Re: AUT: Re: hegelian stuff

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Harry said:
> > Of course, it is worth noting, again and again, that Marx was also
indebted
> > to the Old Man, and any acqauintance with Hegel will make it clear that
many
> > of Marx's categories bear the imprint of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
and
> > The Logic.
>
> Absolutely true. The real issue is the kind of "imprint" one finds. In
> other words how Marx adopted and used Hegels concepts and whether there
> are radical differences. I used to use Hegel in teaching Marx but later
> decided it was more useful to use Marx to critique Hegel.
>
Indeed, this is where the meat is, so to speak.  I do not think that one can
read Marx as simply adopting Hegel's dialectic, but at the same time, his
idea of dialectic as negation and critique permeats all of it, hence also a
rigorous critique of Hegel's limitations.  I think that Hegel is important
both for reading Marx and to grapple with Marx's critique of Hegel as the
culmination of the limits of bourgeois philosophy (and of philosophy
itself.)

> > The people who claim that Marx dumped Hegel in his later years
> > have a political-ideological axe to grind because Hegel's influence is
all
> > over each section of Capital and the books on Surplus Value, as well as
the
> > Grundrisse (which makes Negri's fondness for the Grundrisse particularly
> > hilarious and ironic) and other smaller works.
>
> Again the issue is what is meant by "dumped". Althusser argued Marx
> dumped the Hegelian analysis of alienation of the 1844 Manuscripts but not
> that Marx dumped the dialectic. How could he when he himself was a born
> again diamatician. Negri's fondness for the Grundrisse (1857) as opposed
> to Capital (1867) is explained in his book Marx Beyond Marx and has
> nothing to do with the absence or presence of Hegel in either. The
> traditional orthodox left always leaned heavily on Capital, even before
> Althusser's "rereading" and Negri found in the Grundrisse
> formulations that provided opportunities to counterpose a very different
> reading of Marx. When he lectured at Althusser's seminar it also provided
> a rhetorical way to avoid a direct attack on his host's version of Marxism
> while launching a wide-ranging indirect attack.

"Diamat" could not be further from Marx's notion of dialectic than anything.
Marx did not, except at his weakest moments, propose dialectics as a new
system of thought, but rather as a mode of critique, of negation.  It is
this that Althusser and Negri share in common, and it is the basis of both
of their rejections of Hegel.
>
> > As John Holloway puts it in
> > his new book, we are not dialecticians because we are materialists, but
> > materialists because we are dialecticians.  This was certainly true of
Marx.
>
> Whatever that means. Cute but opaque.

I do not find it opaque, in so far as John expresses the content of it quite
clearly.  Marx's critique of previous materialisms is important here.  His
critique that previous materialism did not grapple with social life as
dynamic met with his critique of Hegel as treating social dynamic as largely
in our heads (the resolution of contradiction was a
philosophical/theoretical resoluton in Hegel), whereas for Marx it is a
social/practical resolution: social transformation.  The latter is a
'materialist' position.

> > Now, one can level of a critique of those categories, but as with Negri,
one
> > wonders what is actually left of Marx's critique.
>
> Look, the anti-dialectical tradition to which Negri has attached himself,
> so to speak, is one that sees capital itself as a social system that
> imposes dialectical relations on people. (This is my forumulation.)

I think that this is very useful.  I don;t think that Marx saw the social
relations imposed by capital as dialectical, and therefore revolution would
undo dialectics.  IMO (and that's an opinion), dialectic was a mode of
critique of capitalist social relations, of its limitations, weaknesses and
contradictions.  Dialectic in Marx expresses the power of the working class,
not simply capital's imposition.  The refusal of dialectic is the refusal of
working class power, not only of capital's power.  Dialectic is critique and
negation, not affirmation and recuperation.

> Capital imposes exploitation and endless work and alienation and endless
> circuits of sameness that bind the resistance to that imposition into
> itself (into contradiction). To the degree that it is successful it
> reduces the inevitable antagonism to mere contradiction that functions as
> a motor of the capitalist dialectic, of its own movement. The
> anti-dialectical moment of this analysis is the perception that
> in successful working class struggle the resistance or antagonism ruptures
> the binding and thus ruptures the dialectic. Moreover the resistance or
> antagonism is not merely negative but includes the kind of positive
> creativity that Marx saw in living labor (but we can generalize far beyond
> it) that creates new, non-dialectical ways of being, i.e., ways of being
> not involving the creation/subordination of antagonism into contradiction.

> > Werner Bonefeld has an
> > insightful set of comments on non-dialectical Marxism in one of the back
> > issues of Common Sense where he discusses structuralism and
autonomism(sic).
>
> If this is the piece I think it is, I think it was awful. He gave it at a
> CSE conference in England and I rebutted it there. I was asked to write
> up my rebuttal for Commonsence but never got around to it --mainly I
> think because in debate I found Werner impermeable to argument, so
> repeating myself, once again, in print seemed useless-- so they
> published his piece independently. As you can see in Commonsense, in
> John's writings, and in the Open Marxism collections we share a perception
> of the self-activity of the working class but those who associate
> themselves with "Open Marxism" as a perpective have an attachment to such
> things as dialectics that we do not share at all.
>
Maybe it's time to lay it out, since the discussion is not simply with
Werner Bonefeld.
>
> > For example, without any explicit reference to dialectics, Mariarosa
Dalla
> > Costa, Selma James and Leopoldina Fortunadi formulated a very powerful
> > critique of Marx's own limited understanding of the relation of
reproduction
> > to production in Capital.  that failure meant a failure to grasp the
> > centrality of women's struggles to the rest of the working class and
> > housework as surplus-value producing and socially capitalist labor, but
in a
> > different way from waged labor.  Harry Cleaver talks about it a bit, but
> > does not take it as far as Fortunadi, for example, who develops a
systematic
> > critique of Marx based on a close-reading and critique of Capital and
> > Theories of Surplus Value.  Good critique, but does it really hit the
mark?
> > Not sure yet myself, but it is the most important stuff I have read
because
> > of its vast political implications which have been seriously
> > under-appreciated.
>
> Mariarosa, Selma and Silvia Federici's work in the wages for housework
> movement is, as far as I am concerned, an indispensible extension or
> complement to Marx's own work (and involves some critique of him for not
> having worked through much of what they have understood). But Silvia
> disassociated herself from Fortunati for both theoretical and political
> reasons that she may or may not ever speak to directly. As opposed to
> Fortunati's book I would recommend, as was done here recently by someone
> else, Silvia's Caliban and her other writings which continue and elaborate
> the wfh insights. I'm not sure what "take it as far as Fortunati" means.
> But the wfh insight that housework can reduce the value of labor power to
> capital and thus increase surplus value has been central to my own
> analysis for over a quarter of a century. It was for that that I
> elaborated the "circuit of the reproduction of labor power" to complement
> Marx's circuits of money, commodity and productive capital and facilitate
> an exposition of the interelationship between unwaged and waged work in
> capitalism. I began that within the context of teaching, extended it in
> the analysis of public health and subsequently my students have done so in
> the case of peasant unwaged work and struggle in Mexico and Nigeria.

Harry, I did not mean that you did not work from a similar critique, but
that Fortunadi worked that critique out in a full book, instead of a
section, and in relation to all of Marx's later major works.  That is what
makes it valuable over and above your work, but not necessarily against it.

Cheers,
Chris




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