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NEWS & LETTERS, February-March 2006Philosophy and revolution as equal partners: Response to Arthur's critique of Dunayevskayaby Kevin Anderson Co-editor of Dunayevskaya’s THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY and author of LENIN, HEGEL AND WESTERN MARXISM Chris Arthur, a well-known British Marxist economist, begins his review of Dunayevskaya’s THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY with a brief appreciation of Dunayevskaya as "an original Marxist thinker and activist," who wrote in an "inimitable lapel-grabbing style." More substantively, Arthur notes that she "was one of the first to study Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts" and also terms her MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958) a "pathbreaking" book. Additionally, he terms the introduction by editors Peter Hudis and me "lucid." When Arthur gets down to specifics, however, he becomes almost dismissive, after which he sums up his view of the book as follows: "Sympathetic as I am to the project of illuminating Marx through a study of Hegel, Dunayevskaya’s work is an instance of how not to do it." I think this conclusion is totally unwarranted. Arthur’s most important criticisms of Dunayevskaya center on Hegel’s absolutes, which Arthur rejects as any basis for Marxism. He identifies with Herbert Marcuse’s early objection, in his correspondence with Dunayevskaya: why do we need the absolute idea to get at the subjectivity of self-liberation? Of course, Arthur’s own position is almost as far removed from that of Marcuse as it is from Dunayevskaya’s, as is seen in his characterization of Dunayevskaya’s position as a "'Young Hegelian' reading of Hegel as the philosopher of absolute negativity," referring also to her "Young Hegelian Marxism in which philosophy and revolution are equal partners." (For example, I doubt Arthur would agree with Marcuse that "Marx derives all that is essential to his view of dialectics from Hegel"--see his "Dialectics," in MARXISM, COMMUNISM, AND WESTERN SOCIETY, 1972, p. 416). In dismissing the notion of absolute negativity, Arthur conveniently ignores Hegel’s actual statements about absolute negativity, presumably counting on the contemporary reader’s general aversion to any form of absolute. In fact, as we point out in our introduction to THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, Hegel introduces the concept of absolute negativity in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC by calling second negation, or the negation of the negation--which he contrasts to "first negation" or "negation in general"--nothing less than "absolute negativity." On the one hand, he calls such an absolute negativity "concrete." On the other hand, Hegel attacks negation in general or first negation as "only abstract negativity," because it lacks the positive content afforded by some form of determinacy (SCIENCE OF LOGIC, Miller trans., p. 116). Surely it would have been harder to dismiss "absolute negativity" as a vestige of a Young Hegelian sort of idealism were Arthur to have acknowledged that it is the source of a core category in Marxist dialectics, negation of the negation or second negativity. Thus, on absolute negativity or negation of the negation, Arthur disagrees with Marx as much as with Dunayevskaya. In bringing in Dunayevskaya’s exchange with Marcuse, Arthur is also suggesting something more specific--that contra Dunayevskaya, Hegel’s absolutes are irrelevant to Marxist dialectics. In her discussion of Hegel’s absolutes, beginning with her 1953 Letters (published in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY), Dunayevskaya uses the closing paragraphs of Hegel’s major works on the absolute, especially those in THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, the final volume of his ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES (1817-30)--often referred to as Hegel’s "system"--to carve out a new concept of dialectic. In her interpretation, Hegel’s system did not end in closure, in the end of history, as Engels maintained, but in a process of self-movement and becoming, as seen particularly in the last sentence of the last paragraph (¶575) of the last (1830) edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA, where the topic is "self-knowing reason": "The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind" (PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, p. 315). In probing the "final syllogisms" in paragraphs 575, 576, and 577, Dunayevskaya elaborated a concept of absolute negativity as new beginning, one in which a variety of liberatory forces--rank-and-file workers, Blacks, women, and youth--were reaching for philosophy by activities so creative that they challenged not only the structure of the system, but also its thought, especially the type of technocratic rationality that dominated postwar capitalism. (She had in mind events like the 1953 Berlin workers’ uprising, as well as mass strikes by miners against automation and the Montgomery bus boycott in the U.S.) The creativity of these liberatory forces needed to be met by an equal creativity in philosophy, one that would base itself on new readings of Hegel and Marx in light of the times. In those 1953 Letters, Dunayevskaya argues that the concretization of Hegel’s final syllogisms for the social world would mean nothing less than, "We have entered the new society" (THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, p. 30). Admittedly, "the eternal idea" enjoying itself "as absolute mind" seems at first glance to be miles away from any form of Marxist materialism and it is not surprising that Arthur, who opposes the notion of "philosophy and revolution" as "equal partners," would strongly oppose this kind of appropriation of Hegel. Although no other Marxist philosophers centered their entire dialectical perspective on Hegel’s absolutes, Dunayevskaya is not the only prominent Marxist or Hegel scholar to have seen the discussion of absolute mind at the end of Hegel’s system as having important implications for today. In his EROS AND CIVILIZATION (1955), Marcuse intones, "Hegel’s presentation of his system in his ENCYCLOPEDIA ends on the word 'enjoys’" (p. 116). It is also important to underline that Hegel did not add the sentence in question until the third and last edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA, in 1830. Several academic Hegel scholars have also taken up the final paragraphs of Hegel’s system, in order to attack the notion that Hegel is ultimately a philosopher of closure and totality, as so many have charged. For example, T. Geraets holds that this "eternal idea" acts "eternally, that is to say without ever putting an end to history." Further, as Geraets notes, "the changes [Hegel] brought into the 1830 edition are the most important" concerning the final syllogism in ¶575 ("Les trois lectures philosophiques de l’Encylopédie," HEGEL-STUDIEN 10, 1975, pp. 254, 250). More recently, John Burbidge argues: "Whereas in 1817 [the three final syllogisms] summarize what has gone before, in 1830 they offer the pattern of further developments" ("Hegel’s Absolutes," OWL OF MINERVA 29:1, 1997, p. 32). Arthur not only dismisses Dunayevskaya’s pre-occupation with Hegel’s absolute, but he also tries to argue that Dunayevskaya is an unreliable commentator on Hegel by examining what she says about the final syllogisms in the three editions of the ENCYCLOPEDIA--1817, 1824, and 1830. Specifically, he argues that Dunayevskaya was factually incorrect when she stated that Hegel had added these three syllogisms only in the last edition of that work, published in 1830, in a kind of culmination of his life’s thought (see THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, pp. 178, 195, 205, and 330). In fact, although his claim is partially true, I do not believe that it seriously undercuts Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of the three final syllogisms. As Arthur points out, we can easily check these facts today through the three editions of the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, each conveniently republished since 1989 in volumes 13 (for the 1817 edition), 19 (1827 edition), and 20 (1830 edition) of Hegel’s GESAMMELTE WERKE. As against Dunayevskaya, Arthur writes that the three syllogisms appear first in the 1817 edition, are dropped in the 1827 one, and then "come back" in the 1830 edition. This is the main evidence for his charge that Dunayevskaya "occasionally makes bizarre mistakes" in her reading of Hegel and Marx. Unfortunately, the rigorous Arthur himself gets a bit confused as he winds his way through the various editions of Hegel PHILOSOPHY OF MIND in German. While it is true that some of the language of the three final syllogisms is already there in 1817, some of it is not, as attested to not only by Dunayevskaya, but also the Hegel scholars Geraets and Burbidge cited above. In particular, the crucial sentence about the "eternal idea" engendering and enjoying itself as absolute mind is not included in the 1817 edition. It is introduced for the first time in 1830, as Dunayevskaya stresses correctly, and Arthur fails to notice. Therefore, as far as this crucial sentence is concerned, Arthur is wrong and Dunayevskaya is correct. (However, Dunayevskaya could have expressed herself more precisely on the changes from 1817 to 1830, and we certainly should have done so in our editorial notes, something we will correct in the next printing.) Arthur also criticizes Dunayevskaya for suggesting that in the early 1860s, Marx moved the discussion of landed property to a later part of his "economics," from Vol. I of CAPITAL to what became Vol. III, while in fact this material was "brought forward." In other words, it was to come sooner (not later) than in the plan for "six books" on "capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market" mentioned in the preface to THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY of 1859 (MECW 29, p. 261). Again, while there is some technical imprecision here (both in Dunayevskaya and our notes), the main point for Dunayevskaya, which I do not think Arthur would contest, is that Marx left the discussion of landed property--as well as many debates with Ricardo and other theorists found in the CRITIQUE--out of Vol. I of CAPITAL in order to concentrate there on the capital-labor relation. As Dunayevskaya argued in her MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958), in Vol. I Marx, "instead of keeping up a running argument with theorists," as had Hegel in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, "relegated the history of theory to the end." In this way, she wrote, he "created a new dialectic instead of applying one," thus moving beyond the applied Hegelian structure of THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY of 1859 (p. 91). As to Arthur’s point on ecology and nature, I am not very familiar with the literature he cites, but I would mention that one of today’s most important Marxist ecologists, Joel Kovel, has a very different appreciation of Dunayevskaya’s work, as seen in his introduction to the 2000 reprint of MARXISM AND FREEDOM. Arthur also criticizes our introduction for its claim that there is a paucity of discussion of Hegel and dialectics today, even amid a revival of interest in Marx’s critique of capital. I think our claim can be easily upheld by contrasting our period with that of the 1960s and 1970s. In the earlier period, dialectical thinkers like Marcuse, Sartre, Gramsci, Fanon, and Lukács--all of them indebted to Hegel--dominated philosophical debate on the Left. Today, anti-Hegelian and anti-dialectical thinkers dominate that philosophical debate, as seen most prominently in the writings of Hardt and Negri, or the varieties of structuralism and post-structuralism in academia. In particular, Arthur chides us for failing to mention the debate over "systematic dialectic" in which he has participated. We did not mention it because: 1) Its impact on the larger debates mentioned above has been fairly limited, something I am certainly not happy about. 2) This kind of systematic dialectic is somewhat removed from Dunayevskaya’s work, not only in its assumptions, but also in the issues it addresses. I am sorry if Arthur felt slighted, especially since I have great respect for some of his scholarly work on Marx, especially in his edited volume, ENGELS TODAY: A CENTENARY APPRAISAL (1996). In closing, I want to underline my disagreement with Arthur’s rejection of a "Marxism in which philosophy and revolution are equal partners." First, this would mean rejecting some of the best in Marx. Think of his magnificent 1843 statement, "The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be actualized without the abolition [aufhebung] of the proletariat; the proletariat cannot be abolished without the actualization of philosophy" ("Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right," in MARX'S EARLY POLITICAL WRITINGS, ed. O’Malley, p. 70). Second, one can read Arthur’s "philosophy and revolution as equal partners" against the grain. In critiquing Dunayevskaya, Arthur has created a felicitous phrase that describes, I believe, what we really need today as well: a radical reading of Marx that places philosophy at the center, one that would help us to move beyond the present impasse of the movements against global capital and imperialism. To take one example, a Marxism grounded in Dunayevskaya’s revolutionary humanist perspectives could help us to critique not only global capitalism and the American imperial agenda, but also those tendencies in today’s anti-war movement that are willing to ally themselves with any forces--even if misogynist, heterosexist, or fundamentalist--as long as they oppose U.S. imperialism. |
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