Published in 1988, Hiroshi Uchida’s detailed short compendium, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, serves as both a capstone to a larger body of research and a starting point to reexamine the way that Marx drew on Hegel’s Science of Logic to develop his mature political economic thought, first in the Grundrisse in 1857-59 and then in Volume 1 of Capital published in 1867.
“As far as the method [of the Grundrisse] goes,” Marx wrote to Engels on January 14, 1858, “the fact of having leafed through, once again, by mere accident, Hegel’s Logic rendered me a great service.”[i] In his letter to Engels, Marx goes on to write that “If I ever find the time for a work of this type, I would greatly desire to make accessible to the intellect of the common man … how much there is in Hegel’s method of rationality and mystification.”[ii] According to Toni Negri, this reflects Marx’s methodological synthesis of critique and praxis, or what Negri calls his “spirit of theoretico-practical synthesis.”[iii]
Readers of the Grundrisse have been scouring for the traces of the Logic ever since—traces that Marx himself left like crumbs on a path. In his discussion of market value in the “Chapter on Money,” for instance, Marx explains that the “market value” of a commodity is never equated with its “real value as if the latter were a third party, but rather by means of constant non-equation of itself” and he then adds, in parenthesis, “as Hegel would say, not by way of abstract identity, but by constant negation of the negation, i.e. of itself as negation of real value.”[iv]
In this segment, we will explore the relationship between Marx’s mature political economic writings and his reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic.
Core Readings
G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) . Available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slconten.htm.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992).
Ruy Fausto, Le capital et la logique de Hegel. Dialectique marxienne, dialectique hégélienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997)
Hiroshi Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, ed. Terrell Carver (Routledge, 1988).
Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto Press, 1992).
Additional readings
Riccardo Bellofiore, Guido Starosta, and Peter D. Thomas, eds., In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 48) (Leiden: Brill, 2013)
Ruy Fausto, Sur le concept de capital. Idée d’une logique dialectique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985)
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (New York: Verso, 2023)
Marcello Musto, ed., Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (New York: Routledge, 2008)
Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (London: Pluto Press, 1978)
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Notes
[i] Quoted in Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (London: Pluto Press, 1978), at p. 2.
[ii] Quoted in Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 2-3.
[iii] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 3.
[iv] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 137 (referring to Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 416).