www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Just 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 (continued from last issue) Dunayevskaya's interpretation
[of Hegel's dialectic] diverges in important ways from those of other Hegelian
Marxists, such as Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse. As will be seen in one of the
selections in this volume, Dunayevskaya applauds Lukács' argument in HISTORY
AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS (1923) that the dialectic is the core of Marxism, but
she also critiques his theory of reification. In THE YOUNG HEGEL (1948), Lukács,
like Dunayevskaya, writes with respect to Absolute Knowledge in Hegel's
PHENOMENOLOGY that "it would be quite mistaken to see the 'absolute spirit'
as nothing but mysticism."(1) Here, as elsewhere in his work, Lukács
connects Hegel's writings to the historical and social reality of his time.
However, Lukács in the end dismisses Absolute Knowledge as a type of flight
from objective reality which cannot serve as a source for the further
development of Marxist dialectics: "Absolute Knowledge, Hegel's designation
for the highest stage of human knowledge, has a definite idealistic
significance: the reintegration of 'externalized' reality into the subject, i.e.
the total supersession of the objective world."(2) In his REASON AND REVOLUTION
(1941), Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse, also like Dunayevskaya,
stresses the revolutionary character of Hegel's dialectic, especially the
concept of negativity: "Hegel's philosophy is indeed what the subsequent
reaction termed it, a negative philosophy. It is originally motivated by the
conviction that the given facts that appear to common sense as the positive
index of truth are in reality the negation of truth, so that truth can only be
established by their destruction."(3) At the level of the Absolute Idea,
which Marcuse holds to be a "totality," he concedes that the Absolute
is also "dialectical thought and thus contains its negation, it is not a
harmonious and stable form but a process of unification of opposites." However, what he ultimately
stresses with regard to the Absolute is what he sees as its totalizing moment,
wherein "all negativity is overcome."(4) Dunayevskaya's debates with
Marcuse on these issues can be found in a number of the selections for this
volume, which include several letters which form part of the extensive
Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence. Dunayevskaya’s emphasis on
the liberatory dimension of Hegel’s dialectic underlines her similarities as
well as differences with other thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno, also of the
Frankfurt School. Adorno affirmed the liberatory character of Hegel’s overall
philosophy, writing in his "Aspects of Hegel's Philosophy" (1957),
“In Hegel reason finds itself constellated with freedom. Freedom and reason
are nonsense without one another. The real can be considered rational only
insofar as the idea of freedom, that is, human beings’ genuine
self-determination, shines through it.”(5) As against those who contend
that Hegel’s dialectic ignores the actual and leaves it as mere notion of
freedom, Adorno argued that Hegel “accomplishes the opposite as well, an
insight into the subject as a self-manifesting objectivity” (p. 7). Yet Adorno parted company with
Hegel when it came to the concept of absolute negativity. Adorno, who sought to
expunge the affirmative character of Hegel's dialectic, went so far as to link
absolute negativity to Nazi genocide! In the midst of a discussion of the
horrors of Auschwitz and its implications for philosophy in NEGATIVE DIALECTICS
(1966), Adorno writes: "Absolute negativity is in plain sight and ceased to
surprise anyone."(6) On the basis of her own reading of Hegel's SCIENCE OF
LOGIC, Dunayevskaya attacks this view, terming it a "vulgar reduction of
absolute negativity" (see this volume, Part 4). Adorno contended in
"Aspects of Hegel's Philosophy" that Hegel’s Absolutes “dissolve
anything not proper to consciousness” by reducing all existence to the
self-movement of the absolute subject. By holding fast to idealism, he said,
Hegel’s Absolutes invoke a totalizing subject which swallows up the actual.
This, Adorno argued, bears a striking resemblance to what Marx conceptualizes as
alienated labor. Just as Reason in Hegel subsumes all otherness into the
self-movement of the concept, so the labor process in capitalism subsumes all
human and natural contingency into the movement of mechanized, abstract labor. According to Adorno, “In
Hegel, abstract labor takes on magical form. . . . The self-forgetfulness of
production, the insatiable and destructive expansive principle of the exchange
society, is reflected in Hegelian metaphysics. It describes the way the world
actually is” (p. 44)—but not, as in Marx, the way it can be transformed. This notion that Hegel’s
Absolutes provide, at best, a philosophical gloss for the self-expansive power
of the capitalist production process, rather than, as Dunayevskaya contends, the
ground for a philosophy of human emancipation, is shared in different ways by a
wide variety of contemporary thinkers, including Jürgen Habermas, Gilés
Deleuze and Tony Negri, Moishe Postone and István Mészáros.(7) Another challenge to the
concept of absolute negativity has come from Jacques Derrida’s
deconstructionism. To be sure, Derrida has acknowledged Hegel’s creation of an
“immense revolution” in philosophy “in taking the negative seriously,”
and has even tried to ground his concept of DIFFÉRANCE in Hegel’s affirmation
of the inseparability of identity and difference in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC.(8) Yet Derrida argues that the
self-activating power of absolute negativity means that “the concept of a
general heterogeneity is impossible” in Hegel. As Derrida sees it, Hegel’s
Absolutes “determine difference as contradiction, only in order to resolve it,
to interiorize it, to lift it up . . . into the self-presence of an
onto-theological or onto-teleological synthesis.”(9) He therefore calls for a
total “break with the system of AUFHEBUNG [transcendence] and with speculative
dialectics.” Even more problematically, he
has argued that such an “absolute break” with Hegel also characterizes Marx:
“Marx [in his 1844 critique of Hegel] then sets out the critical moment of
Feuerbach and in its most operative stance: the questioning of the AUFHEBUNG and
of the negation of the negation. The absolute positive...hence must not pass
through the negation of the negation, the Hegelian AUFHEBUNG ...”(10) We need to underscore that
Adorno’s and Derrida’s characterizations of Hegel’s concept of negativity,
especially absolute negativity, are in our view quite different from those of
Marx. It is true that Marx took sharp exception to Hegel, in his 1844
“Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” and elsewhere, for dehumanizing the
Idea by treating it as stages of disembodied consciousness instead of that of
live men and women. As a result, Marx argued, Hegel’s philosophy ends in a
series of absolutes which elevate the abstract at the expense of life itself.
For this reason he called Hegel’s LOGIC “the money of the Spirit.”(11) Yet
this did not mean that he followed Feuerbach in rejecting “the negation of the
negation” and Hegel’s Absolutes as a mere idealist delusion. Nor, like Adorno, did he view
Hegel’s concept of dialectical self-movement as simply expressing the
self-expansive power of capitalism. To be sure, Marx critiqued the way capital
takes on a life of its own and becomes self-determining. He did not, however,
limit the concept of self-determination to that of capital. Quite the contrary.
For Marx the subjective struggle of the workers is capable of attaining a
liberatory, HUMAN self-determination, by experiencing the dialectic of absolute
negativity. Marx broke this down concretely
in his 1844 ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS by showing that the abolition
of private property is merely the first negation. To reach the goal of a truly
new society, he writes, it is necessary to negate this negation. In contrast to
what he called “vulgar communism,” which stops at the mere abolition of
private property, he stressed that only through the “transcendence of this
mediation” is it possible to reach “POSITIVE humanism, beginning from
itself.” This “thoroughgoing
Naturalism or Humanism,” Marx continues, is the result of the negation of the
negation. This is why he writes, in commenting on the chapter on “Absolute
Knowledge” in Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND: “The greatness of Hegel’s
PHENOMENOLOGY, and of its final result—the dialectic of negativity as the
moving and creative principle—lies in this, that Hegel comprehends the
self-production of the human being as a process...”(12) Two decades later, in the
closing pages of CAPITAL, Vol. I, Marx makes recourse once again to Hegel’s
concept of absolute negativity, here also discussing the negation of the
negation. In his discussion of “the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation,” Marx refers to the brutal expropriation of the peasants from
their land during the sixteenth century agricultural revolution in England as
“the first negation of private property,” in which the peasants lose their
property. Over the next centuries, capitalism develops and eventually “begets
its own negation,” the working class which it has called into existence. Marx
concludes, "This is the negation of
the negation. It does not reestablish private property, but it does indeed
establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist
era: namely, cooperation and the possession in common of the land and the means
of production produced by labor itself."(13) Thus, Marx sees Hegel’s
concept of negativity and of the first and second negation neither as purely
destructive nor as limiting us to an overly affirmative stance toward existing
society. In addition, contrary to the claims of Louis Althusser and others,
Marx’s critical appropriation of Hegel’s dialectic was continuous, even in
his late writings, as seen in his reference to the negation of the negation in
his MATHEMATICAL MANUSCRIPTS. (14) In the twentieth century the
emergence of new objective crises has again and again stirred interest in this
dialectic of negativity, no matter how often Hegel was declared dead and buried.
This has been reflected not only in the work of such Western Marxists as Lukács,
Gramsci, and Adorno, but also in the dialectical humanism of the African
revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s profound return to
Hegel in light of such realities as the “additive of color” in the
contemporary freedom struggles demonstrates the importance of dialectical
philosophy in meeting the challenges posed by new forces of liberation. This is no less true when it
comes to today. The collapse of statist communism in the former Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe has given new meaning to Marx’s critique of the tendency to
stop at first negation, the mere abolition of private property, without moving
on to the negation of the negation, and the creation of new humanist social
relations. As the power of capital continues to expand and globalize, bringing
with it ever-greater social dislocations and inequities, the search for new
alternatives rooted in the dialectic of second negativity is sure to show
itself. This can already be seen on one
level in the appearance of a number of studies over the past decade of Hegel,
such as those by Daniel Berthold-Bond and John Hoffmeyer, which sharply contest
the notion that Hegel’s Absolutes are a “closed ontology” signifying
“the end of history.”(15) As Berthold-Bond put it in his discussion of the
final pages of Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY, "Absolute Knowledge is not
the End of history, but the sort of knowledge which is possible only at the end
of an epoch of history, and which is required to comprehend the development of
the world-spirit within that epoch, so as to prepare the rebirth and
transformation of the world into a new shape, a new existence. . . .
Recollection [is] not only a sort of memorial of the past but an anticipation of
the future, a redemption or resurrection of spirit into a new birth in
historical time" (p. 136). As Dunayevskaya noted in
PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, “Hegel’s Absolutes have ever exerted a
simultaneous force of attraction and repulsion” (p. 4). We believe that
Dunayevskaya’s specific interpretation of Hegel, in emphasizing the cogency of
the dialectic of absolute negativity for today’s freedom struggles, takes on
new life at the present juncture. As this collection will make clear, she views
Hegel’s Absolutes as NEW BEGINNINGS. Central to this is her belief that the
concept of absolute negativity expresses, at a philosophical level, the quest by
masses of people not simply to negate existing economic and political
structures, but to create TOTALLY NEW HUMAN RELATIONS as well. As Louis Dupré
put it in his Preface to PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, "A notable difference
separates Raya Dunayevskaya’s from the earlier positions of [Lukács and Karl
Korsch]. Their interpretation had limited the revolutionary impact of Hegel’s
philosophy to the sociopolitical order. Dunayevskaya aims for a total liberation
of the human person—not only from the ills of a capitalist society but also
from the equally oppressive state capitalism of established communist
governments' (p. xv). In situating the concept of
absolute negativity in the struggles of workers, women, youth, Blacks and other
minorities, Dunayevskaya opened new doors to appropriating and projecting this
concept PHILOSOPHICALLY. Once the dialectic of second negativity is seen as
intrinsic to the human subject, it becomes possible to grasp and project the
idea of second negativity as a veritable force of liberation. Dunayevskaya’s
writings on Hegel and dialectics provide a new basis for working out a vision of
the future—of totally new human relations, of an end to the division between
mental and manual labor and of alienated gender relations—which can animate
and give direction to the emerging freedom struggles of our time. Our time is burdened by the
absence of a vision of a future which transcends the horizon of existing
society. Everywhere, we are confronted with the near-unchallenged assertion that
we must accept the limits of actually existing capitalism as our sole
alternative. The profound crisis of the socialist movement over the past decades
has made this crisis of the imagination all the more overwhelming. The failure
to project an alternative to both existing capitalism and statist communism is a
more important facet of today’s social crises than is generally recognized.
Unless we rethink the meaning of Marx’s Marxism in light of THIS problem, THIS
reality, THIS contradiction, it is hard to see how it is possible to break
through the stranglehold of retrogression which has engulfed the world ever
since the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s. For this reason, we believe,
Dunayevskaya’s studies of Hegel’s dialectic and his Absolutes, in which she
saw the vision of a liberatory future that post-Marx Marxists had failed to
articulate, are more timely than ever. NOTES 1. Georg Lukács, THE YOUNG
HEGEL, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975), p. 510. For
background on Lukács’ overall position, see especially Tom Rockmore,
IRRATIONALISM: LUKÁCS AND THE MARXIST VIEW OF REASON (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992). 2. Lukács, THE YOUNG HEGEL, p.
513. 3. Herbert Marcuse, REASON AND
REVOLUTION (New York: Oxford, 1941), p. 27. The best overview of Marcuse’s
work remains Douglas Kellner, HERBERT MARCUSE AND THE CRISIS OF MARXISM
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 4. Marcuse, REASON AND
REVOLUTION, p. 165. 5. Theodor Adorno, “Aspects
of Hegel’s Philosophy” (orig. German edition 1957), in HEGEL: THREE STUDIES
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, p. 28. All of the
following page references to Adorno are to this essay. 6. Theodor Adorno, NEGATIVE
DIALECTICS, trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), orig. German
edition 1966, p. 362. 7. For a critique of Moishe
Postone’s TIME LABOR AND SOCIAL DOMINATION: A REINTERPRETATION OF MARX'S
CRITICAL THEORY, in which this position is articulated, see Peter Hudis,
“Labor, High-Tech Capitalism, and the Crisis of the Subject: A Critique of
Recent Developments in Critical Theory,” HUMANITY AND SOCIETY, Vol. 19, no. 4,
November, 1995, pp. 4-20 and “Conceptualizing an Emancipatory Alternative:
István Mészáros’ BEYOND CAPITAL,” SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY Vol. 11, No. 1,
Spring 1997, pp. 37-54. 8. Jacques Derrida, “From
Restricted to General Economy, a Hegelianism Without Reserve” (orig. French
edition 1967), in WRITING AND DIFFERENCE, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 259. 9. Derrida, POSITIONS (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, (1971), trans. Alan Bass, p. 44. 10. Derrida, GLAS (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, [orig. French edition 1974] 1986), trans. J.P.
Leavey and R. Rand, pp. 200-01. 11. Marx, “Critique of the
Hegelian Dialectic,” in Marx and Engels, COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 3 (New York:
International Publishers, 1975), p. 330. 12. We have used here
Dunayevskaya’s more lucid first English translation of Marx’s “Critique of
the Hegelian Dialectic,” which appeared in her MARXISM AND FREEDOM (New York:
Bookman, 1958), p. 308. See also the more pedestrian rendering in Marx and
Engels, COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 3, p. 330. 13. Marx, CAPITAL I, pp.
929-30. 14. See Ron Brokmeyer, Raya
Dunayevskaya, et al. THE FETISH OF HIGH TECH AND MARX'S UNKNOWN MATHEMATICAL
NOTEBOOKS (Chicago: News and Letters, 1984). 15. HEGEL'S GRAND SYNTHESIS, A
STUDY OF BEING, THOUGHT AND HISTORY by Daniel Berthold-Bond (Albany: SUNY Press,
1989), p. 136. See also THE PRESENCE OF THE FUTURE IN HEGEL'S LOGIC by John H.
Hoffmeyer (Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1996). |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
