Marx’s work is construed on one of the poorest readings of classical German philosophy, specially of Hegel. Marx’s genius can’t be overstated. He offered the most systematic and lucid explanation of the capitalist mode of production. Yet, the worst way to understand Marx and his contributions is to think of an “inversion of Hegel”. Marx wrote in a prologue to Das Kapital that he “flirted” with Hegel’s dialectics but used him in a properly materialistic way. He was thus conduced to invert Hegel to put his feet on earth. Nothing is more diffuse in Marx than the distinction between the real and the ideal. Hegel, Schelling and Fichte were infinitely more subtle and nuanced in this respect. They never denied corporality, material existence or reality. They never denied praxis and transformation of reality. Quite on the contrary the two central concepts of German classical philosophy are precisely praxis (Tätigkeit) and effective reality (Wirklichkeit). Marx’s materiality is almost synonymous with Wirklichkeit. The latter meant the concrete, historical and collective existence of humanity. Marx’s materiality is also found in the concrete historical organization of humanity and cannot be with nature, mechanistic reality or some metaphysical concept of matter. The early recourse to the body and the sensible under the influence of Feuerbach had to be dropped by Marx in his mature oeuvre. It is also wrong to confuse empirical consciousness with self-consciousness as such. In classical German philosophy the task of thought consisted in allowing the contingent and empirical subject to understand his own unconscious history. This is why history is never that of consciousness and its contents, but the process of becoming aware, of becoming self-conscious. This cannot be directly lived. It has to be reconstructed. The reconstruction is called “system”. The system serves the understanding our own times. The task of philosophy is to understand the present times in light of their historical development.
The operation Marx applied to Hegel’s system was not inversion but collapse. Hegel had a name for Marx’s social materiality: objective spirit. Hegel’s system is divided into three broad domains: logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. They correspond roughly to the conceptual articulation of the world, nature and social life. Philosophy of spirit is divided into subjective, objective and absolute spirit. The first is a sort of anthropology. The second is the proper social domain including family, civil society and state. This is the world of law, labor, and private contracts. It is not by chance that Marx focused his criticism in Hegel’s philosophy of right. Absolute spirit includes art, religion and philosophy.
Now, while Hegel offered a stratified system, Marx intentionally collapsed the system into objective spirit. Hegels metaphysical logic was transformed into the logic of capital. Philosophy of nature lost its relative autonomy and was incorporated to the human process of production as its absolute presupposition. Finally, subjective spirit was dropped, while absolute spirit was interpreted as ideology. Only the thin layer of objective spirit survived. But, as we have seen, the system (logic and nature) is far from disappearing. It remerges but within the absolute ground of objective spiri