June, 1999

Philosophic Dialogue: "Dialectics of revolution for the here and now"

Editor's note: As part of our effort to stimulate new discussion of dialectical philosophy, the last four issues of NEWS & LETTERS presented a detailed commentary on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC written in 1961 by Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism. These notes served as an anchor for a series of classes on "The Dialectic of Marx's CAPITAL and Today's Global Crisis" held nationwide by News and Letters Committees, which have just concluded. To continue this discussion, we print below excerpts from presentations given in three of those classes and invite your response. We hope to present excerpts from other presentations in future issues.

From class 1: Marx's Re-creation of Hegel's Dialectic

In her majestic discussion of Marx's CAPITAL in chapter 10 of ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, Raya Dunayevskaya wrote, "[Its] dialectic is totally new, totally internal, deeper than ever was the Hegelian dialectic which had dehumanized the self-development of humanity in the dialectic of consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason."

Before we rush to conclude that Marx therefore left Hegel behind with the completion of his greatest theoretical work, we should consider the next sentence, which says: "Marx could transcend the Hegelian dialectic not by denying that it was 'the source of all dialectic'; rather, it was precisely because he began with that source that he could make the leap to the live Subject" (p. 143).

CAPITAL is Marx's full break with Hegel, since unlike the GRUNDRISSE or CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY it fully integrates the human subject into his theoretic categories. Yet it isn't as if Marx caught the Subject and only afterwards was able to grasp the importance of Hegel. On the contrary, his deep rootedness in Hegel's dialectic enabled Marx "to make the leap to the live Subject."

To help elucidate this, I'd like to note several ways in which Hegel's work directly impacted the writing of CAPITAL (this list is by no means exhaustive!).

One is the concept of the unity of opposites. It is expressed in Hegel's notion that identity is the identity of identity and non-identity. This head-splitting notion underlies Marx's entire discussion of the dual nature of capitalist production. The commodity is the unity-in-difference of use-value/exchange-value; labor is the unity-in-difference of concrete labor/abstract labor; capital is the unity-in-difference of variable capital/constant capital, etc. These opposites do not lie side-by-side; they are mutually exclusive poles of the same relation. Without Hegel's LOGIC, it is impossible to fully grasp Marx's use of these categories.

Two is the notion of appearance as containing the necessity or show of essence. This is central to Hegel's LOGIC. Unlike Descartes, for whom appearance is peeled away to reveal the underlying essence, Hegel emphasizes the objectivity of appearance, i.e., THAT ESSENCE TOO MUST APPEAR. This is central to Marx as well. He shows that value is abstract, has "absolutely no connection" with the physical properties of objects; and yet, value must show itself through a relation between these objects. It is impossible to fully unravel this relation of appearance and essence, which is central to chapter 1 of CAPITAL, without Hegel's LOGIC.

Three is the notion of concrete existence as the mode of expression of the abstract universal. Marx was sharply critical of Hegel in his 1844 Manuscripts for treating the concrete as a mere vehicle for the abstract universal. Yet in CAPITAL he utilizes this notion to express the nature of the value-form.

Concrete use-values, he shows, become mere modes of expression for the substance of value, abstract labor. Marx writes, "This inversion whereby the sensibly concrete counts only as appearance-form of the abstractly-universal, and it is not to the contrary that the abstractly-universal counts as property of the concrete—this inversion characterizes the value-expression. At the same time it renders difficult its comprehension."

Dunayevskaya made a point closely related to this in the first part of her "Rough Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC" [see News & Letters, Jan./Feb. 1999] in quoting Lenin's statement that "the general exists only in the singular and through the singular." This is what happens to the value-form of a product of labor under capitalism. The general, value, exists only through the singular, in the relation between particular use-values, just as these singular use-values "exist only in the connection that leads to the general" form of value.

Four, and most important, is the centrality of the notion, the realm of subjectivity and freedom, in delineating the logical categories. This is central to Hegel. The Doctrine of the Notion, the realm of subjectivity or freedom, is not simply the conclusion of his LOGIC; it is intimated in its very originating principle. As he put it in the PHENOMENOLOGY, "Every beginning must be made with the Absolute, though it is Absolute only in its completion."

This is the approach Marx follows in CAPITAL, by bringing in the realm of subjectivity or freedom—the notion of freely associated labor—right in chapter 1. This is no mere add-on or external addition. Envisioning the new society is essential in order to see through the perverse nature of value production itself. In making the Doctrine of the Notion integral from its first chapter, CAPITAL becomes no mere delineation of a logic of domination, but rather the expression of a philosophy of liberation.

—Peter Hudis

From class 2: The Phenomenon of Capitalism: The Commodity-Form

In 1914, Lenin wrote that one could not understand CAPITAL without studying the whole of Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC. Most post-Marx Marxists have at best looked at being and essence in CAPITAL, but not at how the third book of Hegel's LOGIC, the subjective logic or the notion with its logic of freedom, relates to Marx.

Although the context was a letter trying to convince a youth to study the whole of Hegel, Engels probably started us down this road when he wrote: "If you compare development from commodity to capital in Marx with development from being to essence in Hegel you have a fairly good parallel" (letter of Nov. 1, 1891 to Conrad Schmidt).

As post-Marx Marxism elaborated this, Marx in Vol. I of CAPITAL supposedly discusses the surface level of the market in the first chapter, but then exposes it as false by pointing to the underlying production relations that are the true essence of capitalism, all developed in the rest of the book. However, this leaves out the subjective or notional side, the fact that the worker not only suffers, but also struggles to be free. This is the element that emerges forcefully already in chapter 1, in Marx's discussion of freely associated labor as the future in the present. Contra Engels, this is not only being and essence, but also notion.

In his preface to the most recent translation of Vol. I, the Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel stumbles over this very point, reducing our goal to "capitalism's replacement by a classless society of associated producers" (p. 86). Raya Dunayevskaya catches him, writing that in refusing to write "freely associated" as had Marx, Mandel here "perverts the whole concept of freedom" (MARX'S CAPITAL AND TODAY'S GLOBAL CRISIS, p. 18). This is not unrelated to the fact that for Mandel, a collectivist totalitarian society like Stalinist Russia, with its associated but hardly free labor, was superior to private capitalism, while to a Marxist-Humanist such state-capitalism has no advantages over the other kind.

There's another reason not to rush to essence, however, which is that being or phenomenon, as Dunayevskaya warns us repeatedly in her notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC, should not be dismissed. This is key because when human relations appear as relations between things, this is not a false appearance that hides the truth. Instead and more ominously, it is an appearance that reflects essence, for as Marx writes, that is what human relations under capitalism really are.

Only freely associated labor, he writes, can break that up and remove the veil and the oppression of the fetishism of commodities. Only then will human relationships be one of a free association while simultaneously becoming transparent and clear once again. The fetish imprisons even the theoretician who opposes capitalism, he implies.

Yet isn't Marx also implying here that he, a theoretician and not a worker, has penetrated the fetish, not by participating in an experiment in freely associated labor like a worker inside the Paris Commune, but through the power of abstraction, through his historical and dialectical analysis of capitalism?

And once Marx has published this in CAPITAL cannot others therefore gain those same insights by studying it, as we are doing? Through doing that, don't we begin to reach the point where, as Raya Dunayevskaya puts it, "thought molds experience" in a way that "determines" experience (PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, p. 13)? Doesn't this allow us to penetrate the fetish, since Marx's dialectical thought, once we embrace it, is now molding our experience in a new way? Won't that give direction to the activity not only of intellectuals and youth, but also of workers?

—Kevin Anderson

From class 3: The Essence of Capitalism: The Labor Process

It is only by descending into the production process that Marx is able to go beyond the REFLECTION of the form of value as exchange value to the essence and form of value itself.

In the labor process, labor's twofold character presents itself first as a certain quality and the expenditure of a certain quantity of labor. By the expenditure of a certain quantity of labor, measured by the socially necessary labor time of the factory clock, a new amount of value is added to the products of labor; at the same time, by its qualitative property as a particular kind of labor, "the original values of the means of production are preserved in the product" (CAPITAL, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, p. 309).

The powerful duality in this is that labor as MEDIATION in the process of production between the objects of production and the products of production is also, or for that very reason, the key to establishing new social relations.

As Dunayevskaya noted in a Feb. 25, 1949 letter to C.L.R. James on Hegel's category of law in the Doctrine of Essence: "law in the sense in which Marx uses 'absolute general law'... can only be abrogated by the mediation of the proletariat establishing different social relations" (THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 1600).

It is essential to stress this dual aspect of labor, i.e., as what at once creates, transfers, and preserves value, and what, for that very reason, can abrogate the LAW of value and the general law of accumulation. Thus, it is not just that Marx split the category of labor, but that lodged within that duality is the revolutionary impulse to tear-up the value form by its roots. That is so whether the revolt is at the point of production, or is against the exploitative manifestations of the value form outside of production, as in the case of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion.

Of Hegel's dialectic in the Doctrine of Essence, Raya says, "What a dialectician that Hegel was; nothing else can explain the sheer genius of that man's language which defines identity as 'unseparated difference and now as he enters Actuality and totality asserts that totality is found as SUNDERED COMPLETENESS'" (RDC, 1601). This speculative standpoint needed to hold contradictory determinations together as one is evident in the following formulation by Marx: "...the two properties of labor, by virtue of which it is enabled in one case to preserve value and in the other to create value, within the same indivisible process are different in their very essence" (CAPITAL, p. 309).

Philosophically speaking, what is important is that while Hegel's concepts of identity and totality are found in the the Doctrine of Essence of his SCIENCE OF LOGIC, his speculative grasp of them transfers them to the Doctrine of the Notion. Likewise, we also see that insofar as Marx grasps the inseparability of value preserved and value added to the products of labor as directly proportional to each other, he has comprehended the unity of concrete and abstract labor, i.e., the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the labor process, and of the relation of subject to object that becomes perverted under the relentless regimen of the factory clock.

This, in embryo, is Marx's notion of surplus-value. When Marx's concept of surplus-value does appear full-blown in the production Process, it is as the "Rate of Surplus Value" which is equally the "Degree of Exploitation of labor-power" (p. 320). In other words, surplus-value is from its first appearance in the production process a result achieved through the perversion of the labor process, that of the relationship of subject to object.

—Lou Turner