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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Philosophic Dialalogue
New Studies in dialectical thought
EXPLORATIONS IN DIALECTICAL AND
CRITICAL THEORY: FROM HEGEL TO DERRIDA AND FROM MARX TO MÉSZÁROS. Published by
News and Letters, 2002. by Nate Holdren The EXPLORATIONS collection
brings together essays originally printed in NEWS & LETTERS between 1994 and
2001, representing its theoretical responses to the past decade. As anyone
paying attention to the global situation should be aware, our world is in a
state of profound and continuing crisis. With a global pandemic of military
misadventuring, attacks on women, and steadily eroding work and living
conditions, we find ourselves besieged from nearly all sides. It's not always
easy to see significant headway being made by human purposive activity opposing
capitalism. Kevin Anderson remarks that "in today's retrogressive climate
it is hard to see the actuality of dialectical Reason as negation of the
negation, as the positive in the negative of this crisis-ridden world" (p.
4). Living as we do in the early
21st century we can no longer maintain the old faith that capitalism's crises
will shake the system apart. In Andrew Kliman's words "It should by now be
clear that crisis and increasing misery will not 'automatically' bring about
either the collapse of capitalism or a revolutionary upsurge to end it and
create a new, human society" (p. 55). So great is today's crisis that
some now talk of a "crisis state" wherein capital's crises function as
a method of social control. But though this collection doesn't shy away from
confronting today's crisis, neither does it despair. The whole point is
"to aid finding a humanist pathway out of the present crisis" by
initiating dialog around "the kind of political and philosophical movement
that our times demand" (vi). The human capacity for and the
widespread historical existence of resistance to capitalism has all too often
gone unnoticed. Sadly, even many Marxists frequently "discuss
fetishism...only as an 'objective' feature of capitalism, one which weighs down
upon us, and not as something which also generate[s] 'subjective' yearnings for
freedom on the part of the oppressed" (p. 5). Even the erudite Frankfurt
school theorist Jürgen Habermas overlooks this. Victor Hart details Habermas'
attacks on Marx's 1844 Manuscripts as "romantic," "especially the
notion of alienation and the vision of its transcendence" (p. 9). This is
due to Habermas' rejection of the revolutionary subject, a mistake which leads
Habermas to wholly untenable positions. "Ignoring decades of mass revolt
and creativity, Habermas makes the 1980s dissolution of Communism appear as
having originated from above in the perestroika and glasnost of Mikhail
Gorbachev" (p. 13). This exile of the revolutionary
subject is in no way unique to Habermas, indeed our world today has "a new
divide—between those so swept up in the increasingly abstract forms of social
domination that they proclaim 'the death of the subject,' on the one side, and
the still-uncertain search for new human beginnings from out of this alienated
reality, on the other" (p. 64). But if we can't rely upon capitalist crisis
to end capitalism, what hope is there for the future? Our hope lies in that the
breakdown of capitalism and the constitution of a new society of freedom
"is no mechanical inevitability, but the action of cognition united with
the activity of live subjects" (p. 45). The only way forward from the
present crisis, the only source for new human beginnings, is the very concept
rejected by so many contemporary theorists—revolutionary subjectivity—a
matter upon which this collection has much to offer. Ted McGlone underscores that
capital's logic is to increase "misery and waste of life" while
simultaneously "new passions and new forces release themselves for the
reconstruction of society on new humanist foundations" (p. 48). So central
is the concept of the revolutionary subject that McGlone argues the
"resistance of the 'Subject' becomes the determining element in both the
length of the working day and in the introduction of new machinery into
production" (p. 44). The powerful revolutionary
subject which shines forth from this collection, the new passions and forces
which strive toward a new society, are freely associated human beings fighting
"against the dehumanized manner" of life under capitalism (p. 44). Maya Jhansi tells us "Marx
appropriated the Hegelian dialectic with a 'real corporeal' human subject at its
center" (p. 19). As corporeal human subjects we are capable of
re-appropriating our own labor, to place "the unfoldment of the richness of
the five senses" (p. 58) at the center of our social relations. Our
"conscious, purposeful activity" (p. 8) of resistance constitutes
"in the movement of the present...the future of the movement" (p. 37).
This capacity for resistance is what gives living laborers the power
"to objectively transcend the capitalist value-form" (p. 44) as a
result of the "difference between the content of the value-form and the
human content of the laborer who resists it" (p. 59). It is the capacity to break the
chains of capitalism, to refuse servitude, that makes up our power. This is the
same power, the power of living labor, which capital requires of us and with
which we can overthrow the capital relation and create new human relationships. As Olga Domanski notes, the
refusal of women "to consider the contradictions of life in a
male-dominated society as only a private matter," was the basis from which
"Women's Liberation moved from an Idea whose time had come to a
Movement" (p. 31). Refusing the alienation of
capitalism is not merely a nihilistic "no" to the present order.
Franklin Dmitryev articulates that "transcending this alienated reality
takes not just the overthrow of the old but the creation of the new, a process
[Marx] labeled 'revolution in permanence'" (p. 35). The "new passions
and new forces" that are one pole of capital's contradictory logic are not
only "first negation or revolt, but at one and the same time" serve as
"second negation in a positive new subjectivity that wants to create a new
human society" (p. 43). These new passions and new forces "carry out
the self-development of the new society" (p. 43). Peter Hudis states that the
"test of any revolutionary theory is to grasp the newly emerging forms of
domination inseparable from the elucidation, articulation and indeed
construction of its dialectical opposite," the new passions and new forces
which arise and strive for freedom (p. 64). This collection does not contain
much detail on specific passions and forces challenging global capitalism. The
collection does, however, clarify the concept of the revolutionary subject,
while NEWS & LETTERS newspaper contributes to the growth of new passions and
forces by circulating knowledge of specific freedom struggles occurring around
the world. Thus, to get the most from this collection, one should read the
essays in tandem with the ongoing project of resistance that is NEWS &
LETTERS. I would like to voice my hope that in forging ahead N&L and others concerned with revolution will aim for an even closer tie between theory and practice. It is important to articulate exactly how today's freedom struggles embody new passions and forces. It is also vital that revolutionaries consider both the failures and the successes of class struggle today in taking up Domanski's questions "What kind of freedom are we fighting for?" and "What kind of organization can help us get there?" (p. 31). We need to heed Domanski's call for revolutionaries to take "a hard look in the historic mirror and ask... what are the totally new relations we need, between woman and man, woman and woman, and...between the movement from practice and the movement from theory" and how present freedom struggles both fail and succeed from this perspective. |
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