One-Sided Marxism

Abstract

We have seen that the side of wage-labour is not contained in Capital. Despite the recognition of the ‘worker’s own need for development’, that second ‘ought’ is not developed. And, even though the discussion in our last chapter has shown that Marx understood there to be a separate political economy of the working class — one manifested in the struggle to remove capital as a mediator between and above workers, it remains to consider some of the implications of Marx’s failure to incorporate this second side explicitly within capitalism as a whole. What logically follows from this one-sided Capital and from a Marxism which treats Capital as an adequate representation of capitalism as a whole?

We must now consider some of the phenomena which result from the isolation of Being and Nothing, when one is placed without the sphere of the other, and transition is thus denied.

Hegel ¹