Some Passing Remarks on the ‘New’ Hegelian Marxism

It will be clear from the foregoing discussion that what Marx calls Hegel’s ‘Umkehrung’ of subject and predicate is also indeed supposed to be a ‘Yerkehrung’ of the same: a ‘reversal’ which disturbs the rational content of the subject-predicate relation, hence an ‘inversion’. Indeed, in order to lay stress on the point, Marx employs the verymetaphor which would later acquire such fame through its occurrence in his 1873 ‘Afterword’. ‘It is self-evident,’ he writes, ‘The true way is turned upside-down [wird auf den Kopf gestellt - literally: ‘is put on its head’]’ (CHDS, 99-100/242). The puzzle which Marx’s 1843 Critique presents for us here, however, is that it is manifestly the very same Yerkehrung of ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ to which Marx yet again alludes in ‘the Value-form’. But in ‘the Value-form*, it would seemthat the ‘Yerkehrung’ is no longer to be regarded as the spurious product of a mystifying theoretical treatment, but rather as pertaining to the real nature of the object itself under consideration. Must we conclude, then, that the mature Marx had come to accept as legitimate the very inversion which he once expended such energies to expose as, so to say, the mystical kernel of all of Hegel’s mysticism in his outhful critique?