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NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
Philosophic Dialogue
Hegel's Absolute
The dialectic of freedom and necessity in post-capitalist society impinges on the nature of labor in its relationship to self-activity, which according to Marx is the essence of true wealth. Russell Rockwell's "Freedom, Necessity, and Post-Capitalist Society" explores this question from the vantage point of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind and how it was appropriated both by Marx and by Raya Dunayevskaya. Rockwell stresses the movement to freedom beyond social necessity--and, at the same time, beyond the sphere of labor in material production, toward creative self-activity, what Marx termed "the absolute movement of becoming."
Crucial to Dunayevskaya were the final paragraphs of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. While recapitulating the movement of negation of the negation presented in the Introduction's outline of self-liberation, those final three paragraphs illuminate the relationship of theory and practice needed for the movement to the new society--so much so that it forms the basis for the re-creation of Marx's philosophy of revolution for our day as Marxist-Humanism.
In addition to departing from the course of necessity, Hegel's final three paragraphs provide the basis for the category of the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory--which is needed to grasp the distinctive nature of our time, and to escape from the course of capitalist necessity hemming in revolts and revolutions. The self-activity that is the goal, as what opens up the realm of freedom in post-capitalist society, is at the same time the means to self-liberation. This is a concretization of Marx's concept of praxis for a new age, and allows an original view of what it entails.
While Marx stopped writing his "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic" before reaching "Absolute Mind," Dunayevskaya held that Volume I of Capital re-created Hegel's Absolute as an absolute that is concrete for capitalist society. It was an absolute split into two: capitalism's law of motion to ever greater concentration and centralization, and with it the growth of pauperization; and united with that motion, while at the same time opposing it, the revolt of an army of the unemployed and "new passions and new forces" for the reconstruction of society. The historical tendency becomes "...not just a negation of the negation 'in general' but the specifically self-developing subject, in its logical, philosophical, historical and individual envelopment" (The Power of Negativity, p. 105).
Seen from the vantage point of Marxist-Humanism, Capital reveals Marx's break with the old concept of theory, and his re-creation of the Hegelian dialectic. But making a category of this break took Dunayevskaya's return to the Hegelian dialectic, and specifically as Hegel summed up his life's work in the three final paragraphs of his Philosophy of Mind in its last edition. At the same time, the category grows out of the experience of our age when counter-revolution is in the innards of revolution, and "what happens after revolution" becomes the burning question--not to be answered with a blueprint, but to be comprehended philosophically. Blueprints only provide one more way for intellectuals in this age of state-capitalism to get sucked into the mindset of the Planner. Instead of breaking down the division between mental and manual labor, the Planner revives it within the revolutionary movement. One thing this shows is that a social translation--even by Marx--no matter how important, can't substitute for the philosophical generalization, and the continual return to Hegel with eyes of today.
--Franklin Dmitryev
Explore these issues further in New Essays by Raya Dunayevskaya
Contents:
- Dialectics of Liberation in Thought and in Activity: Absolute Negativity as New Beginning
. . .it is this subjectivity as objectivity which is "subject, a person, a free being." Clearly, free creative power assures the plunge to freedom. It is the unifying force of the Absolute Idea.
- Leon Trotsky as Man and as Theoretician
(includes exchange with Ernest Mandel on the criticism of Trotsky).
- Post-Mao China
Instead [of Marx's theory of proletarian revolution], there is the capitulation to the objective pull of state-capitalism as the "next" stage of human development. . . .The Chinese masses have not yet had their last say.
- Marx and Critical Thought
Marx was so appalled by labor that he, at first, called for "the abolition of labor." What convinced him otherwise. . .and call, instead, for "the emancipation of labor" was the laborer, his class struggles, his daily resistance at the point of production. . . .
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