"The freedom conquered by the slave is not his elevation to the status of a new master"

From Hegel to Marx on emancipation beyond modern normativity

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the alternative interpretation of Hegel's theory of recognition offered by Susan Buck-Morss and endorsed by Vladimir Safatle. The main objective is to answer to what extent some of the aspects highlighted by this interpretation – which points out to the limits of modern principles and institutions – reappear in Marx's critique, specifically in his critique of the conception of modern property represented by a political economy that is incapable of seeing the contradictory nature of a movement necessarily linked to the phenomena of domination and exploitation ultimately marking the alienating and fetishizing aspect of the capitalist market economy. To place the need of overcoming slavery in Hegel’s time, i.e. the modern one, at the center of the discussion on recognition implies calling into question what Ludwig Siep calls the “Project of Modernity” (das Projekt der Moderne). Presupposing, as Safatle warns, a hegemonic conception of emancipation and a metaphysics that is inherent to it, this project places a strong emphasis on principles, rights, and institutions which, in Marx's conception, serve as a condition for the systematic reproduction of modern relations of domination and, consequently, a constant denial of true emancipation. Although Hegel himself criticizes the “Project of Modernity” by pointing out its limitations regarding the recognition of the person and in guaranteeing rights in purely juridical terms (which are constitutive of abstract freedom), he nevertheless advocates that the claims emerging from the jusnaturalist tradition should be integrated, as one of its essential moments, with the demands for a broader concept of freedom, which, in his Philosophy of Right, he calls, in the context of a modern ethical life, “concrete freedom”. Marx, however, radically opposing Hegel's position, will show how the problem of recognizing the individual as a person and the right to property does not consist of its one-sidedness, to be solved by integrating it into a broader notion of emancipation. Instead, the problem lies in the very meaning of modern property as the direct antithesis of property based on one's own labor, which “grows only on its tomb” through a systematic movement of expropriation.