From Hegel to Marx: Property and Poverty

Despite the imposing edifice of Hegel's system, a fundamental problem lay in his treatment of property. ‘In his property' he wrote, when discussing Abstract Right, ‘a person exists for the first time as reason'.^[211] ^{^[212] ^[213] ^[214] ^[215] ^[216] But the right of property also entailed the right of alienation.}

Through contracts, individuals affirm the will's independence of any and every particular thing by alienating their property. This is why contractual exchange is inherent in ‘the Idea of the real existence of free personality, “real” here meaning “present in the will alone"'.12⁷ To alienate the thing is the most concrete way of asserting one's will over it and thus one's independence of it.

... alienation proper is an expression of my will... no longer to regard the thing as mine... alienation is seen to be a true mode of taking possession. To take possession of the thing directly is the first moment in property. Use is likewise a way of acquiring property. The third moment... is... taking possession of the thing by alienating it.12⁸

Since alienation of the thing is necessary in order to affirm self-determination, it also follows that there are limits to what may be alienated, including one's ‘freedom of will' and ‘ethical life', the substantive elements of personality.^⁹ Reason cannot tolerate slavery or serfdom. On the other hand, day-labourers, in accordance with their own will, may ‘for a restricted period' alienate products of their ‘particular skill' and their ‘power to act'.1³⁰ The wage contract, in other words, conforms to the requirements of reason. The problem is one of degree. How much might a worker alienate before ceasing to exist both for himself and as a citizen?

Even more problematic was the issue of unemployment.

Hegel published The Philosophy of Right in 1821, six years after the end of the Napoleonic wars and in the midst of capitalism's first cyclical depression. Hegel looked anxiously for a solution to unemployment. One way to mitigate the increase of poverty was through price controls.131 Unemployment might also be met with private or public charity, financed by taxes on the wealthy (as Kant had suggested).

But the problem with charity was that ‘the needy would receive subsistence directly, not by means of their work, and this would violate the principle of civil society and the feeling of individual independence and self-respect in its individual members’.^[217] ^{^[218] ^[219] ^[220] ^[221] ^[222]}

By analogy with the family capital, Hegel thought the social means of production might serve as a kind of common property, ‘the universal permanent capital which gives each the opportunity, by the exercise of his education and skill, to draw from it and so be assured of his livelihood, while what he thus earns by means of his work maintains and increases the general capital’.133 When citizens find themselves impoverished by ‘factors grounded in external circumstances’, the public authority ‘takes the place of the family’.^⁴ But if public resources were used to provide productive employment to the poor, the problem of post-war over-production would simply be compounded. The attempt to alleviate unemployment would create more unemployment:

In this event the volume of production would be increased, but the evil consists precisely in an excess of production and in the lack of a proportionate number of consumers who are themselves also producers, and thus it is simply intensified... It hence becomes apparent that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble.13⁵

Hegel had no doubt that poverty was a ‘wrong’ that must be made ‘right’.

‘The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society’. 136 Moreover, poverty was not simply an economic issue; it was a spiritual sickness, involving destruction of civic consciousness and ‘loss of the sense of right and wrong, of honesty and the self-respect which makes a man insist on maintaining himself by his own work and effort’.^⁷ Mere physical need, on its own, does not create the rabble: ‘a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government etc.’.^[223] ^{^[224] ^[225] ^[226] ^[227] ^[228] ^[229] ^[230] ^[231] Impoverishment of wage-workers, accompanied by ‘concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands’,13⁹ also raised the threat of class struggle: ‘Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another'.1⁴⁰ Unable to resolve the problem of poverty within his political philosophy, Hegel in effect expelled it. What Reason required was renewal of the dialectical ‘circle of necessity’. Hegel concluded that mature civil society is driven to colonising activity ‘by which it supplies to a part of its population a return to life on the family basis in a new land and so also supplies itself with a new demand and field for its industry’.^ The solution to capitalist unemployment turned out to be imperialism:
This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it - or at any rate drives a specific civil society - to push beyond its own limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has overproduced, or else generally backward in industry, etc.^w2}

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Source: Day R.B., Gaido D.F. (eds). Responses to Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill,2017. — 856 p. 2017

From Hegel to Marx: Property and Poverty

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