中的另一段同源文本(Gr., 247/173)也有相同的内容。这些构想展现出了明显的探索性，而且更重要的是，它们从马克思的成稿中消失了。

        4.例如，参见Christopher J. Arthur, 'Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital', in Fred Mosely, ed., Marx's Method in Capital: a Re-examination (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993).

        5. Arthur, p. 78.

        6. Cf. Jairus Banaji, 'From the Commodity to Capital: Hegel's Dialectic in Marx's Capital', in Diane Elson, ed., Value: the Representation of Labour in Capital, (London: CSE Books, 1979), p. 28 and passim.

        7.这里可以引用一些其他的“新”黑格尔马克思主义学者的代表作品，例如Michael Eldred，Geert Reuten和Michael Williams。在这方面，许多早期英文著作都受到了西德黑格尔—马克思学者Hans-Georg Backhaus的影响。（对于Backhaus自己的著作，请参见'Zur Dialektik der Wertform', in Alfred Schmidt, ed., Beitrdge zur marxschen Erkenntnistheorie [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969] and 'Materialen zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorie' in Gesellschaft. Beitrdge zur Marxschen Theorie, vols. 1, 2 and 11 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974, 1975, 1978].）然而目前为止，公平地讲，“新”黑格尔马克思主义就像“老”马克思主义一样，构成了一个完整的“话语”(‘discourse’)，而基于其规范的学术文本从不同来源显示出某种规律性。可以说，“新”黑格尔马克思主义处在“氛围中”——当然，只是在马克思主义学术辩论的稀薄氛围中。同时也不用指出，每个人著作的水平都有高有低。

        译者注：

        (1)本质并非某种独立的实体，不能仅仅通过揭开面纱来认识它。现象不仅仅是本质的反映或者说是表现形式，更是本质的存在方式。在我们从杨树、柳树和桦树中找出其本质“树”的过程中，并不存在一种名叫“树”的东西，“树”仅仅存在于杨树、柳树和桦树之中，没有各种各样的现象，本质就不可能存在。我们可以而且只能通过分析杨树、柳树和桦树来揭示它们的本质“树”以及它们的共同特征。同时，这也意味着我们不能仅仅通过对本质“树”的分析来推导出这三种树具有的一切特征，尤其是仅有它们自己所具有的独特特征。

        (2) En.L = 'Encyclopedia Logic', i.e. the first part of the Enzykloptidie, titled Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, vol. 8.

Part IV

The Objectivity of the Economic

        Here we are right in the middle of Germany! Even while speaking political economy, we are going to have to speak metaphysics.

(Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy)

13 Some Passing Remarks on the 'New' Hegelian Marxism

        It will be clear from the foregoing discussion that what Marx calls Hegel's 'Umkehrung' of subject and predicate is also indeed supposed to be a 'Verkehrung' of the same: a 'reversal' which disturbs the rational content of the subject-predicate relation, hence an 'inversion'. Indeed, in order to lay stress on the point, Marx employs the very metaphor which would later acquire such fame through its occurrence in his 1873 'Afterword'. 'It is self-evident,' he writes, 'The true way is turned upside-down [wird auf den Kopf gestellt - literally: 'is put on its head']' (CHDS, 99-100/242). The puzzle which Marx's 1843 Critique presents for us here, however, is that it is manifestly the very same Verkehrung of 'subject' and 'predicate' to which Marx yet again alludes in 'the Value-form'. But in 'the Value-form’, it would seem that the 'Verkehrung' is no longer to be regarded as the spurious product of a mystifying theoretical treatment, but rather as pertaining to the real nature of the object itself under consideration. Must we conclude, then, that the mature Marx had come to accept as legitimate the very inversion which he once expended such energies to expose as, so to say, the mystical kernel of all of Hegel's mysticism in his youthful critique?

        Fortunately, Marx's discovery of the 'inverted world' of economic value - or rather of the 'inverted' character of the phenomena which this 'world' comprises - does not require us to draw such an improbable conclusion. If only some objects exhibit the peculiarity in question, if indeed it is precisely a peculiarity of them, then Hegel's metaphysical claim, inasmuch as it was supposed to concern the character of objectivity as such, is thereby shown to be false. It is not the case that particulars considered simply per se are in reality subordinated to universals (much less to 'the universal'), such that the essential being of the former would consist merely in their providing the material for the manifestation of the latter. We are very familiar with the mystical import of this claim in the Hegelian context. To reiterate: since things in their empirical existence, viz. as particulars, necessarily deviate from 'the universal', they are, then, destined to lose this empirical embodiment, viz. to perish, 'thus' in their dissolution testifying to the merely illusory quality of their supposed independence and to the real power of 'the universal' over them. It is in this - esoteric - sense that Hegel declared the realm of particulars as a whole, viz. sensuous reality, to be the 'world of appearance': with respect to which and precisely in which 'the universal', viz. 'Geist', is able to 'show itself as the abiding essence.1

        At the very outset of this work, I commented upon the attraction which Hegel's 'derogation' of the empirical concrete to the status of 'appearance' has had for Marxist economists and the willingness of the latter even to adopt the traditional philosophical companion category of 'appearance', viz. 'essence', as somehow being germane to their own (in fact largely unrequited) attempts at a Methodenstreit with the neoclassicals. In lending support to the 'spontaneous' philosophical impulses of the economists in this matter - by expounding upon 'dialectical logic' and the like - I am afraid that their 'Marxist' colleagues from the philosophy departments have only made themselves into the handmaidens of bad science. I do not want to go into any detail here on such philosophical 'aids' to the sciences. Much of the work associated with this tendency is of such an ad hoc sort as not to merit close scrutiny: or if it does merit scrutiny, then only by virtue of its symptomaticity and not on account of any intrinsic intellectual qualities.

        In light of the severity of this judgement, it might in fact be better to avoid making any particular citations. But for the benefit of readers not already familiar with the style of discourse I have in mind, let me offer just the following as a representative sample:

        The intelligibility of the concrete and material can only be grasped through asserting the priority of the thought process over how the concrete and material is given in appearances. The concrete and material has a depth level underlying its surface level of appearances. The task of thought is first to pierce through the appearances to that depth-level (the level of 'value' as measured by labor-time rather than price...) and then to proceed to the mediations that connect the depth level with the given appearances. To fulfill this task it is not sufficient for thought to assert its independence, it must assert its primacy over the appearances generated by the real process. A dialectical reconstruction of categories allows for this. In this there is no difference in principle between Hegel and Marx. Both assert that it is only in thought, in theorizing, that the intelligibility of the world can be grasped.2

        One would be hard-pressed to come up with any theorist who did not agree that it is 'only in thought, in theorizing' that the world's intelligibility is to be grasped. Where else?! But what has that to do with some alleged 'priority' of thought or, for that matter, with the mysterious 'depth-level' to which allusion is made? (And in exactly what dimension are values 'deeper' than prices? And just what, in any case, is material about a price?) It can hardly be seriously expected that appeals to philosophically long since discredited 'surface' versus 'depth' metaphors should help clarify already vague talk of 'appearances' and 'essences'.

        Marx himself does, incidentally, sometimes write of events occurring and phenomena appearing on the 'surfaces' of a capitalist economy. To these 'surfaces', however, he does not systematically contrast any 'depth-level' which lies 'beneath' them, but rather spheres of social activity which are concealed behind them.3 This usage has absolutely nothing to do with any metaphysical distinction of 'levels' of reality, much less with the protocols of some 'dialectical logic' which is supposed to be especially well-suited to grasping the connection between the latter. Indeed, Marx's own talk of 'surfaces' barely even deserves to be described as metaphorical. The acts which transpire on the 'surfaces' of capitalist economic life are, quite simply, those which transpire on the market, and the objective 'phenomena' which appear associated with the latter are value-phenomena: most fundamentally, prices, and most crucially in the contexts in which Marx tends to employ such a rhetoric, profits. What occurs behind the 'surfaces' of capitalist economic life is, quite simply, what occurs in the private domain: most notably for Marx's theoretical purposes, consumption, including the consumption of labour-power.

        Recall the remark in Capital with which Marx motivates the transition from the discussion of the capital/wage-labour exchange to that of the labour-process:

        The consumption of labour-power occurs, like the consumption of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere of circulation. Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere of what lies on the surface and in full view of everyone, in order to follow them into the hidden place of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice: 'No admittance except on business'. Here will be seen not only how capital produces, but also how it is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be exposed. (CI, 279/189)

        Once the utterly mundane character of Marx's distinction is fully appreciated, any grandiose metaphysical interpretation of it appears not just mistaken, but frankly rather comic.

        In any case, the philosophers might have done more to assist the academic laity in forming a correct appreciation of the sense which the 'essence-appearance' couplet has in Hegel's usage, and hence in acquiring at least a certain prudence with respect to emulating the latter, by calling attention to a passage such as the following:

        . . . essence does not lie behind or beyond appearance, but it is rather the infinite goodness that releases its show [Schein] into immediacy and grants it the joy of existence. The appearance which is thus posited does not stand on its own feet and does not have its being in itself, but rather in another. God as the essence, just as He is the goodness that creates a world by lending existence to the moments of His inward showing-forth [Scheinen], proves Himself at the same time to be the power over this world and the righteousness which, inasmuch as the content of this existing world wants to exist on its own, reveals the latter to be mere appearance. (En.L, §131, add.)

        Be that as it may, it will be an extremely simple matter to demonstrate that Marx's observation to the effect that in the value-relation the sensate-concrete counts as but the 'form of appearance' of the abstract-universal has nothing in common - apart that is from a certain, indeed not even entirely felicitous, 'mode of expression' - with the Hegelian derogation of the sensate-concrete as such to the phenomenal form of 'the universal'.

        In fairness, it should be noted that some of the more astute representatives of the 'new' Hegelian Marxism have not only recognized, but even placed special emphasis upon the isomorphism between the Hegelian 'concept' and the specific object of Marx's value-analysis.4 This has not prevented them, however, from continuing to credit Hegel with a distinctive and rational 'method' (at least of 'presentation' if not of inquiry) and to attribute to Marx a particular application of it. Consequently, they have set about discovering conceptual 'transitions' on the Hegelian pattern throughout Capital or, worse still, in tacit acknowledgement that such 'transitions' are not in fact there to be found, have taken the initiative of devising them on Marx's behalf. C.J. Arthur writes, for example, that 'as merely implicit, value is a vanishing semblance. To be really of the essence it must become posited for itself; it must gain actuality in its further developed forms of appearance. This is what makes money necessary.'5 Such a 'derivation' of the necessity of the money-form will be recognized as a fair piece of Hegelian 'explanation'. It does not, however, serve to demonstrate how the coalescence of the money-form is necessitated by certain definite features of commodity exchange as a mechanism of social integration, but only how it is 'necessitated' by certain definite features of Hegel's 'doctrine of essence' as a division of the latter's 'logic'.

        In an analogous manner, Jairus Banaji, in a pioneering work within the genre of Hegeloid reinterpretations of Marx's economics, confidently asserts that the expository move in Capital from the simple commodity circuit to the circuit of capital represents a 'dialectical-logical derivation'.6 Turning to the actual text, however, what we find is not any 'dialectical derivation', but rather a humble juxtaposition. 'The direct form of the circulation of commodities,' Marx writes,

        is C-M-C, the transformation of commodities into money and the re-conversion of money into commodities: selling in order to buy. But alongside this form we find a second specifically different form: M-C-M, the transformation of money into commodities and the reconversion of commodities back into money: buying in order to sell. Money which in its movement describes this latter circulation is transformed into capital, becomes capital, and, according to its determination, already is capital. (CI, 247-8/162)

        Marx's justification for presenting the circuit of capital as he does lies not in the alleged necessity that value overcome its merely immediate being in the commodity and 'posit itself' as 'essential ground' (sic!), per Banaji's creative suggestion, but rather in the more mundane fact that money actually does circulate in the manner described by it. Marx notes the empirical occurrence of such a circuit, and establishes that only a quantitative variation between the values represented by its extremes could motivate the social activity with which it is associated (viz. buying in order to sell). He then sets himself the task of explaining how such an apparent augmentation of value through circulation (a) is possible and (b) is compatible with the basic 'law of value' which governs the simple circulation of commodities (viz. that commodities should exchange in just such quantities as their values are equal). He does not 'derive' the circuit of capital from the 'concept' of value, nor could he, since the circuit of capital is not in fact entailed by said 'concept' (that is, in the ordinary rather than the Hegeloid sense). Indeed, it is precisely the prima facie inconsistency between the former and the latter that constitutes the problem which Marx attempts to solve.

        Even in a text such as the Grundrisse, where Marx's own 'flirtation' with Hegelian styles of argumentation is far more overt and prevalent than in Capital (and indeed where, to paraphrase Wal Suchting, this 'flirtation' sometimes does even lead to real indiscretions), and even in the midst of passages where (for precisely those reasons here reviewed) Marx finds himself most severely tested by the Hegelian temptation, he still takes hold of himself long enough to interject: 'It will be necessary later... to correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts' (Gr., 151/85-6). The 'new' Hegelian Marxists have by and large not heeded this warning - with the result that for Marx's explanations of economics forms they have in the name of 'dialectical' sophistication tended to substitute mere pseudo-explanations.7

        1. Cf. En.L, §131, add.: 'Merely to be appearance, this is the proper nature of the immediate objective world itself, and insofar as we know it to be so, we recognize at the same time the essence which remains neither be hind nor beyond appearance, but rather precisely manifests itself as essence in that it derogates this world to pure appearance.' Cf. too En.L, §50, add.: ' . . .it lies in the very fact that the world is contingent that it is merely something transitory, phenomenal and in and for itself null'.

        2. Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx's Capital (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 37. Symptomatically, the cited passage occurs in a chapter on 'Dialectical Logic in Marx’s Work’.

        3. There is one infelicitous passage from the so-called 'Urtext' of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, an 1858 draft of the latter text, in which Marx writes of a 'deeper process’ lying behind the 'form of appearance’ provided by the sphere of simple circulation (cf. Grundrisse, [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953], pp. 922-3) and also another cognate passage in the Grundrisse (Gr., 247/173). Such formulations exhibit a distinctly groping quality and what is especially significant about them is only that they disappear from Marx’s subsequent finished texts.

        4. See, for example, Christopher J. Arthur, 'Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital', in Fred Mosely, ed., Marx's Method in Capital: a Re-examination (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993).

        5. Arthur, p. 78.

        6. Cf. Jairus Banaji, 'From the Commodity to Capital: Hegel's Dialectic in Marx's Capital', in Diane Elson, ed., Value: the Representation of Labour in Capital, (London: CSE Books, 1979), p. 28 and passim.

        7. Other authors whose work could be cited as representative of what I have here described as 'new' Hegelian Marxism are, for instance, Michael Eldred, Geert Reuten, and Michael Williams. Many of the earliest English-language writings in this vein bear the influence of the West German Hegel-Marx scholar Hans-Georg Backhaus. (For samples of Backhaus's own writings, cf. 'Zur Dialektik der Wertform', in Alfred Schmidt, ed., Beitrdge zur marxschen Erkenntnistheorie [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969] and 'Materialen zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorie' in Gesellschaft. Beitrdge zur Marxschen Theorie, vols. 1, 2 and 11 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974, 1975, 1978].) By now it is fair to say, however, that the 'new’ Hegelian Marxism, like the 'old’, constitutes a full-fledged 'discourse', and scholarly texts drawing upon its norms appear with a certain regularity from diverse sources. The 'new' Hegelian Marxism is, so to speak, 'in the atmosphere' - albeit, of course, only in the quite rarified atmosphere of academic Marxist debates. It should not need to be added that the intellectual quality of individual contributions to this literature varies greatly from case to case.