Aufheben

[Lyev]

Hello, I know that this Philosophy forum is saturated with threads on the dialectic, but I have a couple of ideas about this concept of 'supersession', after reading a few quite basic introductions to Hegel and his method. Anyway, I posted this in the Dialectical Materialists usergroup a while back but it didn't get much attention (:():
Firstly - this is unrelated to the actual discussion that I wanna bring up - I was hoping, in lieu of some particularly heated/complex discussion in philosophy involving The You Know Who of 'anti-dialectics', that we could get some good discussion going in this sub-forum again. It seems activity in here has died a bit, especially since users like Random Precision and Led Zeppelin don't post anymore. I also heard a while ago there would be a short introductory essay on the dialectical method (Marxist, Hegelian or otherwise) that would be stickied in philosophy or something.

Anyway, on to the topic at hand, whilst trying to be very open-minded about 'dialectical materialism', I have been reading through Craig B. Matarrese's Starting with Hegel, which, so far, has been very informative. I was also reading Peter Singer's introduction to Hegel, published by OUP, but when I got to the part about dialectics, Singer understood this method as only thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which, whilst being an interesting model for analysing capitalism and such, is not the Hegelian dialectic, as far as I know.

What is closer to the Hegelian method, and bearing in mind that Marx, at least by the time he writes Capital, was not a Hegelian, is what Matarrese describes in his book, I think. But I wanted to check it with you guys first. As I understand, in a simple and brief manner, when Hegel examines in the Phenomenology of Mind 'modes of consciousness' (consciousness, to self-consciousness, to reason, to spirit, then finally to religion), we can see pretty easily how Marx extracts the "rational kernel" here, and applies this to modes of production (slave, feudal, capitalist, communist). However, I want to verify all this with users here. On supersession, Matarrese writes:

to say that there are supersessions is to say that there are dialectical progressions through which one interpretation of self, knowledge, or life generally, will give way to another, that the later interpretation is superior because it resolves tensions inherent in the prior stage, or because it better satisfies the criteria established earlier, or because it proves to be a more satisfying or stable interpretation to inhabit and explore than the previous one
My understanding of the materialist conception of history is much better now that I have read a bit more about Hegel. I read a Cyril Smith essay a while ago that talked about the oft-misunderstood quote, "religion is the opium of the masses". He argues that, where Marx says a few sentences previous that religion is "the heart of a heartless world", this quote does not in fact mean religion induces working class people into a haze-like slumber to distract them from class struggle etc. - it really means that Marx wants a supersession to take place within religion. As Smith himself says, "we have to uncover those aspects of a way of life which gave rise to religion — and then revolutionise those aspects. Religion was ‘the heart of a heartless world’, so the issue was to establish a world with heart. Instead of an illusory solution, we must, in practice, find a real one." (On a side note, as you can glean quite nicely from the Smith paper, which is here, there is often a false dichotomy created between Marx the 'materialist' and Hegel the 'idealist' - in some aspects, all philosophers are idealists).

On a final note, the concept of alienation, self-estrangement, as espoused by Marx, was once explained to me through Hegel's initial exposition of the idea - roughly put, I think it is basically that humankind is alienated from God, but when we die we are re-united with him, which is represented by Hegel's final supersession, his highest mode of consciousness, which is religion. This is similar to Marx's idea of alienation, where the proletarian is depressed by the boredom and normalcy of capitalism, but also feels disenchanted with not owning any means of production, and by the way that her past labour rules over her through the form of concrete capital: when the bourgeoisie are expropriated (for Hegel, when we go to heaven), we are re-united back with our true-self, so to speak, and happiness and fulfillment is achieved once more.

Now, sorry for the rambling nature of my post, I was just full of ideas today, and am in a bit of a rush - I just basically wanted to put this all through you folks for a discussion, to check if I have anything wrong, or maybe even aid someone else in understanding the Marx-Hegel relationship a bit better. Thanks a lot.I realise that the above doesn't perhaps encompass every facet of the dialectical method, but how do the immanent antagonisms of capital/wage-labour etc. fit in with this all? Thanks again

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lyev:


Hello, I know that this Philosophy forum is saturated with threads on the dialectic, but I have a couple of ideas about this concept of 'supersession', after reading a few quite basic introductions to Hegel and his method. Anyway, I posted this in the Dialectical Materialists usergroup a while back but it didn't get much attention

1) No wonder then that us genuine materialists (over in the anti-dialectic group) have re-named it the Dialectical Mausoleum -- no one discusses this 'theory' (over and above mouthing a few superficial platitudes) in the Dialectical Materialsm Group. In fact, you can count on one hand the number of substantive posts that have been posted there in the last two years, and most of those have merely repeated stuff you can find anywhere on the internet, or in books and articles.

2) I commented on it:


Ok, so nothing philosophically interesting or novel here, either.

Lyev is clearly quite happy with the a priori dogmatism Hegel inflicts on his readers, never once examining the 'arguments' Hegel attempts to throw up in support of the dogmas he pinched from mystics like Plotinus (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/) and Jakob Boehme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_B%C3%B6hme) (among others).

Nor does Lyev take into account the fact that Marx had waved all this gobbledygook 'goodbye' by the time he came to write Das Kapital:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/scrapping-dialectics-would-t79634/index4.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1158574&postcount=73

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1158816&postcount=75

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1161443&postcount=114

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1163222&postcount=124

http://www.revleft.com/vb/dialectics-and-political-t118934/index.html

Which means that all this Hegel stuff is of interest only to obscurantists and mystics.

What it is doing here at RevLeft is, therefore, no less of a mystery.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?do=discuss&discussionid=1160&pp=30&page=2

To answer your question:


but how do the immanent antagonisms of capital/wage-labour etc. fit in with this all?

They don't since they have nothing to do with the obscure 'theory' Hegel concocted (upside down or the 'right way up').

[Zanthorus]

Argh, I wrote a PM to ZeroNowhere containing my thoughts on precisely the subject of the relation between Hegel's method and Marx's method in the critique of political economy. I'll try and type it up again tomorrow morning. For now, remember that Hegel's dialectical method is a method that only gets to work after 'the understanding' has done it's job, and then read the third section of the first chapter of the Grundrisse on The Method of Political Economy.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


For now, remember that Hegel's dialectical method is a method that only gets to work after 'the understanding' has done it's job, and then read the third section of the first chapter of the Grundrisse on The Method of Political Economy.

Alas, his 'method' no more 'gets to work' than Anslem's 'proof' of the existence of 'god' does, since both are based on a series of crass logical blunders.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1941396&postcount=2

[Zanthorus]

Ok, first of all:


Marx's idea of alienation, where the proletarian is depressed by the boredom and normalcy of capitalism, but also feels disenchanted with not owning any means of production, and by the way that her past labour rules over her through the form of concrete capital:

This is not Marx's theory of alienation, this is a psychological theory, and Marx was not a psychologist. Marx's theory of alienation derives from Feuerbach's theory expressed in The Essence of Christianity that religion is a product of the human mind which comes to rule it's producers, the worshippers who follow the gods created by their own minds. Similarly, under capitalism people's lives are ruled by capital, which is merely the result of surplus labour-time carried out by the producer's themselves. It is quite ironic that many people mistake Marx's theories for psychological theories actually, since if anything Marx's approach is diametrically opposite to the approach that seeks the source of social problems in errors in human thinking. For Marx, the problem is not with thinking, but the very nature of the object that is to be thought about. As the Cyril Smith essay you quote says, Marx thinks that religion is the product of features of the real world. Feuerbach thinks that religious alienation is the result of an error in thinking, whereas for Marx, "...the fact that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionised. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated theoretically and practically."

I should also comment briefly on the title of the thread and it's relation to Marx and Engels. M & E's theory of revolution involves showing how capitalism generates it's own supersession, the communist revolution comes from the movement of the working-class against capitalism, a movement which is generated by capitalism itself. By multiplying the productive forces on the one side and creating a mass of human beings alienated from control over these forces, capitalism creates the material for it's own supersession. In this way, M & E get around Hegel's critique of utopian theories of revolution, and actually appropriates it in his critique of the various socialist groups which base themselves on detailed plans for a future society, and use this plan to critique existing society, ignoring the working-class as an agent of social change and only considering them insofar as they show the evils of capitalism. "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." (The German Ideology)

Now as for your question at the end, about the relation between Hegel's method and Marx's critique of political economy, as I said before, first of all we have to remember that Hegel's dialectical method only begins it's work after 'the understanding' has done it's own work. Mattarrese's book goes over all of the following points but I'll repeat them so as you recognise which parts are relevant. The understanding is the mode of consciousness which typifies the modern natural sciences - it makes distinctions, breaks down objects and processes into their component parts and studies things in an atomistic fashion. Hegel thinks that this mode of consciousness does important work, insofar as it affords new knowledge about the world. However, overuse of it causes the distinctions to become entrenched in the spirit of a culture and causes a breakdown in that culture to occur. The archetypal example for Hegel is the French revolution. The revolutionaries revolted against existing French society in the name of eternal reason and virtue, and only ended up causing senseles destruction.

Hegel's way out of the problems of this kind of consciousness is through his dialectical method. By examining everything with an idea towards the absolute, by showing the 'actual in the rational', the rational structure that exists of necessity within everything despite the fact that those things may not conform to their rationality, his method provides a kind of philosophical therapy that reconciles us to the existing world and dissuades us from various forms of revolutionary theory. For example, the rationality of the state is to represent a universal interest, and this justifies the existence of the state even if it does not conform to this rationality at the present time. The Young Marx displays a similar confusion, he believes that a true state represents a universal interest, and whenever the Prussian state legislates in a manner contrary to the universal, by defending the rights of landowners against the customary rights of the poor, or by defending christianity by curtailing the freedom of speech of atheists, it is not in fact a state but something else.

If you read The Method of Political Economy in the Grundrisse the connection between the two immediately becomes obvious. For Marx, political economy begins by taking the economy as a whole, and making various distinctions between the component parts - wage-labour, capital, money, debt, credit, exchange-value, division of labour and so on. However, once this is done, it is necessary to proceed in the opposite direction. By beggining with the most basic unit of capitalist society, the commodity, and tracing out the implications of the generalised production of commodities to show that it necessitates the existence of money, social division of labour, surplus-value, capital and so on. This method of showing how the categories of capitalism imply one another is essential to Marx's critique of the various forms of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism (i.e of reformism) which try to get rid of what they see of the bad aspects of capitalism whilst keeping what they see to be it's positives. For Marx, all the aspects of capitalism imply one another, reformism fails to understand their necessary interconnection (In particular, for Marx commercial crises are implied by the very existence of generalised commodity production). This is the key, for example, to his critique of Proudon. Unlike Hegel, of course, he does not merely show the necessary interconnection of the aspects of the present mode of production, but also the fact that another mode of production is not only possible, but that the material for such is created by capitalism itself. As our old friend the reviewer in the afterword to the second edition of Capital wrote, "Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over".

The key difference between Marx and Hegel is that the former is a materialist whilst the latter is an idealist. You bring up the point of wether this is the best terminology to use to describe the difference between the two. It is true that if we take materialism in the sense of 18th century 'mechanical materialism', or if we take Hegel's idealism to be the kind of idealism endorsed by figures like Fichte where the world is quite literally the product of the human mind, then the distinction merely causes additional confusion. If, however, we take materialism to mean merely "comprehend[ing] the real world — nature and history — just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist crotchets", and "sacrific[ing] every idealist fancy which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in a fantastic interconnection" (Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy), and if we understand Hegel's idealism in the sense that both Marx and Hegel understood it, to mean that the world is ruled by a kind of logical structure, then the differentiation seems to be a good one. Marx's critique of Hegel is that the logical structure he attempts to impose on the world is merely the result of his own attempting to fit everything into neat boxes rather than an examination of the real interconnection between things. So, for example, when Hegel makes the transition from the family and civil society to the state in the philosophy of right using concepts derived from the logic, Marx says he may as well replace the categories of political theory for those of physics for all the good it would have done him. Marx abandons the idea that logical structure rules the world, and instead examines the real interconnections between things. For Hegel, it is reason which rules the world. For Marx, reason is merely a product of thinking human beings.

Final point - Rosa continues to harp on about the 'logical blunders' made by Hegel. This is practically irrelevant for our purposes though, the question is not about the faults of Hegel's project is a whole, but about the 'actual in the rational' of Hegel's project, the parts that Marx appropriates and uses in his own social and political theory.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


Now as for your question at the end, about the relation between Hegel's method and Marx's critique of political economy, as I said before, first of all we have to remember that Hegel's dialectical method only begins it's work after 'the understanding' has done it's own work. Mattarrese's book goes over all of the following points but I'll repeat them so as you recognise which parts are relevant. The understanding is the mode of consciousness which typifies the modern natural sciences - it makes distinctions, breaks down objects and processes into their component parts and studies things in an atomistic fashion. Hegel thinks that this mode of consciousness does important work, insofar as it affords new knowledge about the world. However, overuse of it causes the distinctions to become entrenched in the spirit of a culture and causes a breakdown in that culture to occur. The archetypal example for Hegel is the French revolution. The revolutionaries revolted against existing French society in the name of eternal reason and virtue, and only ended up causing senseles destruction.

How can a method 'begin it's work' if it makes no sense to begin with? You keep ignoring this fatal defect.


Final point - Rosa continues to harp on about the 'logical blunders' made by Hegel. This is practically irrelevant for our purposes though, the question is not about the faults of Hegel's project is a whole, but about the 'actual in the rational' of Hegel's project, the parts that Marx appropriates and uses in his own social and political theory

How can it be 'irrelevant' if it nullifies all that Hegel had to say?

[Zanthorus]

Rosa, I appreciate your critique of both Hegel's speculative dialectics and Plekhanov's 'dialectical materialism' (Which actually really misunderstands the point that the idealism of Hegel's philosophy is contained precisely in the fact that the posits that the world is governed by a logical structure), however the subject here is not Hegel's errors, but Marx's appropriation of the various aspects of Hegel's philosophy which he belives to be useful. In relation to that subject, your only contribution so far has been quibbling over the wording of the afterword to the second German edition of Capital and laying emphasis on Marx's use of the word 'coquetting' when describing his use of Hegel's terminology, which ignores the fact that the discussion is not about terminology but methodology.

[Lyev]

Thank you, Zanthorus and Rosa, for your thoughtful responses. I will try and comment just quickly, then I'll come back later because I've got some work to getting on with.
2) I commented on it:Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "a priori dogmatism"? Which aspects of Hegel are dogmatic? By the way, I appreciate your time in participating in these debates; after having studied Hegel for over 25 years (I think that's right) you must be incredibly bored of this, and I doubt that the majority of what 'dialecticians' posit on Revleft is anything new for you.

As regards Marx's coquetry with Hegel's ideas, I could also mention that Marx, in the same passage refers to him as a "great thinker" and that in chpt. XI of volume 1 of Capital, he also says that, "Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his 'Logic')". And I have trawled through dozens of threads in a similar vein to this - endless to-ing and fro-ing on semantics. I understand, Rosa, that you prefer to cite Marx's published works, but I understand there are numerous letters, but also his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where Marx clearly shows the extent to which Hegel has influenced him. And as Zanthorus has mentioned, the meaning of the word "coquetting", or the way in which Hegel used, logically, the word "is", is not exactly 100% pertinent here. I find it difficult to see how these aspects of Hegel can effect so largely his total system. But, indeed, Marx of course critiqued Hegel too. Anyway, this isn't the centre of the discussion here, and the thread will be pages and pages of circular argumentation if we proceed to debate the afterword to the second edition of Capital. I guess the point I am making is that there are many other sufficient sources in the works of Marx where we can see his relationship to Hegel.

On this subject, I also think it is pertinent to discuss Marx's break with philosophical thinking, or at least where he deliberately decided to stop writing about philosophy, study political economy instead, and dedicate his time to a lengthy economic treatise, instead of a philosophical one. Although, I don't mean this in the sense that Althusser did, who tried to emphatically demarcate between Marx's earlier 'humanist' writings, and his later more empirical, economic works, an example being Capital, in fact. There are two important texts that Lucio Colletti identifies - on top of the second edition's afterword - as clear explanations of why Marx moved away from philosophy. These are his Theses on Feuerbach and the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. I would like to discuss these further, but later on.

Another point, which is pretty much presupposed here, is that the concept of 'critique' with Marx is very much tied to Aufheben, supersession. Surely we can see quite clearly Hegel's influence on Marx in such a concept, in that, the word is quite ambiguously defined, with no clear translation to English from German. It can have negative connotations (negate, annul etc.) but also positive ones too (transcend, supersede etc.). However, both men exploited this double meaning when using it to denote when one mode (be it 'of production' or 'of consciousness') supersedes a next one, where the new mode is a more satisfactory or efficient one, but it also leaves some aspects of the previous one intact. Critique is Marx's example of the negative-positive movement of transcendence, right? (I am reading the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts at the moment and there is a section where Marx's general critique of Hegel is presented clearly. He discusses this negative-positive idea there, so I want to comment on that later too.)

Finally, as Zanthorus mentioned, there needs to be a distinction between Marx's dialectic, and the 'dialectical materialism' of Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, Stalin etc. It would seem that all these thinkers and revolutionaries after Plekhahov wrote about philosophy in his shadow. And the term 'dialectical materialism' never actually was used in Marx at all, but invented by Engels after his death. It seems even Engels had an erroneous undestanding of what Marx truly meant, an understanding to rigid and mechanical. And Plekhanov and Kautsky were quite instrumental in popularizing Marxism in the early 20th century; a whole generation of communists learnt about communist theory (incl. dialectical materialism) from these guys, and they were excepted as the top authority on this subject and similar ones. So everyone after them took their (systematized, rigid) presentation of 'dialectics' as a given. This was further reinforced when DM became the official state dogma (almost religion) of the Soviet Union, and by Mao's peculiar understanding of it as well. And maybe it should also be mentioned that many of Marx's earlier, more philosophically-inclined texts weren't actually published till around 1930; this may account for at least some of the German and Russian misunderstanding of Marx's views on philosophy (Hegel and dialectics especially).

[Kotze]

however the subject here is not Hegel's errors, but Marx's appropriation of the various aspects of Hegel's philosophy which he belives to be useful.Right.
It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.Discuss.

[Zanthorus]

An amusing quip, the source of which is not on the Marxists Internet Archive unfortunately. A quip moreover which does not give much of any serious help with regard to Marx and dialectics.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


Rosa, I appreciate your critique of both Hegel's speculative dialectics and Plekhanov's 'dialectical materialism' (Which actually really misunderstands the point that the idealism of Hegel's philosophy is contained precisely in the fact that the posits that the world is governed by a logical structure), however the subject here is not Hegel's errors, but Marx's appropriation of the various aspects of Hegel's philosophy which he belives to be useful. In relation to that subject, your only contribution so far has been quibbling over the wording of the afterword to the second German edition of Capital and laying emphasis on Marx's use of the word 'coquetting' when describing his use of Hegel's terminology, which ignores the fact that the discussion is not about terminology but methodology.

And those parts Marx allegedly appropriated are no less defective. For example, Hegel 'derived' his dialectical 'contradictions' from just such logical blunders, and they remain blunders whether they are left upside down or put the 'right way up'.

[Zanthorus]

So, revolution is actually based on a utopian blueprint, rather than the movement which springs out of existing society itself?

So, the categories of capitalism do not imply one another, we can have a form of capitalism which can do away with all it's bad aspects, the commercial crises and so on?

So, Marxism is right out the window then?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lyev:


Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "a priori dogmatism"? Which aspects of Hegel are dogmatic?

Well, it's what Kant meant by it. It's what the vast majority of traditional philosophers indulge, in all the time.

You will find examples, and a much longer explanation, in the thread I linked to:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1924027&postcount=5

Hegel's work is full of a priori dogmatics; in fact it is little other than a priori dogmatics. Here are some examples:


"Everything is opposite. Neither in heaven nor in Earth, neither in the world of mind nor of nature, is there anywhere such an abstract 'either-or' as the understanding maintains. Whatever exists is concrete, with difference and opposition in itself. The finitude of things will then lie in the want of correspondence between their immediate being, and what they essentially are. Thus, in inorganic nature, the acid is implicitly at the same time the base: in other words, its only being consists in its relation to its other. Hence also the acid is not something that persists quietly in the contrast: it is always in effort to realise what it potentially is." [Hegel (1975) [I]Shorter Logic, p.174; Essence as Ground of Existence, §119.]

"It is this contradiction and negativity which must be recognized in order to comprehend things in their movement. 'Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity'. [Hegel (1999) The Science of Logic, p.439; §956.]

"The Judgment is the notion in its particularity, as a connection which is also a distinguishing of its functions, which are put as independent and yet as identical with themselves not with one another.

"One's first impression about the Judgment is the independence of the two extremes, the subject and the predicate. The former we take to be a thing or term per se, and the predicate a general term outside the said subject and somewhere in our heads. The next point is for us to bring the latter into combination with the former, and in this way frame a Judgment. The copula 'is', however, enunciates the predicate of the subject, and so that external subjective subsumption is again put in abeyance, and the Judgment taken as a determination of the object itself. The etymological meaning of the Judgment (Urtheil) in German goes deeper, as it were declaring the unity of the notion to be primary, and its distinction to be the original partition. And that is what the Judgment really is.

"In its abstract terms a Judgment is expressible in the proposition: 'The individual is the universal.' These are the terms under which the subject and the predicate first confront each other, when the functions of the notion are taken in their immediate character or first abstraction. (Propositions such as, 'The particular is the universal', and 'The individual is the particular', belong to the further specialisation of the judgment.) It shows a strange want of observation in the logic-books, that in none of them is the fact stated, that in every judgment there is still a statement made, as, the individual is the universal, or still more definitely, The subject is the predicate (e.g. God is absolute spirit). No doubt there is also a distinction between terms like individual and universal, subject and predicate: but it is none the less the universal fact, that every judgment states them to be identical.

"The copula 'is' springs from the nature of the notion, to be self-identical even in parting with its own. The individual and universal are its constituents, and therefore characters which cannot be isolated. The earlier categories (of reflection) in their correlations also refer to one another: but their interconnection is only 'having' and not 'being', i.e. it is not the identity which is realised as identity or universality. In the judgment, therefore, for the first time there is seen the genuine particularity of the notion: for it is the speciality or distinguishing of the latter, without thereby losing universality....

"The Judgment is usually taken in a subjective sense as an operation and a form, occurring merely in self-conscious thought. This distinction, however, has no existence on purely logical principles, by which the judgment is taken in the quite universal signification that all things are a judgment. That is to say, they are individuals which are a universality or inner nature in themselves -- a universal which is individualised. Their universality and individuality are distinguished, but the one is at the same time identical with the other.

"The interpretation of the judgment, according to which it is assumed to be merely subjective, as if we ascribed a predicate to a subject is contradicted by the decidedly objective expression of the judgment. The rose is red; Gold is a metal. It is not by us that something is first ascribed to them. A judgment is however distinguished from a proposition. The latter contains a statement about the subject, which does not stand to it in any universal relationship, but expresses some single action, or some state, or the like. Thus, 'Caesar was born at Rome in such and such a year waged war in Gaul for ten years, crossed the Rubicon, etc.', are propositions, but not judgments. Again it is absurd to say that such statements as 'I slept well last night' or 'Present arms!' may be turned into the form of a judgment. 'A carriage is passing by' should be a judgment, and a subjective one at best, only if it were doubtful, whether the passing object was a carriage, or whether it and not rather the point of observation was in motion: in short, only if it were desired to specify a conception which was still short of appropriate specification....

"The abstract terms of the judgement, 'The individual is the universal', present the subject (as negatively self-relating) as what is immediately concrete, while the predicate is what is abstract, indeterminate, in short the universal. But the two elements are connected together by an 'is': and thus the predicate (in its universality) must contain the speciality of the subject, must, in short, have particularity: and so is realised the identity between subject and predicate; which being thus unaffected by this difference in form, is the content." [Hegel (1975) Shorter Logic, pp.230-34, §166-169.]

In the above, Hegel is quite happy to derive fundamemtal truths about reality, true for all of space and time, from thought alone, which he then imposes on reality. That's a priori dogmatics in action.

Here's why all philosophers, and all dialecticians do it:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1349779&postcount=2

You can find literally scores of examples of this here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2002.htm


By the way, I appreciate your time in participating in these debates; after having studied Hegel for over 25 years (I think that's right) you must be incredibly bored of this, and I doubt that the majority of what 'dialecticians' posit on Revleft is anything new for you.

Well, I engage in this here, not to convuince the hardened dialecticians (since they cling onto this theory like the religious cling onto their beliefs, and for the same reason), but to prevent younger comrades catching this intellectual disease.

Your other comments I'll deal with in my next post.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


So, revolution is actually based on a utopian blueprint, rather than the movement which springs out of existing society itself?

Well, Marx did not get that idea from Hegel.


So, the categories of capitalism do not imply one another, we can have a form of capitalism which can do away with all it's bad aspects, the commercial crises and so on?

No category can imply anything, only propositions can.

You will continue to make such basic errors if you insist on taking advice from logical illiterates -- i.e, Hegel


So, Marxism is right out the window then?

No, since it does not depend on Hegel, or his loopy ideas.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lyev:


As regards Marx's coquetry with Hegel's ideas, I could also mention that Marx, in the same passage refers to him as a "great thinker" and that in chpt. XI of volume 1 of Capital, he also says that, "Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his 'Logic')". And I have trawled through dozens of threads in a similar vein to this - endless to-ing and fro-ing on semantics. I understand, Rosa, that you prefer to cite Marx's published works, but I understand there are numerous letters, but also his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where Marx clearly shows the extent to which Hegel has influenced him. And as Zanthorus has mentioned, the meaning of the word "coquetting", or the way in which Hegel used, logically, the word "is", is not exactly 100% pertinent here. I find it difficult to see how these aspects of Hegel can effect so largely his total system. But, indeed, Marx of course critiqued Hegel too. Anyway, this isn't the centre of the discussion here, and the thread will be pages and pages of circular argumentation if we proceed to debate the afterword to the second edition of Capital. I guess the point I am making is that there are many other sufficient sources in the works of Marx where we can see his relationship to Hegel.

1) It's possible to describe someone as a 'migty thinker' and totally disagree with him/her. For example, I think Plato is a 'mighty thinker' but I disagree with 99.99% of what he said.

2) The example of the 'law' you give is an fact in error, since it is not possible to become a capitalist by the mere increase in quantity (as Marx well knew). It takes a change in the mode of production to do that. So, Marx is clearly 'coquetting' here, as he is with other Hegelian terms you find in Das Kapital.

3) Hegel certainly influenced Marx's early work, I have never denied this. What I deny is that Hegel influencced Marx's work in Das Kapital.

4) As to the letters you refer to, well, I'd like to see what you mean.

5) But, the most important point is that no unpublished source can countermand a published source.


On this subject, I also think it is pertinent to discuss Marx's break with philosophical thinking, or at least where he deliberately decided to stop writing about philosophy, study political economy instead, and dedicate his time to a lengthy economic treatise, instead of a philosophical one. Although, I don't mean this in the sense that Althusser did, who tried to emphatically demarcate between Marx's earlier 'humanist' writings, and his later more empirical, economic works, an example being Capital, in fact. There are two important texts that Lucio Colletti identifies - on top of the second edition's afterword - as clear explanations of why Marx moved away from philosophy. These are his Theses on Feuerbach and the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. I would like to discuss these further, but later on.

Ok.


Another point, which is pretty much presupposed here, is that the concept of 'critique' with Marx is very much tied to Aufheben, supersession. Surely we can see quite clearly Hegel's influence on Marx in such a concept, in that, the word is quite ambiguously defined, with no clear translation to English from German. It can have negative connotations (negate, annul etc.) but also positive ones too (transcend, supersede etc.). However, both men exploited this double meaning when using it to denote when one mode (be it 'of production' or 'of consciousness') supersedes a next one, where the new mode is a more satisfactory or efficient one, but it also leaves some aspects of the previous one intact. Critique is Marx's example of the negative-positive movement of transcendence, right? (I am reading the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts at the moment and there is a section where Marx's general critique of Hegel is presented clearly. He discusses this negative-positive idea there, so I want to comment on that later too.)

I realise that this word has a complex meaning. What I deny is that the Marx of Das Kapital is in any way influenced by it, over and above 'coquetting' with it, that is.

And I disagree that this word in any way helps us understand social change -- in fact, as I have shown, if this theory were true, change would be impossible:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/dialectical-theory-change-t144536/index.html

And, once again, these obscure Hegelian terms certainly appear in Marx's early work, but they do not feature in Das Kapital, except in a 'coquettish' way.

If they didn't, they'd make Marx's theories unworkable.


Finally, as Zanthorus mentioned, there needs to be a distinction between Marx's dialectic, and the 'dialectical materialism' of Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, Stalin etc. It would seem that all these thinkers and revolutionaries after Plekhahov wrote about philosophy in his shadow. And the term 'dialectical materialism' never actually was used in Marx at all, but invented by Engels after his death. It seems even Engels had an erroneous undestanding of what Marx truly meant, an understanding to rigid and mechanical. And Plekhanov and Kautsky were quite instrumental in popularizing Marxism in the early 20th century; a whole generation of communists learnt about communist theory (incl. dialectical materialism) from these guys, and they were excepted as the top authority on this subject and similar ones. So everyone after them took their (systematized, rigid) presentation of 'dialectics' as a given. This was further reinforced when DM became the official state dogma (almost religion) of the Soviet Union, and by Mao's peculiar understanding of it as well. And maybe it should also be mentioned that many of Marx's earlier, more philosophically-inclined texts weren't actually published till around 1930; this may account for at least some of the German and Russian misunderstanding of Marx's views on philosophy (Hegel and dialectics especially).

I agree. Marx's method owes nothing to Hegel, as the theories of others you mention do. Marx's 'dialectic' more closely resembles that of Aristotle, Kant and the Scottish Historical School (Ferguson, Smith, Millar, Robertson, Hume and and Stewart), as I have argued here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1693775&postcount=260

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1693776&postcount=261

[Zanthorus]

Well, Marx did not get that idea from Hegel.

I think Engels made the link between their critique of utopianism and Hegel's ideas fairly clear in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, but suit yourself.


No category can imply anything, only propositions can.

So, generalised commodity production does not necessitate the existence of money, which in turn does not necessitate the existence of surplus-value and capital? None of the above necessitates the existence of the reserve army of labour, of periodic commercial crises?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


I think Engels made the link between their critique of utopianism and Hegel's ideas fairly clear in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, but suit yourself.

I do not doubt that that philosophical incompetent, Engels, did this, but Marx did not.


So, generalised commodity production does not necessitate the existence of money, which in turn does not necessitate the existence of surplus-value and capital? None of the above necessitates the existence of the reserve army of labour, of periodic commercial crises?

Propositions about it might, but that's about all. And those implications will depend on other propositions being true, too.

There are no necessities outside of language and inference.

There are no 'necessary truths' either, as I have shown here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1924027&postcount=5

[Zanthorus]

I do not doubt that that philosophical incompetent, Engels, did this, but Marx did not.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch to suggest that Marx's critique of utopianism derives from the Hegelian idea of immanent critique. He was a Hegelian prior to becoming a communist after all, and these kind of ideas were floating around the German intellectual milieu of the time.


There are no necessities outside of language and inference.

Well, bye bye Das Kapital and hello System of Economic Contradictions I guess. Oh wait, Proudhon was also infected with the Hegelian disease.

I never posited the existence of 'necessary truths', merely that the existence of generalised commodity production necessitates the existence of money and so on. Which it is part of the point of Das Kapital to demonstrate. If it does not in fact demonstrate this, then we're going to have to seriously rethink this whole Communism thing.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


I don't think it's that much of a stretch to suggest that Marx's critique of utopianism derives from the Hegelian idea of immanent critique. He was a Hegelian prior to becoming a communist after all, and these kind of ideas were floating around the German intellectual milieu of the time.

If so, his theory won't work, so it is important to reject this connection.

Fortunately, there is no (published) evidence to suggest there was such a connection.


Well, bye bye Das Kapital and hello System of Economic Contradictions I guess. Oh wait, Proudhon was also infected with the Hegelian disease.

1) But, these aren't contradictions, and do not even look like them.

2) What has Proudhon got to do with this?


I never posited the existence of 'necessary truths', merely that the existence of generalised commodity production necessitates the existence of money and so on. Which it is part of the point of Das Kapital to demonstrate. If it does not in fact demonstrate this, then we're going to have to seriously rethink this whole Communism thing.

Your implications seem to be necessary truths to me.

And so do statements like this:


the existence of generalised commodity production necessitates the existence of money

You:


If it does not in fact demonstrate this, then we're going to have to seriously rethink this whole Communism thing.

Not at all. What on earth makes you say that?

[Zanthorus]

If so, his theory won't work, so it is important to reject this connection.

Fortunately, there is no (published) evidence to suggest there was such a connection.

So here we have what the argument from Rosa boils down to. Anything influenced by Hegel must necessarily be 'tainted' by 'apriori dogmatism', hence Marxism must be cleansed, even it it's propositions make perfect sense, because sensible theories influenced by Hegel are in fact senseless. Why, we're still not quite sure, although it may have something to do with the fact that Rosa is an unrepentant dogmatist.


1) But, these aren't contradictions, and do not even look like them.

2) What has Proudhon got to do with this?

System of Economic Contradictions is the book which Marx was replying to with his The Poverty of Philosophy. One essential part of Marx's critique of Proudhon is that he ignores the interconnection between the various aspects of capitalism and because of this he advocates a 'reformed' capitalism with the 'bad sides' gone.


Your implications seem to be necessary truths to me.

And so do statements like this:

Well, if it is indeed a 'necessary truth' that generalised commodity production necessitates the existence of money, and 'necessary truths' are necessarily nonsense, then there goes Das Kapital.


Not at all. What on earth makes you say that?

Because it implies the possibility of a reformed capitalism which removes all the issues caused by capitalism such as commercial crises and unemployment.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


So here we have what the argument from Rosa boils down to. Anything influenced by Hegel must necessarily be 'tainted' by 'apriori dogmatism', hence Marxism must be cleansed, even it it's propositions make perfect sense, because sensible theories influenced by Hegel are in fact senseless. Why, we're still not quite sure, although it may have something to do with the fact that Rosa is an unrepentant dogmatist.

1) Since Hegel's entire system is based on a series of crass logical blunders, and depends on dogmatic apriorism, then it's rejection is forced upon us.

2) Marx's propositions (from Das Kapital) make sense because they do not depend on Hegel.

3) Point out a dognatic statement of mine, and I will either a) substantiate it with evidence and argument, or b) withdraw it. We can't say the same for you Hegel-clones.


Well, if it is indeed a 'necessary truth' that generalised commodity production necessitates the existence of money, and 'necessary truths' are necessarily nonsense, then there goes Das Kapital.

1) So, you now admit that your case depends on 'necessary truths', which you earlier denied.

2) Once more, there are no 'necessary truths' as I have shown here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1924027&postcount=5


Because it implies the possibility of a reformed capitalism which removes all the issues caused by capitalism such as commercial crises and unemployment.

Not so. The above follow from Historical Materialism.

[Zanthorus]

Rosa, for the last time, I am not a Hegelian, nor am I a dialectical materialist. I agree that we must reject Hegel's system. No, Marx's propositions do not depend on the correctness of any propositions made by Hegel. What is being stated is that aspects of Marx's ideas were influenced by Hegel. You seem to have a strange incapability of acknowledging any position which isn't either 'Hegel was a mystical bumbler' or 'Hegel was a genius who had the last word in everything'.

The continued repetition of the act of exchanging commodities on a social scale necessitates the singling out of one commodity as the standard measure of value rather than having the producers each regard their own commodity as the universal equivalent. This is Marx's argument in Das Kapital. If it is a necessary truth, and all necessary truths are necessarily nonsense, then again, there goes Das Kapital. It is becoming increasingly questionable to me as we go on wether you've actually read that particular work (Besides our old friend the afterword to the Second German edition of course).

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


Rosa, for the last time, I am not a Hegelian, nor am I a dialectical materialist. I agree that we must reject Hegel's system.

Where did I say you were?


No, Marx's propositions do not depend on the correctness of any propositions made by Hegel.

And his ideas do not depend on his obscure terms either, such as 'contradiction', 'negation of the negation', 'unity of opposites', 'aufheben' and 'quantity and quality'.


What is being stated is that aspects of Marx's ideas were influenced by Hegel.

The evidence from Das Kaptial suggests otherwise.


You seem to have a strange incapability of acknowledging any position which isn't either 'Hegel was a mystical bumbler' or 'Hegel was a genius who had the last word in everything'.

1) Where have I argued for the latter of these two?

2) And you seem to think we should ignore his crass errors.


The continued repetition of the act of exchanging commodities on a social scale necessitates the singling out of one commodity as the standard measure of value rather than having the producers each regard their own commodity as the universal equivalent. This is Marx's argument in Das Kapital. If it is a necessary truth, and all necessary truths are necessarily nonsense, then again, there goes Das Kapital. It is becoming increasingly questionable to me as we go on wether you've actually read that particular work (Besides our old friend the afterword to the Second German edition of course).

Well, you can keep using the word 'necessitate' but here it can only relate to your inference, not to social change itself.

And the same goes for Marx, if he used this word.

But that has no implications for capitalism itself, since it is human beings who will put an end to it, not 'necessity'.

[Zanthorus]

And his ideas do not depend on his obscure terms either, such as 'contradiction', 'negation of the negation', 'unity of opposites', 'aufheben' and 'quantity and quality'.

'Aufheben' is quite a nice summing up of Marx's theory of revolution though. In fact it is the word used in the Communist Manifesto: "...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition [Aufheben] of private property." It's implications of both a supersession and yet a preservation of the rational content of what has been superceded, a development which proceeds from internal development of the thing that is being superceded itself, this is the essence of Marx's idea of how humanity can transcend capitalism. We preserve the 'actual in the rational' of capitalism, the multiplied productive forces, the dissolution of all natural bonds and forms of personal domination and ideas about human equality, all the while moving to a higher mode of production, and the whole development is brought about by capitalism itself, which creates the agents of it's own destruction. It is also a nice description of Marx's attitude towards Hegel. It is even a good way of explaining Marx's attitude towards classical political economy now that I think about it. Preserving the 'actual in the rational' of the classical theory of value while discarding the mystical theories of Ricardo which claimed that the law of value was still in operation when the first man skinned a deer alive.

I'm really not sure what is obscure about quantity and quality. And you're having a laugh if you think the two aren't important to Marx's theory. He begins his exposition of the theory of value by noting that use-value is both qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative aspect is the various uses of a particular object, and the quantitative is the socially approved standards of measure such as litres, bytes, centimetres, miles to the gallon and so on. Similarly, although exchange-value appears at first only quantitative (The ratio at which two use-values exchange for one another), it is in fact also qualitative (The 'common magnitude': Abstract labour-time). The difference between qualitative and quantitative aspects of value runs through Marx's analysis. For example, in the distinction between money as the universal measure of value, which represents all commodities as embodiments of human labour-time, and money as the standard of price, which sets exchange ratios between the various commodities. If we don't make the distinction between quality and quantity in terms of value, then we can easily fall into the trap of dismissing the theory on the grounds that price is not always determined by or equal to value.

Now would probably be a good time to point out that you misread the comment by Marx which Lyev brought up about the transformation of quality into quantity. It is not talking about the transformation of one mode of production into another, it is talking about the transformation of the 'small master' (Or petit-bourgeois) into a capitalist proper. The key is that at a certain point the small master has enough money to live off the surplus-value produced by the workers' he hires, at which point he is now a capitalist proper, and we have had a transformation of quantity into quality.

EDIT:

And 'unity of opposites' would seem to be precisely what the commodity is. It is both a use-value and a non use-value. It is a use-value because it must satisfy some social want in order to be a commodity in the first place, but also a non use-value, since to be exchanged it must not form a use-value for it's immediate owner. This particular 'unity of opposites' traces it's way back to the 'unity of opposites' in the capitalist labour process. Labour under capitalism is at once social (Production of social use-values) and private (Production for private account). This 'unity of opposites' within capitalism, between the collective and the individual, between the social and the private, would appear to be one of Marx's main themes going back as far as the 1844 Comments on James Mill.


1) Where have I argued for the latter of these two?

I didn't suggest that you ever had. I said you were incapable of recognising anything outside either of those positions, and consequently ignore any possibility that there might be some aspects of Hegel which are worth looking at, or which Marx thought were worth looking at, and others which are not.


2) And you seem to think we should ignore his crass errors.

I don't think we should ignore his errors, I'm saying that his errors have no bearing on Marx's extraction of the rational kernel, they do not 'taint' Marx's critique of political economy in any way.


Well, you can keep using the word 'necessitate' but here it can only relate to your inference, not to social change itself.

I'm not using 'necessitate' to refer to social change, I'm using 'necessitate' to refer to the fact that a society of generalised commodity production without money or capital is an impossible fantasy.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


'Aufheben' is quite a nice summing up of Marx's theory of revolution though. In fact it is the word used in the Communist Manifesto: "...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition [Aufheben] of private property." It's implications of both a supersession and yet a preservation of the rational content of what has been superceded, a development which proceeds from internal development of the thing that is being superceded itself, this is the essence of Marx's idea of how humanity can transcend capitalism. We preserve the 'actual in the rational' of capitalism, the multiplied productive forces, the dissolution of all natural bonds and forms of personal domination and ideas about human equality, all the while moving to a higher mode of production, and the whole development is brought about by capitalism itself, which creates the agents of it's own destruction. It is also a nice description of Marx's attitude towards Hegel. It is even a good way of explaining Marx's attitude towards classical political economy now that I think about it. Preserving the 'actual in the rational' of the classical theory of value while discarding the mystical theories of Ricardo which claimed that the law of value was still in operation when the first man skinned a deer alive.

I don't doubt Marx used this term seriously in his early work, but by the time he came to write Das Kapital, he had entered his 'coquetting' phase.

It's a good job, too. As I have already pointed out, the use of this term would cripple Marx's theory, rendering social change impossible.

And, while we are on it: there is no 'rational' of capital since it isn't a human being.


I'm really not sure what is obscure about quantity and quality. And you're having a laugh if you think the two aren't important to Marx's theory. He begins his exposition of the theory of value by noting that use-value is both qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative aspect is the various uses of a particular object, and the quantitative is the socially approved standards of measure such as litres, bytes, centimetres, miles to the gallon and so on. Similarly, although exchange-value appears at first only quantitative (The ratio at which two use-values exchange for one another), it is in fact also qualitative (The 'common magnitude': Abstract labour-time). The difference between qualitative and quantitative aspects of value runs through Marx's analysis. For example, in the distinction between money as the universal measure of value, which represents all commodities as embodiments of human labour-time, and money as the standard of price, which sets exchange ratios between the various commodities. If we don't make the distinction between quality and quantity in terms of value, then we can easily fall into the trap of dismissing the theory on the grounds that price is not always determined by or equal to value.

Well, we are never told what a 'quality' is; Hegel made an obscure stab at it -- you are welcome to try to make some sense of it -- and the examples he used to illustrate this 'law' undermine what little we can glean from that attempt. [See below.]

You will find the details at my site:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2007.htm

Go to Section A

Now, you make an attempt yourself, but it can hardly be called a definition:


The qualitative aspect is the various uses of a particular object

That can't be so, since no amount of increase in quantity will change, say, a hammer into anything other than a hammer. Or do you suppose that the use of a hammer, to knock nails in, changes if we have a hundred, or a thousand, or a million of them?

Here is Hegel's 'attempt':


"Each of the three spheres of the logical idea proves to be a systematic whole of thought-terms, and a phase of the Absolute. This is the case with Being, containing the three grades of quality, quantity and measure.

"Quality is, in the first place, the character identical with being: so identical that a thing ceases to be what it is, if it loses its quality. Quantity, on the contrary, is the character external to being, and does not affect the being at all. Thus, e.g. a house remains what it is, whether it be greater or smaller; and red remains red, whether it be brighter or darker." [Hegel (1975), Shorter Logic, p.124, §85.]

I do not see how quantity is external to 'being', do you? As Frege noted, quantity attaches to a concept expression and so is logically internal.

Here is the Marx Internet archive definition:


"Quality is an aspect of something by which it is what it is and not something else and reflects that which is stable amidst variation. Quantity is an aspect of something which may change (become more or less) without the thing thereby becoming something else.

"Thus, if something changes to an extent that it is no longer the same kind of thing, this is a 'qualitative change', whereas a change in something by which it still the same thing, though more or less, bigger or smaller, is a 'quantitative change'.

"In Hegel's Logic, Quality is the first division of Being, when the world is just one thing after another, so to speak, while Quantity is the second division, where perception has progressed to the point of recognising what is stable within the ups and downs of things. The third and final stage, Measure, the unity of quality and quantity, denotes the knowledge of just when quantitative change becomes qualitative change." [Accessed August 2007. The definition has been altered slightly since.]

But this destroys many of the examples used to illustrate this 'law'. For example, water changing into steam. There is no change of quality here (as defined above); the substance stays as H2O throughout. Same with many of the other examples.

But, what about this:


For example, in the distinction between money as the universal measure of value, which represents all commodities as embodiments of human labour-time, and money as the standard of price, which sets exchange ratios between the various commodities. If we don't make the distinction between quality and quantity in terms of value, then we can easily fall into the trap of dismissing the theory on the grounds that price is not always determined by or equal to value

But, and once more, I fail to see what the 'quality' is here, just as I fail to see how a mere change in quantity can affect it (even if we knew what 'it' was).


Now would probably be a good time to point out that you misread the comment by Marx which Lyev brought up about the transformation of quality into quantity. It is not talking about the transformation of one mode of production into another, it is talking about the transformation of the 'small master' (Or petit-bourgeois) into a capitalist proper. The key is that at a certain point the small master has enough money to live off the surplus-value produced by the workers' he hires, at which point he is now a capitalist proper, and we have had a transformation of quantity into quality.

Artesian tried this one out a few months ago, and failed too. But, it can't be an increase in quantity here that effects the change you mention, since it is the use to which money is put that does that. A small master can have a billion pounds, dollars or yen, and still not be a capitalist.

And a capitalist can have the same amount of money as a small master and still be a capitalist.

Marx knew this, so the only conclusion is that he was still 'coquetting'.

On the other hand, if he didn't know this, he was not quite the intellectual giant we all take him for.


And 'unity of opposites' would seem to be precisely what the commodity is. It is both a use-value and a non use-value. It is a use-value because it must satisfy some social want in order to be a commodity in the first place, but also a non use-value, since to be exchanged it must not form a use-value for it's immediate owner. This particular 'unity of opposites' traces it's way back to the 'unity of opposites' in the capitalist labour process. Labour under capitalism is at once social (Production of social use-values) and private (Production for private account). This 'unity of opposites' within capitalism, between the collective and the individual, between the social and the private, would appear to be one of Marx's main themes going back as far as the 1844 Comments on James Mill.

But, use value and exchange value do not change into one another, as we are assured all such opposites do. Nor do they 'struggle' with one another.

Moreover, as Marx also noted, these 'opposites' mutually exclude one another. In which case they cannot exist together. But they manifestly do exist together.

On the other hand, if they do mutually exclude one another, then they can't contradict one another, since they cannot co-exist. Alternatively, if they do contradict one another, then they must co-exist, so they can't mutually exclude one another, after all.

Either way, this mystical 'theory' falls apart.

Whenever we try to re-impose Hegelian terms on Marx's theory, it falls apart.

No wonder then that the summary of 'the dialectic method' Marx endorsed contained no trace of Hegel at all.


I didn't suggest that you ever had. I said you were incapable of recognising anything outside either of those positions, and consequently ignore any possibility that there might be some aspects of Hegel which are worth looking at, or which Marx thought were worth looking at, and others which are not.

But the two options were these:


You seem to have a strange incapability of acknowledging any position which isn't either 'Hegel was a mystical bumbler' or 'Hegel was a genius who had the last word in everything'.

My point was that I have never argued for the second of these, so how can you attribute this dichotomy to me, or make it the basis of any appraisal I have ever offered of that Hermetic Harebrain?


I don't think we should ignore his errors, I'm saying that his errors have no bearing on Marx's extraction of the rational kernel, they do not 'taint' Marx's critique of political economy in any way.

Well, and ignoring the anachronism for now, if Marx had used the word "Jabberwocky" (a term I might add that has more going for it than the Hegelian use of 'contradiction', upside down or the 'right way up') you could not and would not argue this way.

There is thus no rationale for using 'contradiction' -- except that which Hegel gave, and his reasons are defective from top to bottom.


I'm not using 'necessitate' to refer to social change, I'm using 'necessitate' to refer to the fact that a society of generalised commodity production without money or capital is an impossible fantasy.

Once more, that is an inference on your part. There is nothing in the natural or social world that 'necessitates' this.

If there were, then nature and society would be mind-like.

[Zanthorus]

I don't doubt Marx used this term seriously in his early work, but by the time he came to write Das Kapital, he had entered his 'coquetting' phase.

It's not the word, it's what it implies - supersession, transcending yet at the same time preserving. A movement which comes from within the thing being transcended itself, a movement immanent to the thing itself.


It's a good job, too. As I have already pointed out, the use of this term would cripple Marx's theory, rendering social change impossible.

The use of a term would cripple Marx's theory and render social change impossible? Social change is impossible according to the terms of the Communist Manifesto?


Well, we are never told what a 'quality' is;

Oh my then, looks like ordinary language isn't so brilliant.


Now, you make an attempt yourself, but it can hardly be called a definition:


That wasn't an attempt at defining quality, it was a statement of what Marx saw as the qualitative aspect of use-value. This is part of Marx's use of quality and quantity throughout Das Kapital. He also talks about qualitative and quantitative aspects of exchange-value. Now you bring up a bunch of examples involving hammers and water boiling over into steam and give us Hegel's definition of 'quality'. The question is what exactly any of this has to do with Marx's critique of political economy?


Artesian tried this one out a few months ago, and failed too. But, it can't be an increase in quantity here that effects the change you mention, since it is the use to which money is put that does that. A small master can have a billion pounds, dollars or yen, and still not be a capitalist.

And a capitalist can have the same amount of money as a small master and still be a capitalist.

If a 'capitalist' had the same amount of money as a small master, they wouldn't be able to hire enough labourers such that the surplus-value produced by their investment would be enough for them to live on without performing labour themseves. You need a certain sum of money before you can go into capital and labour markets and buy the means of production, raw materials and human labour necessary to carry out production and reap a large enouch surplus-value to sustain the existence of a capitalist. This is what the change of quality into quantity means in this case. At a certain point the amount of money that the small master has becomes large enough that he can cease to be a small master and become a capitalist proper. There is nothing 'obscure' or 'tainted' about this analysis, apart from the fact that you are on some ridiculous crusade to stop people framing things in a set of terms you don't like.


Nor do they 'struggle' with one another.

Oh yes they do, an increase in the productivity of concrete labour, the increased production of use-values, leads the value produced to be spread out more among the individual products and causes a subsequent drop in the value of each individual use-value. This conflict between the productivity of labour as concrete labour and labour as abstract value creating labour contains within it the secret of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, of overproduction.


Moreover, as Marx also noted, these 'opposites' mutually exclude one another. In which case they cannot exist together. But they manifestly do exist together.

Do they? Is not the point of the circulation of commodities that the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value becomes manifested in the transaction where on the one side we have a commodity with a use-value whose exchange-value is only an ideal exchange-value represented in it's price, and on the other side we have the money commodity which represents value as such, and whose use-value is merely the ideal use-value of the object it is about to be exchanged for? That the two seperate themselves into two distinct objects?


My point was that I have never argued for the second of these, so how can you attribute this dichotomy to me, or make it the basis of a

No you have not, but it is the position you attribute to anyone who tries to argue for a positive influence of Hegel on Marx.


Well, and ignoring the anachronism for now, if Marx had used the word "Jabberwocky" (a term I might add that has more going for it than the Hegelian use of 'contradiction', upside down or the 'right way up') you could not and would not argue this way.

Wouldn't I? If Marx had used the word 'jabberwocky', and inherited this term from Hegel, I think that would show the influence of the latter on the former, which is what is being argued about here.


There is thus no rationale for using 'contradiction' -- [I]except that which Hegel gave, and his reasons are defective from top to bottom.

And, who cares exactly? What difference would replacing the word 'contradiction' in Marx's works make to the actual analysis apart from satisfying your need to quibble over words?


If there were, then nature and society would be mind-like.

Well yes, one of the points than can be derived from Capital is that capitalist society has a kind of internal structure, a 'logic' - capital is similar to Hegel's Geist in that it rules humanity behind the backs of human beings. Of course, for Hegel this structure is the logical structure of existence, whereas for Marx the universe has no logical structure, the structure described in Capital is the structure of a particular social form, which can therefore can be overthrown. Now you continue to claim that such a structure exists, that positing a structure to capitalist society is equivalent to positing that society works as a mind, and is therefore false. In other words you are rejecting the analysis of the production and reproduction of capital put forward in Das Kapital.

Or else this is another one of those things where you reject propositions based solely on the choice of words or on the basis that anything that posits a link between Hegel and Marx must be rejected because Hegel and by extension everything associated with him must be 'tainted'.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


It's not the word, it's what it implies - supersession, transcending yet at the same time preserving. A movement which comes from within the thing being transcended itself, a movement immanent to the thing itself.

But this is true of no object or process in the entire universe, as far as we know.

If it were, then when you kicked a ball, for example, your kick would not move the ball, the ball would move itself.


The use of a term would cripple Marx's theory and render social change impossible? Social change is impossible according to the terms of the Communist Manifesto?

Indeed. And I have already explained why:

Argument:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1761299&postcount=30

Quotes:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1761300&postcount=31


Oh my then, looks like ordinary language isn't so brilliant.

I don't see why that follows.


That wasn't an attempt at defining quality, it was a statement of what Marx saw as the qualitative aspect of use-value.

As I noted, we are seldom told what 'quality' is, and never clearly.


This is part of Marx's use of quality and quantity throughout Das Kapital. He also talks about qualitative and quantitative aspects of exchange-value. Now you bring up a bunch of examples involving hammers and water boiling over into steam and give us Hegel's definition of 'quality'. The question is what exactly any of this has to do with Marx's critique of political economy?

But you are the one who mentioned use here, and I gave a clear example of how use cannot be affected by quantity (or do you suppose that hammers aren't commodities?). It is up to you to show how it can. All you have done up to now is assert it can, but we still await the missing detail.


If a 'capitalist' had the same amount of money as a small master, they wouldn't be able to hire enough labourers such that the surplus-value produced by their investment would be enough for them to live on without performing labour themselves. You need a certain sum of money before you can go into capital and labour markets and buy the means of production, raw materials and human labour necessary to carry out production and reap a large enough surplus-value to sustain the existence of a capitalist. This is what the change of quality into quantity means in this case. At a certain point the amount of money that the small master has becomes large enough that he can cease to be a small master and become a capitalist proper. There is nothing 'obscure' or 'tainted' about this analysis, apart from the fact that you are on some ridiculous crusade to stop people framing things in a set of terms you don't like.

A capitalist can surely have the same amount of money as a small master, if that master just leaves it sitting in the bank and does not invest it in her business.

And sure you need a certain amount of money in order to hire labour, but it is the use that money is put to that enables this, not the amount per se. We can see that from the fact that the very same amount of money could be frittered away at the roulette table, or used to buy heroin.


This is what the change of quality into quantity means in this case

But, how does quantity change into quality. The quantity remains the same, surely, it does not change, and it still remain quantity. An we are still not too clear what 'quality' means either.


There is nothing 'obscure' or 'tainted' about this analysis, apart from the fact that you are on some ridiculous crusade to stop people framing things in a set of terms you don't like

Alas, you are the one who is looking ridiculous, defending a theory invented by a bourgeois mystic that does not work and which is so loosely and obscurely defined, no one can say what it actually means. Indeed, you are struggling in this regard.


you are on some ridiculous crusade to stop people framing things in a set of terms you don't like

Oddly enough, I have a healthy, materialist dislike of concepts lifted from card-carrying mystics. Funny that...


Oh yes they do, an increase in the productivity of concrete labour, the increased production of use-values, leads the value produced to be spread out more among the individual products and causes a subsequent drop in the value of each individual use-value. This conflict between the productivity of labour as concrete labour and labour as abstract value creating labour contains within it the secret of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, of overproduction.

This does not sound like a 'struggle' to me, more like a good old fashioned causal sequence.

And where do they change into one another?


Do they?

Marx says they do so pick a fight with him, not me.


Is not the point of the circulation of commodities that the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value becomes manifested in the transaction where on the one side we have a commodity with a use-value whose exchange-value is only an ideal exchange-value represented in it's price, and on the other side we have the money commodity which represents value as such, and whose use-value is merely the ideal use-value of the object it is about to be exchanged for? That the two separate themselves into two distinct objects?

And how does that address this point of mine:


Moreover, as Marx also noted, these 'opposites' mutually exclude one another. In which case they cannot exist together. But they manifestly do exist together.

On the other hand, if they do mutually exclude one another, then they can't contradict one another, since they cannot co-exist. Alternatively, if they do contradict one another, then they must co-exist, so they can't mutually exclude one another, after all.

You:


No you have not, but it is the position you attribute to anyone who tries to argue for a positive influence of Hegel on Marx.

Where do I attribute this to anyone?


Wouldn't I? If Marx had used the word 'jabberwocky', and inherited this term from Hegel, I think that would show the influence of the latter on the former, which is what is being argued about here.

Except:

1) The word 'Jabberwocky' is meaningless.

2) You have yet to provide a rationale for your odd use of 'contradiction', which, as things stand, is about as meaningful as 'Jabberwocky'.

3) I have not denied that Marx lifted this word from Hegel (and used in his pre-Das Kapital work), the point is what was his justification for using it? I have yet to see where he justified his use of this word (perhaps you can point it out?).

So, if he borrowed it from Hegel, and he offered no new justification (or none at all), then the only one left is the one Hegel gave, and the latter is full of holes.

In which case, you too have no justification for using it -- except Hegel's defective rationale.

And that in turn means there is no justification for using it in this odd way.

4) Marx merely 'coquetted' with this word in Das Kapital.

But, you have an answer to point 3) above:


And, who cares exactly?

Apparently only those keen on removing Hegel's mysticism from Marxism -- and by your comments we can rule you out on that score.

And perhaps those who want to defend the scientific credentials of Marx's work. We can rule you out there too.


What difference would replacing the word 'contradiction' in Marx's works make to the actual analysis apart from satisfying your need to quibble over words?

It is important for several reasons. Here's now I made this point in an earlier thread:


(1) The use of Hegelian terms would mean that social and natural change would be impossible, crippling Historical Materialism.

(2) 'Marxist' opportunists, substitutionists and counter-revolutionaries of every stripe use this word to justify anything they like and its opposite. Because it makes a virtue out of 'contradiction', it can be, and has been used to defend all manner or counter-revolutionary and anti-Marxist political doctrines, and their opposites, sometimes 24 hours later.

(3) It insulates militant minds from the facts (thus preventing the scientific development of Marxism). For example, because it teaches that surface 'appearances' 'contradict' underlying reality, it prevents dialectically-distracted comrades from acknowledging the long-term failure of Dialectical Marxism. In many cases, because it encourages comrades to see failure as its opposite, its 'contradictory', 'success' (or 'success' about to happen any day soon), they refuse to admit (they won't even countenance the possibility) that their core theory (dialectics) has anything to do with this. So, even though dialectics teaches that everything is interconnected, apparently, the only two things in the entire universe that are not linked in any way at all are: a) the long-term decline of Dialectical Marxism and b) its core theory!

(4) It exacerbates (but does not cause) sectarianism.

(5) Because it is a source of consolation for the long-term failure of Dialectical Marxism (for reasons outlined in (3) above), its acolytes cling on to it like grim death, and become highly irrational and emotive in its defence.

There are other reasons why this mystical creed is deleterious to Marxism, but these will do for now.

More details here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2009_02.htm

Use the 'Quick Links' at the top to jump to Section 7) Case Studies

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%20010_01.htm

You:


Well yes, one of the points than can be derived from Capital is that capitalist society has a kind of internal structure, a 'logic' - capital is similar to Hegel's Geist in that it rules humanity behind the backs of human beings. Of course, for Hegel this structure is the logical structure of existence, whereas for Marx the universe has no logical structure, the structure described in Capital is the structure of a particular social form, which can therefore can be overthrown. Now you continue to claim that such a structure exists, that positing a structure to capitalist society is equivalent to positing that society works as a mind, and is therefore false. In other words you are rejecting the analysis of the production and reproduction of capital put forward in Das Kapital.

In that case, you are no different from Hegel.


Now you continue to claim that such a structure exists, that positing a structure to capitalist society is equivalent to positing that society works as a mind, and is therefore false. In other words you are rejecting the analysis of the production and reproduction of capital put forward in Das Kapital

Eh? Where do I do this?


Or else this is another one of those things where you reject propositions based solely on the choice of words or on the basis that anything that posits a link between Hegel and Marx must be rejected because Hegel and by extension everything associated with him must be 'tainted'.

As we have seen, you have no effective reply to this so I will continue to maintain it.

[Lyev]

3) Hegel certainly influenced Marx's early work, I have never denied this. What I deny is that Hegel influencced Marx's work in Das Kapital.I'll address this in a bit later, because there's another point that I emphasised in my previous post which seems to contradict this.


4) As to the letters you refer to, well, I'd like to see what you mean.I'll find these later, maybe tomorrow or the evening after that, likewise with all that other stuff I said I would follow up.


5) But, the most important point is that no unpublished source can countermand a published source.I most definitely disagree with this though, at least with a thinker like Marx whose writing career and political activism spanned some 40 years (if not more), and who, with a lot of his very important, most relevant texts, had many of his thoughts published and translated posthumously after his death. Volumes II and III of Capital were finished off by Engels after he died; some of his very important earlier writings were (the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts come to mind); the German Ideology, which was never intended for publishing I don't think (but could be wrong), contains some very important ideas on ideology, history, the state etc., and many of Marx's letters contain some insightful or useful polemical-style debates and such. It seems unfair to dismiss his 'unpublished' works. Maybe this would be different, obviously, with a modern theorist like Slavoj Zizek (maybe a bad example) perhaps.
I realise that this word has a complex meaning. What I deny is that the Marx of Das Kapital is in any way influenced by it, over and above 'coquetting' with it, that is.

And I disagree that this word in any way helps us understand social change -- in fact, as I have shown, if this theory were true, change would be impossible:

And, once again, these obscure Hegelian terms certainly appear in Marx's early work, but they do not feature in Das Kapital, except in a 'coquettish' way.

If they didn't, they'd make Marx's theories unworkable.



I agree. Marx's method owes nothing to Hegel, as the theories of others you mention do. Marx's 'dialectic' more closely resembles that of Aristotle, Kant and the Scottish Historical School (Ferguson, Smith, Millar, Robertson, Hume and and Stewart), as I have argued here:But here's the point I am making: whilst he was not a Hegelian, of course, it seems erroneous to deny that Hegel's thoughts did not influence Marx in writing Capital whatsoever. Indeed, the full title ends with A Critique of Political Economy - it's even in the name of book (the word critique, which, in Marx, is an example of supersession) and therefore it seems that Marx is more than coquetting.

Zanthorus, there's several things you've brought up that I'll mention later, cheers

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lyev:


I most definitely disagree with this though, at least with a thinker like Marx whose writing career and political activism spanned some 40 years (if not more), and who, with a lot of his very important, most relevant texts, had many of his thoughts published and translated posthumously after his death. Volumes II and III of Capital were finished off by Engels after he died; some of his very important earlier writings were (the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts come to mind); the German Ideology, which was never intended for publishing I don't think (but could be wrong), contains some very important ideas on ideology, history, the state etc., and many of Marx's letters contain some insightful or useful polemical-style debates and such. It seems unfair to dismiss his 'unpublished' works. Maybe this would be different, obviously, with a modern theorist like Slavoj Zizek (maybe a bad example) perhaps.

In that case, unpublished letters Marx wrote to his father, before he became a communist, can be used to show that, despite later published comments, he wasn't a communist.

Now, if you read what I said, I'm not saying we shouldn't learn from his unpublished writings, but where those unpublished sources contradict the published works, the latter take precedent. If not, my comment in the previous paragraph must hold.


But here's the point I am making: whilst he was not a Hegelian, of course, it seems erroneous to deny that Hegel's thoughts did not influence Marx in writing Capital whatsoever. Indeed, the full title ends with A Critique of Political Economy - it's even in the name of book (the word critique, which, in Marx, is an example of supersession) and therefore it seems that Marx is more than coquetting.

Well, we can stop speculating, since Marx very helpfully published a summary of the 'dialectic method'. Here it is:


"After a quotation from the preface to my 'Criticism of Political Economy,' Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:

'The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has.'

"Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?" [Marx (1976), pp.101-02. Bold emphases added.]

In the passage that Marx quotes not a single Hegelian concept is to be found -- no "contradictions", no change of "quantity into quality", no "negation of the negation", no "unity and identity of opposites", no "interconnected Totality" --, and yet Marx calls this the "dialectic method", and says of it that it is "my method". So, Marx's "method" has had Hegel completely excised, except for the odd phrase or two here and there with which he merely "coquetted". In that case once more, Marx's "dialectic method" more closely resembles that of Aristotle, Kant and the Scottish Historical School (Ferguson, Millar, Robertson, Smith, Hume and Stewart).

And I fail to see what the title of his book has to do with this. You say this, however:


Indeed, the full title ends with A Critique of Political Economy - it's even in the name of book (the word critique, which, in Marx, is an example of supersession)

But, as I have show if this were so, change would be impossible:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/dialectical-theory-change-t144536/index.html

And that is quite apart from the fact that I dispute your claim that "Critique" is an example of "supercession", and I like to see you show otherwise.

[Lyev]

I agree. Marx's method owes nothing to Hegel, as the theories of others you mention do. Marx's 'dialectic' more closely resembles that of Aristotle, Kant and the Scottish Historical School (Ferguson, Smith, Millar, Robertson, Hume and and Stewart), as I have argued here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1693775&postcount=260

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1693776&postcount=261I think you misunderstood me. The point I wanted to emphasise here is that "dialectial materialism" (not simply the dialectical method, or "dialectics"), as seen in the works of Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Mao, Stalin and even Engels is not the same method as espoused by Marx, although in Lenin's defence, when he was studying Hegel, the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts and the Grundrisse weren't published yet. Perhaps this is shown by, at least to some extent, Kautsky's attempt to systematize Capital into a purely economic text within the Second International, thereby removing from the book its true revolutionary content, of critiquing orthodox political economy very mode of thinking (not on purpose obviously). Anyway, therefore when you attack the philosophical ideas of Plekhanov et al, you're attacking them somewhat tangentially. They do not represent the heart of Marx's or Hegel's views on estrangement, dialectics, sublation etc.

On 'contradictions', is there perhaps one presented in Marx (in Capital), where the bourgeois political economists are critiqued for presenting the absurd as rational and clearly thought-out? Here:
If I state that coats or boots stand in relation to linen because the latter is the incarnation of human labour, the absurdity (Verrücktheit = madness) of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold or silver ... as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the labour of society appears to them in exactly, this absurd (verrückt = crazy) form. The categories of political economy consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid (gültig), and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production.

As regards alienation, in both Hegel and Marx, this was an idea that helped me understand much more clearly the relationship between the two thinkers. Zanthorus, you said that the latter derived his own theory of this from Feuerbach in the Essence of Christianity, but surely Hegel's own ideas on estrangement must have influenced Marx? Perhaps it is appropriate to discuss here Hegel's obsesssion with the Ancient Greek society which he saw as a harmonious city-state of freely associating individuals; a place of "free morality where the "spiritual substance of freedom was bore the principle of morals, laws and constitutions". This was not present in later epochs that didn't share these traits. His ideas on modern society - unlike the Ancient Greece - as a divided society were quite important at times. His project consisted of reconciling these aspects of society. But I think he did not believe philosophers should change society - they should only discuss it and investigate it. He once referenced some Greek play I think, which roughly said, "Here is Rhodes! Jump here!". I can't remember the full details, but he basically thought we should be concerned with problems of the present, rather than thinking about changing things for the future (although this is all a bit rambling, and now somewhat a bit irrelevant because I cannot remember what point I was going to make to follow on from this). Anyway, the abolition, transcendence, of private property, I thought, was a good example of aufheben. Can the revolutionary communist project be summed up in this supersession of alienation itself, which is only as a result of features of the concrete, material world (the social form we live under)?

One final point, Rosa: I think I remember you citing the book by G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, A Defence, as a text that defends Marx's view on history, modes of production, etc., without reference to Hegel or dialectics. I am going through this book at the moment and it starts with an examination of both Hegel's and Marx's writings on history and social change, called "Images of History in Hegel and Marx". Could you explain this? (This isn't me trying to catch you out or score any points or anything, I am curious.)

[Zanthorus]

I think you misunderstood me. The point I wanted to emphasise here is that "dialectial materialism" (not simply the dialectical method, or "dialectics"), as seen in the works of... even Engels

I don't think this is true. Engels is quite clear in the Dialectics of Nature that the laws he discusses are not some kind of logical structure to the universe but merely generalisations from empirical investigation. Also, if Engels work on science is dialectical materialism, then Marx would quite clearly be a dialectical materialist, as Engels points about creationism being refuted by the self-movement of matter echo Marx's comments on geognosy in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts.

Have you ever read John Bellamy Foster's work Marx's Ecology? He has some very interesting things to say with regards to Engels and the dialectic. In particular, he notes that Engels comments on the party played by labour in the transition from ape to man actually presage modern theories of co-evolution, and quotes Stephen Jay Gould as acknowledging this fact. He characterises Engels approach as 'Dialectical Naturalism' in opposition to 'Dialectical Materialism'. I reccomend reading it (And not just for the parts on Engels and dialectics either).

Of course, all in all it would depend what we mean by dialectical materialism. I think that in Plekhanov it is fairly clear that he thinks the world has a logical structure based on the 'three laws'. I'm not too up on other DM classics, apart from Stalin's 'Dialectical and Historical Materialism', which I remember making the same mistake. It is possible that various different things have gone under the banner of 'dialectical materialism', not all of the compatible with one another.


As regards alienation, in both Hegel and Marx, this was an idea that helped me understand much more clearly the relationship between the two thinkers. Zanthorus, you said that the latter derived his own theory of this from Feuerbach in the Essence of Christianity, but surely Hegel's own ideas on estrangement must have influenced Marx?

I'm not too hot on Hegel's ideas about alienation I'm afraid. Marx cites Feuerbach's theory of religious alienation as late as Das Kapital itself, so it would seem to be a lasting influence here.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lyev:


I think you misunderstood me. The point I wanted to emphasise here is that "dialectial materialism" (not simply the dialectical method, or "dialectics"), as seen in the works of Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Mao, Stalin and even Engels is not the same method as espoused by Marx, although in Lenin's defence, when he was studying Hegel, the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts and the Grundrisse weren't published yet. Perhaps this is shown by, at least to some extent, Kautsky's attempt to systematize Capital into a purely economic text within the Second International, thereby removing from the book its true revolutionary content, of critiquing orthodox political economy very mode of thinking (not on purpose obviously). Anyway, therefore when you attack the philosophical ideas of Plekhanov et al, you're attacking them somewhat tangentially. They do not represent the heart of Marx's or Hegel's views on estrangement, dialectics, sublation etc.

Well, I disagree that these ideas (i.e., dialectics as it has traditionally been understood, and 'sublation') appear in Marx's mature work, and as far as Hegel is concerned, I do attack the core of his theory, and show it makes no sense at all -- hence his other ideas go by default.


On 'contradictions', is there perhaps one presented in Marx (in Capital), where the bourgeois political economists are critiqued for presenting the absurd as rational and clearly thought-out? Here:


If I state that coats or boots stand in relation to linen because the latter is the incarnation of human labour, the absurdity (Verrücktheit = madness) of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold or silver ... as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the labour of society appears to them in exactly, this absurd (verrückt = crazy) form. The categories of political economy consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid (gültig), and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production.

Yes, but this isn't a contradiction, so I fail to see your point.


As regards alienation, in both Hegel and Marx, this was an idea that helped me understand much more clearly the relationship between the two thinkers. Zanthorus, you said that the latter derived his own theory of this from Feuerbach in the Essence of Christianity, but surely Hegel's own ideas on estrangement must have influenced Marx? Perhaps it is appropriate to discuss here Hegel's obsesssion with the Ancient Greek society which he saw as a harmonious city-state of freely associating individuals; a place of "free morality where the "spiritual substance of freedom was bore the principle of morals, laws and constitutions". This was not present in later epochs that didn't share these traits. His ideas on modern society - unlike the Ancient Greece - as a divided society were quite important at times. His project consisted of reconciling these aspects of society. But I think he did not believe philosophers should change society - they should only discuss it and investigate it. He once referenced some Greek play I think, which roughly said, "Here is Rhodes! Jump here!". I can't remember the full details, but he basically thought we should be concerned with problems of the present, rather than thinking about changing things for the future (although this is all a bit rambling, and now somewhat a bit irrelevant because I cannot remember what point I was going to make to follow on from this). Anyway, the abolition, transcendence, of private property, I thought, was a good example of aufheben. Can the revolutionary communist project be summed up in this supersession of alienation itself, which is only as a result of features of the concrete, material world (the social form we live under)?

Well, alienation is a Christian notion, and certainly appears in the work of German Romantics, and in embryonic form in Rousseau.

Providing it is meant in a more materialist sense, I am Ok with it. But I do not see why we need to look to Hegel to mystify the whole thing.

And, sure, as I keep pointing out to you, these ideas did influence the early Marx, but there is no evidence they influenced Das Kapital.


One final point, Rosa: I think I remember you citing the book by G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, A Defence, as a text that defends Marx's view on history, modes of production, etc., without reference to Hegel or dialectics. I am going through this book at the moment and it starts with an examination of both Hegel's and Marx's writings on history and social change, called "Images of History in Hegel and Marx". Could you explain this? (This isn't me trying to catch you out or score any points or anything, I am curious.)

Well, he certainly begins his book with this (as a sop to tradition, I reckon), but it hardly features anywhere in the rest of the book. It stands out, therefore, as a sore thumb.