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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2001Just off the press!
The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and
Marx
by Raya Dunayevskaya$25.95 Order from News & Letters, 36 S. Wabash, Room 1440, Chicago IL 60605 --- From the Introduction by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson I. The Present Moment Marx's oeuvre, which many had declared obsolete, has taken on new life at the
dawn of the twenty-first century because the strength of his critique of the
destructive power of capital is so missed. Today's unprecedented inequities in
wealth and power, accompanied by wrenching technological changes and
environmental havoc, as well as monopolization and social fragmentation, are
increasingly begetting the sense that the time has come to return to Marx. In a
process that conjures up the spirit of the dialectic itself, the very fact which
had been heralded as proving the death of Marx the universalization of capital,
as it invades every corner of the earth and all spheres of everyday life has led
workers as well as intellectuals, activists as well as academics, to look anew
at what Marx's work means for today. This is reflected in everything from
journalistic discourses on the need to face the specter of Marx to theoretical
analyses on the cogency of the Marxian critique of globalized capitalism.(1) The
more the globalization of capital spurs social dislocation and impoverishment,
the more we can expect such appraisals of Marx in the coming period. One surprising feature of much of the current return to Marx, however, is the
relative silence on Hegel and the dialectic. This attitude has developed despite
Marx's insistence in CAPITAL and other works that his method was at its core
dialectical and that Hegel's dialectic was for him "the source of all
dialectic."(2) For example, in his SPECTERS OF MARX, Jacques Derrida on the one hand terms
Marx's writings "urgent" for an understanding of today's globalized
capitalism, while on the other distances himself from the Hegelian dialectic,
which he calls an "onto-theology" and
"anthropo-theology."(3) From the vantage point of the Frankfurt
School, a tradition once rooted in a form of Hegelian Marxism, Jrgen Habermas
rejects the Hegelian dialectic as the remnant of a romantic idealist philosophy
of consciousness, and attacks Marx for remaining "tied to Hegelian
logic."(4) Even Moishe Postone, a Frankfurt-trained Critical Theorist who
has urged a return to Marx's critique of capital in order to comprehend the
present crisis, considers the Hegelian dialectic as little more than a
philosophical expression of the logic of capital.(5) At the same time, the present moment is rife with serious studies of Hegel by
non-Marxists. The past decade has experienced a veritable explosion of new works
on Hegel in the Anglo-American world, as seen in such recent books as H.S.
Harris's HEGEL'S LADDER, a 1,600-page study of Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND. On
a more modest, and yet significant level, new studies on Hegel by feminists,
especially those from a postmodernist background, have emerged.(6) Yet instead
of intersecting, the ongoing discussions of Hegel and Marx often appear as two
trains passing each other in the dead of night, very nearly unnoticed by one
another. Fredric Jameson has spoken to this problem: "This is a time when people no longer understand what dialectical
thinking is or why the dialectic came into being in the first place, when they
have abandoned the dialectical for less rewarding Nietzschean positions. So
there is certainly a need today for a revitalized vision of the dialectic. There
I would certainly not abandon Marx, but I would want to go back to Hegel for an
enlargement of the way we have normally understood Marx. This is not any
particularly new idea with me. Lenin had already said that no one could
understand Das Kapital who had not already worked his way through Hegel's logic.
. . . I think the coming years will show an unconscious need for the dialectic
which some of us on the left ought to have the mission to satisfy.(7)" The writings in this volume will, we hope, take us toward satisfying this
need. At each stage in the history of Marxism, revolutionaries and theorists
have felt the need to hew a path out of the seemingly insurmountable barriers
facing the radical movement by turning anew to Hegel. This was true of Lenin in
1914, when he responded to the collapse of established Marxism with the outbreak
of World War I by delving into Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC. It was true of such
diverse tendencies as the Frankfurt School and French neo-Marxists in the 1930s
and 1940s, who turned to Hegel in a period defined by fascism and the rise of
Stalinism. Likewise, in the 1950s, in the face of the new challenges posed by
the freedom struggles of the post-World War II era, Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87)
developed the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism through a direct encounter with
Hegel's dialectic. Dunayevskaya's life and work represent a rare combination of passionate
involvement in freedom struggles and intense philosophical exploration. Born in Ukraine in 1910, she immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, and by the
mid-1920s became involved in labor, socialist, and Black liberation movements.
After serving as secretary to Leon Trotsky in 1937-38, she broke with him at the
time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, and subsequently developed a theory of
state-capitalism. She argued that Roosevelt's New Deal, Hitler's Germany, and
especially Stalin's Russia, represented varieties of a new stage of global
capitalism, one in which the fetishism of state planning was paramount.(8) This
work soon brought her into a period of close collaboration with the Trinidadian
Marxist and cultural critic C.L.R. James. During the 1940s, she also engaged in
dialogue with a number of intellectuals of the anti-Stalinist left, such as
Meyer Schapiro, and became a sharp critic of those, such as the pragmatist
Sidney Hook, who strongly rejected Hegel as a reactionary thinker. By the mid-1950s, Dunayevskaya moved in a different direction from James, as
she developed a new position, rooted in a reexamination of the Hegelian
underpinnings of Marx's thought, which she soon termed Marxist-Humanism. In the late 1950s, she engaged in an extensive correspondence on dialectics
with the Critical Theorist, Herbert Marcuse, and, a bit later, with Erich Fromm,
another former Frankfurt School member.(9) In her MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958), to
which Marcuse contributed a critical preface, she included as appendices the
first English translations of major parts of Marx's 1844 ECONOMIC AND
PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS and of Lenin's PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS. In rethinking and extending Marx's humanist conceptions in light of the
contemporary struggles of rank-and-file labor, women's liberation, African
Americans, and youth from the 1950s to the 1980s, she developed an original
philosophy of liberation rooted in a continuous return to the Hegelian
dialectic. On the one hand, this entailed scathing critiques of anti-Hegelian
Marxists such as Louis Althusser, and on the other, more sympathetic but
nonetheless probing critiques of leading dialecticians, many of them Hegelian
Marxists, including Marcuse, Georg Lukcs, Karl Korsch, and Theodor Adorno. In
her later discussions of dialectics, she also gave prominence to what she
regarded as the highly original contributions of the African liberation theorist
Frantz Fanon and dissident East European Marxist humanists, as can especially be
seen in her PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION (1973) and ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S
LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION (1982). II. Contemporary Issues in Dialectical Philosophy The need to return to the Hegelian dialectic with new eyes is no less urgent
today, in light of the crisis confronting all liberation movements, whether of
workers, Blacks and other minorities, women, lesbians and gays, or youth. This
crisis is disclosed by the aborted and unfinished revolutions which have marked
this century, from Russia 1917 to Spain 1936, China 1949, and Cuba 1959, and
from Iran to Nicaragua to Grenada in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, the
experience of the Russian Revolution after 1917 suggests that even to BEGIN to
hew a path out of this crisis means confronting such questions as, what happens
AFTER the revolution? How can we ensure that a new form of totalitarianism or
bureaucracy will not once again take over after the collapse of the old order?
How can ending the division between mental and manual labor move from underlying
concept to social practice? Here is where Dunayevskaya's work as founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.
takes on special importance. Few thinkers in the revolutionary tradition have
focused as exhaustively on these issues as Dunayevskaya, especially on the need
to philosophically confront the question of what happens after the revolution.
And even fewer have done so by means of a new interpretation of Hegelian
dialectics. On the whole, radical interpreters of Hegel in this century have emphasized
such aspects of Hegel's thought as the master-slave dialectic and the unhappy
consciousness in the PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, or the concepts of essence,
negativity, or contradiction in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC. While Dunayevskaya also
addresses these issues, her core contribution to dialectics centers on what many
other Marxists have ignored or rejected Hegel's concept of absolute
negativity.(10) In Hegel, absolute negativity signifies not only the negation of
external obstacles, but also the negation of the earlier negation of them. The
power of negativity gets turned back upon the self, upon the internal as well as
external barriers to self-movement. Such a negation of the negation is no mere
nullity, for the positive is contained in the negative, which is the path to a
new beginning. One of Hegel's first references to absolute negativity in the Science of
Logic occurs during a critique of Spinoza's notion that "every
determination is a negation." Hegel considers such a stress on negativity
to be a great advance over previous positions. However, this advance is not
without contradiction and in Hegel's view has the drawback of dissolving into a
"formless abstraction," because this type of bare negativity lacks
determinateness.(11) At this point, Hegel goes beyond bare or first negativity
to what he calls second or absolute negativity, with the latter containing not
only a rejection of the old, but also the basis for a forward movement:
"But in all this, care must be taken to distinguish between the FIRST
negation as negation IN GENERAL, and the second negation, the negation of the
negation: the latter is concrete, absolute negativity, just as the former on the
contrary is only ABSTRACT negativity" (pp. 115-16). If the question of absolute negativity were exhausted here, in a more or less
formal process of the negation of the negation, there would be far less
controversy among radical interpreters of Hegel. For example, writing more than
a century ago, Friedrich Engels, whose studies of dialectics have formed the
basis of most orthodox Marxist discussions of the topic ever since, did at least
mention the negation of the negation. However, while extolling a formalized and
sometimes scientistic notion of negation of the negation, Engels also attacks
Hegel's Absolute Idea, which, he maintains, includes a notion of "the end
of history" in which "the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian
system is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical
method, which dissolves all that is dogmatic."(12) Thus, Engels mentions
the negation of the negation as a principle of the dialectic while attacking the
Absolute Idea as dogmatic and even reactionary. In contrast to Engels and most subsequent interpreters within the Marxist
tradition, Dunayevskaya finds extremely important insights for a dialectics of
liberation in Hegel's Absolutes, which Hegel develops in the concluding chapters
of his major works. In so doing, she focuses on the chapters on Absolute
Knowledge in the PHENOMENOLOGY the Absolute Idea in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, and
the Absolute Mind in the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. Hegel's Absolutes have been frequently dismissed not only as dogmatic, but
also as closed ontology. These are interpretations which, as Dunayevskaya argues
in many of the selections in this volume, are hard to maintain once one examines
Hegel's actual texts. This can be seen from a few representative passages from
the chapter on the Absolute Idea with which Hegel concludes the Science of
Logic. Hegel begins his discussion by stating that the Absolute Idea is
"the identity of the theoretical and the practical idea," thereby
holding to a notion of practice as well as of theory at the very point where
some have seen only a flight into an abstract universal. A few lines further in
this same passage, Hegel also writes that "the Absolute Idea...contains
within itself the highest degree of opposition" (p. 824). Here, at least,
Hegel rejects the notion of an oppositionless totality which has absorbed all
negativity and particularity, as is so often charged. Some pages later, at the conclusion of the chapter, Hegel writes of the
Absolute Idea as an "absolute liberation," as a dialectic of freedom
in which "no transition takes place" (p. 843). The human spirit now
moves toward liberation, having already worked through the myriad obstacles
which lay in wait for freedom in the previous 800 pages of his work. Dunayevskaya's focus on Hegel's Absolutes countered the traditional Marxist
view of them as a closed ontology in which all particularities and difference
are effaced in the name of an abstract unity. As early as her initial studies on
dialectics in the late 1940s, she emphasized the sheer genius of [Hegel's]
language which defines identity as unseparated difference (see the appendix to
this volume, part 4). Nor was she attracted to Hegel's Absolutes out of an affinity with Lukcs's
emphasis on totality. Throughout her work, from her Letters on Hegel's Absolutes
of 1953 through MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958), PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION (1973) and
ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION (1982),
she saw in Hegel's Absolutes the categories of freedom, of subjectivity, of
reason, the logic of a movement by which humanity makes itself free. As she put
it in chapter 1 of PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, her most sustained and important
discussion of Hegel, "Precisely where Hegel sounds most abstract, seems to close the shutters
tight against the whole movement of history, there he lets the lifeblood of the
dialectic absolute negativity pour in. It is true that Hegel writes as if the
resolution of opposing live forces can be overcome by a mere thought
transcendence. But he has, by bringing oppositions to their most logical
extreme, opened new paths, a new relationship of theory t o practice, which Marx
worked out as a totally new relationship of philosophy to revolution. Today's
revolutionaries turn their backs on this at their peril" (p. 34). (To be continued next issue) NOTES 1. The protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the end of
1999, and the demonstrations in Washington, D.C. against the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank in April 2000, have proved of special importance in
having many turn with new eyes to Marx's critique of capital. 2. Karl Marx, CAPITAL, Vol. I, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Pelican, 1976),
pp. 102, 744. 3. Jacques Derrida, SPECTERS OF MARX, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York:
Routledge, 1993), pp. 13, 144. 4. Jrgen Habermas, THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION, Vol. 2, trans. by
Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987), p. 338. 5. Moishe Postone, TIME, LABOR, AND SOCIAL DOMINATION (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993). 6. See especially Dianne Coole, NEGATIVITY AND POLITICS (London: Routledge,
2000); Judith Butler's Introduction to a new edition of SUBJECTS OF DESIRE:
HEGELIAN REFLECTIONS IN 20TH CENTURY FRANCE (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999); and Toula Nicolapoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, HEGEL AND THE
LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF LOVE (London: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999). 7. Interview with Fredric Jameson, LUKCS AFTER COMMUNIISM, INTERVIEWS WITH
CONTEMPORARY INTELLECTUALS, in Eva L. Corredor (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1997), p. 93. We should add that in works such as DIALECTICAL
INVESTIGATIONS (New York: Routledge, 1993), Bertell Ollman has steadfastly
defended the dialectical core of Marxism throughout the recent period, often in
the face of sharp opposition to dialectical thought. 8. Many of these writings have been recently published in THE
MARXIST-HUMANIST THEORY OF STATE-CAPITALISM: SELECTED WRITINGS BY RAYA
DUNAYEVSKAYA (Chicago: News and Letters, 1992), with an Introduction by Peter
Hudis. 9. Some of her correspondence with James, Marcuse, and Fromm is included in
this volume. Most of her other correspondence and writings have been gathered in
THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION: MARXIST-HUMANISMÑA HALF-CENTURY OF ITS WORLD
DEVELOPMENT, on deposit at Wayne State University Archives of Labor History and
Urban Affairs in Detroit, Michigan. 10. For some discussions of Dunayevskaya's standpoint on Hegel, see Patricia
Altenbernd Johnson, Women's Liberation: Following Dunayevskaya in Practicing
Dialectics,Ó QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IDEOLOGY, Vol. 13: 4 (1989), pp. 65-74;
Thomas M. Jeannot, Raya Dunayevskaya's Conception of Ultimate Reality and
Meaning, JOURNAL OF ULTIMATE REALITY AND MEANING, Vol. 22:4 (1999), pp. 276-93.
See also the entry for Dunayevskaya in WOMEN BUILDING CHICAGO, 1790-1990: A
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY, ed. by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 11. G. W. F. Hegel, SCIENCE OF LOGIC, trans. by A. V. Miller (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1969), p. 113. Subsequent pages references are directly in the
text. 12. Engels, LUDWIG FEUERBACK AND THE END OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY,
Marx-Engels COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1990),
pp. 360-61. |
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