Il Capitale come feticcio automatico e come soggetto, e la sua costituzione: sulla (dis)continuità Marx-Hegel

This article will deal in two steps with the Marx–Hegel (dis)connection in Capital. First, I’ll present a survey of what I take to be the most relevant positions about the role of dialectics in Marx. Second, after reviewing Marx’s criticisms of Hegel, I’ll consider the debate within the International Symposium on Marxian Theory. Third, I will argue that it is exactly Hegel’s idealism which made the Stuttgart philosopher crucial for the understanding of the capital relation. Here, I will refer to the ‘Hegelian’ Colletti of the late 1960s-early 1970s, to Backhaus’ dialectic of the form of value, and to Rubin’s interpretation of abstract labour as a process. At this point, I will provide my reading of Marx’s movement from commodity to money, and then to capital, in the first 5 chapters of Capital. Marx is moving on following a dual path. The first path reconstructs the ‘circularity’ of Capital as Subject, as an Automatic Fetish: it is here that Hegel’s idealistic method of ‘positing the presupposition’ served Marx well. The second path leads him to dig into the ‘constitution’ of the capital-relation, and therefore into the ‘linear’ exploitation of workers and class-struggle in production. Here we meet Marx’s radical break from Hegel, and understand the materialist foundation of the critique of political economy.