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Essay
News & Letters, July 2001
Hegel's dialectic: logic of capital -- or of freedom?
by Tom Jeannot
This essay consists of excerpts from "Raya Dunayevskaya's
Conception of Ultimate Reality and Meaning" from THE
JOURNAL OF ULTIMATE MEANING AND REALITY, vol. 22, no. 4,
December 1999.--Editor
Hegel begins his chapter on the Absolute Idea in the SCIENCE OF
LOGIC by announcing that it "has shown itself to be the
identity of the theoretical and the practical Idea. Each of
these by itself is still one-sided."
In founding News and Letters Committees in 1955 and developing
the theoretical presentation of Marxist-Humanism, Raya
Dunayevskaya interpreted Hegel's announcement in the light of
Marx's THESES ON FEUERBACH, where Marx criticizes the "main
shortcoming of all materialism," including Feuerbach's, for
failing to "comprehend the significance of 'revolutionary,'
practical-critical activity," i.e., the unity of the
practical with the theoretical Idea, apart from which either
moment, isolated from the other, is one-sided and false.
This is the definition of praxis, "a new relation of
practice to theory and philosophy to revolution as an integral
part of the struggle for freedom," about which she writes,
"No concept of Marx's is less understood, by adherents as
well as enemies" (PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, p. 264). Her
original reading of the Absolute Idea as praxis, the principled
hermeneutical basis of which was her deep fidelity to Marx's own
Marxism and his philosophical appropriation and historically
materialist transformation of Hegelianism, was the heuristic
clue that oriented her practical and scholarly work from 1955 to
her death on June 9, 1987.
Perhaps audaciously, Dunayevskaya claimed that she had
"discovered a new Hegel, who, instead of closing his
thought off in a 'system' and retreating with the Owl of
Minerva, had at least left the doors open for future
philosophers" (MARXISM AND FREEDOM, p. 9). But she could
claim this only because she had also discovered a "new
Marx," forgotten by what she came to call the
"post-Marx Marxists" (from Engels and the Second
International to the present day), who himself had discovered
what she called "a new continent of thought and of
revolution."
As the first to translate Marx's ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC
MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 into English (partly included as an appendix
to the first edition of MARXISM AND FREEDOM, 1958), she was
never taken in by the idle conundrum, occasioned by the
unavailability of Marx's early writings until Ryazanov's
archival labor of the twenties and early thirties, of how to
relate the young, humanist Marx to the mature, scientific author
of CAPITAL, a pseudo problem that has waylaid most Marx
scholarship in the 20th century.
She observed that not only in the well-known 1873 Postface to
the second German edition of CAPITAL, in which Marx declared
himself "the pupil of that mighty thinker," but, later
still, with the manuscripts he left to Engels for Vol. 2 of
CAPITAL, he wrote, "My relationship with Hegel is very
simple. I am a disciple of Hegel, and the presumptuous chatter
of the epigones who think they have buried this great thinker
appears frankly ridiculous to me"....
A MARXIST READING OF HEGEL
The world-historical instantiation of commodity fetishism as the
absolute opposite of Marx's humanism, the philosophical mirror
image of which is positivism--or, the totalizing reduction of
the "dialectic of negativity"--inevitably pushed
Dunayevskaya back to the Hegelian, as the "source of all
dialectic."
Whereas a standard reading of Marx's critique of Hegel finds
Marx repudiating Hegel's absolutes as the theological
mystification of real history, as "metaphysics" and
'"idealism" over against "empiricism" and
"materialism," and as a fantastic flight of the
abstract speculative imagination of philosophers over against
the "pragmatism" of activists who seek to change the
world rather than comprehend it, Dunayevskaya finds Marx
reinterpreting the absolutes in the light of his own humanism.
Hers is not a "Hegelian" reading of Marx, but a
Marxian reading of Hegel....
Perhaps more provocative still is the way Dunayevskaya laid hold
of Marx's claim to find Hegel's "outstanding
achievement" in the PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND not just in its
course of development, but in "its final result,"
i.e., "Absolute Knowing." If the dialectic were best
understood as a theodicy, we might expect this culminating
moment to be heaven, but in its very last lines, as if
deliberately to ward us off from the illusion of closure and
absolute rest, Hegel returned, not to the parousia, but to
"the Calvary of absolute Spirit." Dunayevskaya linked
this metaphor of absolute negativity to the chapter on the
Absolute Idea closing the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, and also to the
conclusion of the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND:
"In the PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, when Hegel finally arrives
at Absolute Knowledge, the reader is confronted, not with any
beautiful hereafter, but with "the Golgotha of the
Spirit." Thus, in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, as Hegel approaches
the Absolute Idea, the reader is not taken up into any abstract
blue yonder, but learns that the Absolute Idea contains the
highest opposition within itself. And thus, finally, when we
reach the pinnacle of the whole system, the final syllogism of
Absolute Mind of the entire Encyclopedia of Philosophical
Sciences, Hegel has us face the self-thinking Idea" (p.
38).
On this reading, following Marx, the Absolute is "absolute
negativity," and the dialectic is the "dialectic of
negativity." "Negativity," in turn, as "the
moving and generating principle," is both "alienation
and the transcendence of alienation," both the recognition
of the "negative" in the "positive," and the
impulse toward overcoming it, the restless, ceaseless wellspring
of creativity.
Finally, for Marxist-Humanism, this unquenchable impulse and
wellspring are situated neither in a remote heaven beyond, nor
somehow metaphysically reposited in "matter" per se,
as the reverse mirror image of dialectical materialism would
have it. Rather, absolute negativity is the very rhythm of human
subjectivity itself....
THE DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL
Marx opened the first volume of CAPITAL by asserting the
following: "The wealth of societies in which the capitalist
mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of
commodities."
To achieve the appropriate conceptual depth of Marx's
presentation from the outset, we can immediately add
Dunayevskaya's acute observation that "The commodity of
commodities in capitalist society is labor power" (MARXISM
AND FREEDOM, p. 117). The commodification of working people
themselves, therefore, is the differentia specifica of
capitalism....
Though this is not the place to go into the details of Marx's
theory of value, this reduction of human beings to merely a
means of production entirely mastered by the imperatives of
self-expanding capital is the inner core of commodity fetishism,
explaining the inner drive of capitalist accumulation.
Two situations are proposed here, one in which workers exist for
the sake of "the continual reproduction, on an ever larger
scale, of the capital-relation," and its reversal, where
"objective wealth'" (as opposed to "value")
"is there to satisfy the worker's own need for
development."
Furthermore, as Marx developed the argument of the chapter [on
the accumulation of capital], he declared that the general law
of capitalist accumulation was "absolute":
centralization and concentration of capital at one pole, ever
worsening conditions of life for workers at the other ("be
[their] payment high or low"); "the accumulation of
misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation
of wealth."
This absolute general law of capitalist accumulation foresees a
world in which the domination of the capital-relation is total,
or in other words, the totalitarianism wrought by the commodity
fetish itself, the total heteronomy of persons as things, the
total autonomy of things as capital, as if capital were god.
However, Marx can say of this absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation what Hegel says of the Absolute Idea, that it
"contains within itself the highest degree of
opposition." Marx refers to its "antagonistic
character," an antagonism or contradiction internal to its
very character as absolute. As Dunayevskaya put it, "A
second look is needed ..." (PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, p.
92).
Hegel, who, according to Marx, theorized in the "mode of
being" of "abstraction" despite his deepest
philosophical intention to the contrary, finally stood in
contradiction with himself, explaining his systematic
ambivalence and the inability of his system as it stood to stand
otherwise than within the horizon of "modern political
economy," the bourgeois horizon of the capitalist mode of
production.
Although Lenin and Dunayevskaya read Hegel through the lens of
Marx, and therefore recast the "Absolute
Idea"--"the identity of the theoretical and the
practical Idea" that "contains within itself the
highest degree of opposition"--as the praxis of human
subjects aspiring to freedom, Hegel quite obviously did not cast
it that way himself. Dunayevskaya explains why Hegel could not
have written, with Lenin, "Notion = man":
"In the Hegelian system, humanity appears only through the
back door, so to speak, since the core of self-development is
not [humanity], but only its 'consciousness,' that is, the
self-development of the Idea. It is this dehumanization of the
Idea, as if thoughts float between heaven and earth instead of
out of the human brain, which Marx castigates mercilessly: 'in
place of human actuality Hegel has placed Absolute
Knowledge'" (MARXISM AND FREEDOM, p. 38).
From the Marxist-Humanist perspective, expressed in a single
phrase, the "dehumanization of the Idea" is Hegel's
essential mistake. "Because Hegel could not conceive the
masses as 'Subject' creating the new society, the Hegelian
philosophy...was compelled to return to Kant's idea of an
external unifier of opposites. Hegel had destroyed all dogmatism
except the dogmatism of 'the backwardness of the masses.' On
this class barrier Hegel foundered" ( p. 38)....
As Hegel dehumanized the Idea, so Ricardo dehumanized labor,
conceiving the buying and selling of labor power, the exchange
between capital and labor. as a "social relation between
things"--as Marx put it in the section on commodity
fetishism--while meanwhile, behind the factory doors, there
reigns "material [dinglich] relations between
persons": persons as variable capital, means of production,
appendages of the machine.)
In the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation, this
ultimate reduction of human personality prevails as
unconditionally as the Absolute Idea. The reification of
persons, which deprives them of their agency, must locate agency
somewhere, in a corresponding personification: in one case, the
Absolute Idea as "pure personality"; and in the
analogous case, capital, or self-valorizing value, as the
apparent subject of its own process of production.
However, as Hegel did not fail to recognize in the Absolute
Idea, capital as an absolute also "contains within itself
the highest degree of opposition." In order to thematize
this opposition, Dunayevskaya found Marx enlisting an analogous
strategy for each case, a strategy of "splitting the old
category."
As the "old category" was "labor" for
Ricardo, so Dunayevskaya argued that it is the Idea for Hegel.
She developed this argument in the context of political economy,
in her own account of the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation in PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION. First, she
acknowledged, '"It is true, of course, that Marx had to
break with Hegel's Absolutes before he could discover the
materialist conception of history" (p. 92).
"But," she continued, "this hardly explains
Marx's return to Hegel...a second look is needed":
"When Marx came to the end of his analysis of the process
of production and moved over to its 'results' in the
accumulation of capital, the word absolute became crucial. It is
there the Absolute is broken in twain... Now, there is no doubt
that where Hegel's Absolutes are always 'syntheses,' unities--of
history and philosophy, of theory and practice. of subject and
object--Marx's are always total diremptions--absolute,
irreconcilable contradictions, whether that be of the technical
base and social character, or of accumulation of capital at one
pole and misery and unemployment at the other, or of dead labor
versus living labor. Where Hegel's Absolutes are always high
points, Marx's are always collapses, as is the nature of 'the
law of motion of capitalist society.' And where Hegel's
Absolutes seem achievable within the existing framework, Marx's
tear up the existing society by its roots" (pp. 92-3).
AN AGE OF ABSOLUTES
In other words, if what dialectically emerges in Hegel's hands
is "absolute reconciliation," what emerges in Marx's
is "absolute contradiction." Hence, for
Marxist-Humanism, there are two series of absolutes, absolutely
opposed: in mystified form, the Idea and capital as god; in
demystified form, the Idea as praxis, and human beings as the
subjects and agents of revolutionary, practical-critical
activity. The "absolute positivity" of totalitarianism
can be opposed only by the "absolute negativity" of
the human aspiration and struggle to be free....
In MARXISM AND FREEDOM, Dunayevskaya wrote: "Today we live
in an age of absolutes, that is to say, in an age where the
contradictions are so total that the counter-revolution is in
the very innards of the revolution. In seeking to overcome this
total, this absolute contradiction, we are on the threshold of
true freedom."
We are now in a position to see what she might have meant by
"ultimate reality and meaning." It is not a content
already achieved by speculative insight, but "a new
continent of thought and revolution" yet to be won. It is
not a theological determinism or theodicy with its outcome
guaranteed in advance, but an adventure in freedom that can rest
assured only in the idea of freedom itself. As she put it in the
title of her lecture to the Hegel Society of America in 1974, it
is, in one sense, Hegel's Absolute, but it is "Hegel's
Absolute as New Beginning."
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