ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the transformation of the employment contract in Capital, and points to the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegelian motifs Karl Marx used to isolate and examine the change. The most striking instance of this is the transformation of the employment contract. The stages of contract resemble the movement in the Hegelian concept of property from taking possession, to use, and alienation. The transformation of contract has historical and organizational dimensions, as well as the theoretical one. Metamorphosis of the wage contract is intimately connected with changes in workplace organization. Use coincides with Marx’s second stage of the wage bargain— “the dialectical inversion” of contract. Marx’s model provided an opening for his discussion of the growth of working class consciousness and something like a theory of corporations and the welfare state. Marx’s use of Hegelian categories in the transmutation of contract clearly reveals the revolutionary implications of “piecemeal” government reform.
