Three books on dialectics

2018

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC-ND License at the time of publication. chapter 14 An outline of systematic dialectics-General appendix A systematic-dialectical method for the investigation and exposition of the capitalist system

Special Issue 'Dialectics and World Politics', Globalizations, 2014

Dialogue and Universalism

In a period in which capital has been on the offensive for many years, using debt and financial crises as rationales for wielding austerity to hammer down wages and social services and terrorism as an excuse for attacking civil liberties, it is important to realize that the origins of this long period of crisis lay in the struggles of people to free their lives from the endless subordination to work within a society organized as a gigantic social factory. In both the self-proclaimed capitalist West and socialist East the managers of that subordination, whether in private enterprise or the state, repeatedly found their plans undermined by people who refused to play by their rules and who elaborated activities and social relationships that escaped their control. The refusal of their rules meant crisis for the managers; the elaboration of other ways of beingwhether characterized as the crafting of civil society or as autonomous self-valorizationmeant crisis for and freedom from society-as-work-machine. As always, the capitalist response has involved instrumentalization and repression; basically its managers have sought to harness what they could and eliminate what they couldn't. For a long time instrumentalization was most obvious in the West and repression was most obvious in the East, yet both were always at play everywhere, and everywhere those responses were resisted and often escaped. It was that resistance and those escapes that led to the unleashing of the monetary weapons of financialization and their current employment to convert crisis-for-capital into crisisfor-us. It is in past and present resistance and escapes that we must discover both our weaknesses and our strengths in order to overcome capital's current offensive and to elaborate new worlds. It is the overall thesis of this paper that Marx's labor theory of value still provides vital aid in helping us understand these historical developments. behooves me to note at the outset of these remarks that I have come to the analysis and politics that I will set out here through a personal trajectory that has passed through science and economics on the one hand and a variety of engagements in social struggles on the other. Although I entered college bent on refining my scientific skills, I left it with a Ph.D in economics. The transition from the one to the other came about in response to participation in the American Civil Rights and Anti-war movements which led me out of the laboratory, into the streets and into a search for some intellectual framework for grasping the tumultuous events in which I had been involved. I was drawn to economics because it seemed to deal most directly with the structures against which the civil rights and anti-war movements were struggling: those of an economic inequality organized, in part, through racial hierarchies and those of an American imperialism that sought to extend that inequality globally in a post-colonial world where pacified pools of labor could be pitted against existing militant ones. Unfortunately, economics turned out to provide, indeed to have always provided, since its beginnings in the self-serving writings of the mercantilists, not only a justification for such a world but strategies and tactics for creating and managing that world. What it lacked in the 1960s when I was studying the subject in school, were any direct ways of grasping the struggles against that worldthe struggles in which I and millions of others were engaged. Eventually some economists would try to adapt game theory, operations research, thermodynamics and chaos theory to handle the contestation that repeatedly frustrated the strategies implied by their elegant theoretical modelsbut never with much success. Even before I completed my Ph.D I decided that economics was very much part of the problem and not part of the solution. Casting about for alternative approaches I wound up studying Marx and, to a lesser degree, Hegelboth of whom were familiar with what economists call the classical political economy of the 18 th and 19 th Centuries. My interest in Marx was obviousbecause his entire life and work were dedicated to overthrowing the capitalist grip on the world, he inevitably dealt with the struggles that subverted and threatened to transcend that world. My interest in Hegel was less obvious. On the one hand, a course on the Hegel's Phénoménologie de L'Esprit at the Université de Montpellier had drawn my attention to his analysis of the master-slave relationship, but it was primarily to his Science of Logic and Philosophy of Right that I turned in trying to make sense of Marx's exposition of his labor theory of value in the early chapters of Volume I of Capital. In both cases I discovered how these two authors grasped not only the dialectics of class struggle, but also, in their different ways, the tendencies of capital to infinite expansion and totalization. But whereas I found Hegel's analysis, however critical, to be ultimately accepting of capitalism, I found in Marx not only an analysis of capital's efforts to endlessly reimposed its dialectic but, more importantly, an analysis of the struggles that repeatedly ruptured, subverted and, sometimes strove to create post-capitalist futures in the present. 38 The rationale for such expenditures was provided by studies that demonstrated how much of the early post-WWII growth in the US economy was due to improvements in the quality of both capital and labor. 39 Although, as I have mentioned, capital was able to shape public education throughout the 20 th Century, the student movement of the 1960s seriously reduced the legitimacy of business influence in schoolsa situation corporations have been trying hard to reverse ever since. 40 While the economists discussed, of course, other parts of the government were sending in police and military troops to quell the uprisings. 41 The expenditure of money on hiring workers, of course, is only part of the expenditure by business of money as capital. Other monies are spent on the means of productionfactories, tools, machines, raw materials. In Part I of Volume III of Capital the circuit of capital M-C-M' is expanded in a way that makes this explicit: M-C(LP,MP). .. P. . .C'-M'.

This paper explores the contemporary relevance of dialectical thought in the context of a number of common contemporary critiques of the practice. Against the common claim made against dialectical thought that it somehow lacks rigor or disciplinary seriousness I argue for a conception of dialectics as scholarship without a scholar. Against the argument that dialectics is hobbled by an ostensibly mono-causal Marxism I posit an understanding of dialectical thinking as research at the edge of an objectively unfolding mystery called capitalism. At the same time I argue that dialectics should openly embrace its skeptical and anti-ethical dimensions but without falling into the temptation of outright skepticism or an exhausted post-political irony.

Special Issue, 'Dialectics and World Politics', Globalizations, 2014

The question ‘What is dialectics?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. Theoretical obfuscation and ideological baggage have fostered widespread misunderstandings of the concept. This article is intended to go some way in providing an answer, though one offered as a heuristic in which further developments can be made, rather than as doctrinaire statement of first principles. This introductory account of dialectics proceeds in four steps. It begins with a basic definitional and conceptual outline of dialectics before offering a brief philosophical history of dialectics in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions; its reemergence from scholasticism through Kant and Hegel; its vivification in Marx’s thought (and subsequent decline under ‘Diamat’); and its development in Western Marxism and on into contemporary political philosophy. The third part then explores the more modest engagements with dialectics that have taken place within IR theory before closing with a discussion of some of the ongoing tensions and key themes in dialectical thought. These center on the question of understanding dialectics as a process of reflection and an objective logic traceable in human praxis, highlighting the ongoing critical and revolutionary essence of dialectics.

1980

This is CLR James's long out of print book.

2018

While dialectics must be understood as one particular method in the humanities and social sciences, with many proponents and detractors, it is also a general principle that can be said to underlie all argumentative practice. As a particular method, it is grew out of developments in German Idealism, especially the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), and became the hallmark of Marxist theories of history. Insofar as dialectics is related to the general practice of engaging in dialogue, however, it cuts across all theories and, like rhetoric in Aristotle's words, "belongs to the ken of all human beings." What unites these to aspects of dialectics is the idea that thought, language, and perhaps reality itself unfold in processes that involve internal differentiation or necessary engagements with difference (alienation, contradiction) and the overcoming of difference through a form of reconciliation-only to have the process begin again at a higher level. From a different angle, we could say that the issue at the heart of dialectical thinking is the role of negativity and negation; that is, in order for thinking to progress, it must also encounter moments of negation since every concept takes shape only in opposition to others. (Hence the classical formulation by Spinoza: omnes determinatio est negatio.) A prominent example of this principle would be the practice of "immanent critique," whereby the best way to engage with an opposing position is to understand its logic so to speak from within, reveal its