Jointly edited and translated by Rafael Khachaturian and Igor Shoikhedbrod
Introductory Editorial Note[1]
The article that follows, translated for the first time into English, was written by Evgeny Pashukanis in 1931, on the centenary of Hegel’s death. Several international congresses were held by Hegelian societies at the time to commemorate Hegel’s philosophical legacy, most of which are taken to task by Pashukanis in the article for their refusal to acknowledge Marxism-Leninism as natural heir and successor to Hegelian philosophy. Pashukanis uses the occasion to critically reflect on contemporary political appropriations of Hegel’s philosophy against the backdrop of fierce divisions between opposing camps—Marxist-Leninists (in which Pashukanis proudly situates himself), social democrats (or “social fascists” in Pashukanis’ terminology) such as Siegfried Marck, and full-blown fascists, such as Giovanni Gentile, whom Pashukanis calls “Mussolini’s faithful servant”. More substantively, Pashukanis displays an impressive command of Hegel’s representative works—The Science of Logic (with many references to Lenin’s Conspectus on that work), The Philosophy of History, The Philosophy of Right, and lesser-known works. He proceeds by underlining the critical-revolutionary and reactionary sides to which Hegel’s Philosophy of Right lends itself. Pashukanis ultimately sides with Hegel against his epigones, adversaries, and competitors, including Kant, celebrating Hegel as “the greatest representative of classical German philosophy” and reaffirming his bold view that Hegelian philosophy has been effectively “sublated” in revolutionary Marxism-Leninism.
The significance of Hegelian philosophy is measured by the greatness of those world-historical movements on the verge of which it is situated.
Deeply rooted in the Reformation and the French Revolution, Hegel’s philosophy is further developed through Left Hegelianism. Marx, Engels, and Lenin materialistically reworked Hegel’s dialectic, creating the philosophy of dialectical materialism as the greatest weapon of the revolutionary proletarian communist movement.
Only on this scale can one evaluate the world-historical significance of Hegelian philosophy. It is too grandiose to be measured by the number of dissertations, university courses, or academic societies devoted to Hegel. In order to understand the significance and degree of influence of Hegelian philosophy, one must turn not to the international reference book of the scholarly “Minerva”, but to the very movement of world history, which, in Hegel’s idealistic terms, embraces “spiritual actuality in its entire range of inwardness and externality” (“Die geistige Wirklichkeit in ihrem ganzen Umfange von Innerlichket und Äusserlichkeit”).[2]
It is impossible not to note the comical position in which the organizers of the [1931] Berlin Congress, dedicated to the centenary of the death of Hegel, placed themselves. They refused in principle to put forward the reports of the Soviet delegation on such topics as “Marx, Lenin, Hegel” or “Hegel and Modernity”, and suggested that they confine themselves to “reporting on the scope and organization of the study of Hegelian theories in Russian scientific institutions.”
However, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the venerable neo-Hegelians, united in the arch-reactionary Hegelian alliance, are least of all interested in the significance of Hegel for world history. For in this arena the demiurge-builder is the proletariat. Therefore, bourgeois science seeks to confine Hegelian philosophy within the walls of academies and universities, to bring to the fore its weakest and most reactionary sides, to make it a monopoly of Protestant priests and rabid nationalists, to place it at the service of international fascism.
“It would be absurd,” asserts G. Lasson, one of the initiators of the Hegelian Congress, “to look for the Hegelian doctrine of pure spirit in the materialistic soullessness of Marxism.”
But, alas, world history, as Hegel himself pointed out, is least of all inclined to follow the recipes of those who are devoted to “the calm, orderly and sanctified course of things in the existing system.”
Only by considering Hegelian philosophy as the “algebra of revolution”,[3] as a step towards materialistic dialectics, only through the prism of the historical creativity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, can we single out in Hegel’s philosophy that which is an eternal creation – “under the semblance of the temporary and transient to understand our own strength and meaning.” For the task that Hegel posed to philosophy must be resolved in relation to his own creations: “For what matters is to recognize in the semblance of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present” (“In dem Schein des Zeitlichen und Vorübergehenden die Substanz, die Immanent und das Ewige, das Gegenwärtig ist, zu begreifen”).[4]
Hegel’s philosophy, like all classical German philosophy, bears the imprint of the backwardness of the economic and political relations of Germany at that time. The bold flights of thought in Kant and Hegel, which stand out especially brightly against the background of the insignificance of their modern followers and epigones, were combined with timidity in practical conclusions and in relation to the autocratic-feudal-clerical state, as well as in relation to the Protestant religion, with which both seek reconciliation. Nevertheless, Mehring is profoundly right in regarding as one of the most amusing ironies in world history the fact that Hegel’s philosophy was proclaimed as Prussian state philosophy. For, regardless of all the painful efforts Hegel made to broaden the mind in the surrounding reality of Prussian absolutism, the spirit of Hegelian philosophy, his dialectics, were the strongest explosive.
It is well known that Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right, defends the monarchy, the estate system, the bureaucratic-police state against the doctrine of liberalism, which, in his opinion, reduces the state into separate atoms and leads it to impotence. He fights there against parliamentarism and, in the spirit of the Metternich and the Carlsbad Decrees, falls upon the press, which, they say, is striving “toward general decay.” Hegel reflects in his social philosophy not only the revolutionary, but also the reactionary aspirations of the bourgeoisie, its readiness to come to terms with semi-feudal political institutions, with the monarchy, with the police-bureaucratic machine of absolutism, if only to protect “order” from the encroachments of the “mob”. Fear of the proletariat is the source of that half-heartedness and reactionary tendency that we find in Hegel. The fascists are now seizing on these propositions of Hegel.
The revival of interest in Hegel, which is noticeable in modern bourgeois philosophy, is in general of a pronounced reactionary character. Modern neo-Hegelians look least of all in Hegel for the rational grain of his dialectics. They fiddle primarily with its mystical husks, they take from Hegel everything that comes closer to clericalism, to reconciliation with reality. In a review of the book by the Bulgarian scholar [Janko] Janeff, “Hegel, His Personality, and His Philosophy”, published in “Logos”, we read:
“Now we can speak with full right of returning to Hegel. This return signifies the turning of modern man to the eternal questions of life; means the renewal of faith in the work of the human spirit, which is the strongest on earth”.[5]
The bourgeoisie needs Hegel so that it can believe in the salvation of bourgeois culture and the whole of bourgeois society, which is heading irresistibly towards its collapse. They seek reconciliation in him, overcoming specific contradictions, grasping at the metaphysical and idealistic sides of Hegel’s philosophy, interpreting Hegel in a priestly spirit, highlighting the weakest thing in Hegel: “God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea”.[6] One of the professors who wrote on the topic of the “Hegelian Renaissance” saw the essence of this renaissance in the fact that:
Among the restless, this-worldly and striving for transient blessings of civilization, the consciousness of the groundlessness and meaninglessness of all this feverish activity is awakened, and at the same time, the search for something stable, full of meaning and enduring value.[7]
Hegel is interpreted here in a clerical-quietistic spirit; his philosophy is portrayed as a kind of haven of blissful reassurance from the contradictions of the sinful world and the “horrors of the class struggle.”
The social-fascist theoreticians do not lag behind the bourgeois scholars, either. In his report dedicated to the centenary of Hegel, the notorious Siegfried Marck, digging into the essence of dialectics, identifies it from the point of view of “historical integrity”.[8] He sees the significance of dialectics in the fact that “only in the integrity of historical events can one understand in appearance senseless contradictions as driving factors of development.”[9] The social-fascist theoretician manages to eradicate the revolutionary essence of dialectics, to use it as a justification for passivity, as a means of calming oneself from the contradictions of life. The indignation of the masses at the concrete contradictions of capitalism, which doom them to unemployment, want and hunger, Siegfried Marck tries to lead into a safe channel of philistine reasoning about the “higher” meaning of these contradictions, which he opens from the point of view of “historical integrity”. It is difficult to imagine a greater vulgarization of Marxism and dialectics.
The same Siegfried Marck, of course, rejects “the attempt of communist theorists to understand Marxism in a popular-dialectical way, as an empirical science of the real contradictions of life.”[10]
Comments, as they say, are superfluous. It might perhaps be added that, even according to the reports of the Social-Democratic press, Siegfried Marck’s report was read in such a dry and heavy language that most of the audience did not understand it. This is how the theory of scientific socialism is “popularized” by the Social-Democrats, this is how they distort and vulgarize Marxism and dialectics.
Meanwhile, Hegel’s philosophy is farthest away from passive contemplation:
In the theoretical idea the subjective concept, as a universal that in and for itself lacks determination, stands opposed to the objective world from which it derives determinate content and filling. But in the practical idea it is as actual that it stands over against the actual; but the certainty of itself that the subject possesses in being determined in and for itself is a certainty of its actuality and of the non-actuality of the world; it is the singularity of this world, and the determinateness of its singularity, not just its otherness as abstract universality, which is a nullity for the subject.[11]
This passage from Part III of the Science of Logic contains the most profound thought, which receives its complete and consistent expression in dialectical materialism and which Marx expressed in his famous Theses on Feuerbach. Lenin formulates the same idea in his comments [Conspectus of Hegel’s book, “The Science of Logic”] on the Science of Logic as follows:
Theoretical cognition ought to give the object in its necessity, in its all-sided relations, in its contradictory movement, an-und für-sich. But the human notion “definitively” catches this objective truth of cognition, seizes and masters it, only when the notion becomes “being-for-itself” in the sense of practice. That is, the practice of man and of mankind is the test, the criterion of the objectivity of cognition.[12]
“The self-certainty which the subject … is a certainty of its own actuality and of the non-actuality of the world.” – this formula reveals the revolutionary side of the Hegelian dialectical method.[13] Having written out this passage, Lenin comments on it in his simple and clear language, “i.e., that the world does not satisfy man and man decides to change it by his activity”.[14] But if the highest objectivity is achieved in the realm of the practical idea, i.e., human practice, which “[gives] itself reality in the form of external actuality”,[15] then, on the other hand, the practical idea “is doomed to remain in the realm of subjectivity, in the pure spaces of transparent thought, which is opposed by external manifold actuality, which is an unexplored realm of darkness,” if only “the will … separates itself from cognition and external actuality does not receive the form of a true existence”.[16]
To recognize the truly existing as a reality independent of subjective opinions is, according to Lenin, “pure materialism!”:
“The non-fulfilment of ends (of human activity) has as its cause (Grund) the fact that reality is taken as non-existent (nichtig), that its (reality’s) objective actuality is not being recognised.”[17]
And vice versa:
“The activity of man, who has constructed an objective picture of the world for himself, changes external actuality, abolishes its determinateness (= alters some sides or other, qualities, of it), and thus removes from it the features of Semblance, externality and nullity, and makes it as being in and for itself (= objectively true).”[18]
Such is Lenin’s materialist commentary on these most important passages in Hegel’s Logic.
It goes without saying that social-fascists first of all try to break the revolutionary edge of dialectics, tear theory from practice, turn the unity of theory and practice into a harmless “postulate which we proclaim again and again, but which, with our limited forces, can only be achieved approximately” (Siegfried Marck).[19]
Pretending that they reject only the Hegelian metaphysics of the world spirit and its absolute development, the social fascists in essence oppose the proletarian revolution. The same Siegfried Marck showed this with complete clarity. For all the reasoning about the limited forces of our “finite mind” was needed by him only to declare that there is no “absolute proof of the death of capitalism.”
This is how the “certified lackeys of the clergy” carry out the task entrusted to them.
Only the proletariat, as the class to which the future belongs, as the class which, by the very objective course of the development of capitalist society, emerges as the grave-digger of the latter [i.e., capitalist society], is capable of seeking grounds for its active influence on reality itself. The ideologist of the bourgeoisie, sensing that the historical ground is slipping from under his class, prefers to make a leap into the realm of subjectivity, into the realm of pure will and absolute actualism, such as the ideologist of Italian fascism, the philosopher [Giovanni] Gentile. He takes upon himself the task of ideologically arming the bourgeoisie for the last struggle in the period of decay and collapse of capitalism, instilling in it courage and confidence in its strength. To do this, he creates a mixture of Fichte’s subjective idealism along with elements of Hegelian philosophy and presents this mixture under the name of actualism, as a kind of ideological dope for the bourgeois world. The eternal striving forward, the eternal creation from nothing, the eternal assertion of one’s freedom, one’s value, one’s strength—such are the recipes that Mussolini’s faithful servant Professor Gentile prescribes to dying capitalism. This philosophy is capable of stirring up the bourgeoisie and serving as an ideological justification for any brutal reprisals against the working class, for any imperialist war. But it does not indicate any way out of the contradictions of reality, because it does not want to know this reality.
This is very much unlike Hegel’s dialectical formulation of the problem of theory and practice, for in him confidence in the limitless powers of the human mind, inspiring to fight, is combined with a courageous and stern recognition of objective reality. This work comes close to materialism and contains the rationale for an effective attitude to the world, active participation in the historical process. Hegel’s philosophy is permeated with the desire to embrace and comprehend the social and political tasks of the era in all their historical breadth, in their deepest objective significance. In this respect, Hegel is incomparably superior to other representatives of classical German philosophy.
To be convinced of this, it suffices to compare the meager formalism and empty content of Kant’s doctrine of the categorical imperative with the richness of content that the Hegelian philosophy of objective spirit contains. The same thing is striking when comparing Hegel with Feuerbach. The latter, as you know, despite the break with the idealistic system of Hegel, despite the fact that he rejected the mystical pre-eternal existence of the absolute idea and returned man to the only real world that external senses reveal to him, not only remained an idealist in his ethics and philosophy of religion, but also incredibly narrowed the understanding of human relations, reducing them to one side – to morality:
And here we are again struck by Feuerbach’s astonishing poverty when compared with Hegel. The latter’s ethics or doctrine of social ethics, is the philosophy of law and embraces: 1) abstract law; 2) morality; 3) social ethics under which again are comprised: the family, civil society and the state. Here the content is as realistic as the form is idealistic. Besides morality the whole sphere of law, economy, politics is included here. With Feuerbach it is just the reverse. In form he is realistic since he takes man as his point of departure; but there is absolutely no mention of the world in which this man lives; hence, this man remains always the same abstract man who occupied the field in the philosophy of religion. For this man is not born of woman; he emerged, as if from a chrysalis, from the god of the monotheistic religions.[20]
Two historical elements dominate Hegel’s philosophical thought and raise it to an unattainable height. These are the Reformation and the French Revolution. The Hegelian philosophy of history and the philosophy of the state can only be understood in the light of the great class struggles of the bourgeoisie, which created the new world under the slogans of political freedom, freedom of thought and freedom of property.
The militant spirit of the bourgeois revolution appears in Hegel in a veiled philosophical form. This is a feature common to him and other representatives of [classical] German idealist philosophy. “Among the Germans this view assumed no other form than that of tranquil theory; but the French wished to give it practical effect,” Hegel himself remarks.[21]
“German philosophy,” Marx wrote on the same occasion, “is the ideal prolongation of German history”.[22]
However, the abstract form of Hegelian philosophy cannot hide its political purposefulness. Hegel stands among the militants opposed to feudalism, against the gloomy oppression of the Catholic Church. Hegel, who put forward the thesis: “What is rational is actual; And what is actual is rational”[23], did not belong to that trend of thought which, in the words of Marx, “legitimates the baseness of today by the baseness of yesterday, a school that declares rebellious every cry of the serf against the knout once that knout is a time-honoured, ancestral, historical one”.[24]
Even in the Philosophy of Right, where reconciliation with the surrounding political reality is expressed most strongly, we have a rather sharp polemical speech against the arch-reactionary Haller, against the Historical School, against those who exalted the feudal-serf system and preached a return to the Middle Ages.
Hegel throws a direct accusation against the Catholic Church, that it burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and forced Galileo on his knees to beg for mercy and renounce the theory of Copernicus. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel says that “It [the Catholic Church ] severed itself from advancing Science, from philosophy and humanistic literature”.[25] In the remark to § 270 of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel quotes that passage from Laplace, which tells of the humiliating violence to which the papal inquisition subjected the seventy-year old man, forcing him to renounce his convictions and declare scientific truth to be heresy.
For modern bourgeois philosophy, which loves to dress up in Hegelian clothes and comes out under the slogans of neo-Hegelianism, there is nothing more alien than this unambiguous position of Hegel in the dispute between science and the church. For Hegel, the fates of Giordano Bruno and Galileo are historical facts, full of significance for today. He cannot ignore them, he acts as a side, as an accuser, for he himself embodies the spirit of protest against the medieval Inquisition, against the obscurantism of the Catholic Church, which sought to impose fetters on the development of the scientific study of nature. How far from this are the modern followers of Hegel, ready for any compromise with church dogma, ready for an alliance with all the forces and remnants of the Middle Ages; how unlike their teacher are those “neo-Hegelians” like Gentile who spewed the slogan: “More discipline, obedience, less philosophizing!”
Hegel understood profoundly the revolutionary significance of the Reformation. The Reformation destroyed the monasteries, rejected the secular authority of the bishops and the pope, undermined the external authority of the church in matters of faith, secularized church possessions, freed bourgeois man with his carnal aspirations, with his enterprise and thirst for the use of capital from the constraints of medieval ascetic morality. It [the Reformation], in the words of Hegel, “established moral trade and industry”, it opened the way for free scientific research and freed the state from the tutelage of the church. Protestantism declares inner conviction to be the basis of religion. That is why in Protestantism Hegel saw the reconciliation of reason with religion. At the same time, he [Hegel] hoped to ensure the hegemony of reason by deifying the logical process itself.
Only the dialectical materialism of Marx and Lenin, as the only consistent philosophy of the revolutionary proletariat, only the latter’s [the proletariat’s] victory over capitalism brings about the complete liberation of human consciousness from the power of supernatural forces created by [human consciousness] itself.
If Hegel saw in the Reformation “the latest standard round which the peoples rally – the banner of Free Spirit, independent, though finding its life in the Truth, and enjoying independence only in it”,[26] then Marx reveals the half-heartedness of this emancipation:
Luther, we grant, overcame the bondage of piety by replacing it by the bondage of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.[27]
Declaring an irreconcilable war against any religious intoxication, revolutionary Marxism-Leninism in particular sharpens it against the most refined, the most spiritual and therefore the most dangerous forms of religious ideology, the sources of which are Protestantism in its various varieties. I remind you what Lenin wrote in a letter to Gorky:
Just because any religious idea, any idea of any god at all, any flirtation even with a god, is the most inexpressible foulness, particularly tolerantly (and often even favourably) accepted by the democratic bourgeoisie—for that very reason it is the most dangerous foulness, the most shameful “infection”.[28]
A million physical sins, dirty tricks, acts of violence and infections are much more easily discovered by the crowd, and therefore are much less dangerous, than the subtle, spiritual idea of god, dressed up in the most attractive “ideological” costumes. The Catholic priest corrupting young girls (about whom I have just read by chance in a German newspaper) is much less dangerous, precisely to “democracy”, than a priest without his robes, a priest without crude religion, an ideologically equipped and democratic priest preaching the creation and the invention of a god. For it is easy to expose, condemn and expel the first priest, while the second cannot be expelled so simply; to expose the latter is 1,000 times more difficult, and not a single “frail and pitifully wavering” philistine will agree to “condemn” him.[29]
The dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin raises the bold atheism of the French materialists of the eighteenth century to a new, higher level.
On the other hand, it is absolutely inevitable that under the guise of the revival of Hegelianism in modern bourgeois philosophy we see an attempt to kill and immobilize Hegel’s philosophical teaching, to perpetuate what is weak, transient in him, his far-fetched schemes, his scholasticism, his vague metaphysics, throwing overboard the dialectic. Hegel’s philosophy has been sublated and “negated,” that is, negated and preserved in revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. It is mummified and distorted and compromised in the reactionary attempts to connect Hegel with Bergson, with the “philosophy of life”, with Eastern mysticism, with all modern obscurantism.
Hegelian social philosophy is known in wide circles mainly for its clearly expressed motif concerning the deification of the state. During World War I, every average inhabitant of the states at war with Germany was informed that Hegel’s philosophy required the sacrifice of the individual to the state, that by defining the state as “the actuality of the ethical Idea” [§257] and “the embodiment of reason”, Hegel justified Prussian militarism and the policy of blood and iron. However, not only in tendentious journalism, but also in serious historical and philosophical works, a sharp line is drawn between the bourgeois individualistic ideology of Manchesterism[30] and the Hegelian apotheosis of statehood. Indeed, on the one hand, the state is a nightwatchman protecting property, and on the other hand, the state is “the ultimate end”.[31] What greater contrast can you imagine? It is not for nothing that in recent years, when the general crisis of the capitalist system is becoming more and more pronounced, we see attempts to create some new, non-bourgeois, anti-individualist, anti-parliamentary conception of the state from the scraps of the restored Hegel. But the fact is that in Hegel we find not only the deification of the state: The Philosophy of Right contains, in addition, an image of bourgeois civil society, and, moreover, one that is presented with such depth and substance, which is difficult to admit, bearing in mind the complete underdevelopment bourgeois social relations of Germany at the time. In understanding the essence of civil society based on the blind play of economic forces, Hegel is two heads taller than the flat epigones of classical political economy, like Say or the apostles of harmony like Bastiat. In his social philosophy, Hegel stands with both feet on the soil of bourgeois society. At the basis of so-called abstract right, he puts property, which is nothing but the “external embodiment of freedom” [§41]. He exalts bourgeois formal equality.
It is false to maintain that justice requires everyone’s property to be equal; for it requires only that everyone should have property.[32]
What and how much I possess is therefore purely contingent as far as right is concerned.[33]
Hegel appears as a principled supporter of bourgeois individual property, “pure private property”, as Marx calls it:
Since my will, as personal and hence as the will of an individual [des Einzelnen], becomes objective in property, the latter takes on the character of private property.[34]
Hegel therefore criticizes Plato, who in his Republic commits injustice against the individual, depriving him of private property. The principle of property in Hegel is inextricably linked with the principle of personality. “Be a person and respect others as persons” [§36] – this, according to Hegel, is the highest principle of right. In the doctrine of “abstract right” Hegel depicts in the most idealized form the relations of bourgeois society, portraying them as the embodiment of freedom and reason.[35] Hegel opposes representatives of feudal-Christian romanticism, who argue on the subject that, of course, every person, including a serf, has a free and “immortal” soul, but that this does not at all concern a sinful body:
It is only because I am alive as a free entity within my body that this living existence [Dasein] may not be misused as a beast of burden. In so far as I am alive, my soul (the concept and, on a higher level, the free entity) and my body are not separated; my body is the existence [Dasein] of freedom, and I feel through it. It is therefore only a sophistical understanding, devoid of any Idea, which can make a distinction whereby the thing-in-itself [Ding an sich], the soul, is neither touched nor affected by the body is abused and the existence [Existenz] of the person is subjected to the power of another.[36]
But the most valuable and most significant are Hegel’s discourses on civil society. Civil society is not only a world of labour and needs in general, but, moreover, it is also especially a bourgeois society, built on arbitrariness and anarchy, entirely subject to spontaneous laws. “The concrete person who, as a particular person, as a totality of needs and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness” is one of the principles of civil society.[37] But along with this, Hegel also points out another principle, that “each asserts itself and gains satisfaction through the others, and thus at the same time through the exclusive mediation of the form of universality”.[38]
External necessity manifests itself formally as a contract,
“since my will is contained in a thing, it can pass to another only with my consent; this creates the relation of one will to another will, which constitutes the true ground of freedom and the realm of contract.”[39]
These arguments of Hegel must be contrasted with the well-known passages from the first volume of Capital, where Marx establishes a connection between the fact of the exchange of goods and certain characteristic legal forms of bourgeois private property and contract.[40]
The idealistic theory of Hegel is turned upside down. Legal forms are explained by underlying economic relations.
Hegel not only gives an image of civil society, he tries to substantiate the positive value of the principles embodied in it:
The right of the subject’s particularity to find satisfaction, or – to put it differently – the right of subjective freedom, is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age.[41]
Hegel, as stated above, criticizes Plato, who
presents the substance of ethical life in its ideal beauty and truth; but he cannot come to terms with the principle of self-sufficient particularity, which had suddenly overtaken Greek ethical life in his time, except by setting up his purely substantial state in opposition to it and completely excluding it [from this state], from its very beginnings in private property and the family to its subsequent development [Ausbildung] as the arbitrary will of individuals and their choice of social position [des Standes], etc.[42]
Hegel does not have any illusions about the contradictions that the beginning of singularity and subjective arbitrariness lead to when people are fully dependent on satisfying their needs:
In these opposites and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and misery as well as of the physical and ethical corruption common to both.[43]
Hegel speaks of the inevitable corruption of morals in those societies based on patriarchal and religious principles, where the principle of private property begins to develop: “In civil society, each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him. But he cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others; these others are therefore means to the end of the particular [person]. But through its reference to others, the particular end takes on the form of universality, and gains satisfaction by simultaneously satisfying the welfare of others.”[44]
This picture of a society left to elemental laws, which are the result of the random, arbitrary, and self-serving actions of individuals, Hegel, as is known, compares with a planetary system in which only chaotic movements are presented to the eye. In the addition to §185 cited above, Hegel provides a picture of capitalist society that is full of gloomy tragedy.
Particularity in itself [für sich] is boundless [maßlos] extravagance, and the forms of this extravagance are themselves boundless. Through their representations [Vorstellungen] and reflections, human beings expand their desires, which do not form a closed circle like animal instinct, and extend them to false [schlechte] infinity. But on the other hand, deprivation and want are likewise boundless, and this confused situation can be restored to harmony only through the forcible intervention of the state.[45]
Here the state appears in Hegel in a somewhat different, more realistic light, than elsewhere in his Philosophy of Right. State power is bound here by the presence of a gulf between the haves and the have-nots. With the help of force, state power must establish “harmony” between wastefulness and poverty. Every unprejudiced reader reading these lines should have the idea that the class theory of the state is already on the threshold. Even the very expression “complexity” of the situation directly recalls the well-known definition of Engels, where it is said that the state is the recognition of the fact that society has become entangled in hopeless contradictions, etc.
Here again we come to a point in Hegel’s teaching beyond which a further step is only possible in the direction of Marx and Lenin. True, Hegel himself immediately runs away from materialistic conclusions in relation to the state. Turning his back on reality, he begins his frantic idealistic glorification of the State with a capital letter. He reaches his maximum pathos in the well-known note [addition] to § 258, where we read that “The state consists in the march of God in the world, and its basis is the power of reason actualizing itself as will,” etc.[46]
To make ends meet, Hegel repeatedly in his most diverse works – in the Science of Logic, The Philosophy of History, and in the Philosophy of Right – starts to prove that it is necessary to distinguish between the rationality of the “state in itself and for itself” from the forms in which it arose and was introduced. Thus, in a polemic against the reactionary Haller, Hegel tries in every possible way to prove that it is impossible “taking the externality of appearance and the contingencies of want, need of protection, strength, wealth, etc. not as moments of historical development, but as the substance of the state.”[47] But these arguments sound very unconvincing. For civil society is a reality, the features of which are derived directly from life, and exactly the same reality is the “external state” corresponding to civil society, or the “state of need and reason.”
If, in the period preceding World War I, bourgeois philosophy was guided mainly by Kant, now it is making a turn towards Hegel. Kant is too liberal; he preaches universal human morality and humane internationalism. This is only good for sowing illusions among the working people. Therefore, neo-Kantianism is at the mercy of the Social Democrats, who act as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. The right wing, represented by the fascists, now prefers to orient itself towards Hegel, from whom they derive justification for extreme nationalism and chauvinism, for the imperialist policy of violence and conquest. Hegel, in his ideology of the nation-state, reflected the first epoch in the development of capitalism, about which Lenin says:
there is the period of the collapse of feudalism and absolutism, the period of the formation of the bourgeois-democratic society and state, when the national movements for the first time become mass movements and in one way or another draw all classes of the population into politics through the press, participation in representative institutions, etc.[48]
Prussia experienced this rise of the national movement during the era of the Napoleonic Wars, when its independence was under threat, and Hegel reflected precisely on this period when he wrote that “the substantial aim [of every nation] is to be a state and preserve itself as such.”[49]
It is in connection with this struggle for national independence that the principle of the absolute sovereignty of the state proclaimed by Hegel should be considered. The state, according to Hegel, does not know a judge above itself, Hegel rejects Kant’s idea of perpetual peace through a federation of states, because an alliance presupposes a unanimous decision, and it again rests on the sovereign will of individual states. Therefore, Hegel believes that only war can resolve a dispute between states in the absence of an agreement and sees the obligation to sacrifice life and property for the state as the “moral moment of war.” These ideas are taken up by the ideologists of fascism and are used by them to justify the policy of imperialist plunder and violence.
This is all the easier for them to do since bourgeois nationalism, even in the first epoch, appears in a dual guise. Freedom for “one’s own” nation is combined with oppression and violence against a “foreign” nation. In Hegel, the upholding of the principle of national independence is combined with an apology for colonial conquests and violence. Therefore, the ideologists of imperialism can not only directly rely on Hegel, but also use his philosophy to fool the broader masses, to obscure the crudely imperialist essence of their policy.
Thus, in Germany today the fascists are dragging along a part of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, appearing under the guise of fighters for the national liberation of Germany.
Speaking about the exploitation of national ideology, Lenin wrote:
The national ideology created by that epoch (the collapse of feudalism and absolutism – E.P.) left a deep impress on the mass of the petty bourgeoisie and a section of the proletariat. This is now being utilised in a totally different and imperialist epoch by the sophists of the bourgeoisie, and by the traitors to socialism who are following in their wake, so as to split the workers, and divert them from their class aims and from the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.[50]
As noted above, the Hegelian philosophy of right also includes political economy. We find in Hegel deep insight into the spontaneous laws of the economy. Characteristic of is the calm confidence with which Hegel states the birth of necessity out of the collision of contingency, out of apparent arbitrariness. This calmness fully corresponds to the confidence in the future, self-confidence, which bourgeois society possessed in the first third of the 19th century. The bourgeoisie is not yet tormented by fear and anxiety in the face of growing contradictions. Hegel reflected this in his discussion of political economy:
There are certain universal needs, such as food, drink, clothing, etc., and how these are satisfied depends entirely on contingent circumstances. The soil is more or less fertile in different places, the years are more or less productive, one man is industrious and the other lazy. But this proliferation of arbitrariness generates universal determination from within itself, and this apparently scattered and thoughtless activity is subject to a necessity which arises of its own accord. To discover the necessity at work here is the object [Gegenstand] of political economy, a science which does credit to thought because it finds the laws underlying a mass of contingent occurrences.[51]
However, Hegel does not hide the main formidable contradiction, which at the same time forms the basis of bourgeois society – the transformation of an increasing number of working people into proletarians. The famous § 243 of his Philosophy of Right is devoted to this problem. There we read:
When the activity of civil society is unrestricted, it is occupied internally with expanding its population and industry. – On the one hand, as the association [Zusammenhang] of human beings through their needs is universalized, and with it the ways in which means of satisfying these needs are devised and made available, the accumulation of wealth increases; for the greatest profit is derived from this twofold universality. But on the other hand, the specialization [Vereinzelung] and limitation of particular work also increase, as do likewise the dependence and want of the class which is tied to such work; this in turn leads to an inability to feel and enjoy the wider freedoms, and particularly the spiritual advantages, of civil society.[52]
In the next paragraph, Hegel develops the same theme. He points to the presence in civil society of a significant mass of people who are barely provided with the necessary means of subsistence. Hegel refers to them contemptuously as “rabble”. His petty-bourgeois-philistine reactionary spirit manifests itself in this case with particular force. What worries Hegel most of all is the mentality that is generated by poverty and which manifests itself “by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc.”[53]
Hegel ends this paragraph with an ominous reminder that “the important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.”[54]
At the present moment, when capitalism condemns tens of millions of people to want and hunger, it does not hurt the bourgeois neo-Hegelians to recall this instruction of the old Hegel. Hegel points out that with “an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough … to prevent an excess of poverty.”[55] Hegel seeks salvation from contradictions in the estate-corporate system and in the seizure of colonies. These prescriptions of Hegel, which he gave a hundred years ago, are no less absurd than those put forward today by the luminaries of bourgeois science. Neither colonial plunder, nor the miracles of “organized” capitalism, nor the fascist corporate state, were able to avert the crisis.
Hegel called for studying the contradictions of civil society using the example of England, now he could point to the whole world, except for the only country that took the revolutionary path of resolving the contradictions of capitalism, along the path of Marx and Lenin, which accepted the revolutionary essence of dialectics, discarding its mystical, idealistic husk, taking from Hegel those features that elevated him above the epoch, while discarding those features that expressed his historical limitations.
Hegel considered the history of humanity as the movement of the world spirit. In its “absolute universality,” he wrote, “individual peoples, appearing on the stage of world history, receive their truth and their definition.” Each of the peoples interprets and realizes one of the moments, one of the steps of the movement of the world spirit. This thoroughly idealistic view of history served as the basis for the ideology of nationalism and for the division of nations into historical, or elected, nations and non-historical ones, doomed to play a passive role in the development of humanity. But along with this reactionary side, Hegel’s philosophy of history is a grandiose attempt to find the general laws of the historical process and to apply the principle of development most widely, fully, and comprehensively.
This positive side of the Hegelian philosophy of history was materialistically reworked and further developed by revolutionary Marxism, creating a genuine science of society:
“Inasmuch as this science,” wrote Lenin “was built up, first, by the classical economists, who discovered the law of value and the fundamental division of society into classes; inasmuch as important contributions to this science were made, in conjunction with the classical economists, by the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century in its struggle against feudalism and clericalism; inasmuch as this science was promoted by the historians and philosophers of the early nineteenth century who, notwithstanding their reactionary views, still further explained the class struggle, developed the dialectical method and applied it, or began to apply it, in social life—Marxism, which made tremendous advances along precisely this path, marks the highest development of Europe’s entire historical, economic and philosophical science”.[56]
World history, according to Hegel, is the creation of the new, its creation by an act that rejects the established, the old, the ordinary, that rebels against it. History is a revolutionary process carried out with iron necessity. But the bearers of this necessity, the actors in this revolutionary struggle, are not peoples, as Hegel thought, but classes. They are representatives of a particular era.
Hegel’s philosophy of history is the highest limit for a generalizing view of world history that the bourgeoisie could achieve. After Hegel, the bourgeois philosophy of history did not rise to such heights. In the next step could only appear, as indeed had appeared, the Communist Manifesto [1848].
Hegel’s philosophy is one of the greatest achievements of human thought in the 19th century, for it gave the most complete, comprehensive, and profound understanding of development for its time. But only Menshevik idealists like Deborin and his school can think that Hegelian dialectics is the last word of philosophical thought, that it was enough for Marx and Lenin to discard Hegel’s idealistic system and adopt his method. This radically distorts the relationship of Marxism-Leninism to Hegelian philosophy and paves the way for the restoration of idealism. Not Hegel per se, but the materialist reworking of Hegel by Marx and Lenin, materialist dialectics as a weapon in the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the inseparable connection of this only consistent materialist philosophy with the tasks of the epoch, with the struggle of our party, with the victorious building of socialism in the USSR and the maturing world proletarian revolution—this is our militant slogan, with which we celebrate the centennial anniversary of the greatest representative of classical German philosophy.
References
Engels, Frederick 1990, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Collected Works, Vol. 26, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1861, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, translated by John Sibree, London: Henry G. Bohn.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1894, Philosophy of Mind, translated by William Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1991, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H. B. Nisbet, edited by Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2010, The Science of Logic, translated and edited by George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Janeff, Janko [Yanev, Yanko] 1929, ‘Sein Persönlichkeit, sein Schicksal, seine Philosophie. (Theodor Peters)’, in Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, no. 18, Tübingen: J. C. B Mohr, 293. See as well in Bulgarian: Янев, Янко, “Хегел. Личност, съдба, флософия”. София, 1928.
Lenin, V.I. 1973, ‘Lenin to Maxim Gorky, 13 or 14 November 1913’, in Collected Works, Vol. 35, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 121–124.
Lenin, V.I. 1974, ‘The Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. Groups Abroad’, in Collected Works, Vol. 21, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 158–164.
Lenin, V.I. 1976, ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic’ Collected Works, Vol. 38, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 85–237.
Lenin, V.I. 1977a, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’ Collected Works, Vol. 20, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 393–454.
Lenin, V.I. 1977b, ‘Socialism Demolished Again’, in Collected Works, Vol. 20, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 187–208.
Levy, Heinrich 1927, Die Hegel-Renaissance in der deutschen Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Neukantianismus. Charlottenburg: Pan-verlag R. Heise.
Marx, Karl 1996, Capital, Volume I, in Collected Works, Vol. 35, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, Karl 1975, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’ Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 175–187.
[1] Originally published under the same title in Soviet State and the Revolution of Law, No. 8 (Aug.), pp. 16-32, 1931; republished in E.B. Pashukanis, Selected Works on the General Theory of Law and State, (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), pp. 195-215. Whenever possible, English translations of quoted passages have been referenced for the convenience of readers. Our editorial interventions are designated using square brackets and/or Ed.
We would like to express our gratitude to the editorial team at Kritika Prava for transcribing this essay and making it available in Russian on their website. The translators would also like to thank Ksenia Arapko for her assistance with cross-referencing.
[2] Hegel 1991, p. 372.
[3] Pashukanis is referring to Alexander Herzen’s famous characterization of Hegelian philosophy as “the algebra of revolution”.
[4] Ibid., p. 20.
[5] Janeff [Yanev] 1929, p. 293.
[6] Lenin 1976, p. 104.
[7] Levy 1927, p. 11.
[8] ED. Given that Pashukanis does not provide any accompanying references for the quotations from Siegfried Marck, readers are encouraged to consult Marck’s final reflections on this topic in Siegfried Marck, “Dialectical Materialism”, History of Philosophical Systems, ed. Virgilius Ferm (Rider and Company, New York, 1950), pp.306-314. Readers are also encouraged to review
Siegfried Marck, “Die dialectische Soziologie des Marxismus,” Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, I. Halbband, JCB Mohr, Tübingen 1929, pp. 122–134, available online, along with Marck’s earlier essay, “Hegelianismus und Marxismus” (Berlin, Reuther & Reichard, 1922).
[9] Ibid.,
[10] Ibid.,
[11] Hegel 2010, p. 729.
[12] Lenin 1976, p. 211.
[13] Ibid., p. 212.
[14] Ibid., p. 213.
[15] Hegel, 2010, p. 729.
[16] Ibid., p. 732.
[17] Lenin 1976, p. 217.
[18] Ibid., p. 217–8.
[19] See n8.
[20] Engels 1990, p. 377.
[21] Hegel 1861, p. 462.
[22] Marx 1975, p. 180.
[23] Hegel 1991, p. 20.
[24] Marx 1975., p.177.
[25] Hegel 1861, p. 436.
[26] Ibid., p. 434.
[27] Marx 1975, p. 182.
[28] Lenin 1973, p. 122.
[29] Ibid., p. 122.
[30] Pashukanis is referring here to the ideological outlook of “non-interference” in economic affairs, inspired as it was by the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, which was especially prevalent among the “Manchester industrialists”.
[31] Hegel 1991, p. 276.
[32] Ibid., p. 81. [Addition to §49].
[33] Ibid., p. 80. [§49].
[34] Ibid., p. 77.
[35] Ibid., p. 69.
[36] Ibid., p. 79.
[37] Ibid., p. 220.
[38] Ibid., p. 220.
[39] Pashukanis is likely paraphrasing §71 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ibid., pp. 83–4 – Ed.
[40] Pashukanis is likely referring to Marx 1996, pp. 94–5 – Ed.
[41] Ibid., p. 151.
[42] Ibid., pp. 222–3.
[43] Ibid., p. 222.
[44] Ibid., p. 220.
[45] Ibid., p. 223.
[46] Ibid., p. 279.
[47] Ibid., p. 278.
[48] Lenin 1977a, p. 401.
[49] Hegel 1894, p. 150.
[50] Lenin 1974, p. 160.
[51] Hegel 1991, pp. 227–8. [Addition to §189].
[52] Ibid., p. 266.
[53] Ibid., p. 266.
[54] Ibid., p. 267.
[55] Ibid., 267.
[56] Lenin 1977b, p. 204.
