Essay
November 2000
The subjectivity of philosophy and anti-capitalism
by David Black
Until the 1990s, socialist politics in the West had long been distorted in
the Cold War's wilderness of ideological mirrors. The perspective that the
Soviet Empire was somehow historically "progressive" in comparison with the
"West" (it wasn't), competed with Social Democracy's notion that it could
abolish capitalism gradually through bourgeois parliamentarianism (it
couldn't and no longer even pretends to try). With Stalinism and Social
Democracy now out of the picture for any meaningful rethinking of
socialism, the Trotskyists have plodded on as best they can, continuing to
blame the victories of Thatcher/Reaganism and the Clinton/Blair Third Way
on a "crisis of leadership" in the "traditional" organizations of the
working class.
Other leftists have rejected class politics altogether. Whilst the
"anti-capitalist" protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C. and London over the
last year have included sections of organized labor, there are many
activists (especially within the anarcho-green and "Third Worldist"
spectrum) who see the "traditional" organizations, such as unions and
socialist parties, as irrelevant to their struggles if not as pillars of
the rule of capitalist "productivism." Moishe Postone says in TIME, LABOR
AND SOCIAL DOMINATION that because the proletariat is tied to "the form of
labor that constitutes and is constituted by structures of alienation,"
then capital cannot be opposed from the proletarian standpoint.
CAPITAL, REVOLT, MARX-HEGEL
Postone is one of a growing number of radical theoreticians who believe
that critical engagement with Marx's CAPITAL must also tackle the question
of how Hegel's idealist dialectic relates to Marx's critique. Postone says
that "Whereas Hegel's Subject is transhistorical and knowing, in Marx's
analysis it is historically determinate and blind." This "historical
Subject" is, in Postone's analysis, capital; which, unlike "Hegel's GEIST,"
does "not possess self-consciousness." Therefore, the notion of a
"self-grounding" and "self-moving" Subject must, in Postone's view, be
distinguished from the "sociohistorical Subject" in Marx's analysis.
Marx criticized Hegel for subjectivizing an abstraction of
self-consciousness rather than real humanity; and as Peter Hudis points out:
"It should not be hard to see that this inversion of subject and object in
Hegel mirrors one of the perverse features of capitalism....the product of
our activity takes on a life of its own and shapes our lives according to
its dictates. Subjective laboring activity becomes a mere means for the
self-expansion of capital."(1)
But, as Hudis points out, because capital appears now more than ever as an
absolutizing force of domination and destruction (and "ultimately
uncontrollable" according to István Mészáros in BEYOND CAPITAL), theorists
tend to see in Hegel's concept of the Absolute Idea an expression of
capitalism's insane logic; in which, as Mészáros sees it, we are seemingly
held under the "tyrannical spell of the World Spirit."
Whereas Postone sees "capital, as analyzed by Marx [a]s a form of social
life with metaphysical attributes-those of the absolute subject," Hudis
counters that "this implies the rejection, not just of the proletariat, but
also the subjectivity of philosophy."(2)
I have taken the Postone debate as a starting point in defending the
subjectivity of philosophy because, whether Hegel's concept of the absolute
is seen as representing a "totalizing" monster or as a "new beginning," the
issues involved are clearly important. Postone's book, like Mészáros'
BEYOND CAPITAL, has had some impact within activist circles in recent years
(though Mészáros' analysis, it should be said, does not share Postone's
dismissal of organized labor). Bearing in mind that Marx at one point says
that Hegel philosophizes "from the standpoint of modern political economy,"
I will draw out some important developments in Hegel scholarship which may
help to show how Hegel's "absolute negativity" might relate to a philosophy
of revolutionary anti-capitalism.
For many Hegel commentators, beginning with Schelling who was his
contemporary, Hegel appears to be trying to show how the Idea, as a
metaphysical abstraction, itself "creates" objectivity in a theological
sense; as if the material world was only the self-reflection of the Idea;
and as if the philosopher himself was some sort of guardian of pure
philosophic form.
For some critics, such as the logical positivist Karl Popper, Hegel offers
a metaphysical idealism drawn from Plato's earlier version. In Plato's
cosmology, the relationship of the Idea to Nature is determined by a
"demiurge" who makes the world out of primordial chaos; an external
determination of the same order as the "divine" philosophic "guardians" who
impose their pure forms and eternal truths on Plato's ideal republic.
Indeed, it seems hardly an accident that the three sections of Hegel's
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES correspond with Plato's main
works (the PAREMIDES is concerned with Logic, the TIMAEUS with Nature, and
the REPUBLIC with Mind).(3)
With Hegel's approach however, the relationship between Idea and Nature is
quite different from all idealist philosophers, from Plato to Kant, for
whom form is hidden from and opposed to particularity. In Hegel's
dialectic, the universality, formulated as SOCIAL-consciousness, is, as
Mészáros puts it in MARX'S THEORY OF ALIENATION, inherent in the
"dynamically evolving particularity." As Hegel expresses it, the whole and
the parts condition each other and are equal to each other, but the whole
"is not equal to them as a parts, the whole is reflected unity," which
means, in Raya Dunayevskaya's interpretation, that "the whole is not only
the sum total of the parts, but has a pull on the parts that are not yet
there."(4)
In Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND (1807), the subject of "absolute knowing"
experiences the "certainty" of objectivity and the substantiality of
subjectivity. Dunayevskaya comments that Hegel is thus able to "proceed to
treat both knowledge and reality in the form of categories [in the SCIENCE
OF LOGIC] because they do include historical reality, present reality, as
well as the long road of thought about it."(5)
The PHENOMENOLOGY culminates in Absolute Knowledge/Absolute Knowing. In one
of the most influential commentaries on the Phenomenology, Alexandre
Kojéve, the French existentialist, says in INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF
HEGEL, that Hegel's Absolute Knowledge is the arrival of a present that is
aware of progress in relation to the past. In this science of the way in
which knowledge "appears," human progress is seen to be mediated by a
knowledge which is at the same time "comprehending memory" and
internalizing "recollection," and the "Golgotha" of Absolute Spirit. But
the end is also a beginning of another science in which Hegel leaves behind
the temporal concerns of the PHENOMENOLOGY for the science of "pure
thought" (the Logic). Hegel's Smaller Logic forms the first of his
three-part ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES.
The second part, THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, follows after the LOGIC and
deals with chemistry, geology, botany, zoology and anthropology-all as
understood in the empirical sciences of his day. Nature here is portrayed
as the "Other" of the Idea, but at the same time Hegel sees Nature as
representing the Idea's essential FREEDOM. John Burbidge points out that in
Hegel's larger work on logic, the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, the discussion of the
organic existence of "life" is concerned with the teleological development
of a thinking subject. This subject, presented in a syllogistic form, is a
living individual, motivated by "feeling," who overcomes PARTICULAR
obstacles to his or her concept of "purpose" and then achieves a measure of
universality. (6)
Within Hegel's "system," the self-determined idea of the Logic, once
unfolded, "freely releases" Nature -as understood in all its diversity and
objectivity. But in Nature, the logical does NOT itself generate the
sequential categories; for subjectivity only comes at the end, in the
concept of the telos.
Dieter Wandschnieder suggests that, although Hegel's concept of nature
doesn't represent an intuition of the now established fact of natural
evolution, what does emerge at the end of his THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE is
nonetheless the concept of "a being capable of thought." Wandschnieder sees
the relationship between Logic, Nature and Mind in Hegel's dialectic as
working itself out through the mediation of "idealized nature or
naturalized idea" in the form of "culture realized in a physical world."(7)
Burbidge, commenting on Popper's assertion that Hegel's dialectic was an
attempt to "draw real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical hats,"
points out that "a rabbit has its own independent life before the magician
went on stage." Furthermore, "Hegel's magic comes not from producing
something out of nothing, but from detailed reflection on the way the brute
facts of existence acquire significance and meaning, even as our sense of
meaning and significance organizes the way we read the facts of experience."
ABSOLUTE NEGATIVITY
Hegel could only transcend the limits of his age in an abstract manner; to
do more would mean going beyond philosophy. Or as Marx put it, it would
mean going beyond "interpretation" of the world-the world in which reigns
the split between mental and manual labor through the social division of
labor in a class-divided society.
For Dunayevskaya, because Hegel's absolutes end up being permeated with
"absolute negativity," he remains relevant to the dialectic of labor and
capital and Marx's concept of the "revolution in permanence."
In Volume 1 of CAPITAL, in the chapter on "the absolute general law of
capitalist accumulation," Marx writes that capital, which cannot produce
wealth without producing poverty, eventually "begets its own negation," the
organized working class. In Dunayevskaya's view, "free creative power
assures the plunge to freedom" as the "unifying force," and "since absolute
negativity, the new foundation, is not 'something merely picked up, but
something DEDUCED and PROVED,' this subjective couldn't but be objective,
so much so that it extends to the SYSTEM ITSELF" as it becomes richer and
more concrete.(8)
Self-realization as self-determined movement must also extend to the
Universal. As Hegel puts it in the PHENOMENOLOGY:
"The object as a whole is the mediated result (the syllogism) or the
passing of universality into individuality through specification, also the
reverse process from the individual, to universal through canceled
individuality or specific determination."(9)
If new dimensions of the "Quest for Universality" (to use Marx's
phrase)-Black, Feminist, Gay, "Green"-are to redefine the notion of
"socialism," then Hegel's absolute negativity can be articulated as
negation within the movement from practice of external obstacles to freedom
which were themselves negations of earlier obstacles and as negation of
internal barriers to new developments of subjectivity.
NOTES
1. Peter Hudis, "Raya Dunayevskaya's Concretization of Hegel's Concept of
'Absolute Negativity'," paper delivered at Socialist Scholars' Conference,
New York, 1999.
2. Peter Hudis, "Is Marx's critique of capitalism still valid?" NEWS &
LETTERS, January-February 1995.
3. Hegel, LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, vol. 2, p. 49. See Gary K.
Browning, "Transitions to and from Nature in Hegel and Plato," in "Hegel's
Metaphysics of Nature," BULLETIN OF THE HEGEL SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN, No.
26, 1992.
4. Raya Dunayevskaya, "Rough Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC," Part 3,
Doctrine of Essence, NEWS & LETTERS, April 1999. See also THE RAYA
DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 2806.
5. Raya Dunayevskaya, "Rough Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC," Part 1,
Introduction and Preface, News & Letters, January-February 1999.
6. John W. Burbidge "Hegel's Hat Trick," BULLETIN OF THE HEGEL SOCIETY OF
GREAT BRITAIN, No. 39/40, 1999.
7. D. Wandschnieder, "Nature and Dialectic of Nature in Hegel's Objective
Idealism," BULLETIN OF THE HEGEL SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN, No. 39/40, 1999.
8. Raya Dunayevskaya, "Hegel's Absolute as New Beginning," ART & LOGIC IN
HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY, (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1974); also in
NEW ESSAYS (Detroit: News & Letters, 1977).
9. Raya Dunayevskaya, "Letter of May 12, 1953," THE PHILOSOPHIC MOMENT OF
MARXIST-HUMANISM (Chicago: News & Letters, 1989).
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