ABSTRACT
THE FOUNDATIONS of Marxist politics are to be found simultaneously in the inductive analysis of the economic process and in a certain intuition of man and the relations between men. “To be radical,” says Marx in a well-known passage, “is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself.” 1 Marx’s innovation does not lie in the reduction of philosophical and human problems to problems of economics but in drawing from economics the real equivalents of these questions. It has been remarked without paradox that Capital is a concrete Phenomenology of Mind, that is to say, that it is inseparably concerned with the working of the economy and the realization of man. The point of connection between these two problem areas lies in the Hegelian idea that every system of production and property implies a system of relations between men such that their social relations become imprinted upon their relations to nature, and these in turn imprint upon their social relations. There can be no definitive understanding of the whole import of Marxist politics without going back to Hegel’s description of the fundamental relations between men.
