Notes on Marx

Here's some quick notes about where I am going in all my Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach posts:

Why marx turns specifically to the economy (at least in his early writings):
because it is hegelian nature (what is outside dialectic, i.e. [perhaps, this isn't right exactly if taken strictly] what is outside reappropriation into the movement of becoming of being and nothingness--i.e. it is brute being, a-dialectical being) conceived RIGHTLY: i.e. not in Feuerbach or Stirner's sense. It is nature that is already social, but this "already" is not due to the movement of the dialectic. How?

This all revolves around trying to see the ultimate general direction of Marx's enterprise with respect to Hegel and especially with respect to the Hegel of Feuerbach, Stirner, and Bruno Bauer (but especially Feuerbach). Obviously, this is extremely reductive. But it might help nevertheless: one needs fundamentally to conceive, in a very brutal, basic sense, why exactly Marx got so intrigued with political economy as a site for dialectic. Althusser is especially good regarding this need. But he can come off as too rigid, because he's trying perhaps to do too much for us at once: understand both the contingency and the necessity of this interest of Marx with respect to others and with respect to the movement of his own thought. But in the end, one should read Althusser with this more humble project in mind--namely, being able to account for the particular specificity of Marx's analysis to the economy and to a historically determined, finite period (to be a little redundant) of the economy (I try to show this a little regarding The Communist Manifesto in another post). In other words, one needs to be able to link in the back of one's mind the project of Hegel to something like this late quote on "the trinity formula" from Capital III:

Capital, land, labor! But capital is not a thing, it is a social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and the produced means of production. Capital is the means of production as transformed into capital, these being no more capital in themselves than gold or silver are money. It is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society...

-Capital III, 953

Something is said here about the particular historicity of what is being analyzed, and it can be elucidated by comparing it to Hegel via Feuerbach in its general tenor. One then, of course, has to try and realize more specifically how this historicity is refined and specific to Marx's particular task at this moment in time, and whether he has already perhaps abandoned this model and its general tenor altogether. In other words, it doesn't hurt to hear Hegel resounding in what Marx is saying here, in order to begin to attune oneself to the background noise of Marx that may be totally indifferent to Hegel (to botch a metaphor).