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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Column: Woman as Reason by Maya Jhansi
A case of philosophical sexism?
On Saturday, Jan. 19, I went to
the launch party for the new book THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON
THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX (Lexington Books, 2002). This is a new
collection of Raya Dunayevskaya's writings on dialectical philosophy, edited by
Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson. As the speakers presented their views of this
book, it occurred to me that one of the most unique things about Dunayevskaya is
the way she jams together dialectical philosophy and gender. For the most part, feminists
who are interested in socialist feminism are not interested in Hegelian
dialectics, and those who write about the Hegel-Marx connection tend to ignore
feminism. Ian Fraser and Tony Burns' new book, THE HEGEL-MARX CONNECTION, is a
good example of the latter. It brings together an array of writings on the
Hegel-Marx connection. However, not only does the book
not have a single essay by a woman, Fraser and Burns fail to mention
Dunayevskaya at all in their introduction, a historical synopsis of the
different approaches to the Hegel-Marx connection, even though no other American
Marxist has written so extensively on the subject. This is not to mention that
Dunayevskaya is often a lone voice in her insistence that Hegelian dialectics is
needed for a feminist rethinking of Marxism. It is hard to see Fraser and
Burns' omission as anything other than sexism, though when you look at their
introduction, it becomes clear why they left Dunayevskaya out. THE MATERIALIST TRAP Fraser and Burns break down the
attitude to Hegel into two main camps, those who saw Marx as appropriating
Hegel's dialectic and those who wanted to expunge Hegel from Marx. They begin
their survey with the young Marx's writings on Hegel, and then move on to Engels
and his influence over orthodox Marxism. They summarize the ways that Engels'
understanding came to dominate orthodox Marxist views of the Hegel-Marx
connection. In the late 1850s Marx had
planned to write a short book on Hegel's philosophy, but never did so. It became
easier to take Engels word on the dialectic, than to do the "labor,
patience and suffering of the negative" to hear Marx think. Engels is the
one who popularized this idea that Marx "inverted" Hegel, that he
turned Hegel around on his feet. To Engels, dialectical philosophy is merely the
"reflection" of the dialectics of reality "in the thinking
brain." Fraser and Burns go over those
who challenged the Engelsian view of the Hegel-Marx connection by taking up the
Hegelian dimension of Marx's philosophy, such as Lenin, Lukács, Marcuse, Kojève,
Lefebvre, Sartre—but, of course no mention of Dunayevskaya, who challenged
Engelsian distortions of Marx's dialectics and of Marx's views on gender. They
then turn to those like Althusser, Colletti, Della Volpe who wanted to
"drive Hegel into the night" as Althusser once put it. Fraser and
Burns, however, reject both camps. Their answer to the battle
between Hegelian and anti-Hegelian Marxists is that "there is no need for
Marxists to appropriate a modified, materialist version of Hegel's philosophical
idealism into their own thought. For Marx's 'materialism' can be derived
directly from Hegel's own social thought without any such adaptation or
modification." To Fraser and Burns, Hegel is himself a materialist and, in
some sense, a "Marxist." They raise Hegel's political
writings above his philosophical writings—calling it his "Realphilosophie."
Hegel and Marx's dialectic, they argue, "are one and the same. The
historical opposition between idealism and materialism, and the influence which
it has had upon our understanding of the intellectual relationship between Hegel
and Marx is, on this reading, overcome by stressing the thoroughgoing
'materialism' of Hegel's own dialectic." Although Fraser and Burns are
attempting to do away with the opposition between materialism and idealism, they
are in fact recapitulating it by ignoring the importance of Hegel's
"idealism," which Marx credited with developing the "active
side" of human subjectivity. They are, in fact, victim to the post-Marx
Marxist aversion to philosophy. UNITY OF THEORY AND PRACTICE On the contrary,
Dunayevskayadid not reduce Hegel to a materialist. A quote from Hegel's SMALLER
LOGIC speaks to this: "The notion that ideas and ideals are nothing but
chimeras, and that philosophy is a system of pure phantasms, sets itself at once
against the actuality of what is rational; but, conversely, the notion that
ideas and ideals are something far too excellent to have actuality, or equally
too impotent to have actuality, is opposed to it as well. This science deals
only with the Idea—which is not so impotent that it merely ought to be, and is
not actual." To Hegel, ideascan't be dismissed as chimeras. At the same
time the Idea itself has actuality. This is what Dunayevskaya
stressed in her writings on dialectics. To her, the Women's Liberation Movement
was evidence of the existence of the Idea in reality, but it was not enough by
itself, as we are experiencing right now. "A movement from theory to
practice" is needed as well, she argued. Dunayevskaya's writings
challenge both the neat division Fraser and Burns make between the Hegelian and
anti-Hegelian Marxists, and their so-called "solution" to the problem.
This is perhaps why they did not see fit to include her in their overview. Or
perhaps it is something more common, the sexist deafness in the world of Marxist
philosophy to women's ideas, except as tokens to talk about gender. In either
case, THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY gives us new insights into dialectics that might
help us bridge the current gulf between feminist and dialectical philosophy. |
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