Respecto al Primer Objetivo Específico

Marx’s idea of revolutionary subjectivity was strongly shaped by his critical engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology. However, the interpretative literature on this influence tends to overlook or underemphasize the extent to which Marx appropriated Hegel’s representation of the life and death struggle between oppressed labourers and their oppressive exploiters as a

fundamentally mental-psychological process. Hegel claimed, for instance, that within this oppressive socio-productive relationship the labourer “rids himself of attachment to natural existence” and their “natural will.”⁵³¹ He thought the oppressed labourers were driven to enter into a state of deferred desire by a fear that completely consumes them—the fear of death.⁵³² In his view a consequence of this is that “the slave,” in “the service of the master, works off his individualist self-will, overcomes the inner immediacy of appetite, and in this divestment of self and in ‘the fear of his lord’ makes ‘the beginning of wisdom’—the passage to universal self-consciousness.”⁵³³

531 Hegel 1977, 117.

532 Hegel claimed that “this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord” (Ibid.). Cf. Aristotle’s claim that “death is the most fearful of all things; for it is the end” (Aristotle 1998, 64).

According to Hegel, in the labourer’s experience “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations,”

and through their “service” the labourer “actually brings this about” (Ibid.). Cf. Marx’s claim that “all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the worker’s life-situation is concerned” is undermined in capitalist society (Marx 1976, 617-18).

533 Hegel 1971, 175. In the process of elaborating this Hegel also touched on its significance for the development of the human species overall: “Since the slave works for the master and therefore not in the exclusive interest of his own individuality, his desire is expanded into being not only the desire of this particular individual but also the desire of another. Accordingly, the slave rises above the selfish individuality of his natural will.... This subjugation of the slave’s egotism forms the beginning of true human freedom. This quaking of the single, isolated will, the

An analysis of Marx’s critical appropriation of Hegel’s idea of the intersubjective nature of class struggle makes the mental-psychological aspect of it in Marx’s work more apparent.

Consider, for instance, his idea of the “life-and-death struggle” between bourgeoisie and proletariat.⁵³⁴ He claimed that it is the “poverty of the proletarian” which “assumes an acute, sharp form” and “drives him into a life-and-death struggle, makes him a revolutionary.”⁵³⁵ Marx did not think of “poverty” only in the “material” sense; he also described a “spiritual” form of

“poverty” which suggests that he thought of it from a mental-psychological standpoint.⁵³⁶ Thus the life-and-death nature of the class struggle can be conceived from this perspective as well. In other words, the class struggle involves an ‘internal’ struggle which is internally related to our struggles in the life-world of ‘socio-natural’ practice.

Class-consciousness, of course, is unthinkable without at least implicitly presupposing the existence of subjective-mental life. After all, Marx thought that the revolutionary working class is becoming conscious of their power as a class and the real potential for independence from economic bondage under the rule of the capitalists. This perspective is unlikely to arouse controversy among scholars of Marx’s work, although there is no consensus regarding how the development of revolutionary subjectivity and its relation to practice should be theorized within the bounds of Marx’s ‘Historical Materialism’. Marx did not provide a substantial amount of elaborate detail about his view of the relationship between subjectivity and practice, nor the

feeling of the worthlessness of egotism, the habit of obedience, is a necessary moment in the education of all men” (Ibid.).

534 Marx referred to “the fear felt by the bourgeoisie of the inevitable life-and-death struggle between itself and the proletariat” and also articulated class struggle in general as such a struggle (Marx 2010c, 371). He claimed, for instance, that there can be “no peace” between “feudal and aristocratic society” and “modern bourgeois society”

because their “material interests and needs require a life-and-death struggle in which one society must win, the other go under”; and that the French bourgeoisie had attempted to “indict the proletariat retrospectively for failing to rise in a bloody life and death struggle on its behalf!” (Marx 2010, 259-60; Marx 2010b, 225).

535 Marx and Engels 1998, 236.

536 Marx 1964, 141.

developmental process of revolutionary subjectivity in particular, but his writings contain some definite ideas about this nonetheless. Elements from the philosophies of Aristotle and Hegel that inspired Marx can be drawn on to enrich our understanding of his thinking on this matter as well.

According to Hegel, a key moment in this process occurs as “consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence” from its exploitative oppressor.⁵³⁷ Even though Marx maintained that there are significant—but not insurmountable—

barriers hindering the wage-worker’s self-awareness and experience of their objectified power in the product that they produce in capitalist relations of production, the influence of Hegel’s representation of the maturation of revolutionary independence is evident in Marx’s writing:

“The recognition of the products as its own, and the judgment that its separation from the conditions of its realization is improper—forcibly imposed—is an enormous [advance in] awareness, itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital, and as much the knell to its doom as, with the slave's awareness that he cannot be the property of another, with his consciousness of himself as a person, the existence of slavery becomes a merely artificial, vegetative existence, and ceases to be able to prevail as the basis of production.”⁵³⁸

However, there is a depth to Marx’s idea of the wage-workers’ revolutionary independence that is not normally taken into consideration because it involves a mental-psychological dimension of

537 Phenomenology, 118. The worker “posits himself as a negative in the permanent order of things, and thereby becomes for himself, someone existing on his own account…. [In] fashioning the thing, he becomes aware...that he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right. The shape does not become something other than himself through being made external to him.... Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own. For this reflection, the two moments of fear and service as such, as also that of formative activity, are necessary, both being at the same time in a universal mode” (Hegel 1977, 118-19).

538 Marx 1973, 462-63.

human life-activity that he left undertheorized. He thought that money plays a role in the development of this independence because since it is “the worker himself who converts the money into whatever use-values he desires”—i.e., since “it is he who buys commodities as he wishes”—the wage worker “acts as a free agent; he must pay his own way; he is responsible to himself for the way he spends his wages” and thus “learns to control himself, in contrast to the slave, who needs a master.”⁵³⁹

The influence of Aristotle is perceptible in this idea of self-transformative life-activity because the development of independence through the use of money, i.e., through habitual practice, is analogous to Aristotle’s idea of “moral virtue” which “comes about as a result of habit.”⁵⁴⁰ As Aristotle claimed, “the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”⁵⁴¹ This also applies to the development of what Marx described as “that

revolutionary boldness which flings at its adversary the defiant words, I am nothing and I should be everything.”⁵⁴² Marx’s higher fusion of Aristotelian and Hegelian philosophy suggests that this revolutionary character requires the development of “courage,” which is a “moral virtue.”⁵⁴³ Aside from the ethical character of revolutionary subjects, Marx’s writing indicates that he also

539 Marx 1976, 1033. Marx also claimed that “piece-wages” in particular give a “wider scope” to “individuality”

which “tends to develop both that individuality, and with it the worker’s sense of liberty, independence and self-control, and also the competition of workers with each other” (Ibid., 697).

540 Aristotle 1998, 28. Aristotle claimed, for example, that “by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust” (Ibid., 29).

541 Ibid., 28-29.

542 Marx 1994, 37.

543 According to Aristotle we become brave “by doing brave acts” and he defined it as “a mean with regard to feelings of fear and confidence” (Aristotle 1998, 29, 63). A “brave” person “faces” and “fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time,” and feels “confidence under the corresponding conditions”; “for the brave man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule [logos] directs,” i.e., “as courage directs” (Ibid., 65-66). Marx’s notes indicate that he thought of this as a virtue (cf.

Marx 1964, 169).

took the mental-psychological dimension of the development of revolutionary productive capacities into consideration.