The concept of appearance in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence

Abstract

The present paper relates the concept of appearance in Marx’s critique of political economy to “The Doctrine of Essence” of Hegel’s Science of Logic. After presenting some methodological questions and Marx’s project from the categories of fetishism and mystification as forms of appearance, the reading of Marx’s critique of political economy is carried out along the three sections of the Wesenslogik: shine, appearance and actuality. Modern society will appear as a totality that produces its inverted representation, apprehended in successive increasingly concrete determinations, from the sphere of circulation, value, money and capital to the derived forms of surplus value and the system of appearance in the Trinity Formula. Finally, some questions on critique and system are raised.