Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 144 页

Commenting on Marx’s claim in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that Hegel does not ask whether his use of the category of subsumption is ‘the rational, the adequate mode of subsumption’³⁴, the Endnotes Collective suggests that:

The irony here is that it is just such a usage of this category that Marx himself goes on to develop. From the 1861-63 draft of Capital onwards, subsumption, for Marx, is the subsumption of the particularities of the labour-process under the abstract universality of the valorisation-process of capital. The abstract category, it seems, really does find itself a body. Marx’s critique of German idealist philosophy is thus paralleled in his critique of capital. However, now the error is not on the part of the speculative philosopher, for it resides, rather, in capitalist social relations themselves. The abstract universal – value – whose existence is posited by the exchange abstraction, acquires a real existence vis-à-vis particular concrete labours, which are subsumed under it. The real existence of abstractions, which acquire the ability to subsume the concrete world of production under them – and posit themselves as the truth of this world – is for Marx nothing other than a perverted, enchanted, ontologically inverted reality. The absurdity and violence which Hegel perceives in a relation of subsumption applies not only to Hegel’s system itself, but also to the actual social relations of capitalist society.³⁵

³² Hegel, The Science of Logic, 629.

³³ The Endnotes Collective gives good commentary on the place of subsumption in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, although they overstate the manner in which this place marks a tension in Hegel’s work more broadly. It is true that, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel in effect recreates the Kantian framework: he reproduces the sense in which the manifold is external to the pure categories of the understanding and thus subsumed under – subjected to – these categories. Here the universality of the sovereign’s decision is not configured as inhering in, and thus constituted by, the particularities of civil society. This decision does not manifest itself as a concrete universal, but is rather a decision which imposes itself upon civil society, such that the executive power – namely the judiciary and the police – have an ‘immediate bearing on the particular concerns of civil society and they make the universal interest authoritative over its particular aims.’ G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right [1821], trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 189 (§287). Therefore, the ‘particular interests which are common to everyone fall within civil society and lie outside the absolutely universal interest of the state proper.’ Ibid. 189 (§288). See http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption (accessed 27 April 2015). ³⁴ In full: ‘The sole philosophical statement Hegel makes about the executive is that he “subsumes” the individual and the particular under the general, etc. Hegel contents himself with this. On the one hand, the category of “subsumption” of the particular, etc. This has to be actualised. Then he takes any one of the empirical forms of existence of the Prussian or modern state (just as it is), anything which actualises this category among others, even though this category does not express its specific character. Applied mathematics is also subsumption, etc. Hegel does not ask “Is this the rational, the adequate mode of subsumption?” He only takes the one category, and contents himself with finding a corresponding existent for it. Hegel gives a political body to his logic: he does not give the logic of the body politic.^’ See Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in MECW Volume 3, Marx and Engels: 1843-1844 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 48.

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