"This slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner. It is by becoming a private property-owner that the Greek Master, a citizen of the City, becomes a peaceful Roman Bourgeois, a subject of the Emperor, who himself is but a Bourgeois, a private property-owner, whose Empire is his patrimony. And it is also in relation to private property that the freeing of the Slaves is carried out; the become property-owners, Bourgeois, like their ex-masters."Now in the Hegelian conception of work can truly be Work, a specifically human Action, only on the condition that it be carried out in relation to an idea (a 'project')--that is, in relation to something other than the given, and in particular, other than the given that the worker himself is.
"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital.
"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)"
(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)
"...the essence of [Capital] is by no means anything [Capitalistic]. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of [Capital] so long as we merely conceive and push forward [Capitalism], put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to [Capital], whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of [Capital]."
"In what follows we shall be questioning concerning [Capital]. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning [Capital], and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of [Capital]."
(Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology)"In what follows we shall be questioning concerning [Capital]. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning [Capital], and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of [Capital]."
