The World-Historic Shift Labor Undergoes in Hegel's Philosophy

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

For most of civilization physical labor, that labor which creates a tangible object, has been seen as an unfortunate task done merely for the sake of acquiring the necessaries of life. The Greeks and Romans in large part relegated this sort of work to slaves. The Middle Ages tell stories of kings, philosophers, theologians, and priests, but not of workers. And the capitalist era, from early mercantilism to modern imperialism, thrives insofar as it has labor to exploit, labor it can reduce to a commodity, labor whose activity and product can be stripped from the laborer. Today most people’s relation to their work is dull at best, a source of life drainage at worst. As a reaction, even many ‘left-wing’ theoretical spaces continue in the tradition of viewing work as an unfortunate necessity – one whose conditions might be improvable, but which is itself not fruitful. It only exists because people need the products it can create.

Although painted with a broad stroke, the history of the greatest minds in Europe has been one which sniffs at the activities for which their abstract mind games depended on. However, can labor be thought of as something done for purposes not limited to those of consumption? Can labor be fruitful and meaningful in itself? In G.W.F. Hegel, for the first time in a prominent western theorist, the response is YES! In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right one can see what I have elsewhere called a “world-historic shift” in how labor is conceived: from labor as an unfortunate necessity, towards labor as a valuable expression of creative activity which constitutes a moment of liberation. [1]

In the famed lord and bondsman section of his 1907 Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel describes the encounter of two self-consciousnesses with each other, an event plagued with a mutual desire for recognition. After a series of ambiguous supersessions between the two consciousnesses, this encounter leads to a life and death struggle, for “only through staking one’s life is freedom won.”[2] Realizing that “death is the natural negation of consciousness,”[3] for he who is dead cannot think and he who requires recognition for self-consciousness that is in and for itself cannot get it from a dead man, this infantile skirmish ends with one submitting to the other. This submission gives rise to the lord and bondsman, the former who posits himself as “pure self-conscious” and the latter as “merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood.” [4]

Although the lord is described as the “pure, essential action in this relation”, because what the “lord does to the other he also does to himself,” the recognition he receives from the bondsman is “one-sided and unequal,” i.e., in the relationship’s reduction of the bondsman to thinghood, his status as independent consciousness is negated and thus unable to afford the recognition necessary for the lord to be certain of his being for-self.[5] Simply put, in sex that you pay for you cannot affirm yourself as a good lover. Hegel concludes that “just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is… it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness.”[6]

How can Hegel affirm the slave as the one with the potential for ‘truly independent consciousness’? Hegel states that “through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.”[7] He continues,

Work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. This negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.

Hence, although his immediate condition is as a slave, his externalization (or objectification for Marxists), although at first appearing as an alien force independent of the bondsman, eventually shows itself as his creation. Through observing the independence of his self-otherization into the object he can, to play with the language of Hegel's Science of Logic, absolutely recoil back into himself and reinstate his initial condition but in a higher form – as true self-consciousness.

Approximately thirteen years after the publication of the Phenomenology, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right reintroduces the liberatory role of labor, albeit without the imaginative and captivating language used in the lord and bondsman moment of spirit’s unfolding. When addressing certain philosophers’ romanticized theories of a ‘state of nature’ where man’s needs were such that the “accidents of nature directly assured to him” enough to subsist, Hegel condemns this view’s inability to see that there is a “moment of liberation intrinsic to work.” [8] For Hegel, this utopianism fails to see that work is meaningful in itself. Yes, its object satisfies needs, cravings, etc., but this satisfactory power of the object is what the French call jouissance, a sort of surplus enjoyment. The objects of labor are valuable [9]; they can fill empty stomachs, warm bodies, provide aesthetic enjoyment, and so on, but the laboring activity which the object presupposes can be valuable as well.

Unlike the traditional views of labor before him, for Hegel the first moment of value in labor is not the object, but the work itself. Work itself is meaningful and valuable because it consists of a dedication of “my time…, my being, my universal activity and actuality, [and] my personality,” [10] into creating, with the “raw materials directly supplied by nature,” [11] that upon which the human community sustains itself. For Hegel, the object labor creates is not simply an independent alien entity, instead, Hegel sees that the object “derives its destiny and soul from [the worker’s] will,” [12] the worker ensouls his object.

Hence, for Hegel the result of labor is 1) the liberating sense of growth, meaning, and flourishing it can provide the laborer and 2) the consumptive growth it brings the consumer (who could, naturally, be the same person). Although this historical-shift is praiseworthy, there are, of course, certain contradictions which ensue from Hegel’s attempt to both: 1) sustain a critique of chattel slavery grounded in his view of labor’s totalizing inalienability, while also sustaining 2) a defense for wage-slavery, grounded in his acceptance of labor’s alienation “for a specific period.” [13]

In my essay, “A World-Historic Shift: Hegel, Marx, and Labour” [14] I further explore how these contradictions arise and how Marx and Engels, by immanently taking Hegel to his logical and practical conclusions, sublate the contradictions Hegel encounters. For now, I simply urge the reader to recognize that this anarchistic disdain of work is not a part of the Marxist tradition. Starting from Hegel, but better formulated in Marx and Engels, labor is humanity’s unique life-activity – it allows one to transform nature consciously and collaboratively in accordance with human needs and aesthetic sensibilities. We must not universalize and fixate the wretchedness of alienated work under capitalism with work in general; for work, when done in a non-exploitative setting, can be the most fruitful and meaningful thing a human can do. In fact, I would argue the few but meaningful moments we do encounter under capitalism are those in which labor takes place in a setting which overflows (albeit never fully) the exploitative logic of capital – e.g., home craft projects, sports, revolutionary militancy, parenting, etc.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American graduate student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, and early 19th century American socialism. His academic work has appeared in Critical Sociology, The Journal of American Socialist Studies, and Peace, Land, and Bread. Along with various editors from The Journal of American Socialist Studies, Carlos is currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism. His popular theoretical and political work has appeared in Monthly Review Online, CovertAction Magazine, The International Magazine, The Marx-Engels Institute of Peru, Countercurrents, Janata Weekly, Hampton Institute, Orinoco Tribune, Workers Today, Delinking, and in Midwestern Marx, which he co-founded and where he serves as an editorial board member. As a political analyst with a focus on Latin America (esp. Cuba) he has been interviewed by Russia Today and has appeared in dozens of radio interviews in the US and around the world.


References

[1] The article I am referring to is “A World-Historic Shift: Hegel, Marx, and Labor,” which is set to appear in the fifth issue of Peace, Land, and Bread.
[2] Hegel, Georg. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford, 1997), p. 114.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 115.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 117.
[7] Ibid., 118.
[8] Hegel, Georg. Philosophy of Right. (Oxford, 1978), p. 128.
[9] To be clear, I am referring to Value as Use-Value here.
[10] Ibid., 54.
[11] Ibid., 129.
[12] Ibid., 41.
[13] Ibid., 54.
[14] See note [i]

From Cruze to Cruise: False Consciousness and Dialectical Conflict in the GM Paradigm Shift

By Werner Lange

On Monday, November 26, General Motors publicly announced its decision to shut down all production at five major plants in 2019, including the sprawling Lordstown Assembly Plant in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, home of the Cruze model, and shift major investment to mass production of all-electric autonomous vehicles through its Cruise subsidiary, headquartered in California's Silicon Valley. This grand paradigm shift from traditional cars to autonomous ones marks a major change in GM operations, ones which will leave abandoned communities economically devastated and thousands of terminated workers financially paralyzed, while simultaneously paving a path toward zero-emission cars. Yet the resultant communal and private havoc imposed upon victimized communities will likely not lead, as it should, to a workers' revolt and political uprising; at least not in northeast Ohio. That disappointing but realistic projection is based upon the potency of widespread false consciousness among the masses, the seductive temptation of subscribing to false hopes, and the emergence of a new dialectical conflict uniting labor and management in an existential struggle against climate change.

November 26 marked the second Black Monday brutally imposed upon the Mahoning Valley located in the heart of de-industrialized America. The first one occurred in September 1977 when steel corporations precipitously closed several major plants in Youngstown, a catastrophic economic blow from which this once vibrant, but now largely impoverished, city has never substantially recovered. A similar fate of an accelerated decline now awaits Lordstown and surrounding communities like Newton Falls, my hometown for the past 30 years. During that time, despite sporadic sparks to the contrary, this part of America's broad Rust Belt has gotten collectively more rusted, but nevertheless reliably remained a Democratic stronghold - until 2016. The mass frustration of hard-pressed communities and working families stuck seemingly forever in economic stagnancy spilled over into a passionate desire for qualitative change during the last presidential election. Only one major-party candidate appeared in substance and style to offer qualitative change, whereas the other candidate, unlike her progressive opponent in the primary, painfully projected business as usual. After voting overwhelming by 23 points for Barack Obama in 2012, voters in Trumbull County, home to the Lordstown plant, gave a 6-point victory margin to Donald Trump in 2016. Revealingly, the only other Republican presidential candidate who won Trumbull County since 1960 was Richard Nixon in 1972. Masters of deceit have been able to occasionally tap into pervasive false consciousness within this largely working-class community, but never with the ferocity of the most recent presidential election. This, of course, comes as no surprise to progressive social thinkers familiar with the roots and consequences of false consciousness among labor and working-class communities.

The ability to successfully colonize the mind of the oppressed with the carefully construed values and deceitfully manipulated images of the oppressor characterizes all tyrannies to some extent. The cultural substrate for this common success of mass deception is based upon the objective reality that the ruling ideas of any stable society are the ideas of the rulers. Those who dominate a society economically also do so ideologically. It is their agents of socialization which substantively shape the mindset of the new generations, and it is their institutions which seek to sustain that self-defeating mindset throughout adulthood. Rebels are demonized, deviants dismissed, conformists applauded, and out-groups scapegoated. Fascists, in particular, are adept at creating and manipulating false consciousness and suppressing class consciousness. The very name of Hitler's fascist party, NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), for example, would have a bitterly frustrated and justifiably angry German citizen think the party promotes socialism and embraces the interests of the working class. Instead it routinely executed socialists (along with communists and many others), turned masses of workers into industrial slaves, and channeled mass frustration into displaced aggression against the vulnerable and marginalized Other. This repressive pattern is largely repeated in Trump's America with his regime's unbridled attacks upon immigrants and journalists, constant invocation of big lies, demonization of liberals, and conversion of the Republican Party, in substance, into what Noam Chomsky recently called "the most dangerous organization in human history." None of this would have been possible if class consciousness (instead of false consciousness) guided the behavior of America's working-class masses. In fact, the antithesis of the Trump regime would now be in power if the working class-in-itself would transform into a working class-for-itself, a work still in progress.

If false consciousness propelled the rise of the Trump regime and aided the fall of GM Lordstown, then false hope is designed to keep victimized workers and communities passive. The emergent false hope is not identical to the false promises made by Trump in his 2017 visit here, claiming the lost jobs were all coming back and "we're going to fill those factories back up." Everyone, except the hopelessly deluded, now knows that to be an outright lie. More pernicious is the emergent, projected hope for a new fossil-fueled product to be allocated to the soon-to-be-idled GM Lordstown plant sometime in late 2019. "Future products will be allocated to fewer plants next year," stated GM's CEO in officially designating the five targeted GM plants as "unallocated," but leaving the door theoretically open for one of the coming "five vehicle architectures" to resurrect perhaps one of these comatose plants back to full life, thus setting up a bitter competition in 2019 among the impacted communities to win this ephemeral prize. In anticipation of this divisive competition, the regional Chamber of Commerce launched its "Drive It Home" campaign, which, according to its website, is a "coalition of local businesses, community, religious leaders, consumers, and workers, as well as their families, coming together to urge GM to support growing their investment at the Lordstown Complex"… and to "create a positive environment and build good relations with local management." This is in stark contrast to the "labor-management wars of the late 60s and early 70s," as one current local UAW leader castigated the strikes, revolts, and progressive activism at Lordstown two generations ago.

Yet that is precisely the type of protest and activism now needed to avoid community devastation. After all, the dialectical conflict inherent to capitalist management-labor relations has lost none of its validity, despite loss of manifested vitality. Maximizing private profit inevitably translates into minimizing community needs; and expanding labor-created surplus value invariably comes at the expense of labor's necessary value. The objective interests of private capital and labor are not identical in the old industrial setting, regardless of projections to the contrary. To create a community-wide "positive environment" in begging GM for a new allocation is tantamount to suppression of any public criticism of the utter corporate greed driving its "vehicle portfolio optimization," as GM characterizes its termination of several models, including the Cruze. Silence in the face of this economic tyranny is the voice of complicity. On its knees begging for a second chance is not the proper posture of organized labor; but rather, it is firmly standing upright and fearlessly speaking truth to power and forcefully demanding justice. For starters, that demand entails full repayment of the $50-billion loan given GM in corporate welfare a decade ago - an outstanding bill of some $10 billion is still owed taxpayers. Better yet would be implementation of corporate alimony, a mandate requiring corporations to justly compensate communities they abandon after benefitting from decades of enrichment there. Yet, to date, not even a murmur along these lines; just a call from community leaders to be hopeful and quietly wait and pray for a miracle. A recipe for disaster.

However, beyond the viability of the labor-management dialectic, there is another dynamic at work in this transition from traditional cars to electric cars which deserves greater attention and analysis. We live in perilous times of grave existential threats to humanity from the growing challenge and increasingly devastating crisis of man-made climate change. The science on climate change is abundantly clear. Unless radical changes are globally and timely implemented to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep them exceedingly low, the very future of humanity and other life forms is at risk. This grave environmental crisis creates a new dialectic, one which supersedes and transcends the traditional labor-management one. Required in this dangerously new context is a paradigm shift of consciousness from conflicting class consciousness to harmonious covenantal mindsets within both labor and management and beyond, a unified humanity confronting a common existential threat. The thesis/affirmation of humanity and other life forms in covenantal union are contradicted by the antithesis/negation of climate change producers and deniers. Unlike the economic and particular labor-management dialectic, this new one is an existential and universal one. Whereas the former arrives at a synthesis of higher quality of life through class consciousness converting an objective class-in-itself to a subjective active class-for-itself, the current existential conflict encompasses all humanity - all classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures - on one side of this colossal dialectical conflict and climate changers on the other. Conflicting class relations in this new context are superseded by complementary covenantal relations, ones that unite labor and management as well as all humanity facing a common foe in climate change. That objective covenant-in-itself must be transformed into an active covenant-for-itself if the current existential crisis is to be overcome.

In that regard, General Motors is to be applauded for its explicit goal of zero emissions through its all-electric autonomous Cruise operations which are slated to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019. By 2023, GM intends to have at least 20 all-electric models on the market globally in paving the way toward a zero-emission future in the automobile industry. In direct contradiction to a zero-emission future, on the other hand, are potent political and economic forces bonded to fossil fuel extraction and consumption, like the Trump regime and mother earth frackers who foolishly promote the existential threat of climate change and thereby constitute the negation of this new dialectic. America's ruling class is clearly split on this question of energy options, and therein lies real hope for needed qualitative change. While the majority still favors and actively fosters fossil-fuel industries, a growing minority within corporate America, as evidenced by GM's embrace of a zero-emission future, has become enlightened to the urgent need for clean energy everywhere. That enlightenment must expand at all levels of our deeply divided society to ensure sheer survival, let alone safety and security. If and when this new global consciousness based on covenantal relations grips the mind of the masses along with the corporate and political power elite, climate change and global warming will not only be reduced; these existential threats will be negated altogether, and a new chapter in human history will open. The alternative is not only unacceptable, it is unthinkable.