Marx and the Communist Enlightenment

Post on: August 2, 2020
Doug Enaa Greene
Harrison Fluss


Marxism is the completion of the Radical Enlightenment project.



Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI

Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment.
— Louis Menand
Enlightenment and the Young Marx

For Jonathan Israel, Marx’s status as a Radical Enlightenment figure ended prematurely in 1844. According to this interpretation, Marx was a Spinozistic liberal until he discovered the proletariat and converted to communism.1 But this sharp break that Israel assumes in Marx’s thinking did not occur. Israel provides only a cursory treatment of Marx’s writings after 1844 and never shows how Marx broke with the Enlightenment. This stark division between Enlightenment ideas and communism is arguably the worst part of his latest book, The Enlightenment That Failed. Israel implies that if only Marx had not collaborated with the bad Engels, but had stuck with the liberal Young Hegelians, he would have been saved from the economic “determinism” and “authoritarianism” that marred his later political career. Israel’s case for a counter-Enlightenment Marx ignores how earlier “Spinozistic” concerns and themes were integrated into his theory of communist revolution. Neither the “young Marx” nor the “old Marx” renounced humanism, naturalism, and the progressive ideas of Radical Enlightenment.

Israel mentions Marx’s father, Heinrich, in passing, but he neglects an entire backdrop of Marx’s Enlightenment-influenced childhood. This refers to the impact of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, the privy councillor of Marx’s hometown of Trier and his future father-in-law. It is true that Heinrich Marx was a fan of Voltaire and Rousseau, but he was a fairly moderate liberal; it was in fact Ludwig who introduced the more radical aspects of the French Revolution to Marx, such as the utopian socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon. One other influence Israel ignores is that of Ludwig’s daughter and Marx’s future bride, Jenny von Westphalen. Four years his senior, and sometimes scandalously wearing a French tricolor in her hair, the young Jenny was key to Marx’s political development.2

As Israel notes, in order to practice law, Heinrich was forced to convert from Judaism to Lutheranism. Seven years after the defeat of the Grande Armée, Frederick William III revoked the civil emancipation of Jews that Napoleon had established in Trier. The emancipation of Jewish people was a conquest of the French Revolution, championed by Robespierre and Napoleon alike, and won the admiration of liberal elements in Germany. The revocation of Jewish emancipation affected not only the Marxes but also future associates of Karl such as the Hegelian law professor Eduard Gans and the poet Heinrich Heine. Heinrich Marx, Gans, and Heine were all pressured to civilly renounce Judaism.

After his conversion, Heinrich Marx continued to admire the French Enlightenment, and as a fellow liberal, he befriended Ludwig von Westphalen.3 Together, they were members of the Trier Casino Club, a club of bourgeois professionals with a liberal or left-wing bent. On one particular Bastille Day, the members spontaneously sang “La Marseillaise” in celebration. Little did they know that there was a Prussian spy in their midst, and once word reached the king about this rousing rendition of the subversive anthem, the club was unceremoniously shut down.

Soon after Karl began studying at university, he immersed himself in Hegelian philosophy. Heinrich feared the increasing radicalization of his son and believed that Karl’s path into philosophy would do him little good for his professional career. Once Marx told his father that he discovered Hegel in 1837, Heinrich all but despaired for his son’s prospects. Marx, however, ignored his father and delved deeper into the exciting world of Young Hegelianism.4

The two most important professors whom Marx had at the universities of Berlin and Bonn were Eduard Gans and Bruno Bauer. Gans was one of Hegel’s students, but after the July Revolution of 1830, Gans took Hegelianism in a republican and socialistic direction. Bauer was also a disciple of Hegel’s, and originally belonged to the Hegelian right; he favored orthodox Lutheranism and monarchism. But later, he transformed into a radical republican and a staunch critic of the Bible. Arnold Ruge christened Bauer the “Robespierre” of theology.5 From these teachers, Marx absorbed Hegelian philosophy and democratic republicanism.
Enlightenment and the Young Engels

Growing up in different circumstances, the young Friedrich Engels was raised by strict conservative Pietists. The wealthy Engels family was based in Wuppertal, and his father, Friedrich Sr., owned textile factories as part of the firm Ermen & Engels. Young Friedrich gradually shook off the traditional religious beliefs of his parents and converted to atheistic Hegelianism after reading David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835–36). Strauss was one of the first left Hegelians, combining Hegel’s philosophy with Enlightenment rationalism. He argued that the Gospels were not literal histories but mythopoetic illustrations of the human condition. Jesus was not the son of God but a poetic representation of humanity’s own infinite worth.6

After beginning military service in Berlin, Engels joined forces with the Young Hegelians. He frequented the Hippel café, where Bauer and others would drink and converse. Engels liked to draw funny caricatures of their rowdy philosophical debates,7 and he even wrote a bombastic epic poem about Young Hegelianism, entitled “The Insolently Threatened yet Miraculously Rescued Bible.” There, Engels portrays the Young Hegelians as more dangerous than the Jacobin Club and refers to himself by his new Jacobin alias, Oswald:


Right on the very left, that tall and long-legged stepper
Is Oswald [Engels], coat of grey and trousers shade of pepper;
Pepper inside as well, Oswald the Montagnard;
A radical is he, dyed in the wool, and hard.
Day in, day out, he plays upon the guillotine a
Single solitary tune and that’s a cavatina,
The same old devil-song; he bellows the refrain:
Formez vos bataillons! Aux armes, citoyens!
[Form your battalions! To arms, citizens! — from the Marseillaise]8

Marx knew Engels in 1842 but did not think much of him at the time. Two years later, however, when they reencountered each other in Paris, they recognized that they shared the same fundamental worldview and thus began a lifelong friendship and collaboration as communists. Engels was the first to accept communism through the work of Moses Hess. From his experiences with the Parisian working class and after reading Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1843), Marx embraced communism in turn. In another essay written in the same year, Engels deduces socialism as the logical result of British economics, the French Revolution, and German philosophy:


The English came to the [socialist] conclusion practically, by the rapid increase of misery, demoralisation, and pauperism in their own country: the French politically, by first asking for political liberty and equality; and, finding this insufficient, joining social liberty, and social equality to their political claims: the Germans became Communists philosophically, by reasoning upon first principles. This being the origin of Socialism in the three countries.9

Marx repeats this European trinity of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy in his writings from 1844: “It must be granted that the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat just as the English proletariat is its economist and the French its politician.”10 With this new communist worldview, Marx and Engels attempted to settle their philosophical debts with the Young Hegelians. In doing so, they took up the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, which combined materialism, empiricism, and humanism.
The Holy Family

Making their Feuerbachian debut together in The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels saw Feuerbach’s materialism as repeating the Enlightenment’s battle against metaphysical abstractions. As Hegel put it in The Phenomenology, Enlightenment liberated itself from any metaphysical rationalism, emphasizing what’s finite and concrete over what’s theological and abstract. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels saw Hegel himself as the German repetition of 17th-century rationalism (e.g., Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche), while Feuerbach represented the return to the Enlightenment of Holbach, Helvétius, and Bentham. According to Marx and Engels, Feuerbach had finally exorcised the ghost of metaphysics once and for all, and now all philosophy had to go through the “fire bath” of Feuerbach. As Marx put it once earlier, “There is no other road for you to truth and freedom except that leading through the brook of fire (the Feuerbach). Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present times.”11

But even in their criticism of Spinoza as a rationalist metaphysician, Marx and Engels maintained a materialist basis. In The Holy Family, they affirm a materialist monism, that “body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same [material] reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world.”12 But, in contrast to Bauer and to Israel, Marx and Engels in The Holy Family trace the impact of John Locke’s empiricism on French materialism. It is true, as Israel has pointed out, that Spinozism was an important philosophical component of the Radical Enlightenment; nevertheless, Lockean epistemology had radical implications for philosophers on the Continent as well.13

The Holy Family criticizes the elitism of the Young Hegelians, where Bauer merely echoes the unhistorical conception of human progress that pits a disembodied reason against the spirit of reaction. For Marx, progress advances from social contradictions, and the masses themselves are the bearers of this progress. The masses are the most important factor in Enlightenment, and this process of Enlightenment is inseparable from class struggle.14 The question of the masses is central to Marx and Engels’ critique of Bauer. Bauer saw philosophical criticism as a task directed against the ignorant masses; for him, the lofty fight for self-consciousness and liberty was antagonistic to the crude material interests of the crowd. As one reviewer of The Holy Family wrote, satirizing Bauer’s own elitism, “To get rid of the French Revolution, communism, and Feuerbach, he [Bruno Bauer] shrieks “masses, masses, masses!,” and again: “masses, masses, masses!”15

For Marx and Engels, the two main sources of French materialism were Lockean epistemology and Cartesian natural science. “The two trends intersect in the course of development,” giving birth to the more refined and sophisticated materialism of Holbach and Helvétius. This materialism, however, contains a dialectic within itself, one that points beyond bourgeois society. From the philosophical claims of materialism, the authors deduce the political conclusion of communism. It is worth quoting The Holy Family at length here, since Israel argues that Marx stopped his association with Radical Enlightenment in 1844. But in 1845, Marx and Engels assert the contrary:


French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism. There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.16

Here, Marx and Engels take up key Enlightenment tenets, including the essential goodness of human nature (i.e., the rejection of original sin); the importance of education and environment; the “great significance” of industry; and hedonistic ethics, or what they call “the justification of enjoyment.” These are the principles that any socialism must defend for it to make philosophical sense. Again, Israel’s stark demarcation between Enlightenment and Marx’s communism is belied by such passages.

Without the backbone of these Radical Enlightenment premises, the struggle for social equality would be meaningless. Marx and Engels affirm equality as,


man’s consciousness of himself in the element of practice, i.e., therefore, man’s consciousness of other men as his equals and man’s relation to other men as his equals. Equality is the French expression for the unity of human essence, for man’s consciousness of his species and his attitude toward his species, for the practical identity of man with man, i.e., for the social or human relation of man to man.17

In other words, equality is the social expression of our common human identity. It serves as the basis for criticizing the dehumanizing economic relations that pit human beings against each other.
The German Ideology

In The German Ideology (1845-6), written shortly after The Holy Family, Marx and Engels criticize Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialist, since he, like the French materialists before him, was an idealist when it came to history. In this domain, Feuerbach still privileges ideas over material reality. The German Ideology is where the authors first clearly articulate the materialistic conception of history, which is marked by a series of different modes of production. The products of consciousness such as law, religion, and philosophy are all conditioned by material circumstances. Such a theory of history in particular explains how French materialism is a necessary outgrowth of the bourgeoisie’s struggles against feudalism.18

The German Ideology acknowledges what Hegel had already discovered in The Phenomenology: that the spirit of Enlightenment came about through emerging bourgeois conditions. The truth of Enlightenment was “utility,” and utilitarianism was the philosophy of the radical French bourgeoisie. Before the consolidation of capitalism, philosophers like Holbach and Helvétius did not carefully distinguish human flourishing from economic competition and exploitation. Bourgeois reality was assumed to be the natural order of things. According to Marx, this idealized conception was a necessary and justified illusion, without which there would be no ideological motivation for the bourgeois revolution. But there is a darker side to bourgeois Enlightenment, of what Hegel called “the spiritual animal kingdom.” Beneath the idealistic image of human flourishing lurked the dehumanized relations of commodity exchange.

In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels extracted the communist kernel from the shell of bourgeois Enlightenment, meaning a transition from Helvétius and Holbach to the utopian socialism of Gracchus Babeuf and Charles Fourier. Here, in The German Ideology, the authors focus on the illusion of bourgeois Enlightenment, which could not fulfill the promise of human flourishing. While Helvétius and Holbach represent the bourgeoisie in its heroic and more universal phase, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill represent the philosophical conscience of a cynical bourgeoisie that has resigned itself to the reality of exploitation. For the latter, human flourishing is fully identified with market relations.
The Communist Manifesto

Nonetheless, as jaded as bourgeois Enlightenment can be, there is something refreshing about its rejection of feudalism. Repeating what Hegel argued in The Phenomenology, Marx and Engels see bourgeois reality as achieving a relative kind of Enlightenment. As Marx and Engels put it famously in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”19 The enlightened bourgeoisie “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”20 This description of feudal culture’s demise was strongly foreshadowed in the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its discussion of Rameau’s Nephew.21

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels not only praise the bourgeoisie for uniting the world economy; they also acknowledge the democratic “representative state” as its most important political achievement. Not just the (partial) liberation of the productive forces, but liberal ideas like freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and freedom of the press are legitimate gains for humanity. Political equality, however, is insufficient without economic equality. The bourgeoisie achieved Enlightenment only halfway since it clings to a superstitious belief in private property. Thus the bourgeoisie cannot complete its own Enlightenment, since a truly human and secular society is incompatible with class relations.22

In the third chapter of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels attack what they call feudal socialism and “true socialism.” Both of these false socialisms are reactionary, insofar as they advocate romantic solutions to capitalism. The feudal socialist wants workers to return to an imagined organic aristocratic society, in which they will resubmit to their noble betters. On the other hand, the “true socialist” wants to push aside class struggle in favor of a classless humanitarianism. Such ethical idealism denounces bourgeois society in toto as sinful and irredeemable. While the “true socialists” think they are moving past bourgeois society, they inadvertently adopt the romantic critique of capitalism. For Marx and Engels, one cannot achieve socialism without presupposing the accomplishments of bourgeois society and bourgeois enlightenment.

True socialism “forgot, in the nick of time, that the French [socialist] criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.”23 In their absolute rejection of everything progressive in bourgeois society, including constitutional law, true socialism gives aid to reaction. Presupposing the advancement of science and industry, socialism not only liberates the productive forces; it also consummates the struggle for democracy. Socialism does not simply cast off the forms of democracy and republicanism, but makes democracy real for the working class.
The Dead Dogs

As Marx matured in his economic thinking, he returned to Hegelian dialectics as the basis for his critique of capitalism. In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, he accuses Feuerbach, along with the rest of the German intelligentsia, of treating Hegel like a “dead dog.”24 According to Marx, one must extract the rational side of Hegel’s dialectics and discard its irrational idealism. It is no coincidence that when Marx defends Hegel in his afterword to the first volume of Capital (1867), he compares Hegel’s fate with that of Spinoza’s. If the German Enlightenment stunted itself in treating Spinoza as a “dead dog,” then the same goes for Eugen Dühring and others when they treat Hegel as a mere mystic.25

Marx’s approach to Spinoza and Hegel is itself dialectical. As he puts it in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, “Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.”26

Spinoza is not absent in Marx’s Grundrisse (1859) and Capital. Marx wrote his critique as a “natural history,” wherein he laid bare the economic law of motion for the capitalist system. This presupposes a Spinozistic outlook of paying attention to rational causes over mere appearances: “Vulgar economy which, indeed, ‘has really learnt nothing,’ here as everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, [political economy] believes that ‘ignorance is a sufficient reason.’” 27 Not only does Marx assume Spinoza’s materialism of causation; like Hegel, he also accepts Spinoza’s insight that all determination is negation; that it is not enough to negate something, but to overcome that negation in turn. Negation is determined not just by particular things, but by an overall process, or what Marx refers to as “the negation of the negation.” For Marx, Spinoza provides the philosophical basis for this dialectical logic: “This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s thesis: determinatio est negatio.”28 Needless to say, this reemergence of Spinozism as integral to Marx’s critique refutes Israel’s argument that the later Marx abandoned Spinozism.
Marx and Engels’ Second Enlightenment

In the Grundrisse, Marx takes issue with bourgeois socialists, who merely affirm the ideals of the French Revolution, while ignoring the realities of capitalism. In pursuing liberty, equality, and fraternity one-sidedly, these socialists ironically reinforce unfreedom, inequality, and atomization. This is because they do not understand the reality of competition and exchange, and fall prey to its logic. This is certainly the case for Marx when he discusses the petty bourgeois socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his followers.29 As Marx puts it in Capital, “There alone rule [in bourgeois society] Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham,” where the name of Bentham signifies the crass logic of exploitation.30

Seemingly strange bedfellows, both Israel and the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser claim that the later Marx abandoned his original humanism. But the evidence in the mature economic manuscripts is clear. Marx reaffirms that socialism will be a realm of freedom based on an advanced material economic base. The realm of necessity will not be abolished but workers will “rationally” regulate “their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.”31 The realm of freedom will “blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”32 In socialism, humanity will live “under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.”33

The interrelation between humanity and nature, a Spinozistic point, is an echo of what Marx and Engels previously wrote decades before in The Holy Family: “If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society. This and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French materialists.”34 These passages from The Holy Family and Capital show continuity in Marx’s Enlightenment humanism.

In his separate works, Engels celebrates the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Diderot and Rousseau are credited for inventing modern dialectics in their respective criticisms of bourgeois society and property relations. But the entirety of the French Enlightenment comes in for special praise in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886): “The French materialists no less than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction [of historical progress] to an almost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice’ — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot, for instance.”35

In Anti-Dühring (1877), Engels calls Spinoza “a dialectician,” and in Dialectics of Nature (1883), he affirms Spinoza’s idea of a self-caused substance as expressing the activity of matter in motion, that is, as anticipating dialectical materialism. 36 In an anecdote, Plekhanov recounts how Engels told him that “old Spinoza” was “absolutely right” to see mind and matter as two sides of one nature. In contrast to Israel, Plekhanov unequivocally states, “I am fully convinced that Marx and Engels, after the materialist turn in their development, never abandoned the standpoint of Spinoza.”37

According to Engels, it was the radical bourgeoisie that originally developed the modern idea of equality. This idea was “first formulated by Rousseau, in trenchant terms but still on behalf of all humanity.”38 The emerging proletariat, however, went deeper than the bourgeoisie in adopting equality under its revolutionary banner, and as “was the case with all demands of the bourgeoisie, so here too the proletariat cast a fateful shadow beside it and drew its own conclusions (Babeuf). This connection between bourgeois equality and the proletariat’s drawing of conclusions should be developed in greater detail.”39 Hence, we see that proletarian morality for Engels is not the total negation of bourgeois Enlightenment morality, but its dialectical negation. Political equality is insufficient and needs social equality to be made substantive and permanent.
The Critique of the Gotha Program

This leads us to Marx’s conception of equality in The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Under the banner of social equality, the proletariat establishes its rule. But, according to Marx, during the first phase of communism (i.e., socialism), the right to equality still presupposes inequality. How is this possible? In this initial stage, the productive forces still need to be reorganized and further developed. Socialism frees society from the domination of what Marx called “the law of value” (i.e., commodity relations), but it cannot totally do away with principles of exchange. For the sake of developing the productive forces, the first phase of communism is governed by the principle from each according to their ability, to each according to their deed. This means that “as far as the distribution of [the means of consumption] among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form…The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”40

Under this first phase of communism, it does not recognize class differences, but it does recognize differences when it comes to what workers can contribute. Some workers, either physically or mentally, will contribute more than others, and they may need more compensation than others because of their particular circumstances. Perhaps they have to take care of more dependents, or they have a greater skill set. Regardless, Marx is clear that a kind of exchange still exists under socialism.

Only in the upper stage of socialism, namely communism proper, does exchange value completely wither away in favor of use value. Hegel had already seen the contradictory nature of value in his analysis of the bourgeois Enlightenment. The truth of bourgeois Enlightenment for Hegel was utility, a contradictory phenomenon that expressed both the promise of human flourishing and the reality of exploitation. Utility was bound up with the commodity form, in which use-value is dominated by market exchange. But for Marx, only full communism can liberate use value from exchange value, thus resolving the main contradiction of bourgeois Enlightenment. Thus, communism is not the abstract negation, but the completion of the Enlightenment project. This completion is summed up in the slogan: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!”41

Under communism, equality is understood as a law of proportion — that all human beings have a right to equal development and satisfaction of their different needs. Helen Macfarlane, the Chartist radical and first translator of The Communist Manifesto into English, put it as follows: “The Rights of one human being are precisely the same as the Rights of another human being, in virtue of their common nature.”42 Without this common human nature, Marx’s slogan for the realization of human wants is unintelligible and unachievable. This slogan is at one with Macfarlane’s translation of the Manifesto’s statement that the “old Bourgeois Society, with its classes, and class antagonisms, will be replaced by an association, wherein the free development of EACH is the free development of ALL.”43

Whether it is Spinozism, French materialism, or the ideas of the French Revolution — particularly the idea of equality — Marx and Engels were no strangers to Radical Enlightenment. On the contrary, they were its most advanced representatives. We have demonstrated that Radical Enlightenment was not just a passing phase of Marx’s youth but the consistent philosophical thread throughout his thinking.

Part V of this series on the Enlightenment will appear next Sunday.


Notes

1. ↑ “Marx’s early thought, shaped by Bauer and Feuerbach, was in a sense a variant of Spinozist materialism, naturalism, anti-providentialism, and anti-Scriptualism which, before long, became dramatically infused with zeal for democratic transformation.” Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment that Failed, 905.



This ignores Bauer’s explicit anti-Spinozism, which favored self-consciousness over substance, as well as Feuerbach’s empiricist critique of Spinoza as a metaphysician. Marx himself in his dissertation repeats Bauer-like criticisms of Spinoza, while in later works, such as The Holy Family, he repeats Feuerbach’s critique. Israel does not deign to comment on Marx’s criticisms of Spinoza in this early period.
2. ↑ Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “Subversive Beginnings,” Jacobin, June 19, 2016; Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “The Life of Jenny Marx,” Jacobin, February 14, 2016.
3. ↑ For more on Heinrich Marx’s opinions on the French Revolution and Napoleon, see Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work, vol. 1: 1818–1841 (New York: Monthly Review, 2019), 81–82.
4. ↑ The young Marx was into dueling, drinking, and, now, Hegel. In Berlin, a group of Young Hegelians met at Hippel’s café, calling themselves the Berlin Frei. There they drank and vigorously argued, celebrating not just free thought but free spirits. When the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin visited Berlin in its Young Hegelian heyday, he liked to play a philosophical drinking game:




In Russia, the young Bakunin became a member of a literary group so intoxicated with Hegelian idealism that even their love affairs were permeated by it, and who, volatilizing in the Russian way the portentous abstractions of the German, used to toast the Hegelian categories, proceeding through the metaphysical progression from Pure Existence to the divine Idea.

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), 262.
5. ↑ David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103.
6. ↑ Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of the Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Friedrich Engels, Letters of the Young Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
7. ↑ For Engels’s drawings, see “Die Freien by Friedrich Engels,” Wikipedia Commons.
8. ↑ “The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible,” in MECW, vol. 2, 335.
9. ↑ “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in MECW, vo. 3, 392–93.
Later in the same article, the young Engels inferred that the premises of German philosophy lead to the conclusion of communism:




Our party has to prove that either all the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to Hegel, have been useless — worse than useless; or, that they must end in Communism; that the Germans must either reject their great philosophers, whose names they hold up as the glory of their nation, or that they must adopt Communism. (Ibid., 406.)

Lenin also popularized Marxism as a synthesis of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy:


The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. (“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” 1913, in Lenin Collected Works [henceforth LCW], vol. 19 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974], 23–24.)

Before Marx and Engels, Hess was the first to conceive of this progressive trinity of England, France, and Germany in his European Triarchy (1841), wherein he claimed that Spinoza represents “the ideal foundation of modern times.” Four years before he wrote this work, Hess had announced in The Holy History of Mankind (1837) that humanity had entered into the Age of Spinoza.
10. ↑ “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” in MECW, vol. 3, 202.
11. ↑ Karl Marx, “Luther as the Arbiter between Strauss and Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 95.
12. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 129.



The relationship between Feuerbach and Spinoza is unfortunately outside the scope of this series. The scholar Marx W. Wartofsky, however, explains that Feuerbach saw himself as a legatee of Spinoza’s pantheism and materialism: “Thus, Feuerbach contrasts pantheism, as the theoretical negation of theology, with empiricism, as the practical negation of theology. But he says pantheism — that is, Spinoza’s pantheism, which accords matter divine status, albeit abstractly and metaphysically — as the legitimation and sanction of the “materialistic tendency of modern times.’” Feuerbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 370.
13. ↑ Joseph de Maistre, in his St. Petersburg Dialogues, engages in a long rant against Lockeanism. In the sixth dialogue, by denying the doctrine of innate ideas, Locke is called an enemy of Christian authority, and Maistre despairs that so many French philosophers fell under Locke’s spell. They neglected their own “Christian Plato” (Malebranche) in favor of English empiricism. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 187, 188.
14. ↑ According to Lukács, during the Restoration period, defenders of human progress redefined Enlightenment as inextricably bound up with mass struggle:




According to the new interpretation the reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the inner conflict of social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation history itself is the bearer and realizer of human progress. The most important thing here is the increasing historical awareness of the decisive role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history. The new spirit of historical writing, which is most clearly visible in the important French historians of the Restoration period, concentrates precisely on this question: on showing historically how modem bourgeois society arose out of the class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie, out of class struggles which raged throughout the entire ‘idyllic Middle Ages’ and whose last decisive stage was the great French Revolution. These ideas produce the first attempt at a rational periodization of history, an attempt to comprehend the historical nature and origins of the present rationally and scientifically.

(Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 27–28.)
15. ↑ Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 22.
16. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 130.
17. ↑ Ibid., 39.
18. ↑ The German Ideology is frequently described as a work that treats philosophy as a mere epiphenomenon of material class relations, or as simply bourgeois mysticism. But in their polemic against Max Stirner, Marx and Engels defend certain philosophers for their progressive contributions to humanity. This includes praise for the Stoic tradition and for Epicurus as a radical Enlightener: “Epicurus…was the true radical Enlightener of antiquity; he openly attacked the ancient religion, and it was from him, too, that the atheism of the Romans, insofar as it existed, was derived. For this reason, too, Lucretius praised Epicurus as the hero who was the first to overthrow the gods and trample religion underfoot.” The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 141–42. As we can see, Israel even ignores Marx’s own use of the phrase radical Enlightenment.
19. ↑ Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW, vol. 6, 487.
20. ↑ Ibid.
21. ↑ For Hegel’s discussion of Diderot, see Hegel, Enlightenment, and Revolution.
22. ↑ In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx pointed out that abstract rights to property and religion presupposed an unequal and alienated society. Any society in which private property and religion predominate, such as in the United States, is not a truly humanized one, but still alienated. While political emancipation is certainly an achievement, it is not enough if it stays at the political level and ignores the so-called private realm of civil society. Thus, the problem is not that American society is secular, but since it rests on an alienated bourgeois reality, it is not secular enough. See “On the Jewish Question,” in MECW, vol. 3, 146–47.
23. ↑ Manifesto, 512.



Around the time of the Manifesto, Marx also wrote,


The workers know that the abolition of bourgeois property relations is not brought about by preserving those of feudalism. They know that the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal estates and the absolute monarchy can only accelerate their own revolutionary movement. They know that their own struggle against the bourgeoisie can only dawn with the day when the bourgeoisie is victorious. Despite all this they do not share Herr Heinzen’s bourgeois illusions. They can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal.

(“Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality,” in MECW, vol. 6, 332–33.)

We will address how Marx changes his position on the proletariat’s relationship to bourgeois revolutions in part six of this series. Suffice it to say, following the failure of the bourgeoisie to lead revolutions on the Continent in 1848, Marx argues that the proletariat cannot simply wait for the bourgeoisie to fulfill its original democratic tasks. By the 1840s, the heroic phase of bourgeois revolutions was over, and the proletariat must now play the leading revolutionary role; it must fight not only for the older tasks of democracy, but for socialism. Hence, after the failed struggles of 1848, Marx disavows a stagist conception of revolution, committing himself to a politics of permanent revolution. On the history and politics of permanent revolution, see Neil Davidson’s How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

It is interesting to note that Davidson himself uses the phrase “radicalized Enlightenment” to describe Marx and Engels’s socialist transformation of the bourgeois Enlightenment in the Manifesto: “From these doubts [about bourgeois society] came the radicalized Enlightenment at the heart of Marxism.” Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 655.
24. ↑ “Marx to Kugelmann. 27 June 1870,” in MECW, vol. 43, 528.
25. ↑ In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx said,




The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

(Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 19.)
26. ↑ “Marx to Lassalle. 31 May 1858,” in MECW, vol. 40, 316.
27. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 311.
28. ↑ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 90.
29. ↑ Ibid., 248.
30. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 186. In a footnote to Capital, Marx contrasts Bentham — that “genius of bourgeois stupidity” — unfavorably with the more sophisticated French materialists. Marx does not dismiss the category of utility but argues that one cannot derive an adequate conception of human nature from utility alone: “The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” Ibid., 605.
31. ↑ Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 807.
32. ↑ Ibid.
33. ↑ Ibid.
34. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, “131.
35. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 26, 373.
36. ↑ “Reciprocal action is the first thing that we encounter when we consider matter in motion as a whole from the standpoint of modern natural science. We see a series of forms of motion, mechanical motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical compound and decomposition, transitions of states of aggregation, organic life, all of which, if at present we still make an exception of organic life, pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum-total of the motion in all its changing forms remaining the same (Spinoza: substance is causa sui strikingly expresses the reciprocal action).” The Dialectics of Nature. Fragments and Notes, in MECW, vol. 25, 511.
37. ↑ Georgi Plekhanov, “Bernstein and Materialism,” Marxists Internet Archive.
38. ↑ “Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring,” in MECW, vol. 25, 603.
39. ↑ Ibid.
40. ↑ Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MECW, vol. 24, 86.
41. ↑ Ibid., 87. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the phrase “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!” was originally a Saint-Simonian one. Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, 29–30.



While Saint-Simon himself eschewed the Jacobin Terror, he defended the achievements of the French Revolution, and his conception of history and utopian socialism built on Enlightenment ideas. According to the Marxist historian Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon set himself the objective of founding the science of man. He desired to follow in the tradition of Newton, and he conceived of science as organized and directed toward the improvement of mankind. Equally with other great Utopians, he looked to those in power for the fulfillment of his dream.” Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon’s Philosophy of History,” Science & Society 12, no. 1 (Winter 1948): 85.

In Louis Blanc’s speech of 1848 (“A Community of Labor”), we find an early popularization of the slogan that Marx would adopt. The French reformist said, “The ideal toward which humanity must proceed is the following: to produce according to its powers, to consume according to its needs” [authors’ translation]. The original French reads, “L’idéal vers lequel la société doit se mettre en marche est donc celui-ci: produire selon ses forces, consommer selon ses besoins.” Louis Blanc, Pages d’histoire de la Révolution de Février, 1848 (Paris: Imprimerie et Librairie de V Wouters, 1850), 217.
42. ↑ Helen Macfarlane, Red Republican (London: Unkant Press, 2014), 66–67.
43. ↑ Ibid., 139.


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Tags: History

Time, Labour, and the Overcoming of Domination: Reflections on Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom”

LONG READ

January 4, 2022


Summary: This review of an outstanding philosophic study that has much to offer to those seeking to develop an alternative to capitalism, first appeared in Historical Materialism Online, September 7, 2021 – Editors

I.

In the face of a global pandemic that underlines the fragility of individual life and the massive protests against police abuse and for Black lives that call for a reorganisation of social life, few books speak more to the present moment than Martin Hägglund’s This Life, Secular Life and Spiritual Freedom. It is not often that a dense philosophical work that engages thinkers ranging from St. Augustine, Spinoza, and Hegel to Marx, Adorno, and Martin Luther King Jr. achieves widespread popularity outside of academia. That Hägglund’s book has done so is due not only to his facility in conveying complex ideas without succumbing to the sin of popularisation; it is most of all because its central argument—that freedom is determined by how we cultivate the finite time at our disposal—speaks directly to the present historical juncture.

Freedom, he correctly emphasises, is not liberation from external constraints. It is being ‘able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time’.1 Taking ownership of our time is what he means by spiritual freedom. It involves secular as against religious faith, since notions of divine transcendence inevitably distract from prioritising the free and collective organisation of the limited time available to us. All living beings devote time to activities not directly related to maintaining their material existence. What characterises humans (for better or worse) is that we can reflect and act upon how to manage this surplus time. ‘It underlies all normative considerations, since what I do with my time is what I do with my life. Every question of what I ought to do—or ought not to do—is ultimately a question of what I ought to do with my time’.2 However, we can seize the time only if we acknowledge that time is finite; if we believe our lives are potentially infinite, there is no urgency to cultivate lived life as the highest value.

Hägglund’s critique of religion has nothing to do with the crude materialism of ‘new atheists’ or many orthodox Marxists. He is not suggesting that religious people are incapable of spiritual freedom, only that their pursuit of it is at odds with a belief in eternal life. Believers who help the poor out of fear (or love) of God actually treat them as means to an end instead of as ends-in-themselves; their standpoint is instrumental. I can treat someone as an end in itself only if in caring for them I affirm that their lives are not a mere way-station on the road to eternal bliss. Hägglund pulls no punches: ‘Freedom as an end in itself is not promoted by any of the world religions or by any of its founding figures. Neither Jesus nor Buddha nor Muhammad has anything to say about freedom as an end in itself. That is not an accident but consistent with their teachings. What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation, what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive’.3

While Hägglund’s critique of monotheistic religions (as well as Buddhism, which defines nirvana as liberation from contingency and finitude) is extremely cogent, it is less clear that it applies to animism (common among many Indigenous peoples), which denies any categorical distinction between the physical and the spiritual (Hägglund does not address the issue). Nor is it so clear that religion per se necessarily reflects an alienated society (one is reminded of Hegel’s praise of Greek religion for fusing religious imagery with ethical life, despite his criticisms of its accommodation with slavery). In any case, Hägglund does not presume that religion can be annulled by enlightened critique; he follows Marx in holding that, since religious alienation is an expression of alienated social relations, the former will persist as long as the latter remains to be uprooted.

The most important part or the book is the second half, which consists of a creative (if not totally original) reading of Marx’s critique of capital. Though few deny that the theory of value is integral to Marx’s critique of capital, many have attributed to him the view that ‘labour is the source of all value’. But this is clearly incorrect. The value of commodities is not determined by the number of hours employed in making them but by the average amount of time in which it is necessary to do so. If it were otherwise, producers would be made to work slower rather than faster, since the greater the quantity of labour time, the greater would be the value of the product. Hence, concrete labour is not the source of value; its substance is abstract or homogenous labour—labour forced to conform to a constantly-shifting average irrespective of the needs of the producers. Hägglund brilliantly shows that ‘socially necessary labour time as the measure of value is specific to the commodity form and becomes the essence of value only in the capitalist mode of production. Labour time as the measure of value is not transhistorically necessary but the historically specific essence of capitalism, which is contradictory and can be overcome’.4

Sadly, many Marxists view value production as a transhistorical necessity that cannot be overcome. They are so overburdened by the unequal distribution of value that permeates modern society that they overlook the need to uproot the human relations that makes value production possible in the first place. The emphasis on a ‘fair’ redistribution of value rather than the abolition of social relations which compel wealth to assume a monetary form defines not just the failed efforts to promote a ‘transition to socialism’ in the twentieth century but also much of the rebirth of interest in socialism in much of the world today. The critique of capitalism remains on the superficial, phenomenal level of targeting property forms and exchange relations rather than what is essential—the domination of abstract universal labour time. It is not hard to see that a superficial critique of the logic of capital that leaves aside its critical time determinant leads of necessity to an impoverished notion of socialism that stops short of a new humanism.

Before turning to the broader implications of Hägglund’s reading of Marx, it is worth noting that it speaks directly to subtle but crucial shifts underway in the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic—even though This Life was published prior to it. I am referring to the fact that millions of workers in the US and elsewhere are deciding not to return to work now that social restrictions in many countries are being lifted—even though there is an enormous pent-up demand for their labour power. As one report put it, ‘On a more philosophical level, the constant threat of illnesses, more time with family members, leisure time that gave way to new passions—all may have prompted some workers to reassess how they want to spend their time. Burned out, some people have left their jobs for once-on-a-lifetime experiences, like traveling the world. Others have seen an opportunity to shift careers or branch out on their own’.5 Another report notes, ‘Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time. It’s leading to a dramatic increase in resignations—a record four million people quit their jobs [in the US] in April alone, according to the Labor Department’. It cites a worker saying, ‘I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time now… I think the pandemic has just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want in life’.6

This hardly reflects the experience of all workers; many (especially in the health care profession) found that the pandemic left them with much less time. But we should not overlook the dramatic sea change in attitudes spurred by the pandemic. Faced with constant reminders of how fickle and uncertain is our finite existence in the face of millions of deaths, increasing numbers of people are rethinking their priorities—especially when it comes to deciding how to organise their time. Without realising it, they are grappling with a problem that is central to the Marxian critique of the capitalist mode of production.


II.

It may seem that Hägglund’s critique of the anxiety felt by many religious and philosophical currents when it comes to accepting the finitude of the human condition does not apply to secular leftists, who are devoted to more mundane matters than the pursuit of everlasting life. However, this is not the case. Marx is often credited or condemned for having a ‘perfectionist’ view of human nature, which implies that socialism ends not just class conflict but all basic conflicts. Others hold that socialism transcends natural necessity, often taken to mean that it abolishes labour—even though Marx held, ‘Labour, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself’.7 It can be argued that secular standpoints that envision a new society freed from such considerations express a disquiet with finitude similar to that found in many religious traditions.

Marx, of course, conceived of socialism as the end of class society, the transcendence of alienation, and the abolition of alienated labour. However, that is a far cry from suggesting that he conceived of the realm of freedom as bidding adieu to natural necessity. As he put it in his 1844 critique of Hegel, ‘Humanity is directly a natural being … [and] as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being it is a, conditioned, and limited creature, like animals and plants’. For Marx, the aspiration to overcome our limited, sensuous being is possible only as ‘a product of pure thought (i.e., of mere imagination)—an abstraction’.8 That is why he stressed, ‘to be sensuous is to suffer’.9 A new society does not put an end to suffering, it puts an end to needless suffering, and it enables us to face our suffering by giving meaning to our life’s accomplishment and setbacks through the free organisation of our time.

That many are reluctant to acknowledge this is reflected in the widespread prohibition against discussing a postcapitalist society. There are good reasons for caution in trying to specify the content of a socialist or communist future, as suggested by Marx’s critique of the utopians. But many have taken this further, by applying the religious prohibition against making images of God to efforts to describe a new society freed from alienation. Perhaps the foremost expression is Theodor Adorno’s invocation of Bilderverbot in Negative Dialectics: ‘Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia be positively pictured; that is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology’.10

There are serious problems with this perspective. It makes sense for a monotheist to prohibit positive descriptions of the ‘absolute,’ since doing so represents the infinite in finite terms. The most that can be done is to say what God is not (via negativa). But communism is not a substitute for God: the latter is unconditioned and freed of finitude whereas the former is historically conditioned and immersed in finitude. It is for good reason that Marx proclaimed, ‘communism is not the end, the goal, of human development’.11 There can be no ‘end,’ since development is impossible without an internal lack or limit. As Hegel never ceases to remind us, negativity is immanent in Spirit. Marx knew this well, as seen from his discussion of the ‘defects’ that define the lower phase of communism in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. He does not suggest that abstract labour, value production, or class domination persists in the lower phase; these are all superseded from the inception of socialism. However, the realm of freedom also undergoes self-development. The needed revolutions never end. Which is why the Grundrisse defines a society that frees material wealth from its value integument is one defined by ‘the absolute movement of becoming’.

But the question remains—is it possible to positively envision an alternative to capitalism without falling into the shortcomings associated with utopian speculation?

Perhaps the most original aspect of This Life is its discussion of how Hegel’s thought speaks to this. Many will object that Hegel was an idealist who glorified the Prussian state and had little to offer in the way of a critique of capital. Much of contemporary Hegel scholarship undermines such stereotypes and Hägglund puts it to good use. It is true that ‘the absolute’ in Hegel involves mutual recognition between individuals and the state, but, by ‘the state’, he means social institutions that embody the idea of freedom. An idea of ‘freedom’ that lacks concrete embodiment is formalist and empty. Hegel therefore contends that the quest for other-worldly religious salvation turns us away from the true object of devotion—freedom’s embodiment in forms of collective social praxis in which no one is considered free unless everyone is free. Such institutions are finite; but, like the Christian God, the idea of freedom must be embodied in a material form that is reconstituted (or born anew) when faced with death—that is, the rise of a new era that renders obsolete older forms of social praxis. Hence, Hägglund writes, ‘The aim of Hegel’s Phenomenology can be seen as a secular “reconciliation” with our finitude, in the sense of grasping that our finitude is not a limitation that blocks us from attaining the absolute. Rather… the absolute knowing of absolute spirit is not the act of a divine mind, but our philosophical grasp of the conditions of spiritual life’.12

Hägglund, nevertheless, acknowledges Hegel’s limits, since ‘On Hegel’s account, only the philosopher can attain the “absolute knowing” that we are the source of the authority of our norms and that our freedom—the highest good—is possible only through our mutual recognition of one another as essentially social, historical, material, and finite living beings’.13 Hegel makes this plain enough in The Philosophy of Religion: ‘How the actual present-day world is to find its way out of the state of dualism [between individual self-interest and collective praxis] and what form it is to take, are questions which must be left to itself to settle and to deal with them is not the immediate and practical business of philosophy’.14 Herein lies a fundamental philosophical divide between Marx and Hegel. As Hägglund puts it, ‘For Marx, on the contrary, absolute knowing cannot be limited to a theoretical achievement of the philosopher. Rather, absolute knowing must be a practical achievement that in principle can be taken up and sustained by everyone’.15 This is the meaning of the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—not that we forgo the effort to think the absolute, let alone the need to think philosophically, but that we change the world by creating conditions in which the absolute can be known—and so that we can be known.

As Gillian Rose magnificently put it several decades ago, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’.16 It can likewise be said that Marx’s philosophy has no social import if the new society cannot be thought. This is because the absolute is immanent in our mundane earthly existence. Which means, ‘If the absolute is misrepresented, we are misrepresenting ourselves, and are correspondingly unfree. But the absolute has always been misrepresented by societies and peoples, for these societies have not been free, and they have re-presented their lack of freedom to themselves in the form of religion’.17

Insofar as the ‘absolute,’ when viewed from the vantage point of Marx’s transformation of Hegel’s revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution, is the expression of a new society that transcends alienation, Hägglund’s book provides a powerful counter to the prevailing prejudice that envisioning the alternative to capitalism is pointless or counterproductive.


III.

There is still more to be said, however, as to whether is it possible to envision an alternative to capitalism without falling prey to the shortcomings associated with utopian speculation.

Many no doubt think that any effort to do so runs counter to Marx’s insistence that ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.18 Yet I would argue that Marx’s opposition to defining the future irrespective of actual movements is precisely what compels us to spell out an alternative to capitalism. Marx made no secret of the fact that he considered the most vital accomplishment of the workers’ movements of his time to be its rejection of the capitalist organisation of time. The chapter on ‘The Working Day’ in Volume One of Capital goes so far as to call the movement for the eight-hour day a greater step in the fight for freedom than the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The question of time was hardly restricted to ‘when does my working day begin and end’; it extended to questioning the timing and rhythm of the work process itself, which Marx takes up in his critique of the despotic plan of capital at the point of production.’

This has taken on greater importance in recent decades in light of struggles against automation and artificial intelligence, objections to digital capital’s extension of the working day, criticisms of the enormous time constraints placed upon women burdened with unpaid domestic labour, and attacks on the prison industrial complex that offers victims of deindustrialisation little more than prison time for committing the pettiest of offenses—especially if they are Black, Latinx, or Native American.

Hägglund’s argument that socialism consists, first and foremost, of replacing socially necessary labour time with free time as the measure of social relations may not constitute an outline of a new society, but it surely provides conceptual ground for developing one. He stresses, ‘Socially available free time is not merely leisure time but time devoted to activities that we count as meaningful in themselves. These activities can range from participation in forms of labour that we recognize as necessary for the common good, all the way to the pursuit of individual projects that challenge the given norms of what may be a meaningful activity’.19 The abolition of socially necessary labour time does not end labour as such, since there will always be a need to reproduce our means of subsistence. It rather means that necessary labour will be reduced to a minimum, while its character and form—like all kinds of activity—will be freely determined: ‘Even our socially necessary labour can be an expression of our freedom if it is shared for the sake of the common good. The aim, then, is to decrease the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom by making the relation between the two a democratic question… we need to negotiate… how to cultivate the finite time that is the condition of our freedom’.20

Although Hägglund’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of capital is incisive, it raises a number of critical questions.

First, the term ‘value’ has two distinct meanings—one refers to economic valuation (‘what’s the value of your mortgage?’), the other to moral valuation (‘I value your love and friendship’). The first treats value as a quantity of money; the second cannot be quantified in terms of money. The two are, at times, conflated by Hagglund, as in, ‘The revaluation of value as the foundation for Marx’s arguments has generally been overlooked and never fully understood, partly because Marx restricts his own use of the term “value” to the capitalist conception of value as the quantity of labour time’.21He is right about this, but Marx has very good reasons for discussing ‘value’ in a purely economic sense. As Hägglund notes elsewhere, Capital is an immanent critique of capitalist society; it employs terms that are adequate to its concept. Value in an economic sense serves as Capital’s object of critique, since that is the only ‘value’ that is acknowledged by capital. This does not mean that a revaluation of value is not extraordinarily important; the creation of an alternative to capitalism hinges on developing social values that break from the notion that only that which augments profit is valuable. However, not alerting the reader to the divide between these two uses of ‘value’ can lead to lack of clarity.

Take the statement, ‘The measure of value is thus different in the realm of freedom than in the realm of necessity. The value of an object or an activity in the realm of freedom is not directly correlated with the amount of labour time required to produce or maintain it’.22 The ‘measure of value’ is indeed different in these two realms since the annulment of alienated or abstract labour puts an end to value production. It is impossible to ‘measure’ what does not exist. Things continue to be valued in socialism but not in terms of socially necessary labour time.

However, Marx clearly states—in the Grundrisse, Capital, and The Critique of the Gotha Programme—that actual labour time (not to be confused with socially necessary labour time) will serve as a measure of social relations in at least the initial phase of socialism or communism (Marx treats the two as indistinguishable, not as distinct historical stages). When Marx, in Capital, calls upon the reader to ‘imagine, for a change, an association of free people, working with the means of production held in common,’ he describes this postcapitalist, socialist society as follows: ‘The share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part’—it would be the basis of ‘a definite social plan [that] maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations’ as well as ‘a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour’.23 Actual labour time—the number of concrete hours one works—becomes a measure of social relations. Nowhere does Marx speak of the measure of value in a socialist or communist society, since actual labour time in no way implies the existence of socially necessary labour time. Since abstract labour is the substance of value, the abolition of the dual character of labour by the freely associated producers eliminates the very basis of value and surplus value in the economic sense. What is abolished is not labour, but social relations in which it is treated as a means for augmenting wealth in monetary form. As Marx discusses in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, once society dispenses with exchange value, commodity exchange and capital and subsequently distributes the social product based on the actual number of hours of labour performed by the individual, we will have reached the initial phase of freedom which prepares us for a higher one in which free time rather than labour time serves as a measure.

Second, while This Life has much to say about the measure of value, it has much less on the substance of value—abstract labour. The two are closely related: labour becomes a value-creating substance insofar as it is subjected to an abstract time determination that is beyond the producers’ control. But labour time is not necessarily correlated to abstract universal labour time; in fact, for most of human history the latter did not even exist. Nevertheless, Hägglund writes, ‘As long as we measure our social wealth in terms of labour time, technological development is bound to intensify exploitative methods for extracting relative surplus value from workers’.24 This is, again, not consistent with Marx’s discussions of a postcapitalist society.

That Marx—briefly and very much in outline—presented a conception of what life would be like following capitalism does mean it should be followed as a blueprint. We do need to take seriously, however, why Marx distinguishes between actual labour time and socially necessary labour time—especially since the point is lost on the part of almost all of his commentators. Take Hägglund’s statement, ‘As soon as the satisfaction of our needs depends on the contribution of our labour, we are back to the form of coercion that Marx sought to overcome through his critique of wage labour’.25 This not only overlooks the fact that some kind of labour contribution will be needed in any society; it also leaves unclear what is meant by a ‘contribution of labour’. Does it refer to producing goods and services in accordance with an average amount of time that is determined by the market or the state? Or does it refer to the actual number of hours of labour performed by freely associated individuals in communes or cooperatives? The two are not just different, they are diametrically opposed. If ‘contribution of labour’ is understood in the first sense, Hägglund is right; if it is understood in the second sense, he is not.

These problems may stem from the debt that This Life owes to Moishe Postone’s Time, Labour, and Social Domination. As I have discussed elsewhere,26 although the book is an important contribution to Marxist scholarship, it suffers from serious theoretical limitations. These appear in its most important contribution—its correct contention that the split between concrete and abstract labour (and value production generally) is specific to capitalism and is not a transhistorical fact of human existence. That, in itself, is no discovery of Postone’s; it was pointed out decades earlier by such figures as Rosa Luxemburg, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Karel Kosik. What is new in Postone’s ‘reinterpretation’ of Marx is the claim that concrete labour becomes so dominated by abstract labour as to become virtually indistinguishable from it. He well knows that both are generated in the same instant; but he argues that since concrete labour is the mode of expression of abstract labour, the logic of capital effaces any distinction between labourers and the value-form of labour power. The logical conclusion is that any appeal to subjective human forces to uproot capital (whether through class struggle or other kinds of human resistance) is futile; the subject of liberation is not living labour but dead labour, capital.

Postone largely draws his interpretation from the section of Marx’s Grundrisse on the automaton, which envisions a point at which living labour becomes so totally displaced from production that ‘labour time ceases and must cease to be a measure’27 of social wealth. Value production comes to an end through the very principle which governs it—the drive to squeeze out more value in less amounts of time through labour-saving devices.

But there are problems with such appropriations of the Grundrisse. First, Marx takes a different position in Capital, writing ‘Only the abolition of the capitalist form of production would permit the reduction of the working day to the necessary labour time. But even in that case. the latter would expand to take up more of the working day’.28 Second, as Dunayevskaya pointed out as early as 1958, since the Grundrisse was written during the politically quiescent 1850s, it falls short of dialectically connecting the objective laws of capitalism with subjective forms of resistance—unlike Capital, which was written under the impact of the campaigns for the eight-hour day and the struggles of African Americans against slavery. As she put it, ‘there is too much emphasis in the Grundrisse on machinery as providing the material basis for the dissolution of capital’.29 The effort to expunge class struggle and other forms of resistance from Marx’s value-theoretic categories—as if the former concerns the ‘exoteric’ Marx which can be put aside in favour of the ‘esoteric’ theory of value—rests on very shaky ground.

Hägglund takes aim at the claim that dead labour is the emancipatory alternative, writing, ‘In Postone’s story of the transition from capitalism to socialism, historical agents do not have the power to change anything… he offers no account of what we will be free to do and why our freedom matters’.30 He rightly holds that Postone’s ‘indeterminant conception of freedom is incompatible with democratic socialism’.31However, while these defects may be related to Postone’s failure to argue for a re-evaluation of value, it has much more to do with his peculiar reading of Marx’s theory of value, in which abstract labour effaces concrete labour to the point of foreclosing any human agency—and hence the kind of re-evaluation Hägglund is arguing for.

Hägglund’s project would be strengthened by engaging the Marxist-Humanist tradition, which decades before Postone, the Neue Marx-Lektüre, and value-form theorists, argued for the historical specificity of Marx’s theory of value, opposed the view that the abolition of private property and competitive markets ensures an exit from capitalism, and held that the elimination of socially necessary labour time in favour of freely associated time is the cardinal principle of socialism. As Dunayevskaya wrote in Marxism and Freedom, ‘The capitalist organisation [of society] is where all labour, no matter what its concrete nature, is timed according to what is socially necessary. It becomes one mass of abstract labour precisely because the labourer himself is paid at value’.32 Notice, here, that the duality of labour under capitalism is posed not only in terms of concrete versus abstract labour, but of the labourer versus the value-form of its labour power. Skipping over such potential internal resistance to the value-form renders value theory, and by extensive Marxism, arid, objectivist and non-humanist.

Marx’s critique of the value-form of mediation, however, is thoroughly humanist—contrary to the claims of Postone and many others. Marx’s value-theoretic categories are thoroughly rooted in class relations, not because he was a class reductionist, but because his fundamental object of critique is the reified form of human praxis that defines modern society—beginning with social relations at the point of production, but hardly ending there. As Dunayevskays argues, ‘Marx’s analysis of labour—and this is what distinguishes him from all other Socialists and Communists of his day and of ours—goes much further than the economic structure of society. His analysis goes to the actual human relations’.33 Grasping and developing this is the fundamental challenge facing all revolutionary theory today, especially when it comes to extending Marxism beyond issues of class to that of race, gender, and sexuality. ‘Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing’.34 Each generation must find its way to meeting that perspective, most of all our own.

The issues raised by Hägglund’s study are of the foremost importance. For, if the logic of capital effaces subjective human resistance, it can only mean (as Postone and many capital-logic theorists openly affirm) that capital is the ‘absolute’ of modern life. And, if that is the case, it follows that we who resist capital are not part of the absolute. The absolute once again gets viewed as outside or beyond us. That is an egregious misrepresentation of the absolute. The claim that the human can no longer be thought—a central premise of much of contemporary left-wing thought—cannot but misrepresent ourselves as well as freedom itself. But the absolute—whether understood in Hegelian terms as the unity of subject and object or in Marxist-Humanist terms as the new society—can be thought, if only we are daring enough to think it.


References

Adorno, T. 1973. Negative Dialectics. New York: Seabury Press.

Dunayevskaya, R.1973. Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao. New York: Dell.

Dunayevskaya, R. 2000 [orig. 1958]. Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today. Amherst NY: Humanities Books.

Ember, EW. 2021. ‘Record Numbers Are Quitting Jobs as Virus Wanes, The New York Times, June 21.

Hägglund, M. 2019. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon.

Hägglund, M. 2021. “Marx, Hegel, and thew Critique of Religion A Response,” Losa Angeles Review of Books, March 15, 2021 https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/article/marx-hegel-and-the-critique-of-religion-a-response

Hegel, G.W.F. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Revolution, Vol. III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Clarenden Press.

Hsu, Andrea 2021. ‘The Great Resignation: Why Millions of Workers are Quitting Their Jobs,’ National Public Radio, June 24.

Hudis, P. 1995. ‘Labour, High Tech Capitalism, and the Crisis of the Subject: A Critique of Recent Developments in Critical Theory,’ Humanity & Society, 19 (4) November, pp. 14-20.

Hudis, P. 2000. ‘The Death of the Death of the Subject,’ Historical Materialism, 12 (3), pp. 147-69.

Hudis, P. 2013. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Marx, K. Marx, K. 1975 [orig. 1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, K. 1977 [orig. 1867]. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Penguin

Marx, K. 1987 [orig. 1858]. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1976 [orig. 1846]. The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. New York: International Publishsers.

Rose, G. 2009 [orig. 1981]. Hegel Contra Sociology. New York and London: Verso Books.


Footnotes

1. Hägglund 2019, p. 11.
2. Ibid., p. 191.
3. Ibid., p. 375.
4. Hägglund, p. 252.
5. Ember 2021.
6. Hsu 2021.
7. Marx 1977, p. 133.
8. Marx 1975, pp. 376, 377.
9. Ibid. p. 377.
10. Adorno 1973, p. 207.
11. Marx 1975, p. 308.
12. Hägglund 2019, p. 365.
13. Hägglund 2021.
14. Hegel 2007, p. 162.
15. Hägglund 2021.
16. Rose 2009, p. 98.
17. Ibid.
18. Marx 1976, p. 49.
19. Hägglund 2019, p. 344.
20. Ibid., p. 25
21. Ibid., p. 262.
22. Ibid., p. 223.
23. Marx 1977, p. 172.
24. Hägglund 2019, p. 264.
25. Ibid., p. 273.
26. See Hudis 1995, Hudis 2000, and Hudis 2012.
27. Marx 1987, p. 91.
28. Marx 1977, p. 667.
29. Dunayevskaya 1973, p. 70.
30. Hägglund 2019, p. 277.
31. Ibid., p. 278.
32. Dunayevskaya 2000, p. 86.
33. Ibid., p. 60.
34. Ibid., p. 22.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• Peter Hudis
  

  Peter Hudis has written widely on Marxist theory and contemporary politics and is the author of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, and Frantz Fanon: Philosopher on the Barricades. He is General Editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (three volumes have appeared so far).

https://imhojournal.org/

Dialectics, Nature and Science

A defense of dialectical materialist science.

Notes and Fragments for Dialectics of Nature. Engels 1883

Dialectics in Nature?

Is Nature Dialectical?

Dialectics and Modern Science

Towards a New Dialectics of Nature

JOSEPH DIETZGEN (1828-1888)

Joseph Dietzgen Internet Archive, also see: Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism
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Ambartsumian, Arp and the Breeding Galaxies

Apeiron, Vol. 12, No. 2, April 2005

In the case of terrestrial nature we observe that matter, life, history
and thought evolve through a series of revolutionary changes
(qualitative leaps) according to the dialectical law of the negation of
the negation or a triad of thesis—antithesis—synthesis mediated by
chance and necessity, and brought forth through the conflict of the
opposites or the contradiction of heredity and adaptation in its very
own units. Chance is blind only when it is not realized in a necessity.
If a seed from a plant falls on a stone or by chance carried to the
moon, it will not grow there, because there is no necessity for it, i.e.,
no scope of its further development. So this chance is sterile and
things end there. But when a chance brings the same seed into a fertile
soil, it develops due to the exacerbation of the conflict of the
opposites within the seed, it negates itself into a plant, which in turn
negates itself (the negation of the negation) to give an increased
quantity of the seed itself. All change, motion, development in this
view proceeds through nodal points or leaps (governed by specific
laws) where dialectical opposites either mutually annihilate each other
or are sublated (aufheben) into a new synthesis and so on (the
negation of the negation) and where changes in quantity leads to a
qualitative change and vice versa. It is the task of natural science to
discover these specific laws and not to impose laws on nature created
in the brain of man.

A dialectical view of the universe as proposed recently (Apeiron,
Vol 10, No. 2. 165-173(2003)) can provide a plausible basis for an
understanding of the evolution of the galaxies in particular and the
phenomenology of the cosmos in general. According to this view,
matter in the form of elementary particles comes into being and
passes out of existence (with a finite amount being present at any
particular time) as a dialectical and quantum mechanical necessity in
the universe, which is void and infinite in space and time. Persuasive
evidence from quantum electrodynamics suggests that virtual
particles inhabit empty space with an increasing concentration close
to an atomic nucleus. Some of these virtual particles can become real
(and the real pass back to virtual) as chance events and necessities, by
tunneling effects, and/or as pair production by quantum fluctuation in
the vacuum and so on, to give rise to both matter and antimatter. Out
of the innumerable possibilities, the law of chance and necessity
determines which particles eventually prevail. Chance accumulation
of matter and/or antimatter at certain points can then provide the seeds
for further growth and development of galaxies, following physical
laws. Since the appearance/disappearance of matter is enhanced
where mass concentration is high, the galactic centers form the most
active sites where new matter accumulates and these centers become
the theatre where other random and periodic cosmic events can
manifest themselves, such as those that we see as the Active Galactic
Nuclei (AGNs), quasars, etc. This basic process then can form the
fundamental dynamics through which the universe evolves.
Everything in this universe from the galaxies to man are

Dynamic logic:

At the dawn of science, Heraclitus introduced the concepts of becoming and union of opposites as principles that govern reality and hence should govern thought. Similar process views had been developed by Buddhist and Taoist philosophers ("Tao," becoming as the cosmic law, is the Chinese equivalent of logos). The recognition of evolution in cosmology, biology, and history, has recreated an interest in the process approach. Evolutionary science requires a process logic that deals with action and change, not stable entities; with actual oppositions, not abstract separation of opposites; and with creative processes in nature and thought, not only linearly determined causality and implication. Quantum mechanics also suggests a departure from traditional logic insofar as it postulates that (1) the universe is made up of quanta of action (Plank constant); (2) particle and wave properties coexist (principle of complementarity) [1]; and (3) interactions create qualitative, non-linear leaps.

Although process philosophies have been also developed by Spencer, Whitehead and Teilhard du Chardin, a process approach to logic is largely limited to the dialectics developed by Hegel. Dialectic logic, which in our century came to be fostered almost exclusively by Marxist thinkers, had the advantage of recognizing empirical facts essential to scientific understanding which are obscured and denied by mathematical logic, namely, the ever present becoming (so an entity becomes unequal to itself), the existence of coexisting opposites in nature, history, and mind (denied by the principle of no contradiction), and the existence and generation of a multiplicity of alternatives (excluded as third cases). On the other hand, dialectic logic was not mathematically formulated except in very partial ways, and by a limited number of thinkers [11, 17, 26-28]. Some systems theorists [42] and trialectics [14] have explicitly incorporated dialectic logic. Temporal [25], and fuzzy [16] logic, may also be understood as partial formalizations of dialectic logic under another name.

The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic

Scientific research can in fact be unaware of its own principal features. Dialectical knowledge, in contrast, is knowledge of the dialectic. For science, there is not any formal structure, nor any implicit assertion about the rationality of the universe: Reason is developing and the mind prejudges nothing. In complete contrast, the dialectic is both a method and a movement in the object. For the dialectician, it is grounded on a fundamental claim both about the structure of the real and about that of our praxis. We assert simultaneously that the process of knowledge is dialectical, that the movement of the object (whatever it may be) is itself dialectical, and that these two dialectics are one and the same. Taken together, these propositions have a material content; they themselves are a form of organised knowledge, or, to put it differently, they define a rationality of the world.

Igor I. Kondrashin - Dialectics of Matter (Part I)

"The universe always contains the same quantity of motion." - R. Descartes.
"The motion is the only way of existence of matter. There was nowhere and never and there is no matter without motion... Matter without motion is as inconceivable as motion without matter. Therefore the motion is as increatable and undestroyable as matter itself - ... : the quantity of existing motion in the universe is always the same." - F. Engels.
"There is nothing in the universe except matter in motion." - V.I. Lenin.
These three postulating quotations put the corner-stones to our cognition of the general theory of evolution of the universe.
So Matter is the objective reality, the nature of which are different forms of motion, being itself her attribute. Hence there is nothing in the universe except motion, all existing construction material is motion. Matter is woven with motion. Any particle of any substance is a regulated motion of micro motions; any event is a determinated motion of elements of the system of motions. It is possible to resolve mentally any phenomena, events or substance into different forms of motion as well as out of different forms of motion in conformity with certain Laws it is possible to synthesize any phenomena, event or substance of Matter. Therefore in order to know how it happens it is necessary to learn the Laws, that regulate different forms of motion of Matter.

Dialectic, Systems, and Organization: The Philosophical Implications of the New Science

By Anthony Mansueto

Abstract:

There has been growing interest in recent years in the philosophical implications of complex systems theory and such related disciplines as cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence. Among theorists working in this area, there is a growing tendency to regard complex systems theory as providing scientific sanction for what amounts to a sophisticated neoliberal philosophy centered on "the spontaneous emergence of higher levels of organization or control (metasystem transitions) through blind variation and natural selection (Principia Cybernetica Project, Symposium on the Evolution of Complexity, Call for Papers)." This interpretation of complex systems theory has its roots in the "negentropic" or "information theoretical" interpretation of organization first advanced by von Neumann, Shannon and Weaver, and finds parallels in the positivistic interpretation of the new physics advanced by Frank Tipler (1986, 1989) among others.

This paper will argue that the neoliberal interpretation of complex systems theory is marked by serious errors. Neoliberal interpereters of complex systems theory fail to situate the new discipline properly in the context of equally important developments in physics (unified field theories) and biology (especially postdarwinian theories which stress the role of problem solving genetic algorithms and symbiosis, as against blind variation and natural selection in the evolutionary process). There are powerful theoretical and empirical grounds to support the idea that competition and natural selection (whether in the ecosystem or in the marketplace) are not only an inadequate basis for explaining development, but in fact hold back the emergence of dynamic, organized complexity.

The paper will advance an alternative dialectical interpretation of the new science (including complex systems theory). Specifically it will argue for

a) a radical, dialectical holism which recognizes being as system, structure, and organization, and treats "things" (particles, individuals) as merely the nodes at which complex relationships intersect,

b) a cosmology which stresses the role of underlying, implicit structures, complex relational interaction, and emerging conscious creativity rather than blind variation and natural selection as the motive force behind the emergence of complex organization and thus the whole cosmohistorical evolutionary process, and

c) a theory of value grounded in the immanent teleology of the cosmos itself, in which complex organization, and not the survival of particular elements, is the telos and thus the highest value of the system.

A Philosophical Naturalism

With a few notable exceptions, the Platonic dualism of identity and change reverberated in one way or another throughout Western philosophy until the nineteenth century, when Hegel's logical works largely resolved this paradox by systematically showing that identity, or self-persistence, actually expresses itself through change as an ever-variegated unfolding of "unity in diversity," to use his own words.² The grandeur of Hegel's effort has no equal in the history of Western philosophy. Like Aristotle before him, he had an "emergent" interpretation of causality, of how the implicit becomes explicit through the unfolding of its latent form and possibilities. On a vast scale over the course of two sizable volumes, he assembled nearly all the categories by which reason explains reality, and educed one from the other in an intelligible and meaningful continuum that is graded into a richly differentiated, increasingly comprehensive, or "adequate" whole, to use some of his terms.

We may reject what Hegel called his "absolute idealism," the transition from his logic to his philosophy of nature, his teleological culmination of the subjective and objective in a godlike "Absolute," and his idea of a cosmic Spirit (Geist). Hegel rarefied dialectical reason into a cosmological system that verged on the theological by trying to reconcile it with idealism, absolute knowledge, and a mystical unfolding logos that he often designated "God." Unfamiliar with ecology, Hegel rejected natural evolution as a viable theory in favor of a static hierarchy of Being. By the same token, Friedrich Engels intermingled dialectical reason with natural "laws" that more closely resemble the premises of nineteenth-century physics than a plastic metaphysics or an organismic outlook, producing a crude dialectical materialism. Indeed, so enamored was Engels of matter and motion as the irreducible "attributes" of Being that a kineticism based on mere motion invaded his dialectic of organic development.

To dismiss dialectical reason because of the failings of Hegel's idealism and Engels's materialism, however, would be to lose sight of the extraordinary coherence that dialectical reason can furnish and its extraordinary applicability to ecology--particularly to an ecology rooted in evolutionary development. Despite Hegel's own prejudices against organic evolution, what stands out amid the metaphysical and often theological archaisms in his work is his overall eduction of logical categories as the subjective anatomy of a developmental reality. What is needed is to free this form of reason from both the quasi-mystical and the narrowly scientistic worldviews that in the past have made it remote from the living world; to separate it from Hegel's empyrean, basically antinaturalistic dialectical idealism and the wooden, often scientistic dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxists. Shorn of both its idealism and its materialism, dialectical reason may be rendered naturalistic and ecological and conceived as a naturalistic form of thinking.

This dialectical naturalism offers an alternative to an ecology movement that rightly distrusts conventional reason. It can bring coherence to ecological thinking, and it can dispel arbitrary and anti-intellectual tendencies toward the sentimental, cloudy, and theistic at best and the dangerously antirational, mystical, and potentially reactionary at worst. As a way of reasoning about reality, dialectical naturalism is organic enough to give a more liberatory meaning to vague words like interconnectedness and holism without sacrificing intellectuality. It can answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this essay: what nature is, humanity's place in nature, the thrust of natural evolution, and society's relationship with the natural world. Equally important, dialectical naturalism adds an evolutionary perspective to ecological thinking--despite Hegel's rejection of natural evolution and Engels's recourse to the mechanistic evolutionary theories of a century ago. Dialectical naturalism discerns evolutionary phenomena fluidly and plastically, yet it does not divest evolution of rational interpretation. Finally, a dialectic that has been "ecologized," or given a naturalistic core, and a truly developmental understanding of reality could provide the basis for a living ecological ethics.

"The Attack on Mead and the Dialectics of Anthropology" (1990)

The well-publicized attack by Derek Freeman (1983) on the Margaret Mead study of Samoa (1928) has raised a number of questions about anthropological research and communication, ranging from professional ethics to the dialectical understanding of science. These questions involve substantive matters as well as methodological canons. Now we have the long-awaited assessment of the Mead-Freeman controversy by Lowell Holmes (1987), a valuable intervention that provides answers to a number of these questions, especially those relating to professional and substantive issues. Their two books are briefly reviewed in panels on the facing page. Here we focus on some areas of philosophical interest in the development of U.S. anthropology: the history and role of the doctrine of `falsifiability' in anthropology and in the sciences in general, the relationship between Boasian anthropology and biologism, and the relation between both these doctrines and historical materialism.

To anticipate somewhat, we will first show how the `falsifiability' canon has a longer and perhaps more interesting history than the popular accolades to Karl Popper would acknowledge, and that it entails a dialectical conception of science and its development. Next, in light of these dialectical considerations, we will show that Boasian anthropology is indeed the negation -- the simple negation -- of biologism. While giving our attention to such biologistic contemporaries of Franz Boas as Herbert Spencer and Karl Pearson, we remark that today's chic variant of the same biologism is called "sociobiology." Finally, the dialectical negation of both these doctrines (biologism and Boasian anthropology) is shown to be social evolutionism and its philosophical recapitulation, historical and dialectical materialism.

Thus, as class struggle intensified during the later decades of the 19th Century, we see that Socialism, Marxism, historical materialism, Morgan's social evolutionism, etc. -- virtually any aspect of science revealing the significance of dialectics -- all became increasingly disreputable in `higher circles.' And their reputations in those circles only worsened with the onset of the general crisis of capitalism and the Bolshevik Revolution. As evidence of the latter, we find the persons and the periods hopelessly confounded. For instance, we find Engels described as "the most explicit Bolshevik spokesman" (Leslie and Kerman, 1985:116), though he died in 1895, some years before the 1903 split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The primary task of `reputable' academics in the West -- and even aspiring academics -- came to be the promotion of doctrines and Metaphysical Worldviews which did not threaten the bourgeois order. Thus the popularity for both the two competing approaches of Boasian anthropology and biologism.

All this bears on our understanding and practice today, as the 20th Century wanes and along with it, Imperialism as well. As we have seen throughout this essay, it is essential to recognize the dialectical considerations and implications of science and its development. We must first assess the ideological significance of a discipline such as anthropology -- as well as its artifacts (e.g. monographs, essays, etc.) -- in class terms, and only then weigh the merits of the controversies between the several forms of apologetics and obfuscations. And that caveat seems to bear on our understanding of the anthropology of the 1980's no less than that of the 1880's.

SEE:

Engels Was Right

Dialectics of Extinction

(r)Evolutionary Theory

Dialectical Science-JBS Haldane

Dialectical Anthropology-AP Alexeev

Design Yes But Not ID

A Lesson in Mutual Aid

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

Goldilocks Enigma

9 Minute Nobel Prize

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