Marx and the Historical Unconscious

Abstract

Marx took from Hegel the supremacy of general historical forces over the deliberate actions of individuals in determining the course of events. History for Hegel is the unfolding of the Universal Mind or Spirit in its progress towards absolute self-knowledge and its final return from alienation in the identity of Knowing and Being. Marx accepted the notion of the inevitable laws of the unfolding of history but deposed the Mind or Spirit from a sovereign position in the historical order of things. He turned Hegel on his head and discovered ‘the rational kernel within the mystical shell’ of Hegelian thought (Capital, p. 20). For him the motor of history was not the intrinsic dynamic of Universal Spirit dialectically quarrelling with itself, but the complex and enormous consequences of the fact that man, uniquely among the animals, produced the means of his own subsistence. History was the dialectic arising out of the material forces of production and the relations of production. Historical idealism was consequently replaced by an historical materialism in which the economic structure was the fundamental basis of human society. What Marx retained from Hegel was a view of history and the affairs of human life in which individuals had very limited ability to influence the course of events — although in Marx’s view, the shots were called not by the Universal Mind but by the productive process.

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing less than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought¹