In the part on “relative surplus value ”, especially the chapter on machinery and large-scale industry, Karl Marx presented a remarkable and fairly detailed description of a highly technologically developed capitalist economy. Moishe Postone, the US-based theorist whose intellectual roots are in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory tradition, elaborated in Time, Labor and Social Domination (1995)—especially in the section on the social implications of the trajectory of (capitalist) production—the current social relevance and significance of this core part of Marx’s Capital (1867/1990). Postone also tied the very possibility of this part of Capital to the dialectic of Marx’s self-critiques of his own earlier interpretations of Hegel’s works—interpretations that Postone identified and developed prior to his presentation of the section on the trajectory of capitalist production. These, and a third “autocritique ” involving Hegel’s philosophy, which I identify in Marx’s work, are crucial for understanding the necessity and freedom dialectic internal to capitalist society, as well as for a contemporary concept of a post-capitalist society.
There is a strong case to be made that the American origins of the by now famous Frankfurt School Critical Theory tradition is represented in Herbert Marcuse’s (1941/1999) seminal work Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. The work was the culmination of a decade of Marcuse’s collaboration—as the principal philosopher of the group—with other Frankfurt School members who had left Germany in the early 1930s and wound up in New York just ahead of Hitler’s rise to power. The obvious caveat is that, as has become the norm today, the Frankfurt School soon splintered into various tendencies, with figures such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno focusing more on cultural issues, and at least one, namely Erich Fromm, breaking from the School altogether—in his case, over an important study of workers’ political dispositions, including in regard to Fascism ,1 and not, as is often assumed, because of disputes in connection with interpretations of the relationship of the theories of Marx and Sigmund Freud.
In contrast to what might be considered the dual national origins of the Frankfurt School, the Marxist –Humanist tradition evolved gradually in the United States. Also, in the United States, there were more reciprocal influences between the two traditions in their origins and development than has often been acknowledged. Raya Dunayevskaya, the principal figure involved in the founding of Marxist Humanism in the United States, was born in the Ukraine, emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and before breaking with Leon Trotsky over the question of the nature of the Soviet Union’s economy, worked with him during the Stalinist frame-up trials of the late 1930s. It was during World War II that Dunayevskaya discovered Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941/1999). Impressed as much by how the work “established the Humanism of Marxism” as by its “reestablishment” of the Hegelian– Marxian dialectic (Anderson & Rockwell, 2012, 233), her own work on the role of labor in the Soviet Union’s state-planned economy intersected with her discovery of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844/1975b, 229–346). It was in Marcuse’s work where she read an analysis of these manuscripts in English for the first time. Dunayevskaya’s article, “Labor and Society” (1942/1992), already indicates the emerging importance for her own work of early Marx’s manuscripts, often referred to as the young Marx’s humanist essays.
Interestingly, however, Dunayevskaya referred to the establishment of Marxist Humanism in the United States only after several years of contentious exchanges with Marcuse on the Hegel– Marx relationship (and on labor ). Her early article displays some close affinities with “The Abolition of Labor”, the important chapter in Reason and Revolution (Marcuse, 1941/1999) that was pivotal for Marcuse’s articulation of the necessity and freedom dialectic underlying the various theories of Hegel and Marx. Early in the 1950s, Dunayevskaya discovered Hegel’s own development of the necessity and freedom dialectic in his under-appreciated Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Hegel, 1817/1973). Increasingly, then, the Hegelian part of the dialectic became a focal point for Dunayevskaya’s theory development. In this, the necessity and freedom dialectic became central, although not always overtly, to the decades-long Dunayevskaya–Marcuse dialogue, which was sustained in both personal correspondence and in their published works.
Unlike in Dunayevskaya’s work, Marcuse’s theorization of the necessity and freedom dialectic did not develop from an interpretation of Marx’s analysis of Hegel’s philosophy that concluded Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. This was the case even though the young Marx in those essays discussed the relation of communism and humanism as the “genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man”, and the “true resolution of the strife … between freedom and necessity” (Marx, 1844/1975b, 296–297). Upon their publication, Marcuse (1932/2005a) reviewed these writings of the young Marx , which had been buried in the archives for nearly a half-century; his review marked (along with his first book on Hegel )2 Marcuse’s move away from his mentor Martin Heidegger’s existential philosophy. It was only in the following year in Marcuse’s (1933/2005b) long essay “On the Philosophic Concept of Labor in Economics” that Marcuse traced the necessity and freedom dialectic from antiquity to the predominance of capitalism. In this, Marcuse noted Aristotle’s distinction between “necessity” and “beautiful things”, the latter of which Marcuse associates with Marx’s concept of the “realm of freedom” (Marcuse, 1933/2005b, 144).
By 1941, Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941/1999) strongly suggested that the necessity and freedom dialectic was central to Hegel’s philosophy. For the development of this idea, he did not imply the importance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (1817/1973) (as did Dunayevskaya little more than a decade later), either in Reason and Revolution, or in his earlier review (Marcuse, 1932/2005a) of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. However, later additions Marcuse made to Reason and Revolution are vital for marking the parameters of the central part of his long correspondence with Dunayevskaya, which often, at her initiative, centered on the Hegel–Marx relationship, especially the necessity and freedom dialectic, and specifically the current social relevance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind.
Written just prior to the beginning of the correspondence with Dunayevskaya (Anderson & Rockwell, 2012), Marcuse’s 1954 Epilogue to Reason and Revolution (1941/1999, 433–439) analyzed the social implications of the conclusion to Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (1817/1973). If the 1954 Epilogue could not have been in rebuttal to Dunayevskaya’s positive perspectives on the current relevance and importance of the Hegelian side of Hegelian Marxism , Marcuse’s new preface to t...