If one's goal as a scholar is neither rejection nor embrace, whether piecemeal or wholesale, of a classical text, but rather the clarification of its key concepts, arguments and intellectual context, in order to show where those concepts and arguments lead—possibly to conclusions beyond those made explicit in the text itself—then Arash Abazari's Hegel's Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism leads by example. The general premise of this study is that Hegel's philosophy of the real is grounded in the prima philosophia of the system, the Science of Logic. The specific task of the investigation is the uncovering of the foundations of the philosophy of objective spirit, as embodied in the 1820 Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, in pivotal categories of the Logic's Doctrine of Essence. But the ultimate goal of Abazari's work is to disclose how the radically critical potential of these same categories and their relations finds its actualization in Marx's account of the process of capital as the real bedrock of bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft).

Abazari does not confine himself to proclaiming or invoking the logical-ontological grounds of Hegel's account of Right—an exercise that is done often enough now, perhaps as overcompensation for decades of scholarship bent on cancelling (against textual and historical evidence) the metaphysical foundations of Hegel's philosophy as a whole. Abazari actually undertakes the hard theoretical work needed to lead back key concepts of the 1820 lecture manual to categories and subcategories of the Doctrine of Essence. This focus on the middle part of the Logic, which admittedly ought to be expanded to its other two Doctrines (and Abazari promises to do just that in a sequel) is entirely justified by the present study's goal, which is to show why Karl Marx's mature analysis of capital as social power both builds on Hegel's political treatise and transcends its (self-imposed) boundaries. Marx, Abazari shows, brings the Doctrine of Essence to full fruition by employing its pivotal categories (semblance, opposition, totality and power) in the realphilosophische explication of capitalism's pivotal features: ideological semblance, class opposition and the economic totalitarianism or absolute power of capital over the lives of individuals and nations.Footnote ¹

The inner-systematic reason for tracing political key concepts back to logical categories in Hegel's Outlines is relatively straightforward. Since Hegel understands philosophy as system, the key concepts (Grundbegriffe) structuring, for example, the Outlines (Abstract Right, Morality and Ethical Life; but also subcategories like Property, Contract and juridical Wrong; Acquisition, Use and Alienation; and so forth) are not sufficiently justified by the appeal to centuries-old traditions of juridical and political thought—as valuable and inescapable as this history is in its own right for grasping the Outlines’ architectonic and semantics. In Hegel's perspective even the traditions on which he so heavily relies require philosophical justification: the final grounding of the systematic explication of what Right means can only be found, in his view, in the ‘immanent development of the Concept’ undertaken in the Science of Logic—a development to which he famously also refers as ‘system of pure reason’, ‘realm of pure thought’ and, shockingly for contemporary sensibilities, as ‘God, as he is in his eternal essence’ (WdL, Introduction, W 5: 44).Footnote ²

Yet there are reasons beyond intra-systematic ones for engaging in a detailed investigation, like Abazari has done, aimed at uncovering the work performed by logical categories in Hegel's political philosophy. Extending the investigation to Marx's analysis of the dynamics of the same social formation as that which Hegel focuses upon is not just an academic exercise aimed at identifying continuities and fractures in the history of modern political thought. The crucial reason for the inquiry lies in the fact that Hegel does not appear to have drawn all the necessary conclusions from his own employment of logical categories in the account of Right. By his explicit acknowledgment, the rational explication of the realm of modern freedom—the modern family, bourgeois society and the state-of-right (Rechtsstaat)—can only be carried out on the basis of those categorial relations. At the same time, however, anyone acquainted with the 1820 work knows how often we find clues in the main text, remarks and additions, about inevitable developments (say, of some inner dynamics of bourgeois society) only to be abruptly presented with new subject-matter—a new ‘sphere’ of analysis. There are good reasons, therefore, to inquire whether Hegel's own systematic account may lead to conclusions beyond those he himself is willing to draw, and good reasons to seek them in Marx's explication of the dynamics of capital formation.

Indeed, Abazari argues, these implications are drawn in the Grundrisse and Kapital. The task of these works is to provide an explanation of the particular historical organism called capitalism in its entirety, namely as totality of its juridical structures, self-disintegrating family, ‘lost’ ethical life (PR: §§184, 229) and their crowning (whether crowned or not) sovereign authority. Marx shows that the bond holding these different spheres of life together cannot be, as Hegel maintains, the universal authority of the state ‘standing over’ the particularity of ends and unifying them all in an authentic “final end” (PR: §184); rather, the unity of bourgeois society grounds in an all-pervading dynamic substance, namely, the process of capital's self-reproduction.

Of course, Marx has over Hegel the advantage of a few decades of capitalism's development in northern Europe. But while he can rely on extensive field observations to describe the involution of the family, the blooming and international spreading of bourgeois society, and the adaptations of the state to the actual telos of bourgeois society, for Marx (ever the Hegel student) accounting for these developments requires going beyond empirical inductions and phenomenological descriptions. The account has to be given in philosophical, that is, systematic terms. Indeed, on January 16, 1858, Marx writes to Engels that a thorough theory of the history and economic mechanisms underlying the political body in question will have to make use of categories from the Science of Logic:

In the following comments I wish, first, to highlight what I take to be especially important insights and arguments in Ontology of Power and to corroborate these with one consideration on the concept of jus or Recht itself. In a second step I comment on a particularly vexing case from the Outlines, in which Hegel first diagnoses a historical phenomenon (bourgeois society's geographical expansion beyond the boundaries of its birth location) and then leaves it to readers’ imagination to reconstruct the reasons for this ‘necessary’ expansion and to speculate on its global consequences. In the end, I very briefly sketch ways in which the Marxian theory of capital may help remedy this case of Hegel's interrupted dialectics.

I. When explicating the relevant sections of the Science of Logic, Abazari refrains from referring to the concepts that form its backbone and subject matter as to fixed notions that Hegel would bring into (ultimately arbitrary) connection with one another. With an eye to Marx's later employment of these categories, but equally with a firm grounding in Hegel's text, Abazari insists that the categories we encounter in the Logic are understood by its author throughout as categorial relations. ‘Semblance’ always means ‘semblance of’ that which is not semblance; ‘opposition’ always means ‘opposition to’ one opposite; ‘totality’ denotes a ‘whole of’ one-sided relations; and ‘substance’, ‘causality’ and ‘reciprocity’ (as already established in Kant's title to the third group of the Table of Categories: ‘III. Relation’) are all concepts of relations. The category of substance, for example, is really a concept of substantiality whose full meaning depends on that of accidentality. Whether in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, or the Science of Logic, Hegel defines substance repeatedly and explicitly as a ‘relation of substantiality’ (Substantialitätsverhältnis) or ‘substance-relation’ (Substanzverhhältnis) (see Phänomenologie des Geistes, Preface, W 3: 23; Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, W 20: 345; or WdL W 6: 219).

The reason for stressing the relational nature of the elements of the Science of Logic is not just to help avoid misunderstandings of this work's arguments and transitions. It also helps avoid misunderstandings of key notions in the Marxian oeuvre such as ‘ideological illusion’ as semblance, ‘class conflict’ as objective opposition of interests, or indeed the meaning of ‘capital’ itself: whether large or small, competitive or monopolistic, embodied in the bank or in the factory, capital is defined by Marx—already in the first of the Paris manuscripts—as a dynamic force: ‘the ruling power [Regierungsgewalt] over labour’ (MEW E I: 484).

In the three chapters (Chapters 3–5) of Ontology of Power dedicated to Hegel's and Marx's notions of totality we find (among much else) an in-depth treatment of the specific opposition between the relation of substantiality and that of accidentality. As in the book's subsequent discussion of the asymmetrical relations between categories (about which more below), the relationship of substantiality and accidentality is both necessary and logically imbalanced. It is the lack of reciprocity in this relation of relations, not their prima facie formal symmetry as contradictories, that prompts Hegel to define substance as a force wielding absolute power over all that contrasts it (the accidents) while also being absolutely dependent on it. While this ‘totalitarianism’ of substance vis-à-vis its accidents surfaces here and there in the classical text of Hegel's political philosophy, it falls to Marx to identify, in the context of his own philosophy of modernity, the nature of this substance—including, among other things, its power to obscure that the contractual equality between owners of capital and possessors of labour-power in the wage system is only a juridical semblance of equality.

Here is Hegel on social domination in the modern politeia:

Well said. But why and how bourgeois society wields this immense power over individuals remains unexplained in the Outlines—except for the recurring mention of an inescapable dialectic movement intrinsic to it. At the descriptive level, several of Marx's definitions of the ‘tremendous power’ at work in modern ethical life are equivalent to the one just quoted. Aside from the well-known ones in the Manifesto, perhaps the most striking is found in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. It makes metaphorical use of Aristotle's theory of light (De Anima II.7) as excitement of an invisible but omnipresent ether: ‘In all forms of society it is one specific production […] that confers rank and dominance over all others […]. It is a general illumination, in which all other colours are bathed and which modifies them in their particularity. It is a special ether which determines the specific gravity of all being [Dasein] that emerges in it’ (Grundrisse 1974: 27).

Yet Marx aims at offering not just a gripping description of bourgeois society's unique historical features but an actual explanation of the all-engulfing force that binds this society together despite its unmistakably centrifugal tendencies. Instead of assimilating this core to a generic social dialectic, Marx identifies it through painstaking dissection of this society's dynamic material foundation: the movement of capital. About this, more in section II below.

A further important issue emphasized in Abazari's book is an often-neglected feature of the conceptual relations that structure Hegel's Logic and, by extension, his philosophy of the real. This is the already mentioned asymmetry in the logical relations among categories, subcategories, concepts and their connotations. Abazari shows in detail how Hegel, having defined essence in terms of being's inner reflection, proceeds to analyse the further meanings of this notion of inwardly reflected being. They are (following the Greater Logic): identity, difference, opposition and their sub-kinds: merely abstract identity, mere diversity, and their underlying truth, absolute contradiction, which Hegel expresses in the (in)famous formulation: ‘All things are contradictory over against themselves [an sich selbst widersprechend]’ (WdL W 6: 74). Yet all these notions stand to one another in anything but a reciprocal relation, or there would be no possibility of advancement from one to the other neither through our analysis nor through their own ‘inner reflection’; there would be no ‘logical movement’, that is, no sublation of the preceding notions into more comprehensive ones. Let us take as examples the relations obtaining between the subcategories of Essence in the Encyclopaedia Logic: ground of existence, appearance, actuality. The ground of existence (or essence proper) must appear, or it would not be grounding something other than itself. Appearance, in its turn, is not ground of its ground, but the ground's necessary manifestation. As for actuality, it must include both the ground and its appearance, hence also their imbalanced relation, or actuality would not be an actual whole (Wirklichkeit). In Hegel's phraseology: the truth of appearance is essence, and the truth of actuality is essence that appears. As in every teleological framework of reference, the same relations do not hold if they are reversed.

I wish now to corroborate Abazari's extensive discussion of Hegel's and Marx's categories-as-relations (and relations of relations) through one additional consideration. It pertains to the central concept of Hegel's Outlines as well as to the central concept of Marx's Kapital.

The subject-matter of the Outlines is defined from the outset as ‘the Idea of right, the concept of right and its actualization’ (PR: § 1). Hence from the first sentence we learn that the categories of concept, actuality, and their unity, the Idea, are the organizational principles of the treatise. We also notice that the constellation of categories that stand to others in a relation of sublation is not just mirrored in the broader systematic exposition, according to which e.g. the state-of-right is the final truth of bourgeois society together with its vestiges of family and the property-centred juridical world. More crucial in my view (but less evident) is the fact that ‘right’ itself as Idea is the sublation of the concept and actualization of right. This in turn means that concept, actuality and Idea of right are categories of relations; ‘right’ itself is therefore the name of a relation. Right derives this connotation from its ontological basis, namely, practical spirit or the will:

Hegel does not inaugurate the linkage of right and will. At least as early as 533 AD the Roman legislator, whose Institutes were standard textbook reading for 18^th- and 19^th-century European scholars and students, states that right (jus) is grounded in ‘the unswerving and perpetual will [voluntas] that gives everyone their right (jus suum cuique tribuens)’ (Justinian's Institutes I. 1.1). To study what Hegel calls the actualization of the concept of right (or its Idea) is supposed to enable us to judge, as the Institutes also promise, the justice and injustice (justum et injustum) of political bodies, as well as the validity or invalidity of law (lex) (ibid.). The very first distinctions in intension and extension of the concept of right in the Institutes show that this notion in the corpus is anything but abstract in the sense of vacuously generic. As a matter of fact, and by way of illustration, this Roman text forms the background of Hegel's famous Remark and Addition to PR §57, which concludes that ‘slavery belongs to a world where a wrong is still the right’. The Roman legislator distinguishes from the onset natural right from the right of all peoples and from state law (jus naturale, jus gentium, jus civile). As a consequence, it turns out that ‘[s]lavery […] is constitutive of the right of all peoples which subjects one to the power of another against nature [contra naturam]’ (my emphases; Institutes 1.3). In other words: it is the will, not a blind force of nature, that establishes or rescinds the right of slavery—or any other right for that matter.

The ground of Hegel's Recht is therefore der Wille, a relation between subject and object that includes of course the case in which the object turns out to be a subject, as in the self-relation expressed by the formula: ‘the free will that wills the free will’ (PR: §27). To put this most concisely (and to simplify somewhat): the actualization of right is the historical emergence of the concept of the free will.

Historical precedents of the rootedness of right in the will aside, the fact is that the argument on which Hegel's already quoted declaration of principle in PR: §1 rests, namely, the identity of the concept and its realizations (or of essence and its appearances) in the Idea of right, is not found in this treatise. It is found in the Science of Logic.

As for the general organization of the Outlines, its exposition of juridical, moral and political right is overtly based on the dynamic exposition of the fundamental categories that structure the Science of Logic: Abstract Right is the external Being of right, Morality its inward Essence, Ethical Life its Actuality as union of its Being and Essence. The pattern is repeated (as we know, with varying degrees of cogency) in the subdivisions of each sphere. As is the case in the Logic's successive transitions leading to the concept of the absolute Idea, discussed in detail by Abazari, so also in the Outlines the strength of the logical advancement from the being to the essence to the actualization of right lies in the non-symmetrical, non-reciprocal relations of the abstractly juridical, the moral and the political spheres, respectively. Only this asymmetry makes it possible for Hegel to argue that each conceptual sphere logically belongs to the next and that all in the end necessarily belong in one whole in which the truly free will (right proper) allegedly prevails: the Rechtsstaat.

It goes without saying that the fractal organization informing the entirety of Hegel's system strikes us at times as contrived; but baring its roots in the Science of Logic, as Abazari does, at the very least helps rebut accusations of arbitrariness or dogmatism in the organization of the Outlines. There are clear reasons for the order and argument structure of this work. It is an altogether different issue whether or not one shares Hegel's reasons.

An issue that has been more rarely acknowledged in the literature is the extent to which Marx's mature work relies on these same logical foundations. It can be shown (and Ontology of Power does a large part of this work) that, mutatis mutandis, Marx's analysis of capitalism in Grundrisse and Kapital relies, first, on the intrinsically relational meaning of logical categories such as ground, appearance and actuality; second, on the necessity of their non-symmetrical connection with one another for grasping a particular political body as an organic totality in development. For example, Marx shows that the modern juridical equality of individuals and the objectively oppositional class interest of exploiters, on the one hand, and exploited, on the other, belong integrally, i.e. necessarily, to the all-embracing, perennially moving substance of capital. Without juridical equality, no wage contract, hence no wage labour; without the exploitation of living wage labour, no appropriation of surplus value, hence no valorization of value; without the latter, no profit, hence no capital.

Marx defines the concept of capital as a spiralling circulation of commodities (i.e. products, means of production, and living labour) for money, and of money for commodities. Hence capital consists essentially not of things but of power; it turns out to be a substance precisely in Hegel's sense of substance-relation—one that is both a material and a speculative process to boot. Not only does capital's circulation make a fundamental asymmetry manifest (the exchange of commodities cannot be one among equal values, or there would be no value increase anywhere in the process), making the image of the spiral more apt to depict it than that of a circle. Perhaps more importantly, just as in Hegel's conceptual fractals Marx presents this basic circulation as consisting in fact of a circle of circles. As Abazari shows under the heading ‘Capital as Totality’ (Chapter 4) three circuits are involved in the production and appropriation of the surplus value created by producers: financial, industrial, and commercial capital circulation. Conceptually distinct and realiter inseparable, their objective unity in capitalism brings forth, according to Marx, not the enhancement of freedom envisaged in Hegel's Outlines, but simply the perpetual expansion of capital itself.

II. My second set of considerations pertains to the elephant in the room: the meaning and role of ‘dialectic’ in both Hegel's and Marx's political philosophies (for a comprehensive treatment see Fluss Reference Fluss, Skeggs, Farris, Toscano and Bromberg2021).Footnote ³ I do not intend to engage here, of course, all the scholarly opinions that have been put forward for over two hundred years about dialectic from Plato to Soviet dialectical materialism. I will only focus on two well-known passages in Hegel's Outlines, passages in which we are left guessing about the reasons or ‘ground’ of a phenomenon said to be engendered with necessity in the inner recesses of bourgeois society—a movement that would result from an inexorable ‘dialectic’ intrinsic to it. Here are the two passages, both from the section ‘The System of Needs’:

There is, in other words, an inner and untameable dynamic (a Substanzverhältnis) of bourgeois society which drives it, as T. M. Knox rightly paraphrased, to ‘seek markets’ in other polities lacking in commodities as well as in the skill, education, or ‘industriousness’ of the human commodity (or ‘human resources’, as per our contemporary jargon). This is the dialectic of that same political body to which Hegel also refers, borrowing Schiller's term for the state of nature, as a ‘state of necessity’ and ‘of the understanding’: Not- und Verstandesstaat (PR: §183).Footnote ⁴ But what is this structural dialectic of the state of necessity, and why does it engender centrifugal tendencies?

In the introductory paragraph to the concept of bourgeois society considered as a system (PR: §189) we are told that there are two ways in which human subjectivity, which is primarily neediness, finds satisfaction in this system. Bearing in mind that to ‘satisfy subjectivity’ (i.e. any kind of desire, including that engendered by need) amounts for Hegel to objectifying (vergegenständlichen) subjectivity, human neediness in bourgeois society can either be satisfied by the use of ‘external things’ that, as Hegel immediately adds, are equally ‘the property and product of other needs and wills’ (ibid.); or it can be satisfied through the subjective activity of work, ‘that which mediates between the two sides’ (ibid.), i.e. the side of subjective need and that of the objective means of its satisfaction. In this way, Hegel comments, arises an illusion of reason (Scheinen der Vernünftigkeit): it is as if the satisfaction of particularity (i.e. of the needs of individuals, families and other particular groups) obtained through the medium of consumptive and productive activity would naturally engender the universal good.

This semblance of reason or ‘sphere of the understanding’ (ibid.), we further learn from the Remark to this section, finds its scientific home in none other than the new science of political economy. Interestingly, Hegel adds that this science ‘has sprung in the most recent time as from its soil’ (ibid.), almost indicating that it owes its existence (like a theoretical superstructure, perhaps) to the economic foundations it aims at explicating. Be that as it may, this new science is able to extract principles of a putatively coherent whole from what appears as an unwieldy multitude of arbitrary processes; they explain ‘a necessity that arises all by itself’ (ibid. Addition). These explanatory principles of political economy are surely not concepts of reason but of the understanding; and yet, against his customary impatience with sciences of the ‘mere understanding’, in this case Hegel makes an exception. Political economy is nothing less than ‘an honour to thought’ (ibid.) in so far as it manages to explain the hidden laws at work in an apparently lawless subject matter.

So far, it seems as if appealing to economists’ explanations is the best the political philosopher can do to account for the mysterious mechanisms and perhaps hidden harmony of bourgeois society.Footnote ⁵ Tangentially, it must be noticed also that Hegel makes no use of the subjunctive when discussing the novel science of political economy, against the customary employment of this mood when conveying theories that differ significantly from one's own. He appears up to this point to fully embrace the theoretical explanations and evaluative interpretation of the system of needs provided by its economists.

Under the heading ‘The Police and Corporation’, however, the focus changes. Now we are faced with systematic problems to which the economists do not appear to have satisfactory answers—indeed they are no longer mentioned. These problems are, in brief: the limitations of the potential to share in society's welfare (today's ‘equality of opportunity’) due to the contingencies of one's ‘ability, health, capital [Kapital] and so on’ (PR: §237); the accidentality of individuals’ social status and hence of the means at their disposal to participate in the political body (PR: §238); society's historically new role as ‘universal family’ (PR: §239), a role it attains by depriving individuals, now recognized as ‘independent persons’ (ibid.), of their ‘original means of acquisition’ (PR: §241);Footnote ⁶ and the consequences for ‘the son of bourgeois society’ (PR: §238) of this shift in location and ownership of the means of living (Erwerbsmittel), namely, the loss of skills and competencies, of legal protection (Rechtspflege),Footnote ⁷ of medical care, often even of ‘the consolation of religion’ (PR: §241).

At this point, Hegel has moved well beyond the economists’ all in all affirmative appraisal of the universal advantages of modern society as a stable if not altogether closed system. To Hegel, the system appears neither stable nor closed. It displays worrisome manifestations of that inner dialectic mentioned in PR: §246. This inner commotion appears to be engendering, among its juridically equal members, centrifugal forces resulting in a historically unprecedented polarization of wealth and power on the one hand, poverty and impotence on the other. Obviously, Hegel does not arrive at this anatomy of political modernity from sociological observation but from the dissection of its concept. This is why the polarization is already addressed in the opening sections devoted to the historically peculiar processes that prevail in bourgeois society. The proliferation of needs and means is a ‘moment’ in this political organism that even affects ‘the reciprocal relations of individuals’ (PR: §192). It is a moment so pivotal that it determines the overall ends of this organism (PR: §193). This kind of social teleology is a genuine novum in the history of political ends: never before has the spiralling creation of ever new needs and ever new means to satisfy them determined the telos of a politeia. There lies in this system for sure ‘an aspect of liberation’ (PR: §194), but one that is only ‘formal because the particularism of ends remains the underlying content’ of it all (PR: §195).

It is at the conclusion of this last section that Hegel addresses, in somewhat obscure wording, what he sees as the principal obstacle to this society's transitioning from formal to concrete freedom:

From the first sections devoted to the concept of bourgeois society, then, the pivot around which its centrifugal movement turns is identified in an absolutely recalcitrant ‘matter’, inaccessible to those living at wealth's opposite pole because of this matter's juridical status as (private) property. In the last sections of ‘The System of Needs’, the result of this insurmountable resistance, i.e. poverty, is dissected in its various facets (material poverty, spiritual loss, the emergence of a rabble, outrage against culture and society at large, indolence, aversion to work, even a sense of entitlement to means of subsistence: PR: §244 and Addition). Hegel describes the ‘dialectic’ that leads to this sorry result as a movement of ‘double universalization’: (a) the universalization of dependency for the satisfaction of need, and (b) the universalization of the production and distribution of the means of satisfaction. And why does bourgeois society need to universalize dependency, work and distribution in this manner? ‘[B]ecause it is from this double process of universalization [universal dependency and universal production—AdL] that the largest profit is derived’ (PR: §243). According to the text's own logic, however, profits cannot be part of universal distribution if indeed universalized work, as earlier explained, is confronted with the infinite recalcitrance of property in the means of production. In the end, Hegel does not say much else about modern poverty except to lament it: ‘The important question of how to remedy poverty is one that moves and haunts modern societies especially’ (PR: §244A; cf. Avineri Reference Avineri1972).Footnote ⁹

The Outlines’ analysis of bourgeois society, and perhaps bourgeois society itself, seem to have entered a cul de sac. Yet dialectic may come to the rescue of both theory and subject matter.Footnote ¹⁰ Since ‘despite the excess of affluence bourgeois society is not rich enough, i.e., … does not possess enough of the wealth peculiar to it [ihr eigentümliches Vermögen] to counter excessive poverty and the creation of the rabble’ (PR: §245), this paradoxical lack of resources in the most productive society the world has ever known may well explain why its inner dialectic drives it ‘beyond itself’ to seek consumers and producers in foreign lands (PR: §246, quoted above). The spirit of modernity, it seems, is doomed to rescue itself through geographical and economic expansion.

Despite Marx's own assurances, his theory of modern society as determined by capital is more than a ‘coquetting’ with Hegel's dialectic. It is an attempt at bringing it to conclusions more persuasive than those I have just sketched.

We read in Chapter 23 of Kapital I that the way in which the ‘relation of capital’ (Kapitalverhältnis as Substanzverhältnis) functions, i.e. the way in which capital reproduces itself, is through a dialectical movement that engenders economic polarization. Among the surplus of commodities it produces, the movement of capital produces a surplus of the living commodity called wage labour. This is an advantage for the valorization of capital in that it helps keep wages down and hence enhances profits. Marx writes: ‘the law [of capital accumulation] … rivets the worker to the capital more solidly than Haephaestus’ wedges to the rock. […] The accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, work, torment, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation, at the opposite pole’ (MEW 23: 675). This theoretical description of the inner movement of capitalism is an almost verbatim rendition of Hegel's description of the inner movement of bourgeois society. Contrary to Hegel, however, Marx also provides an explanation for the polarizing dialectic by which ‘ethical life is lost in its extremes’: the increasing gap between the extremes is due to the continued carrying out of work under the guise (Marx: ‘in the form’) of wage labour. The telos of wage workers’ activity is not the creation of goods for universal need-satisfaction, but goods ‘in the form of capital’. This means that this kind of work, first, creates objects whose value it itself creates or increases; second, it produces them by means that are the ‘absolutely recalcitrant’ property of another.

In Chapter 25 of Kapital I, under the heading ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’ (MEW 23: 792) Marx finally addresses Hegel's (and others’) attempted resolution of the portentous ‘inner dialectic’ via colonial expansion. It is not too difficult for Marx to demonstrate that the solution is a myth. It may alleviate class conflict in the short or medium term, but it does so at its own peril. On the motherland's side, the exodus of goods and workers will cause the low-wage, high-profits cycle to slow down and, if remedies are not implemented, to come to a grinding halt. To think that bourgeois society's economy can survive without engendering poverty—no matter its geographical location—is ‘a pretty fancy’. On the colony's side, the arrival of goods and workers will not engender per se an economy in capitalistic form, as if this were a natural social relation of production: the émigrés will work with means of production they themselves own. They will ‘accumulate for themselves’. In order to survive, bourgeois society must export not just things and people but its peculiar social relation, as ‘capital is not a thing, but a social relation among persons, mediated through things’ (MEW 23: 793). It must export, in other words, the historically unique process of its substance, the all-determining ether that assigns to every being its specific gravity: the relation of capital itself.