Presentation on chapter 2 of" Philosophy and revolution" - PDF document

Presentation on chapter 2 of" Philosophy and revolution" Brendan Cooney May 2019 The transformation of the Russian Revolution into its opposite, State capitalist authoritarianism, caused RD to re-examine Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism in order to exhume the liberatory core of this philosophy. In so doing, she was able to locate the struggle for freedom at the center of historical materialism, a struggle which permeates all of its categories. In the same way that concrete events and concrete struggles caused RD to find the essential liberatory thread in Marx in a way that spoke to and informed contemporary struggles, she also examined the way Marx as well never stopped developing his ideas in response to the concrete struggles of workers for freedom in his time. Thus, in this chapter there are two dialectical processes at work. We see Marx at work, compelled by the struggles of his day, digging deeper and deeper into the economic and philosophic categories to make them relevant for his time. At the same time, RD, compelled by the rise of state capitalism and the resistance to this state capitalism, digs deeper and deeper into Marx and Hegel, in order to grasp the dialectical process at play in her time. In order to do this, RD begins by identifying how and why the struggle for freedom is central to historical materialism, a process requiring a deep dive into Hegel's categories, specifically the concept of negation of negation. All along, her intellectual opponents are those who want to sever the link between Marx and Hegel. This is not merely an academic question of the degree of Hegel’s influence on Marx. For RD, this is not merely a question of Marx using the hegelian language at times, or the similarities between certain categories in the two thinkers. Rather, there is an essential thread which Marx picks up from Hegel which allows Marx to put human liberation at the center of his Philosophy of revolution. Thus, for RD, the quest to understand Hegel’s influence on Marx, to identify the liberatory, humanist thread in historical materialism, has immediate, concrete political ramifications. Those who want to sever the link between Marx and Hegel, also want to purge all of the liberatory elements from Marx. Thus, when RD discusses categories like abstract labor and commodity fetishism, di ff erentiating her interpretation of Marx from that of Stalin and others, the issues at stake are not merely academic, nor is it a matter of degrees of correctness. In other words, it is not as if Stalin's interpretation of Marx sits on a spectrum of correctness, in which he got certain categories correct while making errors in other areas. Rather, Stalin's interpretation of Marx is the polar opposite of the Philosophy of freedom which RD develops, a philosophical di ff erence that parallels the transformation of the Russian Revolution into its opposite. We see this di ff erence reflected in all of the categories that RD examines. Part of RD’s argument is exegetical/historical, identifying the birth of historical materialism in Marx’s engagement with Hegel as well as the continuity of these humanist ideas in both the young and mature Marx. For those of us who don't need to be convinced of the continuity in Marx’s thought, the more interesting issue is the question as to what precisely historical materialism is, what precisely is its relation to Hegel, and how, precisely, does it permeate all of the economic and philosophical categories of the mature Marx. For RD, historical materialism is Marx’s philosophy of liberation. From Hegel, Marx takes the idea of "self development through double negation.” As opposed to Feurbach, who argued that the negation of the negation was a reactionary device that lead Hegel to accommodate existing religion and society, Marx argued that second negativity contained a positive movement

necessary for historical development. For Marx, the source of Hegel's accommodation lay in the fact that his philosophy was constrained to the realm of abstract thinking. For Marx, and for RD, philosophy should "turn outward” and "engage the world”. Not only must it recognize that humans are both created by history and the creators of history, but it must also recognize that this historical process is not merely one of abstract thinking, but also one which entails real human subjects engaged in the every day process of transforming their objective world. Through this understanding, Marx was able to break with Hegel, bourgeois political economy, the materialists, and vulgar communism. According to RD, this break with previous traditions of thought is made possible because Marx’s new philosophy was a philosophy of human activity. Neither Hegel or the political economists saw labor as the subject of their Science. Political economists had identified labor as the source of value, but had stopped there. Rather than attributing the various forms of surplus value (profit, rent, interest) to the exploitation of labor, the political economists had fetishistic-ly attributed these forms of surplus value to nonhuman sources like the land, Capital, and time. By placing humans and human labor at the center of his Philosophy, Marx was able to pierce through these bourgeois fetishes to unmask the real social processes the lay behind the various forms of the appearance of surplus value. Vulgar communism, as well, was handicapped by its failure to put the human subject, and its struggle for freedom, at the center of its philosophy. Thus Marx critiques vulgar communism for treating the abolition of private property as an end in itself rather than a necessary mediation along the way toward the goal of creating new conditions for human freedom. Because human beings strive for freedom, this causes them to seek to negate the conditions of their unfreedom. But this act of negation itself must be negated in order to find positive ground for the creation of new conditions. Thus, in 1844 Marx criticizes vulgar communism’s "Sham universality” in that it sees transcending private property as a goal onto itself rather than a first step toward the creation of new conditions for human freedom. RD finds Marx’s critiques of vulgar communism full of powerful lessons for her own time. The centrality of absolute negativity which she identifies in Marx suggests that all historical formations, even those that may claim the mantle of communism, even those which may negate certain features of capitalism, contain movement. And this movement is the movement of absolute negativity, as humans struggle to create new conditions to realize their own freedom. She sees the struggles against Soviet state-capitalism as an example of second negation carrying out its never-ending battle. Because this philosophy understands historical development to be the product of the struggles of real people, and because this philosophy itself is a part of this struggle to change the world, this philosophy must also develop in response to and with the process of absolute negativity as it is carried out in real life through the various struggles of people fighting for freedom. While many scholars examine Marx’s Grundrisse from all sorts of di ff erent angles, RD’s analysis in this part B of this chapter focuses on two places in which Marx’s thinking evolved overtime in response to historical developments. The first instance concerns Marx’s understanding of the "asiatic Mode of production”. In 1847, when writing the Communist Manifesto, Marx had welcomed the bourgeois revolutions which broke down the" Chinese walls of barbarism". But just a few years later he wrote critically of Western influence in China and praised the Taiping rebellion. As opposed to interpretations of Marx which impose a Eurocentric teleology on his theory of historical development, RD argues that Marx’s evolving understanding of the Asiatic mode of production, as well as his comments about the possibility of revolution in Russia, suggest a di ff erent way of seeing the matter. She