The Theory of Alienation: Marx’s Debt to Hegel

Abstract

The topic “Marx’s Debt to Hegel,” is neither merely academic, nor does it pertain only to the historical period of Marx’s lifetime. From the Hungarian revolt to the African revolutions, from the student demonstrators in Japan to the Negro revolution in the U.S., the struggle for freedom has transformed reality and pulled Hegelian dialectics out of the academic halls and philosophy books onto the living stage of history. It is true that this transformation of Hegel into a contemporary has been via Marx. It is no accident, however, that Russian Communism’s attack on Marx has been via Hegel. Because they recognize in the so-called mystical Absolute “the negation of the negation,” the revolution against themselves, Hegel remains so alive and worrisome to the Russian rulers today. Ever since Andrei Zhdanov in 1947 demanded that the Russian philosophers find nothing short of “a new dialectical law,” or, rather, declared “criticism and self-criticism” to be that alleged new dialectical law to replace the Hegelian and objective law of development through contradiction,1 up to the 21st Congress of the Russian Communist Party where the special philosophic sessions declared Nikita Khrushchev to be “the true humanist,” the attack on both the young Marx and the mystic Hegel has been continuous. It reached a climax in the 1955 attacks on Marx’s Early Essays2 in theory. In actuality it came to life as the Sino-Soviet Pact3 to put down the Hungarian Revolution. One thing these intellectual bureaucrats sense correctly: Hegel’s Concept of the Absolute and the international struggle for freedom are not as far apart as would appear on the surface.