Hegel was the first to see the “natural” movement from the individualistic society of liberal capitalism to the authoritarian state in all its basic implications. Therefore, the analysis of the dialectic of the subject and object of conscious regulation of social processes starts with Hegel’s results. Marx’s critique of Hegel provides the second step. It is based on the critique of the state itself.

Addendum I (June 27, 1979)

An adequate theory of the party-state, that is, a theory of the party in the post-revolutionary context, is still lacking. For that purpose we need an adequate critique of Lenin’s theory of the party, as well as a critique of its variants, provided by Lukács, Gramsci, and others. That may also require a re-examination of the very foundation of Lenin’s theory—the concept of organization as the mediation of theory and practice. And finally, that may lead us to the critique of the concept fundamental to both Hegel and Marx—the concept of conscious regulation of social processes, which underlies all the relevant paradigms of socialist planning. In other words, it is conceivable that we are still enslaved by the remnants of the concept of reason passed down to us by the Enlightenment, where the associated concept of freedom has always been understood in an instrumental fashion, at best as a bonus for good behavior, but still in terms of the calculus of pleasure and pain, as Jevons would put it.

Addendum II (January 26, 1998)

A world economy would also be possible with such distant perspectives that all its individual demands might seem unjust and arbitrary at the moment.

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 490.