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Dr. S.:

I think the short answer is: yes. There's little question that Heidegger was both an arch-conservative German nationalist and an authoritarian elitist, however one reads the details and extent of his involvement with the Nazis. He clearly conflated "Americanism" and "Sovietism" as two variants of technological mass society, counterposed to the bearers of German/European historical tradition, quite reductively, though the basic reduction was of the "ontic" to the "ontological", with a corresponding refusal to countenance the significance of any merely "ontic" difference. Similarly, "internationalism" would be associated with "universal" humanity, as an ideal of both Christianity and the Enlightenment, Hiedegger's scepticism toward which I think has both a nefarious and a critical side.

As to the topic of Marx and Heidegger, I think that there is a "real", but missed relation/clash between the two thinkings by virtue of both occupying, in implicit rivalry, some of the same ground. Certainly, the refusal of a Heideggerian such as Arendt to acknowledge any other possibility of interpreting Marx' thought than the "official" one of Engels is symptomatic of a strain, though she does raise some telling points, even as they betray unacknowledged influence. There's little doubt in my mind that Marx is to be interpreted as deriving the main elements of his thinking from Hegel throughout. But part of the problem is that he never fully spelled out his critique of Hegel, (as oppsed to polemicizing with Left Hegelians, against which he retrieved and deployed Hegelian positions), before taking up political economy, which move had already been prepared, unbeknownst to him, in Hegel's Jena manuscripts. As such, it's never entirely clear just what a "dialectical materialism" might be and what its philosophical status is. But a couple things nonetheless are clear. For one, Marx claimed to step beyond philosophy, while "realizing" it through a practical intention, such that the distinction between appearance and essence is to be overcome through a projection of activity, (only to reappear in "Capital" as the distinction between the fetishism of appearances and the "essence" of the value-realizing process). The other is that his "materialist" turn implicates a priority of being over consciousness and ties the "objectification" of thought and activity to an underlying basis in "the human metabolism with nature", as opposed to sublimating into and retracting it into an idealist conception of "mind". Both features, the stepping beyond philosophy and the priority of being, with its extra-human roots, over consciousness and thought, bear comparison with Heidegger's conception of Being. And, on Heidegger's own interpretation, after all, it was in Hegel's philosophy that the horizon of Being as such, in contrast to the being of beings, first becomes manifest, if not yet thinkable.

So there's a rather complex tangle between the two, Marx and Heidegger, inspite of their obviously opposed political orientations. Marx can not quite be subsumed under Hegel, with labor/production simply being a variant of constitutive subjectivity, if only because he shows how subjectivity/thought must become thoroughly entangled and alienated in its own constitutive conditions. And if Marx does postulate an eventual overcoming of that entanglement through further historical developments and the emergent conscious activity of the class-conscious revolutionary proletariat, that is not through a return to the "original" representation of subjectivity, but rather through the emergence of a new collective form of "subjectivity" under radically transformed conditions, that is, not through the re-gathering of subjectivity qua conscious activity from without the value-process, as its hidden "essence", but rather through the overcoming/abolition of the value-process itself. On the other hand, Marx clearly does project Hegelian-rationalist identities onto futural history, with the projected demise of capitalism being by the very same coin the emergence of its proletarian successor, as if that could be a matter of dialectical-conceptual conjuration, without thinking through, as well, the political-institutional forms of any new order. And he clearly endorses the growth of technological means and scientific rationality, inspite of their alienating and dislocative effects, without specifying their limit or measure, nor indicating how they could be brought under deliberative control. In those respects, Heidegger thinking of "the ontological difference", whatever its own defaults, poses a challenge to Marx.

I didn't find Eldred's merging of Heidegger and Marx altogether convincing. For one thing, I don't see how an altered thinking/attitude toward our technologized, capitalistic world would be of much avail in disentangling ourselves from its problems and conundrums. For another, I don't think his view of the LTV as primarily a determination of prices holds much water. Rather "Capital" was subtitled "Critique of Bourgeois Political Economy". The LTV was, in the first place, an explication of the historical conditions of possibility of capitalist production/value-form and, in the second place, an explication of that value-realizing process in terms of its long-run disequilibriating tendencies. Its whole point is to attempt to show the way to the overcoming of the value-realization process, not to rationalize its equilibria. And certainly, in showing forth the centrality of the labor/capital relation to the capitalist value-form, with the distributional conflicts over the surplus-product and the extraction of surplus-value, Marx fully realized that labor was being turned into capital and that capital would increasingly take on technologically innovative forms. The point was not a fundamentalistic reduction of all "value" to labor, but rather Marx saw the technological dynamism of capitalism, together with its distribution problems as a "ruse of reason". Just as Heidegger's "Gestell" is meant to show forth the non-technological "essence" of technology, the LTV and the associated analysis of the value-form is intended to show the non-economic "essence" of political economy. That at least should put to rest any purely economistic readings of Marx, as utterly non-philosophical. (And while it's true that for purposes of purely economic analysis, one needs to know the differential costs of production rather than labor-values, the famous "transformation problem" that Marx himself clearly recognized without adequately solving, the neo-classical economists who attributed the problem to him by way of refutation assumed a re-normalization of values with each production period as at equilibrium, an assumption that Marx was deliberately not making, since he was analysing long-run disequilibriating tendencies, such that the neo-classicals were, in fact, guilty of double-counting.)

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