Existentialism started as a revolt against the "negative" interpretation of Hegel as taught by Schelling in an effort to posit his own philosophy as one better. It instead developed as an incomplete analysis of Geist and leaves the individual to enjoy his anguish over the results. Marxism, too, started as a revolt against Hegel but, ironically, takes the other side of the fence as its roosting place. Marx read a great deal of Hegel and was profoundly impressed.[1] It is generally assumed that Marx's primary gains from reading Hegel was the dialectic. This may be true to some extent but what does it mean? For Marx to adopt dialectic from Hegel, he had to find dialectic in Hegel. And as Kaufmann shows, dialectic for Hegel is not a mechanical system that is precise, or that enables one to predict anything. "Hegel himself never used the dialectic to predict anything, and actually spurned the very idea that it could be use that way."[2] Instead, "We find a vision of the world, of man, and of history which emphasizes development through conflict, the moving power of human passions, which produce wholly unintended results, and the irony of sudden reversals."[3]
Marx adopts collective Geist but ignores individual Geist and, in so doing, he does not turn Hegel upside-down but simply drops half his philosophy. For Marx, the individual is more like the ant in an ant colony. They have virtually no control over their own lives.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines (bestimmt)
their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.[4]
This leaves man with nothing to do apart from his function in his social class.
...the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour
of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange
establishes directly between the products, and, indirectly
through them, between the producers. To the later, therefore,
the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of
the rest appear, not as direct relations between individuals at work,
but as what they really are, material relations between things.[5]
Even the great world personalities, like Napoleon, work as a result of their social circumstances.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly encountered, given and
transmitted from the past.[6]
As a result "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."[7]
This characteristic is not restricted simply to Marx. It is indeed the core of Marxism. Frederick Engels says:
The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that
the production of the means to support human life and, next to
production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all
social structure; that in every society that has appeared in
history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society
divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is
produced, how it is produced, and how the products are
exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all
social changes and political revolutions are to be sought,
not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal
truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of
production and exchange.[8]
And Georgi Plekhanov says:
The final cause of social relationships lies in the state of productive forces.
This depends on the qualities of individuals, perhaps, only in the
sense that these individuals possess more or less talent for making
technical improvements, discoveries and inventions.[9]
Hegel's influence on Marxism, as on Existentialism, does not need to be shown. It is commonly accepted. But again, how Hegel influenced Marx and the Marxists needs to be evaluated in terms of an adequate grasp of Hegel's concept of Geist. Once this is achieved it can be seen that the inherent flaw in Marxism is its inadequate grasp of the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Interpreting Hegel's concept of Geist as both individual and collective Geist shows essential similarities between Hegel's work and Pragmatism. Existentialism, and Marxism. The similarity between Hegel's thought and Pragmatism is greater than its similarity with Existentialism and Marxism according to this interpretation. This can be more clearly seen by comparing Hegel's conception of God with the contemporary Western conceptions of God.
[1] Kaufmann. Op. cit. p. 137
[2] Ibid. p. 161
[3] Ibid.
[4] Karl Marx. "Historical Materialism" from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) in Marx and the Marxists, The Ambiguous Legacy Sidney Hook editor (New York, 1955) pp. 139-142 see p. 141
[5] Karl Marx. "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret" from Capital vol. 1 sec. 4 English trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago, 1906) Sidney Hook editor p. 145
[6] Karl Marx. "On Tradition, Personality, and Class-Forces" Marx-Engels. Selected Works trans. Foreign Language Publishing House (Moscow, 1950) vol. 1 pp. 221 ff. Sidney Hook ed. P. 154
[7] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto trans. Samuel Moore revised by Engels, Sidney Hook ed. P. 134
[8] Frederick Engels. "'Scientific' Versus 'Utopian' Socialism" Marx-Engels. Selected Works trans. Foreign Language Publishing House (Moscow, 1950) vol. 2 Sidney Hook ed. P. 160
[9] Georgi Plekhanov. "The Individual in History" The Role of the Individual in History trans. Foreign Language Publishing House (Moscow, 1944) Sidney Hook ed. P. 170