Dialectics and Materialism
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Anti-Duhring
Friedrich Engels Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science Written: September 1876 - June 1878; Published: in Vorwärts, Jan 3 1877-July 7 1878; Published: as a book, Leipzig 1878; Translated: by Emile Burns from 1894 edition; Source: Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, Progress Publishers, 1947; Transcribed: [email protected], August 1996; Proofed and corrected: Mark Harris 2010. Formerly known as Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, Engels’ Anti-Dühring is a popular and enduring work which, as Engels wrote to Marx, was an attempt “to produce an encyclopaedic survey of our conception of the philosophical, natural-science and historical problems.” Marx and Engels first became aware of Professor Dühring with his December 1867 review of Capital, published in Ergänzungsblätter. They exchanged a series of letters about him from January-March 1868. He was largely forgotten until the mid-1870s, at which time Dühring entered Germany's political foreground. German Social-Democrats were influenced by both his Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus and Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung. Among his readers were included Johann Most, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, Eduard Bernstein – and even August Bebel for a brief period. In March 1874, the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party paper Volksstaat ran an anonymous article (actually penned by Bebel) favorably reviewing one of Dühring's books. On both February 1 and April 21, 1875, Liebknecht encouraged Engels to take Dühring head-on in the pages of the Volksstaat. In February 1876, Engels fired an opening salvo with his Volksstaat article “Prussian Vodka in the German Reichstag”. -
The Marxist Vol
The Marxist Vol. XII, No. 4, October-December 1996 On the occasion of Lenin’s 125th Birth Anniversary Marxism Of The Era Of Imperialism E M S Namboodiripad The theoretical doctrines and revolutionary practices of Vladymir Illyich Lenin (whose 125th birth anniversary was recently observed by the Marxist-Leninists throughout the world), have well been called “Marxism of the Era of imperialism.” For, not only was Lenin a loyal disciple of Marx and Engels applying in practice their theory in his own homeland, but he also further developed the theory and practices of the two founders of Marxism. EARLY THEORETICAL BATTLES Born in Tsarist Russia which was seeped in its feudal environment, he noticed that capitalism was slowly developing in his country. He fought the Narodniks who advocated the doctrine of the irrelevance and no-applicability of Marxism to Russian conditions. His first major theoretical work was the Development of Capitalism in Russia where he proved that, though in feudal environment, capitalism was rapidly developing in Russia. He thus established the truth of Marxist theory of the working class being the major political force in the development of society. Further, an alliance of peasantry under working class leadership will form the core of the revolutionary forces in the conditions of backward feudal Russia. Having thus defeated the Narodniks, he proceeded to demolish the theory of “legal Marxists” according to whom Marxism was to be applies in perfectly legal battles against capitalism. He asserted the truth that the preparation for the social transformation in Russia should be based on the sharpening class struggle culminating in the proletarian revolution. -
The Critique of Real Abstraction: from the Critical Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy and Back Again
The Critique of Real Abstraction: from the Critical Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy and Back Again Chris O’Kane John Jay, CUNY [email protected] There has been a renewed engagement with the idea of real abstraction in recent years. Scholars associated with the New Reading of Marx, such as Moishe Postone, Chris Arthur, Michael Heinrich, Patrick Murray, Riccardo Bellofiore and others,1 have employed the idea in their important reconstructions of Marx’s critique of political economy. Alberto Toscano, Endnotes, Jason W. Moore and others have utilized and extended these theorizations to concieve of race, gender, and nature as real abstractions. Both the New Reading and these new theories of real abstraction have provided invaluable work; the former in systematizing Marx’s inconsistent and unfinished theory of value as a theory of the abstract social domination of capital accumulation and reproduction; the latter in supplementing such a theory. Yet their exclusive focus on real abstraction in relation to the critique of political economy means that the critical marxian theories of real abstraction -- developed by Alfred Sohn- Rethel, Theodor W. Adorno and Henri Lefebvre -- have been mostly bypassed by the latter and have largely served as the object of trenchant criticism for their insufficient grasp of Marx’s theory of value by the former. Consequently these new readings and new theories of real abstraction elide important aspects of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno and Lefebvre’s critiques of real abstraction; which sought to develop Marx’s critique of political economy into objective-subjective critical theories of the reproduction of capitalist society.2 However, two recent works by 1 Moishe Postone’s interpretation of real abstraction will be discussed below. -
Marx and the Foundations of the Critical Theory of Morality and Ethics
Marx and the Foundations of the Critical Theory of Morality and Ethics Ricardo Brown Epicurus Understanding the Question of Ethics in Marx 1. How are we to understand the ethical content of Marx's work? Is there a socialist ethic or an ethic of socialism? Of course, these are not new questions within the marxist tradition. One hundred years ago, debates over "ethical socialism" coincided with those over accumulation, imperialism, organization and party. Although the question of ethics has been raised most recently by neo-liberal and neo-authoritarian critics, the turn to the question of ethics has not occurred for intellectual reasons. It is occasioned by the passing of state capitalism in the USSR and by the simultaneous critique of the adaptation by the Left of the discursive categories of bourgeois science in the forms of scientific socialism and the science of historical materialism. However, to raise the question of ethics is one thing, but to uncover its location within critical theory is quite another. Broadly speaking, responses to the question of ethics have displayed two theoretical tendencies. In the first tendency, there is a moralization of Marx through the construction of the "young Marx." This tendency identifies the entirety of Marx's critique of morality Copyright © 1999 by Ricardo Brown and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Brown 2 with his readings of Hegel and Feuerbach, the assumption being that Marx's critique of morality is restricted to these early works, leaving the impression that his materialism is at best discontinuous from his critique of morality, and, at worst, simply derived from a previous, enlightenment moral theory. -
Marxist Philosophy and Organization Studies: Marxist Contributions to the Understanding of Some Important Organizational Forms by Paul S
1 Marxist philosophy and organization studies: Marxist contributions to the understanding of some important organizational forms by Paul S. Adler Dept. of Management and Organization Marshall School of Business University of Southern California Los Angeles 90089-0808 Draft chapter for: Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Special Volume on Philosophy and Organization Theory, 2010, Guest editors: Haridimos Tsoukas and Robert Chia Version date: Feb 2, 2010 Author bio: Paul S. Adler is currently Harold Quinton Chair in Business Policy at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.. He received his PhD in economics and management at the University of Picardie, France. His research and teaching focus on organization design, with a particular focus on technical, professional, and manufacturing operations. Acknowledgments Earlier drafts benefited from research assistance from Jade Lo and from comments by Michael Burawoy, Richard Delbridge, Steve Jaros, Martin Kenney, David Levy, Richard Marens, Mark Mizruchi, Craig Prichard, Mick Rowlinson, Paul Thompson, and Matt Vidal, even if there is much with which they still disagree. 2 Marxist philosophy and organization studies: Marxist contributions to the understanding of some important organizational forms Abstract This essay aims to how Marx’s ideas and subsequent Marxist-inspired scholarship have contributed to the analysis of the various forms of work organization. It summarizes Marx’s basic philosophy, theory of history, and critique of political economy; it distinguishes more critical and more optimistic variants of Marxist theory; and it then shows how these ideas have been used in the analysis of key organizational forms, contrasting Marxist versus non-Marxist approaches and critical versus optimistic versions of Marxism. -
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 167–210 Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik Der Politischen Ökonomie, Dritter B
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 167–210 195 Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Dritter Band, Hamburg 1894, in: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). Zweite Abteilung, Band 15, hg. von der Internationalen Marx Engels Stiftung Amsterdam. Bearbeitet von Regina Roth, Eike Kopf und Carl-Erich Vollgraf unter Mitwirkung von Gerald Hubmann, mit einer Einführung von Bertram Schefold, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2004 (XI, 1420 pp. [860 pp. text, 560 pp. apparatus]) Twelve years after Marx’s death and a few months before Fredrick Engels died, the third volume of Marx’s Capital, edited by Engels, appeared in December 1894. Two years later, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, a well known representative of the Austrian school of marginalism, published the first comprehensive critique based on all three volumes of Capital. In December 2004, exactly 110 years after Engels’s edition of Capital’s third volume appeared, the same text was published as Volume 15 of the second section of the complete works of Marx and Engels (MEGA). Th is second section contains Capital and the works preparatory to Capital in chronological order. Numerically and chronologically, Volume 15 is the last one of this section.1 Because some earlier volumes are still unpublished, readers have still to wait some time until the second section will be actually complete. For a further critique of Marx, readers of this MEGA volume will not have to wait so long: radically breaking with the new 1993 editorial guidelines of the MEGA, this volume contains a strongly slanted ‘introduction’, written by Bertram Schefold, a neo-Ricardian economist, presenting a devastating critique of Marx as if it were an undisputed judgement of contemporary economic science. -
6 Marx's Grundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism
6 Marx’s Grundrisse and the ecological contradictions of capitalism John Bellamy Foster Introduction In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx famously wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circum- stances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1979: 103). The material circumstances or conditions that he was referring to here were the product of both natural and social history. For Marx production was a realm of expanding needs and powers. But it was subject at all times to material limits imposed by nature. It was the tragedy of capital that its narrow logic propelled it in an unrelenting assault on both these natural limits and the new social needs that it brought into being. By constantly revolutionizing production capital transformed society, but only by continually alienating natural necessity (conditions of sustainability and reproduction) and human needs. Recent research has revealed that an ecological–materialist critique was embedded in all of Marx’s work from The Economic and Philosophical Manu- scripts of 1844 to his Ethnological Notebooks of the late 1870s to early 1880s (see Burkett 1999; Foster 2000; Dickens 2004). This can be seen in his material- ist conception of nature and history, his theory of alienation (which encom- passed the alienation of nature), his understanding of the labour and production process as the metabolic relation between humanity and nature, and his co- evolutionary approach to society–nature relations. Nevertheless, because Marx’s overall critique of political economy remained unfinished, these and other aspects of his larger materialist conception of nature and history were incompletely developed – even in those works, such as Capital, volume 1, published in his lifetime. -
In Marx's Laboratory
In Marx’s Laboratory Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse Edited by Riccardo Bellofijiore, Guido Starosta, and Peter D. Thomas LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23676-9 Contents Introduction: In Marx’s Laboratory ........................................................................ 1 Riccardo Bellofijiore, Guido Starosta and Peter D. Thomas Part One: Achievements and Limits of the Grundrisse The Grundrisse after Capital, or How to Re-read Marx Backwards ............. 17 Riccardo Bellofijiore Method: From the Grundrisse to Capital .............................................................. 43 Juan Iñigo Carrera The Four Levels of Abstraction of Marx’s Concept of ‘Capital’. Or, Can We Consider the Grundrisse the Most Advanced Version of Marx’s Theory of Capital? ............................................................................... 71 Roberto Fineschi Part Two: Abstract Labour, Value and Money The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour ................................................................ 101 Christopher J. Arthur Unavoidable Crises: Reflections on Backhaus and the Development of Marx’s Value-Form Theory in the Grundrisse ................................................ 121 Patrick Murray Part Three: The Concept of Capital The Transformation of Money into Capital ......................................................... 149 Martha Campbell The Concept of Capital in the Grundrisse ............................................................ 177 Howard Engelskirchen © 2013 Koninklijke -
Karl Marx's Changing Picture of the End of Capitalism
Journal of the British Academy, 6, 187–206. DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/006.187 Posted 30 July 2018. © The British Academy 2018 Karl Marx’s changing picture of the end of capitalism Master-Mind Lecture read 21 November 2017 GARETH STEDMAN JONES Fellow of the Academy Abstract: This essay examines three successive attempts Marx made to theorise his conception of the ‘value form’ or the capitalist mode of production. The first in the 1840s ascribed the destruction of an original human sociability to the institution of private property and looked forward to its destruction and transcendence in the coming revolution. This vision was shattered by the disenchanting failure of the 1848 revolutions. The second attempt, belonging to the 1850s and outlined in the Grundrisse, attempted to chart the rise, global triumph, and the ultimate destruction of what Marx called the ‘value form’. Its model of global triumph and final disintegration was inspired by Hegel’s Logic. But the global economic crisis of 1857–8 did not lead to the return of revolution. Marx’s disturbed reaction to this failure was seen in his paranoia about the failure of his Critique of Political Economy (1859). Marx’s third attempt to formulate his critique in Das Kapital in 1867 was much more successful. It was accompanied by a new conception of revolution as a transi tional process rather than an event and was stimulated by his participation in the International Working Men’s Association and the accompanying growth of cooper atives, trade unions, and a political reform movement culminating in the Reform Bill of 1867. -
Engels, Trotsky and the Natural Sciences: a Case Study in Cosmology
LA ÚLTIMA MORADA DE TROTSKY GABRIELA PÉREZ NORIEGA http://dx.doi.org/10.23925/1982-6672.2020v13i38p19-49 Engels, Trotsky and the natural sciences: a case study in cosmology Alex Steinberg1 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2842-5687 Abstract: The topic of this essay is Trotsky’s approach to dialectical philosophy and the natural sciences. We will first summarize the tradition whose mantle Trotsky inherited as it was developed by Engels. We will then consider Trotsky’s relationship to the natural sciences. Trotsky, echoing Engels proclamations decades earlier, maintained that a dialectical philosophy is an essential guide to the work of the scientist while at the same time granting the autonomy and 19 freedom of scientists to pursue their research. Trotsky had a lifelong interest in following the developments in the natural sciences. He also had an intuitive grasp of some important developments in the natural sciences that would only come to fruition decades after his death. We will then present a case study of how a dialectical approach to nature can assist in overcoming a crisis that is plaguing contemporary physics. Specifically we will discuss how a dialectical approach to nature can inform cosmology in the 21st century and avoid the philosophical pitfalls and dead–ends that mark the contemporary crisis in physics. Keywords: Human Sciences; Marxism; Social History; Dialectical Materialism; Philosophy of Nature. 1 Alex Steinberg has taught classes on Hegel, Marxist philosophy, the dialectics of nature, and other topics at the Brecht Forum, the New Space and the Marxist Education Project. He has been a presenter and panelist at Socialist Scholars Conference, the Left Forum and Historical Materia- lism. -
Karl Marx's Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique
8 Rethinking Capital in light of the Grundrisse1 Moishe Postone Critical social theory and the contemporary world Critical social theory has not kept pace with the far-reaching global transforma- tions of the past three decades. The intense and fruitful revival of Marxian thought and scholarship in the 1960s and early 1970s was followed by a very strong turn away from Marxism on the part of many theorists. The intellectual field became dominated by postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches that appeared plausible to many as critiques of Marxism. It has become increasingly evident, however, that such approaches do not adequately grasp the current epoch; they fail to elucidate the basic historical changes that have reconfigured the world in recent decades. Even major thinkers such as Habermas, Foucault and Derrida now appear as theorists of a fading historical configuration – declin- ing Fordism; their critical approaches illuminate less and less of the contempor- ary social universe. One obvious weakness of these post-Marxist discourses has been the absence of serious political–economic considerations, an absence that has become glaring in the face of processes of globalization. At the same time, it is clear that, however important integrating political–economic considerations into crit- ical theories of the present might be, there can be no plausible return to tradi- tional Marxism. That traditional critical framework failed to provide the basis for an adequate historical analysis of Communist regimes of accumulation; its political–economic assumptions were challenged on the basis of the growing importance of scientific knowledge and advanced technology in the process of production; and its emancipatory ideals have become increasingly remote from the themes of much current social and cultural dissatisfaction. -
Dialectical Materialism: Marx's Method in Human Geography?
Dialectical materialism: Marx’s method in human geography? Ipsita Chatterjee Department of Geography and the Environment University of North Texas [email protected] Waquar Ahmed Department of Geography and the Environment University of North Texas [email protected] Abstract Dialectical materialism, we argue is a philosophical praxis that guided Marx’s critique of capitalist political economy. In this article, we have attempted a self- critique of human geography by explicating that dialectical materialism has been largely used as a metaphor within the discipline. The article has been inspired by the over-whelming use of the terms ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialectical’ in human geography. The purpose has been to lay down some of the basic tenets of dialectical materialism in Marx’s work, and then lay down some human geography research that engages with dialectical materialism. We believe that philosophical introspection on methodology, particularly within the Marxist circles, is scarce. We argue that to develop a truly dialectical materialist human geography we must push dialectal materialism from metaphor to methodology. We also think that methodology and philosophy are inseparably tied and therefore, choice of research methodology is a reflector of the researcher’s philosophy about reality and hence research praxis should be an important matter of discussion and introspection. Published with Creative Commons licence: Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivatives ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(2): 364-393 365 Keywords Materialism; human geography; radical geography; methodology; praxis Introduction The beliefs upon which we rest the objectives of our study form our philosophy, our own individual view of life and living.