Hegel, Marx, and Capital

Andy Blunden presents insights from two new books on Marx’s use of Hegel’s Logic in the writing of Capital. The Capital/Logic Debate offers a critique of the discourse around the relation between the two thinkers. Previous writers have looked for homologies between the Logic and Capital, despite the fact that the Logic has no definite content, while any positive science, political economy included, does have definite content originating from some problem or phenomenon with its own logic. In Marx’s Capital: Hegelian Sources, Blunden explores the three-layered structure of Capital, where each layer has a basis in Hegel. The distinct ethical strata of Capital – bourgeois society, productive capitalism, and finance capital –  parallel Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Marx applies a Hegelian syllogism in which the immediate production of capital (volume 1) and the circulation of capital (volume 2) combine to yield capitalist production as a whole (volume 3). These two synthetic processes are built on 15 “units” – unique products of analysis, as detailed in the penultimate chapter of Hegel’s Logic, “The Idea of Cognition.”

Andy Blunden has long been active on the Left as an activist and educator. Since the early 2000s he has been Secretary of the Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org). Andy has presented courses on Activity Theory, Marx and Hegel at summer schools at Melbourne University. currently retired from waged work, he has worked as a teacher, a technician, or an engineer, and has been an active trade unionist throughout. Among his other books are Hegel for Social Movements; Hegel, Marx, and Vygotsky; and Concepts: A Critical Approach. All are available from Haymarket Books.