Critique of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right
Building the Logic for the Next Philosophy Portal Course on a Non-Orientable Surface
Philosophy Portal’s next course “Early Marx 101” starts June 9th and will extend throughout 2025 offering an extensive overview as well as discussion space to think through the Early Marx in philosophical and political context. We will be attempting to think Marx as situated in philosophical relationship to Hegel, in political context in relation to the major historical waves of emancipatory politics and the death of the Millennial Left, as well as a persistent structural question/problem that still haunts our society dominated by capitalist reproduction. To learn more or to sign up, see:
“Critique of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right” is meant to introduce the logic of the “negation of the negation” in a thoroughly historical analysis, of not only the positive affirmation in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and its negation in Marx’s Critique of the Philosophy of Right, but also to bring out the higher-order tension that we find in a “non-orientable” Hegel-Marx / Marx-Hegel. The living theorists who inform this methodological approach, for me, are philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who emphasises a retroactive return to Hegel from Marx, and theorist Chris Cutrone, who emphasises a passage from Hegel to Marx as a structural question and a problem that still haunts our society.
Real Speculations holds the theoretical and historical body of Philosophy Portal. This text both offers one keys to the foundational texts of modern thought, explored at Philosophy Portal in the form of course work, conferences, and anthologies; as well as in-depth insight into the on-the-ground projects, connections, and relations that are informing this work. The major theoretical trajectory of this work includes a central focus on:
the work of G.W.F. Hegel as in many ways the “last philosopher” of his era (bringing both a closure and a new opening of the concept),1
the work of Friedrich Nietzsche as an “existentialist excess” of the pure concept (opening us to the unconscious psyche in its immediacy),2 as well as
the work of Jacques Lacan as a “social analyst” of the unconscious (presenting to us the condition of possibility for, and need for, a new era of philosophy).3
Throughout the work this foundation enables us to think through:
the basic structure of phenomenological development,
a logic capable of helping us build networks in the global brain,
links between theology and politics on the level of both religion and secularity,
the contradictions of scale between individuals and communities,
new forms of education inclusive of our spiritual processes,
the dimension of sexuality or libido in relation to the political, as well as
the role of the unconscious for social formation.
However, what haunts this work is the dimension of political-economy:
class analysis,
structural inequality,
the social function of property,
the dialectics of labour and capital, as well as
a coherent political strategy for technocapitalism
The work does not ignore class, but it does not overdetermine the analysis; the work does think structure, but not deeply enough engage inequality; the work does think labour and capital, but not in the form of a fundamental agonism; and the work does think the dialectics of techno-feudalism, capitalism, and socialism, but finds itself ultimately in a type of speculative ambiguity in regards to practical political action.
This is why Philosophy Portal will be shifting focus this year to the work of the Early Marx.
The Early Marx had of course yet to write his magnum opus, Das Kapital (his official critique of political economy), but was in his early years laying the intellectual groundwork for such a critique. In this course we will start with Marx’s Critique of the Philosophy of Right, which is of course a direct (and vicious) critique of Hegel’s political works as basically a dangerous legitimation of the liberal bourgeois State which becomes a dictatorship of capitalism (and thus what we think of as democracy as pseudo-democracy). The liberal bourgeois State opens this dangerous condition of possibility, for Marx, because it turns an abstraction: the ideal state, into the real; and turns the concrete: the real life of man, into an abstraction:4
“The criticism of the […] philosophy of state and right, which attained its most consistent, richest, and last formulation through Hegel, is both a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the whole manner of the […] consciousness in politics and right as practiced hereto, the most distinguished, most universal expression of which, raised to the level of science, is the speculative philosophy of right itself. If the speculative philosophy of right, that abstract extravagant thinking on the modern state, the reality of which remains a thing of the beyond [and] inversely the […] thought-image of the modern state which makes abstraction of real man was possible only because and insofar as the modern state itself makes abstraction of real man, or satisfies the whole of man only in imagination.”
For a structural analysis that will inform the rest of the article, we could use the Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, Real (ISR) to situate the difference between Hegel and Marx. First, the basics of the Lacanian ISR:
Imaginary = field of ego (narcissism, alienation), realm of image, deception, lure; presenting images of wholeness, completeness, synthesis, autonomy
Symbolic = field of language/society (culture, laws), realm of sexual structures birthing universal subjects; real of: difference, otherness, absence, lack
Real = field of subject’s reality (unknown thing), mediated by imaginary-symbolic but alien to both; real of: impossible-unavoidable, incestuous jouissance
For Hegel, his Philosophy of Right offers a political system structured by the Family, Community, State; and for Marx, his Critique of the Philosophy of Right offers an inversion where the State becomes subordinated to the Community and Family (of the lowest/the working class, the proletariat). In this way, we could say that Hegel’s system is working with the Family as Imaginary (the field of the ego), Community as the Symbolic (the field of language/society), and the State as the Real (the field of the subject’s reality). This means that for Hegel we work through the ego in the Family, we work through language in Community, and we work through the deepest subjective reality in the State. For Marx, it is the opposite, where the State is the Imaginary (field of the bourgeois ego), the Community is still the Symbolic (field of language/society), but the (working class) Family is the Real (field of the subject’s deepest reality).
For Marxists, Hegel’s State, the State which turns the real life of man into an abstraction, needs to be overcome as a historical necessity. This is the meaning of a movement from a bourgeois State to a worker’s State (it forces the State to recognise the Real of man instead of the other way around, i.e. forcing Man to recognise the Real of the State). Thus, when we hear the often cited remark that Marx flipped Hegel on his head, what many are referring to is precisely Marx’s critique of Hegel’s notion of the political real. Hegel had built up his philosophical system slowly and carefully, from his mediation of phenomenological development to Absolute Knowing (re-capitulated through the stages of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion), towards his mediation of logical unfolding to the Absolute Idea (through the logical seed of the unity of Being-Nothing), and towards his mediation of the political body towards the real of Absolute Freedom (via the structuralism of Family-Community-State). Here is Hegel on the basic structure of the phenomenology towards Absolute Knowing as the phenomenology of self-reflexive self-consciousness becoming-other to itself:5
“The structured forms hitherto considered which are distinguished in general as Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Reason, […] Spirit, religion, too, as consciousness of absolute Being as such, has indeed made its appearance[.] [/] [But] the Spirit of the revealed religion has not yet surrounded its consciousness as such, or what is the same, its actual self-consciousness is not the object of its consciousness[.]”
And from this actual self-consciousness whose object is its consciousness, he reflects the structure of the logical seed of the Absolute Idea:6
“The first concepts or propositions of the logic, on being and nothing, and on becoming which, itself a simple determination, contains […] the other two determinations as moments. [/] It is in this dialectic as understood here, and hence in grasping opposites in their unity, or the positive in the negative, that the speculative consists. It is the most important aspect of dialectic, but for the still unpracticed, unfree faculty of thought, the most difficult.”
And finally this speculative free self-consciousness in becoming-other under the unity of being-nothing, towards the ethical system of the political real:7
“The truth with regard to ethical ideals, the state, the government and the constitution ascends, so it declares, out of each man’s heart, feeling, and enthusiasm. […] Philosophy cannot teach the state what it should be, but only how it, the ethical universe, is to be known.”
I have mentioned before, that this triad progression in Hegel, from phenomenology, to logic, to political right, can also reflect the Lacanian ISR:
Phenomenology of Spirit is the ego’s imaginary traversal of negativity to know itself, its self-consciousness, as its own object
Science of Logic is the social/linguistic logical movement of the concept as reflected by individual subjects living and dying
Philosophy of Right is the subject’s deepest reality as the ethical ideals of the world historical process in an open-ended infinite becoming
As mentioned, Hegel’s political system, and the way it reaches its own climax, is that the ethical system of the State proceeds out of a series that is categorised in a triadic series: “Family”, “Community”, and “State”. Here “Family” is conceived as the ground of “man’s heart, feeling, and enthusiasm” (what we could call “Imaginary”), and the “State” as the “ethical ideals” (what we could call “Real”). The whole challenge with the Early Marx is understanding how the “ethical ideals” of a certain “State order” as Real can bind our minds in a way that actually blinds us to whole of “man’s heart, feeling, and enthusiasm”. In this way the State order as Real can do violence to the Familial ground as Imaginary. Also, the Early Marx operates in the “gap” of philosophy, where practical politics attempts to determine what philosophy cannot: what the State should be. For Marx, the State should not be a Real the blinds us to man’s heart, feeling and enthusiasm; the State should be an Imaginary tool that we can reconstruct towards improving the total ground of man as Real. If in that process the State “withers away”, then all the better, since it is not Real, it is just Imaginary.
Now the Early Marx, it is clear, has worked through Hegel’s philosophical system. But he takes aim straight for Hegel’s political body, and the idea of Absolute Freedom specifically, in order to undermine or invert the entire system, claiming that Hegel’s notion of “State” (as mentioned above) is or has become in time, an Imaginary ideal that needs to be turned upside down to face the new Real of man that has presented itself to practical politics:8
“As the ancient peoples went through their pre-history in imagination, in mythology, so we Germans have gone through our post-history in thought, in philosophy. […] German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history. […] The German nation must therefore join this, its dream-history, to its present conditions and subject to criticism not only these existing conditions, but at the same time their abstract continuation. […] Hence, it is with good reason that the practical political part in Germany demands the negation of philosophy.”
Marx wants to force philosophy into a practical politics that centres the material conditions of Real man, and specifically the Family and Community (or civil society). Of course, in this forcing, he is not asking us to consider the material conditions of any Family or Community, but as mentioned above, the Families and Communities that comprise the “working class”, or the “proletariat”, which he sees as the material basis for a new civil society which re-organises the principle of society itself. This proletarian Family and Community is not exactly equal to the peasantry of pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society, but rather is actively produced by capitalist and industrial conditions:9
“The proletariat is beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the rising industrial movement. For, it is not the naturally arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society, but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society, mainly of the middle estate, that form the proletariat, although, it is easily understood, the naturally arising poor and the Christian Germanic serfs gradually join its ranks.”
This means that Marx does not romanticise or utopianise the early Christian communities or the modes of subjectivity that have formed the basis of Christian society. Marx may see these modes of subjectivity as pre-conditions for the society that emerged on the other side of the Protestant reformation, where the idea and the meaning of the God-Man becomes a direct concern for every human as opposed to only the magistrates; but what Marx really sees as possessing revolutionary potential is the emergence of the Third Estate after the bourgeois revolutions, that is the emergence of a working class consciousness beyond the clergy and nobility. Here we run into not only thinking the “non-orientable surface” of Hegel-Marx; but also the “non-orientable surface” of Luther-Hegel-Marx: where if we lose Luther, we lose the challenge that is set before the working class in its capacity to navigate and manage negative emotional affects of every singular Real of Man as the becoming of God itself (Luther’s we are all potentially “little Christs”).10 Here we should remember that what a pastor effectively is is the very navigation and management of processing people’s negative emotional affects (“shit”);11 and thinking about this on the non-orientable surface of Luther-Hegel-Marx, means we should not just think about the pastor in the church, but rather think about the pastor in the field of bourgeois society and the working class itself.
Back to Marx: it is in these emergent conditions of industrial capitalism, that Marx finds the need to invert the Imaginary of the State, which has grown to serve industrial capitalism itself, towards the Real of the working class Family and Community:12
“The family and civil society are elements of the state. The material of the state is divided amongst them through circumstances, caprice, and personal choice of vocation. The citizens of the state are members of families and of civil society.”
[…]
“The Idea is given the status of a subject [in Hegel], and the actual relationship of family and civil society to the state is conceived to be its inner imaginary activity [as opposed to being real]. Family and civil society are the presuppositions of the state; they are the really active things; but in [Hegel’s] speculative philosophy it is reversed. But if the Idea is made subject, then the real subjects - civil society, family, circumstances, caprice, etc. - become unreal, and take on the different meaning of objective moments of the Idea.”
To state this positively, for Marx:13
“Family and civil society are actual components of the state, actual spiritual existences of will; they are the modes of existence of the state; family and civil society make themselves into the state. They are the active force. […] This is to say that the political state cannot exist without the natural basis of the family and the artificial basis of civil society.”
Now while we seek in this article to legitimise the historicity of Marx’s observations, we at the same time, and true to the non-orientable surface of Hegel-Marx, want to also significantly downplay the way in which Marx is creating a type of “zero-sum” relation between his system and Hegel’s system, i.e. in claiming that Hegel’s system portrays the Family and Community as somehow “unreal”. This seems quite untrue. If we are to look closely at Hegel’s system within the aforementioned coordinates of the ISR, then what we find is something like the idea that Family is something primarily situated in the Imaginary but also with direct links and connections which break into the Symbolic and the Real. We could say something like each term in his system has an accent towards one dimension of the ISR:
Hegel’s Political System:
Family: Imaginary-Symbolic-Real
Community: Symbolic-Real-Imaginary
State: Real-Imaginary-Symbolic
This means that the Family is Imaginary insofar as its “truth” does not close in within itself as a self-sustained big Other, but rather naturally and necessarily breaks upon the Community as the Symbolic mediation of other Imaginary Families; the Symbolic Community then mediates the collective substance of the network of Families, but becomes a mere semblance of unconstrained jouissance unless it can raise itself to the ethical ideal in the Real of the State. Conversely, the ethical ideal in the Real of the State needs to be something that fits the reality of the Family and its Imaginary (which is again where Marx takes Hegel to task historically).
Now let us take a closer look: consider Hegel’s opening to “The Ethical System” of Family-Community-State where he attempts to build out the real as the interrelation between all three elements, starting with Family as the “direct substantive reality of spirit” of man’s heart:14
“The family is the direct substantive reality of spirit. The unity of the family is one of feeling, the feeling of love. The true disposition here is that which esteems the unity as absolutely essential, and within it places the consciousness of oneself as an individuality. Hence, in the family we are not independent persons but members.”
Hegel furthermore emphasises that the Family has a “special right” as a “sphere in actuality” which is held together by the precarious nature of subjective feeling (love):15
“The family has this special right, that its substantive nature should have a sphere in actuality. This right is a right against external influences and against abandonment of the unity. But, on the other hand, love is subjective feeling, which, if it oppose the unity of the family, destroys it.”
However, it is still true that Hegel’s dialectical motion attempts to raise the subjective feeling that holds together the Family into the further elements of Community and State in a way that gives the impression that the State as Idea is the ultimate reality (or “realised ethical idea”):16
“The state is the realized ethical idea or ethical spirit. It is the will which manifests itself, makes itself clear and visible, substantiates itself.”
Now with that being said, it must also be emphasised, that while the State is the pinnacle of the ethical system and his political right, it is not the pinnacle of the Absolute World Spirit as such. For Hegel, the Absolute World Spirit as such is nothing but the endless agonism between limited States for the unlimited World Spirit itself:17
“The destinies and deeds of states in their connection with one another are the visible dialectic of the finite nature of these spirits. Out of this dialectic the universal spirit, the spirit of the world, the unlimited spirit, produces itself. It has the highest right of all, and exercises its right upon the lower spirits in world-history.”
From a Hegelian perspective, the Marxist dialectic perhaps too quickly pretends that the limitation of States and their endless agonism can itself be overcoming in a State of World Communism. Perhaps also, from a Hegelian perspective, there is a way in the Marxist dialectic does not adequate theorise the way in which the endless agonism in the Absolute Real of World Spirit, is actually open and active at every level (Family-Community-State); and thus, any real approach to self-organising the working class Families and Communities will require the subjective skills of processing that negativity (and also that that negativity is in-itself endless).
However, and at the same time, what really breaks the Hegelian dialectic from a Marxist perspective, is the way Hegel theorises the relation between Family, Community, and the Corporation in-between the levels of Community and State. Hegel assumes the corporation can be “grounded upon the civic community” (like early modern communities stabilised by small businesses).18 Of course today, the way Hegel talks about the Corporation seems completely out of touch and irrelevant, as it has become the very antithesis of Community, and it has totally transcended the State in regards to its powers and responsibilities. The only saving grace for Hegel here is that he does note that if the Corporation were to escape this grounding, and fail to proceed to the “higher”, that is the “State”, then “the corporation would become fossilised; it would waste itself upon itself, and be reduced to the level of a wretched club”.19 This distinction in Hegel’s political system alone, and by his own internal standards, necessitates the rise of the Marxist dialectical critique in the historical aftermath of the rise of industrial capitalism and international corporatism. Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone notes how this necessity appeared internal to Hegelianism itself:20
“The “Hegelian” critical self-recognition of the workers’ class struggle, was the substance of Marxism: the critique of communism as the “real movement of history”.”
Now with all this being stated explicitly, and to strong man Marx’s point in the other direction, Hegel’s thinking on the interrelation of Family and Community, and Community and State, does operate on presuppositions that do not centre what Marx wants us to pay closer attention to: that is the nature of the working class Family, and the nature of its precarity (which seems greater given that it hangs together only by the feelings of love, without any deeper material support). Hegel states explicitly that without the subjective feeling of love, the unity of the Family is destroyed; and to add Marx, we might say that, without a strong material foundation, the long-term stabilisation of the subjective feeling of love will itself become precarious (which could help us explain why marriage today is becoming more and more a bourgeois privilege). Here we are offered the opportunity to think the “ideal-material” and the “material-ideal” of the Family foundation of the working class as what needs to be sustained if, on the higher order levels of Community and State, we are to avoid, or reduce the conditions of possibility for, the endless warring of states in a global environs dominated by corporations totally ungrounded from civic duty.21
Here consider Hegel on the impossibility of eternal peace, but also the cause of a contingency leading to war as dependent on injuries in the wide field and varied relations of its citizens without material support:22
“Kant’s idea was that eternal peace should be secured by an alliance of states. This alliance should settle every dispute, make impossible the resort to arms for a decision, and be recognized by every state. This idea assumes that states are in accord, an agreement which, strengthened though it might be by moral, religious, and other considerations, nevertheless always rested on the private sovereign will, and was therefore liable to be disturbed by the element of contingency.
Therefore, when the particular wills of states can come to no agreement, the controversy can be settled only by war. Owing to the wide field and the varied relations of the citizens of different states to one another, injuries occur easily and frequently. What of these injuries is to be viewed as a specific breach of a treaty or as a violation of formal recognition and honour remains from the nature of the case indefinite.”
One might suggest, from a Marxist standpoint, that to reduce the possibility of war between States, we necessarily need a State that servers the material basis of the reproduction of the Family as a stable foundation, as well as subordinate the corporation to a ground in civic duty. This is why Marx tries to force philosophy to think not only the Family and Community/civil society, but rather the Family and Community/civil society of the working class (proletariat), as opposed to thinking from the standpoint of the bourgeois State serving industrial capitalism, in order to raise a new principle for the meaning of “society”:23
“By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order [realm of bourgeois States], the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. […] The proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation [i.e. the proletariat].”
Today, in a world that is driving itself further and further into the conditions of possibility for mega-wartime catastrophes (Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine), we should not forget that this is proceeding in great speed and correlated with the “techno-feudalisation” of global capitalism (turning the working class as well as capitalists into feudal serfs to AI-driven platforms owned by very few totally ungrounded people).24 In this dimension the actual incorporation and participation of the proletariat is systematically excluded, which creates deep frustration, disenfranchisement, and the lack of a material basis for people to form families and communities as a foundation for a real civil society capable of engaging on a level with real social stakes in the State and international activity. This is the underlying cause of the turn to populist leaders whose performativity is itself overriding any capacity to formulate rational policies capable of both preventing the escalation of war between States, as well as establishing dignified working conditions in a radically altered technological landscape with all new modes of industrial production (e.g. artificial intelligence, digital networks, screen-being, algorithmic capture, etc.).
For Marx, and as mentioned, the trouble with Hegel is that, because the liberal bourgeois State gets captured by Capital (as opposed to becoming the “realised ethical idea/spirit”), as a result, his phenomenology becomes a bourgeois mystification or a new mythology for the working class (leaving them trapped on the level of Religion as an internal immanent necessity);25 and Hegel’s logical Idea a type of liberal philosophical escapism from the real Being and Essence of working class conditions (allowing philosophers to live a life of the All-Idea while the vast majority toil the grounds or the factories as Nothing).26 In regards to Hegel’s phenomenology, Marx is claiming that Religion for the working class is actually not necessary, but rather a symptom of their class position, and life in a society which depends on the principle of their exclusion from its actual operations (like for example people turning to fundamentalist Religion when their position within State-Capital become undermined). Many phenomenological symptoms and contradictions appear today precisely at this site of Religion and the bourgeois State in service of Capital. This seems to have enormous consequences for both the capacity to see society from the standpoint of the proletarian Family and Community (or Civil society), as opposed to the standpoint of bourgeois State itself. In regards to Hegel’s logic, Marx is claiming that the real level of “being-nothing” is to be thought from a proletarian standpoint, in his time, from the point of view of those toiling the grounds and the factories. This is why Marx states:27
“nobody can be anything [nothing] if he is not prepared to renounce everything [being].”
And:28
“As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of […] men will be accomplished.”
What Marx is doing is situating Hegel’s logic on the level of, not a reification of a State text, but as a “spiritual weapon” “of the people”. However, the perhaps unintended result of Marx inverting Hegel’s phenomenology and logic like this on the basis of Hegel’s politics, is that those who do not seriously tarry with Hegel’s phenomenology and logic (either because it is too difficult, or because of Marxist presuppositions about it being bourgeois ideology) end up being unable to work on the level of the working class from the perspective of self-relating negativity. Here we have the negative tendency in Marxism towards the self-utopianisation of the working class as capable of realising a non-alienated state of being, instead of seeing the working class as capable of realising itself as the becoming-other of alienation itself.29
This is one of the key reasons why it is so important that we think both the Hegel-Marx axis but also the Marx-Hegel axis.30 What is essential here is not to become a proletariat that can only exist in a negation of the bourgeois State (i.e. scapegoating the State captured by Capital), but rather to become a proletariat that is capable of the negation of the negation, that is to take responsibility for the social unconscious of the Family and Community (civil society) and all of the self-relating negativity that is implied at these levels. The problem with a form of Marxism that can only exist as a negation of the bourgeois State captured by Capital, is that one’s very identity hangs on a false enemy-obstacle, and finds itself oscillating on the level of desire and mimesis, as opposed to drive and self-relating negativity.31 Marx himself does not fall into this trap, and articulates the ground of the proletariat in this way:32
“The state results from them [family and civil society] in an unconscious and arbitrary way. Family and civil society appear as the dark natural ground from which the light of the state emerges. By material of the state is meant the business of the state, i.e., family and civil society, in so far as they constitute components of the state and, as such, participate in the state.”
To put it simply, the reason why the proletariat can get caught into a simple negation is because to negate the negation is to both affirm the “dark natural ground” and to avoid becoming bitter that one is not held in the safety of the “light of the state”.33 For example, one way I could understand my own historical drive, is that I was striving for the safety of the “light of the state” in the position of an academic professor at a university; but in the collapse of the contemporary institutional structure in the context of new modes of industrial production (i.e. internet, digital production, artificial intelligence, algorithmic mediated attention), I fell into the “dark natural ground” of the collapse of the Family and the loss of any civil Community. My own ethical duty in this situation is to “negate the negation”: to both work within the “dark natural ground” of a world where the Family has collapsed and no civil Community exists; and avoid becoming bitter that the “light of the State” is nowhere to be found even if the telos of my being cries out for its “real ethical idea/spirit”.
Hegel, far from thinking of the Family as only imaginary, as mentioned, thinks that the most heroic gesture in times of State collapse (say in our time the capture of the State by Capital), is to introduce (or in our context: re-introduce) the Family. This for Hegel is done within the “dark natural ground”, not by goodness (which he claims is impotent and against nature), but by a type of sublation of nature in lawful violence:34
“In the state there can be heroes no more. They appear only in uncivilized communities. The aim of the hero is right, necessary and in keeping with the state; but he carried it out, as if it was his own private affair. The heroes, who founded states, and introduced marriage and husbandry, did not in this realize a recognized right. These acts issue merely from their particular wills. Yet as they imply the higher right of the idea against a merely natural state of things, their violence is lawful. Little can be effected against the force of nature merely by goodness.”
Now we can accept a more complex view of Hegel’s system, let us dwell in a more philosophical way on how the Critique of the Philosophy of Right holds a metaphorical knife to Hegel’s political real. If Hegel was to think of the Family and Community of modern society as something to become ultimately sublated into the Ideational-body of the State (as the “march of God in the world”),35 then Marx was to inject a new form of political atheism (negativity) into this philosophical system that forced thought to consider the way “State-philosophy” itself could become an enemy to the Absolute Freedom of the human social body as a whole (especially when left to the “dark natural ground” devoid of the “realised ethical idea”).36 In many ways, if Hegel was the “Plato of the modern world” (not smarter than Plato but offering a philosophical coordinates for an objectively new time and era), in precisely historicising the Absolute Idea in relationship to the political body of the State; then Marx represents the limit of the modern philosophical system itself, operating at its “Gödel Point”, to bring out its self-contradiction, unleashing a totally other sequence as a result. As we have previously pointed towards, we can say the zero-level of this limit is the relation between philosophy and politics, as for Marx Hegel’s philosophy serves the bourgeois State, and with Marx’s politics, philosophy is only useful insofar as it serves the transition from the bourgeois State to the workers State (i.e. becoming the aforementioned “spiritual weapon” of the proletariat).
Indeed, in our time, and in the collapse of the State into a type of State-captured by Capital, few think and act in terms of the “State as God” (to which our families and communities must sacrifice themselves). However, we should not forget the way in which, over the past 250 years, basically since 1776/1789, the nation State as a model has functioned like a “marching God”, as all regions of the planet are now divided up by the form. At the same time, many today do think and act in terms of the “Capital God”.37 Žižekian Philosopher Adrian Johnston has pointed out in his most recent book Infinite Greed, that capitalist subjectivity, far from being selfish, in fact enact a type of religious “self-sacrifice” which is “antithetical” to the “most foundational self-interests of all those caught up in it”.38 In this context, I have often quoted the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s claim, against Nietzsche, that “God did not die, he was turned [from the State] into money”.39 Here we can think of the aforementioned passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to Marx’s Critique of the Philosophy of Right as the passage from “God as State” (marching in the world) to “God as Capital” (marching in the world). We could generate the following historical formulas for God:
Hegel: injects an atheism in regards to traditional religion (influenced by Lutheranism/Protestantism) towards thinking the historicity of the “God-State”
Marx: injects an atheism in regards to modern State (influenced by Hegelianism) towards thinking the historicity of the “Capital-God”
Here we must more explicitly re-emphasise that Žižek’s “Marx to Hegel” inversion involves not only the acceptance of this passage (God as State to God as Capital), but also the recognition that Capital in the “post-industrial” era is, in a Hegelian sense, now finally “reaching the level of its notion”, where the Real of capitalist spectrality overdetermines the address of “real people with their real problems”.40 Thus, the zero level of a philosophy capable of sublating and working with Marx is a philosophy that is attentive to whether or not it is serving the “Real of capitalist spectrality” or whether it is addressing “real people with their real problems”.41 Žižek notes that the ideological goal of contemporary capitalism is to totally obfuscate “the gap between real production and the virtual or spectral domain of Capital, and the gap between experiential reality and the virtual reality of cyberspace” so that “even thought actual “frictions” continue to insist, they become invisible, forced into a netherworld outside or “postmodern” and post-industrial universe”.42 He furthermore emphasises “this is why the “frictionless” universe of digitised communication, technological gadgets, etc., is constantly haunted by the notion of a global catastrophe lurking just around the corner, threatening to explode at any moment.”43
In creating Philosophy Portal, this gap is constantly and intimately alive for me in insanely disturbing and haunting forms. I am constantly tarrying, the line of “real capitalist spectrality” of which I need to be aware in order to sustain myself, my partner and the condition of possibility for our Family (which has no material basis in property safe-guarded by a well-functioning State captured by Capital); as well as addressing “real people and their real problems” (for example, the need for real philosophical Community, the need for real discursive spaces to speculate about our situation and condition today).44 But at the same time, and for the other side of the equation, the image that people can have of me in the spectral dimension, is often one that is totally divorced from my actual life and the real of production that goes into generating the spectral dimension of the work. Indeed, the trap can be that people have a perception that everything is “frictionless” or that that “frictions” are made invisible and irrelevant to the shiny surface of the production itself. I am explicitly outlining these dimensions because they are the implicit background of the contemporary universe that needs more thought and attention, i.e. the way in which Family-Community is sustained in a virtual universe, as well as the way surfaces can appear frictionless, and the way in which the frictions of real production are rendered invisible.
Philosophy Portal here does strive to become more explicitly political in this dimension. Since Philosophy Portal’s work started with Hegel, we should remember that Marx was a part of the Young Hegelian camp, which, after Hegel’s death, had split between “conservative” (right-wing) and “radical” (left-wing) forces.45 While the conservative side of the Young Hegelians was very much attempting a return to pre-liberal monarchical conditions safe guarded by a form of Christian universalism, what became of Marxism was perhaps the most radical side, which precisely aimed to think about the relationship between State and Capital in a way that was impossible to think in Hegel’s time (or before Hegel’s time). In this way, Hegel’s thinking does presuppose that a type of humanisation of religious dogmatism and monarchical authority through the State could reconcile the thought of the human subject with its being (i.e. “thought of the liberal subject” = “being of the bourgeois State”).46 Here we could propose the following formulas:
Hegel: “thought of liberal subject” = “being of the bourgeois State”
Marx: “thought of the proletarian subject” = “being of the Workers State”
Thus Marx, true to Hegelian form, was writing at and for a different time, a time where the bourgeois State was itself in a value crisis as a result of the contradictions of industrial production reducing bourgeois values (liberty, egalitarianism, fraternity) to capitalist values (capital accumulation).47 These contradictions produced the French Revolution of 1848, and in many ways, the structure of the contradictions we find here are the contradictions that we still live within (namely the contradictions between bourgeois and capitalist values constantly disrupted under new waves of industrial production, and thus intensified). For example, today we might find our ideas of liberty, egalitarianism, and fraternity contradicted by online and virtual production itself, mediated by artificial intelligence, algorithms, and screen-dynamics.48 If we take the logic of this industrial production to its extreme — what is often called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”49 — then we find ourselves in a world where the very need for most “white collar work” is eliminated, and Capital accumulation is dictated by the owners, i.e. the aforementioned technofeudal lords of platform capitalism.50
In this context, Marx’s approach to the Absolute Freedom of the whole was not through the sublation of the Family and Community into the State, with the philosopher functioning as its “mind-king”; but rather about the part of the social body that was expected in liberal bourgeois society to function mindlessly in darkness and obscurity, in horrible industrial working conditions, marginalised and peripheral to the main functioning of the State and its educated functionaries guarding the self-reproduction of Capital. The utopian dimension of Marx was that what transpired in the bourgeois revolutions (1776, 1789) could happen again, but this time on the qualitatively deeper level of the proletariat, with this level representing not just one class against another, but rather the dissolution of class itself. For example, in regards to the nature of the (national) French Revolution of 1789:51
“For the revolution of a nation, and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be the estate of the general stumbling-block, the incorporation of the general limitation, a particular social sphere must be recognized as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation. For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression. The negative general significance of the French nobility and the French clergy determined the positive general significance of the nearest neighboring and opposed class of the bourgeoisie.”
Whereas when Marx thinks this logic of the French Revolution of 1789 to its own extreme in the conditions of the French Revolution of 1848, he finds something weird in nature about the proletariat (working class) as the kind of bottom of the barrel of class struggle which undermines class struggle itself:52
“the higher nobility is struggling against the monarchy, the bureaucrat against the nobility, and the bourgeois against them all, while the proletariat is already beginning to find itself struggling against the bourgeoisie. The middle class hardly dares to grasp the thought of emancipation from its own standpoint when the development of the social conditions and the progress of political theory already declare that standpoint antiquated or at least problematic.
[…]
In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; […] a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.”
We should think about how, for Marx, the functioning of a certain hierarchical tension from Feudal hierarchy to Capital hierarchy was leading to the “Mother of all challenges”, that is Capital hierarchy (driving a feedback loop with industrial production) and the Real body of man itself. The Real body of man itself, which for all history was treated as “cannon fodder” (nothing, thrown to death) was to become everything, for Marx (and we would find out what humanity really was in this State). But if we look to the Real of the Capital hierarchy today we see explicit goals that do not bring us towards a necessary proletarian revolution but rather a deepening of the commitment to the body of humanity as cannon fodder (in our context: to production driven by artificial intelligence). In other words, the Capital hierarchy is using modern technology to eliminate labour wherever possible, while the political problems that this may create are without the necessary structural support that would be required, due to their international nature.
In this situation, when contemporary Marxists think about re-establishing some “grand narrative” of “real equality” (or liberty, or fraternity), in both the onslaught of new forms of industrial production as well as post-modern deconstruction of grand narratives, we should never forget that Marx associated this real equality (liberty, fraternity) with a courageous proletariat that could overcome its own fear of itself (suggesting a link between a Christian atheist “fearless fall” into “love”):53
“These petrified relations [of the working class] must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them! The people must be taught to be terrified at itself in order to give it courage.”
This form of thought should be fully reflected into the contemporary para-academic network in terms of its relationship between virtual and physical, local and global, but most importantly, hierarchy and equality. Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone notes that while Capitalist freedom is obscene, proletarian freedom is terrifying; and the tensions that we find in the contemporary para-academic network reflect both this difficulty in overcoming capitalist obscenity, but also the fears of true egalitarian social order. Here, without real Christian Atheist speculations, there are traps in every direction:54 creation of new online hierarchies mediated by and serving platform capitalism that scapegoat the old institutional hierarchies hollowed out by the State serving Capital; but also the performance of equality and egalitarianism which obfuscates the Real historicity of hierarchy and how to ethically work with it.55 The Real of Christian Atheist speculations would emphasise that we must think hierarchy from the perspective of the structural metaphor of the “Father-Son” (teacher/leader and student/follower), with the Father functioning as “vanishing mediator”, and Son functioning under a model of “self-birthing”.56 This dynamic could stabilise an ecology or network of Holy Spirit, on both the side of old institutional hierarchies and new online hierarchies, where the spirit is equal/egalitarian with itself. The essential ethic in these coordinates is that processes of communing or networking move at the “speed of relations themselves”, which is of course incredibly difficult, and made all the more difficult by the accelerationist tendencies of industrial production.57
This reflection on the para-academic network is all relevant to the weird Marxist flipping of Hegel’s phenomenology, logic, and politics, because Marx was certainly not anti-education, or anti-philosophical. Marx was rather asking us to consider the way in which — if we did not consider practical politics in light of the dialectics of religion and philosophy that had constituted the birth of modern industrial capitalism58 — then the modern State could use education and philosophy for its social reproduction underneath the monstrous virtuality of Capital driving new modes of industrial production, as opposed to the social reproduction of the (working class) Family and Community itself. We see this in the para-academic network as a potential tension between the old industrial hierarchy and the new online hierarchy,59 but both can potentially find unity if we think through the non-orientable surface of Luther-Hegel-Marx. Again in our time this tension must be thought in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (new wave of industrial production) and the way in which this undermines the working class in all new ways (undermining the conditions of liberty, egalitarianism, fraternity, or introducing an all new social apocalypse).60 Žižek himself explores this in his work with an emphasis on the Marxist theory of “use value” vs. “exchange value” (basically the distinction between the aforementioned value of the bourgeois ideal and capital accumulation for its own sake).61 Without the courage of a working class network that is aware of how terrified it should be to itself, as well as grounded in Family and capable of working towards a real civil society, certainly the current modes of industrial production will wipe it out and render it useless.62
To practically approach these coordinates politically, we should remember that from the time of Marx’s writing on the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, all the way up to his work in Das Kapital, the body of Marxist theory and practice has splintered into the contradictions that we could call “libertine” (egalitarian) and “authoritarian” (hierarchical).63 The “libertine” split finds itself more closely aligned with anarchism and egalitarian ethos (against Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.), and the “authoritarian” split finds itself more closely aligned with the results of Marxism and hierarchy itself (in Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.). The anarchist-libertine egalitarian side can fall into the self-contradiction of too particularist self-organising communities without the capacity to think the problems of spread and scale;64 the Marxist-authoritarian hierarchical side can fall into the self-contradiction of utopianising State-capitalism (in China, for example) as an alternative model to neoliberalism or increasingly technofeudalism in the West.65 While both sides of this split may have the same or a similar goal: the dissolution of the bourgeois State for a more distributed social body on a global order that supports and protects workers; they disagree about the means towards that goal, mostly due to the results of actual communism on the level of the conditions of possibility for a “workers State”.
Here we might say that the “libertine” anarchists believe that communists must act more locally in something like a distributed self-organisation which functions as an “invisible dictatorship” of self-conscious revolutionaries coordinating the otherwise spontaneous action of the masses towards practical emancipation.66 In contrast, we might say that “authoritarian” Marxists believe that communists must seize control of the state, directly transforming the bourgeois State into a workers State (or “dictatorship of the proletariat”). Consider Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone’s view on the topic:67
“Marxism agrees with anarchism on the goal of superseding [State] democracy, but disagrees on how to get there from here. Marxism recognises the need for a democratic state posed by capitalism that cannot be wished away.
The society and state in question were addressed by Lenin with respect to the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which is, importantly, not a national state. His vision was for a workers’ state at a global scale.”
In this debate there are two significant tension points:
How to interpret the historicity of the Russian Revolution in light of the Marxist idea that the revolution of capitalism to socialism cannot happen in a “backwater” of capitalist social reproduction (i.e. Russia, China), but rather on a frontier of capitalist social reproduction (i.e. USA, Europe).68 Here the actual establishment of communist states in Russia and China, far from representing the forward march of Marxism, could have set back and distorted Marxist theory in regards to the Western world navigating an actual dialectical transition from capitalism to socialism. As a result, most of the post-Russian Revolution thinking about emancipatory politics in the West could have been systematically undermined in its capacity to think about how to move from a bourgeois State serving Capital to a worker’s State serving a dialectical transition to socialism and communism.
How to interpret the role of the “coordinator” of the workers state as the “99%” of humanity or the “20%” of humanity, i.e. the idea of a workers State presupposes a very high level of responsibility for workers to coordinate amongst themselves within but beyond the social reproduction of Capital;69 how many human beings at any one time can take on and assume that responsibility on the level required for emancipatory social coordination? For example, we must be open to the possibility that the Russian Revolution failed, not because of the State itself, but because of the workers;70 we must also be open to the possibility that at any one time there are not that many people who are actually capable of embodying the principles of the workers State. Here we run into the possibility that we will never be in a purely egalitarian social condition empirically or actually, and that hierarchies of difference required for sustaining social coordination necessarily require something like the aforementioned Father-Son dialectic.71
In any case, whether one of or both, neither or some other approach in relation to the “libertine/anarchist” or the “Marxist/authoritarian” split needs to be developed, the reality is that the historicity of Marxism has been a failure on the level of Marx’s own philosophical notion (re: sublation of capitalism to socialism on the frontier of capitalism;72 re: coordinator class of the workers state as 99%/20% of the proletariat).73 Here the part of society that Marx sought to liberate towards the whole, transforming the bourgeois State towards the workers State, has not happened. The question is whether we still orbit its impossibility — “the dictatorship of the proletariat”74 — opening us to a dialectical movement from capitalism-socialism-communism; or whether we are approaching a field change, itself generated by the conditions of technocapitalism, which in the extreme either point towards our emancipation (“fully-automated luxury communism”)75 or our self-annihilation (“post-human techno-apocalypse”).76 Or perhaps we should consider the possibility that the extreme (emancipation/annihilation) does not happen, and we are instead rather in the belly of an organism that is not in its “late stage” (as is often claimed), but rather in its “middle stage”.77 If we are in the “middle stage” then we should expect the further intensification of the dialectic between industrial production (“Fifth/Sixth/Seventh Industrial Revolution”) and capital accumulation (M-C-M’) which is only difficult to think because it literally presents to us the question of the post-human.78
The “Early Marx 101” course seeks to set the stage for presentations and conversations that are thinking at this level. The framing is, following Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone, basically the framing of Marx as a question and a problem.79 If Marx, inverting Hegel, appears at the site of a political contradiction which was absent for Hegel (the French Revolution of 1848, the contradictions of the bourgeois State and industrial production), which not only still exist, but appear in an intensified form, then how are we to think and act as both philosophers and practical political agents? This question has haunted me, not only in the construction of Philosophy Portal and the writing of Real Speculations, but as an emerging philosopher during my own doctoral training.80 I remember being spontaneously attracted to Marxism for its willingness to theorise the politics of capitalism external to the conventional frames taught at liberal institutions. At the same time, the forms of subjectivity it produced/produces (myself included) were/are often missing the dimension of philosophical reflection required to tarry with the real antagonisms of actually existing capitalism in our lifetime. As a result, I became attracted to the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, and specifically his insistence that now is the time for thinking, not acting.81 This intuition has proved correct in that more and more Marxist theorists or counter-cultural theory groups recognise the futility of activist and democratic self-organising against the forces of Capital,82 as well as the need to go back to the metaphorical drawing board on the level of our apocalyptic conditions.83
The whole point of the Hegel-Marx non-orientable surface is that when you listen to or read many Marxists from the 19th and 20th century, or even the 21st century,84 you get the impression that the revolution is right around the corner, that a higher freedom from the constraints of capitalism is immanent and that our action will bring it about. As I have been trying to show in this article, while there is truth in this disposition, it should at the same time be fully hystericised:
Are workers really going to bring it about?
Is it really just around the corner?
Is not post-humanism and techno-feudalism more likely?
Does not the working class find itself regression to various religious fantasy’s instead of organising for socialism?
We really do not know what the Hegel-Marx tension reveals to us in our historical moment (or even the Luther-Hegel-Marx tension), even if many of its threads and fragments prove invaluable and indispensable for framing and thinking through many immanent issues regarding the logic of Capital, the state of the Family-Community-State, the waves of industrial production, the impossibility of sublation in bourgeois values (liberty, egalitarianism, fraternity), and so forth. What might be particularly relevant here is to think about the way that the tradition linear narrative from Hegel to Marx gets severely disrupted by both 1914 (World War I) and 1917 (Russian Revolution).85 World War I presented Marxism with huge problems and obstacles that were not thought in Marx’s lifetime, most notably about the capacities of the human being for international coordination in times of war, as well as the ever-present madness lurking beneath the surface of our civilised personas.86 The Russian Revolution, as mentioned, presented Marxism with huge problems and obstacles about the specific locus of emancipatory politics as well as the ever-present threat of “national socialism” (i.e. species of fascism) as opposed to international coalitions coordinating for a workers State against the persistent threat of Capital mobility.87
Throughout the course I will be attempting to form questions and frame problems inspired by this history, and always with an aim to the para-academic network of which Philosophy Portal is a contributor and a facilitator. In this sense then, and as mentioned at the beginning of this article, the Early Marx 101 course sets sail in a direction that is precisely located in where I feel the lack is in Real Speculations. The major theoretical trajectory of this work includes a central focus on:
the work of G.W.F. Hegel as in many ways the “last philosopher” of his era (bringing both a closure and a new opening of the concept),
the work of Friedrich Nietzsche as an “existentialist excess” of the pure concept (opening us to the unconscious psyche in its immediacy), as well as
the work of Jacques Lacan as a “social analyst” of the unconscious (presenting to us the condition of possibility for, and need for, a new era of philosophy).
But the dimension of Marx is missing here, only engaged with lightly and indirectly. I think the next major work needs to make up for this missing dimension. Throughout the work this foundation enables us to think through:
the basic structure of phenomenological development,
a logic capable of helping us build networks in the global brain,
links between theology and politics on the level of both religion and secularity,
the contradictions of scale between individuals and communities,
new forms of education inclusive of our spiritual processes,
the dimension of sexuality or libido in relation to the political, as well as
the role of the unconscious for social formation.
However, what haunts this work is the dimension of political-economy:
class analysis,
structural inequality,
the social function of property,
the dialectics of labour and capital, as well as
a coherent political strategy for technocapitalism
The work does not ignore class, but it does not overdetermine the analysis; the work does think structure, but not deeply enough engage inequality; the work does think labour and capital, but not in the form of a fundamental agonism; and the work does think the dialectics of techno-feudalism, capitalism, and socialism, but finds itself ultimately in a type of speculative ambiguity in regards to practical political action. The focus of the Early Marx course is likewise aiming to target and work with this precise lack.
On a final note: I think that the timing of this course is also important. In terms of the global political climate, I think we as philosophers and thinkers interested in socialism, have about 3 years (on the timing of the Trump presidency), to really think about how to rebuild or reformulate a coherent form of socialism after the collapse or the “death” of the Millennial Left.88 Here I think we need to think “Trump-Sanders” as a unity internal to the American political system (as operating on the frontier of global Capital), as both right and left wing responses to the fact that the current political order cannot continue. In the same way that the Democratic Party made a mistake in thinking that Trump was a contingent fluke and accident, not to be repeated; perhaps the political order as a whole made a mistake in thinking that Sanders was a contingent fluke and accident. Following Hegel, we know there is a deeper inner historical necessity when a contingent accident is repeated. Consider Slavoj Zizek on this point:89
“Hegel does think repetition, but not a pure non-productive one, not a "mechanical" repetition which just strives for more of the same: his notion of repetition always involves sublation; in other words, through repetition, something is idealized, transformed from an immediate contingent reality to a notional universality (Caesar dies as a person and becomes a universal title); or, at least, through repetition, the necessity of an event is confirmed (Napoleon had to lose twice to get the message that his time was over, that his first defeat was not just an accident).”
Can we not think of both Trump and Sanders in this way, i.e. “through repetition, the necessity of an event is confirmed (American Party politics had to lose twice (re: Trump/Sanders) to get the message that its time is over, that the first defeat was not just an accident)? The question is, is the current way the Democratic Party is structuring itself around Bernie Sanders sufficient for what is needed today in the context of technofeudalism/capitalism? Do we have the resources within the current framework to approach real class analysis, structural inequality, social function of property, dialectics of labour and capital? These are the ideas that I hope will come alive in the Early Marx 101 course.
Early Marx 101 starts June 9th and will be treated as a rolling course throughout 2025. To learn more or to sign up check the link below:
Last, C. 2025. Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 39.
Ibid. p. 301.
Ibid. p. 537.
Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. p. 7.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 410 [/] 479.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2010. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 20 [/] 35.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 14 [/] 19.
Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. p. 6.
Ibid. p. 10.
Here I think the work of the “Internet’s Pastor”
is invaluable and indispensable as a working model.In Žižekian terms, the truth of the subject as an “excremental remainder”.
Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. p. 14.
Ibid. p. 14-15.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 138-9.
Ibid. p. 139.
Ibid. p. 194.
Ibid. p. 266.
Ibid. p. 193.
Ibid. p. 194.
Cutrone, C. 2024. Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006-2024. Sublation Press. p. 13.
Marxist philosopher
notes, following Christopher Lasch, that the family remains a “haven in a heartless world”; and orbits the question: “How did the family come to exist in this contradictory fashion, placed at the very center of reproduction of the bourgeois social order and yet being the only refuge for the proletariat at the same time?”, see: Tutt, D. 2022. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation. palgrave macmillan. p. xiv.Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 264.
Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. p. 10-11.
Varoufakis, Y. 2023. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head.
Of course, if we are to think completely the aforementioned “non-orientable surface” of “Luther-Hegel-Marx”, we can also way that Marx too quickly deconstructs Religion as a part of a liberal bourgeois phenomenology. From the “Christian Atheist” standpoint, there is deeper reason to think the connections between between Luther and Marx on the level of the need for something of the equivalent of “Real pastors” capable of helping the working class process its negativity (“shit”).
At the same time, the opening of a broader capacity for historical subjects to think on the level of the Absolute Idea, without constantly having to worry about the day-to-day necessities of Being-Essence, is, and always has been seen internal to philosophy, as a forward advance. The real Marxist question for a Hegelian logic might be something like, how does philosophy basically function in a realised communist society?
Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. p. 10.
Ibid. p. 11.
Today, largely as a result of the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s use of Hegelo-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this view is becoming challenged.
Here inspired by Slavoj Žižek’s inversion or “materialist reversal”, see: Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 207.
Here we could see a unified analysis in both Žižek’s emphasis on moving from enemy-obstacle to working with self-contradiction, as well as Rene Girard’s emphasis on avoiding the traps of mimesis and the scapegoating mechanism.
Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. p. 13.
I would say that
Belonging Again project is a good guide for starting to think what it might mean to become a proletarait capable of “negation of negation” and not simply negation, see: Rose, O.G. 2024. Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose.Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 87.
Ibid. p. 197.
Please note that when we are to think of Hegel’s idea of the State as the “march of God” he was thinking in a radically historical way, i.e. that the State in-and-for his time was God. Moreover, Hegel’s concept of the State as God is not meant to be conflated with the idea that any one state in particular is God, but that the “Idea of the State as such” is God. We can think about this in the way the “Idea of the State as such” spread around the entire world in-between 1776/1789 and the mid-20th century (from the American and French Revolutions to the waves of decolonisation that left us with a global map that is fundamentally constituted by States).
The key distinction that psychologist Jordan B. Peterson brought to the zeitgeist of our collective intellectual discourse is the critical idea, against the New Atheists, that our belief is embedded in our actions, and not in our consciously thought presuppositions or identities. In this way, people who self-identify as an atheist (e.g. Richard Dawkins), can act out their belief in ways that may be surprising and unexpected. However, when it comes to Peterson himself as a performativity, we should precisely level our critique at him on the level of the “Capital God”: has Jordan B. Peterson been serving the intellectual culture? Or has he been psychologising the culture wars to monetise his political brand? In this split I take the truth of Jordan B. Peterson phenomenon to find its home “down-stream” of him, with pastor Paul VanderKlay, whose work certainly finds its main outlet in cultivating real community in a digital social apocalypse, as opposed to monetising the culture war.
Johnston, A. 2024. Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital. New York: Columbia University Press. p. xii.
"God didn't die, he was transformed into money" - An interview with Giorgio Agamben - Peppe Savà. libcom.com. https://libcom.org/article/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio-agamben-peppe-sava (accessed: May 25 2025).
Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 245.
Underground theorist Michael Downs (a.k.a
) works in this dimension, between Žižek’s theory of the modern subject and philosopher Nick Land, on the question of whether “Technocapital as superintelligence” will push us towards an intensive point which fundamentally undermines human existence itself, see: Downs, M. 2025. Capital vs. Timenergy: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land. Independently Published.Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 245.
Ibid.
Here there is a way in which I am trying to think of Philosophy Portal as a whole not only as a non-orientable surface of Hegel-Marx, but a non-orientable surface of Luther-Hegel-Marx, insofar as Philosophy Portal is the actual embodiment and extension of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura (not of the Bible, but of modern philosophical texts).
Tucker, R. 1972. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press. p. 73.
Of course, this form of Hegelian reconciliation should not be confused with an interpretation suggesting the end of antagonism, strife and war, but rather a form of reconciliation where the human subject conceived of the modern state as the best of all possible worlds for our time. This line of reasoning was generally popularised by thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, see: Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press.
Cutrone, C. 2024. Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006-2024. Sublation Press. p. 10.
See again: Downs, M. 2025. Capital vs. Timenergy: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land. Independently Published.
Xu, M., David, J.M., & Kim, S.H. 2018. The fourth industrial revolution: Opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Financial Research. 9.2: 90-95.
Varoufakis, Y. 2023. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head.
Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. p. 9.
Ibid. p. 10.
Ibid. p. 5.
This is the point of my new book: Last, C. 2025. Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. Philosophy Portal Books.
For example, see: Last, C. 2025. Chapter 32: Challenge of Patriarchy for Emancipatory Politics. In: Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 701-720.
For the practical relevance of this to the Filioque, see: Last, C. 2025. Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 218-9.
Again the stakes are outlined here: Downs, M. 2025. Capital vs. Timenergy: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land. Independently Published.
Bringing us back to the non-orientable surface of “Luther-Hegel-Marx”.
I anticipate this problem in my doctoral thesis Global Brain Singularity and attempt to work with it under the idea of the “metasystem”, see: Last, C. 2020. Part II: Challenges of a Global Metasystem. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 66-147.
For my doctoral work on this topic, see: Last, C. 2020. Chapter 7: Global Commons in the Global Brain. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 107-147.
Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 245.
Potentially bringing us to a “post-human reality”, see: Last, C. 2020. Part III: Signs of a New Evolution. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 150-211.
Cutrone, C. 2024. Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006-2024. Sublation Press. p. ix.
This is worked through in Real Speculations, inspired by both the Game A vs. Game B debate, as well as the work of
, see: Last, C. 2025. Chapter 17: Game A/B, Enter the Scale Problem. In: Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 405-437.See again: Varoufakis, Y. 2023. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head.
Cutrone, C. 2024. Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006-2024. Sublation Press. p. 62-63.
Cutrone, C. 2024. Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006-2024. Sublation Press. p. 42.
Ibid. p. 2.
Ibid. p. 123.
Cutrone, C. 2025. personal communication.
In contemporary Western intellectual discourse perhaps this is how we should read the tension and symptom of Jordan B. Peterson and Slavoj Žižek.
Cutrone, C. 2024. Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006-2024. Sublation Press. p. 2.
Ibid. p. 123.
Ibid. p. xiii.
Bastani, A. 2019. Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Verso Books.
Bostrom, N. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press.
As noted by political theorist
at TUCON 2024, see: Studebaker, B. 2024. Day 3 - TUCON EMSTU 2024. Theory Underground. (link)See again: Downs, M. 2025. Capital vs. Timenergy: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land. Independently Published.
Cutrone is someone who is clearly well-read in the history of liberal bourgeois philosophy (from Rousseau to Hegel), something that I think is demanded of someone who reads Marx deeply and well. In that way, if Marx is the “Gödel point” for Hegel’s system, Cutrone could be seen as the “Gödel point” for contemporary Marxist bourgeois subjectivity.
This is clearly visible in my doctoral thesis, see: Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution & Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer.
Turl, A. 2025. Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted From Heaven & Earth. Revol Press.
Gieben, B. 2024. The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future. Revol Press.
Badiou, A. 2015. The Communist Hypothesis. Verso Books.
This is possibly where the whole “Freudo-Marxist” turn becomes immanent, in terms of thinking the role of the unconscious on the level of society and politics.
For a particularly important historical document on this topic, see: Freud, S. 1915. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. In: Freud — Complete Works. p. 3067-3092.
Today we still have economists calling for forms of internationalism, international coordination for the establishment of a tax system capable of limiting and redistributing global wealth, but without the possibility to practically implement these ideas, see for example: Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
For reference of course, see: Cutrone, C. 2023. Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006-2022. Sublation Media.
Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 455.
Masterpiece, Cadell, a critical and invaluable framing of our moment. I wrote out ten pages of notes tonight to wrestle with and think through. They will find their way into a paper. Thank you, and the first class on Early Marx was excellent. I'm looking forward to the year and work ahead.