blake 3:17
13th November 2006, 20:32
The following essay quoted and linked to is by one of leading intellectuals of the Fourth International, the wonderful Michael Lowy, author of Redemption and Utopia and editor of Marxism in Latin America.
Dialectics and Revolution
Michael Lwy
There seems to exist an intimate link between the dialectical method and revolutionary theory: not by chance, the high period of revolutionary thinking in the XXth century, the years 1905-1925, are also those of some of the most interesting attemps to use the hegelo-marxist dialectics as an instrument of knowledge and action. Let me try to illustrate the connexion between dialectics and revolution in the thought of three distinct Marxist figures : Leon D. Trotsky, Vladimir I. Lenin and Gyrgy Lukacs.
Trotskys theory of permanent revolution, as sketched for the first time in his essay Results and Prospects (1906), was one of the most astonishing political breakthroughs in Marxist thinking at the beginning of the XXth century. By rejecting the idea of separate historical stages - the first one being a bourgeois democratic one - in the future Russian Revolution, and raising the possibility of transforming the democratic into a proletarian/socialist revolution in a permanent (i.e. uninterrupted) process, it not only predicted the general strategy of the October revolution, but also provided key insights into the other revolutionary processes which would take place later on, in China, Indochina, Cuba, etc.
Of course, it is not without its problems and shortcomings, but it was incomparably more relevant to the real revolutionary processes in the periphery of the capitalist system than anything produced by orthodox Marxism from the death of Engels until 1917. Now, a careful study of the roots of Trotskys political boldness and of the whole theory of permanent revolution, reveals that his views were informed by a specific understanding of Marxism, an interpretation of the dialectical materialist method, distinct from the dominant orthodoxy of the Second International, and of Russian Marxism. The young Trotsky did not read Hegel, but his understanding of Marxist theory owes much to his first lectures in historical materialism, namely, the works of Antonio Labriola. In his autobiography he recalled the delight with which he first devoured Labriolas essays during his imprisonment in Odessa in 1893. [1]
His initiation into dialectics thus took place through an encounter with perhaps the least orthodox of the major figures of the Second International. Formed in the Hegelian school, Labriola fought relentlessly against the neo-positivist and vulgar-materialist trends that proliferated in Italian Marxism (Turati!). He was one of the first to reject the economistic interpretations of Marxism by attempting to restore the dialectical concepts of totality and historical process. Labriola defended historical materialism as a self-sufficient and independent theoretical system, irreducible to other currents; he also rejected scholastic dogmatism and the cult of the textbook, insisting on the need of a critical development of Marxism [2].
Trotskys starting-point, therefore, was this critical, dialectical and anti-dogmatic understanding that Labriola had inspired. Marxism, he wrote in 1906, is above all a method of analysis - not analysis of texts, but analysis of social relations.
Full article. (http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1119)
Edited to add link and in vain attempt to correct Michael Lowy's name in the thread title. Que sera sera.
Dialectics and Revolution
Michael Lwy
There seems to exist an intimate link between the dialectical method and revolutionary theory: not by chance, the high period of revolutionary thinking in the XXth century, the years 1905-1925, are also those of some of the most interesting attemps to use the hegelo-marxist dialectics as an instrument of knowledge and action. Let me try to illustrate the connexion between dialectics and revolution in the thought of three distinct Marxist figures : Leon D. Trotsky, Vladimir I. Lenin and Gyrgy Lukacs.
Trotskys theory of permanent revolution, as sketched for the first time in his essay Results and Prospects (1906), was one of the most astonishing political breakthroughs in Marxist thinking at the beginning of the XXth century. By rejecting the idea of separate historical stages - the first one being a bourgeois democratic one - in the future Russian Revolution, and raising the possibility of transforming the democratic into a proletarian/socialist revolution in a permanent (i.e. uninterrupted) process, it not only predicted the general strategy of the October revolution, but also provided key insights into the other revolutionary processes which would take place later on, in China, Indochina, Cuba, etc.
Of course, it is not without its problems and shortcomings, but it was incomparably more relevant to the real revolutionary processes in the periphery of the capitalist system than anything produced by orthodox Marxism from the death of Engels until 1917. Now, a careful study of the roots of Trotskys political boldness and of the whole theory of permanent revolution, reveals that his views were informed by a specific understanding of Marxism, an interpretation of the dialectical materialist method, distinct from the dominant orthodoxy of the Second International, and of Russian Marxism. The young Trotsky did not read Hegel, but his understanding of Marxist theory owes much to his first lectures in historical materialism, namely, the works of Antonio Labriola. In his autobiography he recalled the delight with which he first devoured Labriolas essays during his imprisonment in Odessa in 1893. [1]
His initiation into dialectics thus took place through an encounter with perhaps the least orthodox of the major figures of the Second International. Formed in the Hegelian school, Labriola fought relentlessly against the neo-positivist and vulgar-materialist trends that proliferated in Italian Marxism (Turati!). He was one of the first to reject the economistic interpretations of Marxism by attempting to restore the dialectical concepts of totality and historical process. Labriola defended historical materialism as a self-sufficient and independent theoretical system, irreducible to other currents; he also rejected scholastic dogmatism and the cult of the textbook, insisting on the need of a critical development of Marxism [2].
Trotskys starting-point, therefore, was this critical, dialectical and anti-dogmatic understanding that Labriola had inspired. Marxism, he wrote in 1906, is above all a method of analysis - not analysis of texts, but analysis of social relations.
Full article. (http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1119)
Edited to add link and in vain attempt to correct Michael Lowy's name in the thread title. Que sera sera.