Society, totality, and history

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Dia­lectics elude straight­for­ward defin­i­tion. No doubt it is easi­er to say what dia­lectics is not, rather than to say what it is. Against Ferdin­and Las­salle, Marx re­marked in a let­ter to En­gels that “Hegel nev­er de­scribed as dia­lectics the sub­sump­tion of vast num­bers of ‘cases’ un­der a gen­er­al prin­ciple,” and there­fore con­cluded that “the dia­lect­ic­al meth­od is wrongly ap­plied.”¹ Vladi­mir Len­in like­wise poin­ted out that Geor­gii Plekhan­ov, the founder of Rus­si­an Marx­ism, erred in treat­ing dia­lectics as “the sum-total of ex­amples,” a mis­take from which even En­gels was not fully ex­empt.²

Still less is dia­lectics re­du­cible to an ab­stract for­mula or ste­reo­typed pro­ced­ure of thes­is-an­ti­thes­is-syn­thes­is. James re­garded this series as “a ru­in­ous sim­pli­fic­a­tion” in his 1948 Notes on Dia­lectics,³ while Len­in fol­lowed Hegel in con­sid­er­ing “the ‘tripli­city’ of dia­lectics… [as] its ex­tern­al, su­per­fi­cial side.”⁴ In sim­il­ar fash­ion, the Frank­furt School the­or­ist Theodor Ad­orno re­called that “Hegel ex­pressed the most cut­ting ob­jec­tions to the claptrap tripli­city of thes­is, an­ti­thes­is, and syn­thes­is as a meth­od­o­lo­gic­al schema.”⁵ Early in his ca­reer, Len­in up­braided the pop­u­list Nikolai Mikhail­ovsky for his fatu­ous por­tray­al of the ma­ter­i­al­ist dia­lectic as some sort of par­lor trick which “proves” cap­it­al­ism must col­lapse. “Marx’s dia­lect­ic­al meth­od does not con­sist in tri­ads at all,” ex­plained Len­in in 1894, “but pre­cisely in the re­jec­tion of ideal­ism and sub­ject­iv­ism in so­ci­ology.”⁶

How can this meth­od be re­tained in so­ci­ology, however, while at the same time get­ting rid of its ideal­ist residues? Ob­vi­ously, if the dia­lectic is to be any­thing more than a sub­ject­ive ad­di­tion, an ar­bit­rary “way of think­ing” about the world, its lo­gic has to be dis­covered in the ob­ject (i.e., so­ci­ety) it­self. The ma­ter­i­al­ist in­ver­sion of Hegel’s dia­lectic can only be jus­ti­fied if its con­tours ap­pear at the level of so­cial real­ity. “Dia­lect­ic­al un­der­stand­ing is noth­ing but the con­cep­tu­al form of a real dia­lect­ic­al fact,” wrote Georg Lukács in his 1924 mono­graph Len­in: A Study in the Unity of His Thought.⁷ Lukács’ con­tem­por­ary, the Bolshev­ik re­volu­tion­ary Le­on Trot­sky, main­tained that the meth­od should not be ap­plied to just any sphere of know­ledge “like an ever-ready mas­ter key,” since “dia­lectics can­not be im­posed upon facts, but must be de­duced from their char­ac­ter and de­vel­op­ment.”⁸ Re­flect­ing on his con­ver­sion to Marx­ism, Trot­sky wrote that “the dia­lect­ic­al meth­od re­vealed it­self for the first time, not as an ab­stract defin­i­tion, but as a liv­ing spring found in the his­tor­ic­al pro­cess.”⁹

Trot­sky’s meta­phor of the spring re­curs fre­quently in his art­icles and speeches. “Marx­ism without the dia­lectic is like a clock without a spring,” he later de­clared.¹⁰ Wound tightly in­to the shape of a spir­al, the ma­ter­i­al­ist dia­lectic simply mir­rors the dy­nam­ic ten­sion of cap­it­al­ism it­self. “Cycles ex­plain a great deal,” Trot­sky main­tained in 1923, “form­ing through auto­mat­ic pulsa­tion an in­dis­pens­able dia­lect­ic­al spring in the mech­an­ism of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety.”¹¹ Earli­er in the year he stressed that an ad­equate so­ci­olo­gic­al ac­count must be both strong and flex­ible, since “dia­lect­ic­al thought is like a spring, and springs are made of tempered steel.”¹²

For such an ac­count to be war­ran­ted, in oth­er words, a dy­nam­ic ten­sion has to op­er­ate throughout the so­cial whole and gov­ern its to­tal­ity. Ad­orno went so far as to con­tend in his in­tro­duct­ory lec­tures on so­ci­ology that “[t]he concept of ‘so­ci­ety’ is, and must be, in­her­ently dia­lect­ic­al.” So­ci­ety sig­ni­fies “a me­di­ated and me­di­at­ing re­la­tion­ship between in­di­vidu­als, and not as a mere ag­glom­er­ate of in­di­vidu­als. It is thus dia­lect­ic­al in the strict sense, be­cause the me­di­ation between these two op­posed cat­egor­ies — in­di­vidu­als on one side and so­ci­ety on the oth­er — is im­pli­cit in both.”¹³ One of the in­ter­me­di­ate terms of this re­la­tion­ship is class, which struc­tures their op­pos­i­tion.¹⁴ Without this broad­er di­ver­gence, Lukács ob­served, “the ob­ject­ive eco­nom­ic ant­ag­on­ism as ex­pressed in the class struggle evap­or­ates, leav­ing just the con­flict between in­di­vidu­al and so­ci­ety.”¹⁵

Vul­gar Aus­tro­marx­ists like Max Adler were the ob­ject of Lukács’ cri­ti­cism in this pas­sage, but Trot­sky had his own fol­low­ers in mind when he cri­ti­cized the boot­strap­ping ideo­logy of Amer­ic­an cap­it­al­ism. “Nowhere has there been such re­jec­tion of class struggle as the land of ‘un­lim­ited op­por­tun­ity.’ Deni­al of so­cial con­tra­dic­tions as the mov­ing force of de­vel­op­ment leads to the deni­al of the dia­lectic as the lo­gic of con­tra­dic­tions in the do­main of the­or­et­ic­al thought.”¹⁶ Pro­let­ari­ans no longer see them­selves as such, a prob­lem which deeply troubled Ad­orno.¹⁷ As the great Hegel­i­an Marx­ist Ant­o­nio Lab­ri­ola poin­ted out sev­er­al dec­ades pri­or, however,

The real cri­ti­cism of so­ci­ety is so­ci­ety it­self, which by the an­ti­thet­ic con­di­tions upon which it rests en­genders from it­self — with­in it­self — the con­tra­dic­tion over which it fi­nally tri­umphs by passing in­to a new form. But the solu­tion of ex­ist­ing an­ti­theses is the pro­let­ari­at, wheth­er pro­let­ari­ans them­selves know this or not. Even as their misery has be­come the con­di­tion of present so­ci­ety, so in their misery resides the jus­ti­fic­a­tion of the new pro­let­ari­an re­volu­tion. It is in this pas­sage from the cri­ti­cism of sub­ject­ive thought, which ex­am­ines things from the out­side and ima­gines it can cor­rect them all at once, to an un­der­stand­ing of the self-cri­ti­cism ex­er­cised by so­ci­ety over it­self in the im­man­ence of its own pro­ces­sus. It is in this alone that the dia­lectic of his­tory con­sists, which Marx and En­gels, in­so­far as they re­mained ma­ter­i­al­ists, drew from the ideal­ism of Hegel.¹⁸

Lab­ri­ola thereby in­tro­duces a con­di­tio sine qua non of dia­lect­ic­al thought, “the im­man­ence of its own pro­cess.” Hegel once defined dia­lectics as “the im­man­ent pro­cess of tran­scend­ence [dies im­ma­nen­te Hin­aus­ge­hen]” of fi­nite judg­ments is­sued by the in­tel­lect,¹⁹ a defin­i­tion later bor­rowed by Lukács.²⁰ Ac­cord­ing to Hegel, think­ing is noth­ing oth­er than “the res­ol­u­tion of con­tra­dic­tions from its own re­sources [aus sich].”²¹

This is what Marx meant in 1859 when he trans­posed the forms of so­cial con­scious­ness onto the sol­id ground of so­cial be­ing, re­vers­ing their se­quence. “So­cial form­a­tions are nev­er des­troyed un­til the pro­duct­ive forces for which it is suf­fi­cient have been de­veloped, and new re­la­tions of pro­duc­tion nev­er re­place older ones be­fore the pre­requis­ites for their ex­ist­ence have ma­tured with­in the womb of the old so­ci­ety,” Marx wrote. “Hu­man­ity thus ex­clus­ively sets it­self such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer ex­am­in­a­tion will al­ways show that the prob­lem it­self arises only when the ma­ter­i­al con­di­tions for its solu­tion are already present, or at least in the course of form­a­tion.”²² More than a dec­ade later, he yet again con­firmed that the work­ing class has “no ideals to real­ize, but to set free those ele­ments of the new so­ci­ety with which old col­lapsing bour­geois so­ci­ety it­self is preg­nant.”²³ Com­mun­ist so­ci­ety, once it fi­nally makes its en­trance upon the world stage, will “still be stamped with the birth­marks of the old so­ci­ety from whose womb it emerges,” as Marx in­dic­ated in his 1875 Cri­tique of the Gotha Pro­gram.²⁴ Each suc­cess­ive stage must be “over­come dia­lect­ic­ally,” as Hegel put it, “i.e., through it­self, car­ry­ing all its pre­vi­ous de­term­in­a­tions sub­lated with­in it­self.”²⁵

It was Marx, after all, for whom “the dia­lectic of neg­at­iv­ity as the mov­ing and gen­er­at­ing prin­ciple” rep­res­en­ted “the out­stand­ing achieve­ment of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and its fi­nal out­come: the self-cre­ation of man as a pro­cess.”²⁶ En­gels later com­men­ted that if Hegel had demon­strated the trans­it­ory char­ac­ter of everything and in everything — “the un­in­ter­rup­ted pro­cess of be­com­ing and passing away” — then “dia­lect­ic­al philo­sophy is noth­ing oth­er than the re­flec­tion of this pro­cess in the think­ing brain.”²⁷ Quot­ing Goethe’s Faust, he pro­claimed: “All that ex­ists de­serves to per­ish.”²⁸ Though the sys­tem­ic side of Hegel­ian­ism ten­ded to be more con­ser­vat­ive than its meth­od, it nev­er­the­less con­tained the ex­plos­ive dy­nam­ism of an un­pre­ced­en­ted so­cial form.²⁹ (Moishe Po­stone has even pro­posed to read the present­a­tion of Marx’s ar­gu­ment in Cap­it­al as a “meta­com­ment­ary on Hegel,” since the real pro­cess that his philo­sophy re­flects be­longs to cap­it­al­ism).³⁰ With­in cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety there can already be found abund­ant neg­at­iv­ity, but it is a fecund neg­at­iv­ity; to para­phrase Ni­et­z­sche, the present suf­fers from “a sick­ness…, but a sick­ness rather like preg­nancy.”³¹

Giv­en this pre­vail­ing so­ci­et­al neg­at­iv­ity, a “neg­a­tion of the neg­a­tion” would be ne­ces­sary to de­liv­er the fu­ture from the womb of the present.³² “As a con­sequence of the pro­duc­tion pro­cess,” wrote Marx, “the pos­sib­il­it­ies rest­ing in liv­ing labor’s own womb ex­ist out­side it as real­it­ies — but as real­it­ies ali­en to it, which form wealth in op­pos­i­tion to it.”³³ Neg­at­ing such ali­en real­it­ies re­quires force, or a ma­ter­i­al­iz­a­tion of this ideal­ized Hegel­i­an neg­at­ive dia­lectic.³⁴ “Force is the mid­wife of every old so­ci­ety which is preg­nant with a new one,” claimed Marx in Cap­it­al.³⁵ So­ciohis­tor­ic im­man­ence, which he sought to con­vey through this lit­er­ary trope of preg­nancy, is em­bod­ied by the pro­let­ari­at. Wage labor gest­ates in­side the so­cial nex­us of ex­pan­ded re­pro­duc­tion, grow­ing in ex­act pro­por­tion to the in­crease of cap­it­al. Pro­let­ari­ans are “the first­born sons of mod­ern in­dustry.”³⁶

Rolf Hos­feld thus as­tutely com­ments in his re­cent in­tel­lec­tu­al bio­graphy of Marx that “he wanted to de­vel­op new prin­ciples for the world out of the world’s own prin­ciples, through the meth­od of an im­man­ent cri­tique of the world.”³⁷ Hos­feld’s passing com­ment has been worked out in great­er de­tail by Po­stone, even if the lat­ter re­jects labor as the stand­point of cri­tique:

The no­tion that the struc­tures, or un­der­ly­ing re­la­tions, of mod­ern so­ci­ety are con­tra­dict­ory provides the the­or­et­ic­al basis for an im­man­ent his­tor­ic­al cri­tique, which al­lows it to elu­cid­ate an his­tor­ic­al dy­nam­ic in­trins­ic to the so­cial form­a­tion — a dia­lectic point­ing bey­ond it­self, to that real­iz­able “ought” which is im­man­ent to what already “is” and serves as the stand­point of its cri­tique. Ac­cord­ing to this ap­proach, so­cial con­tra­dic­tion is the pre­con­di­tion of both an in­trins­ic his­tor­ic­al dy­nam­ic and the ex­ist­ence of a so­cial cri­tique it­self.³⁸

Yet the im­plic­a­tions of this in­sight prove much more far-reach­ing, ex­tend­ing bey­ond the­ory. “Im­man­ent cri­tique also has a prac­tic­al mo­ment,” Po­stone goes on to state, “con­trib­ut­ing to so­cial and polit­ic­al trans­form­a­tion.” Since it “re­jects po­s­i­tions which af­firm the giv­en or­der as well as uto­pi­an cri­tiques of that or­der,” the ori­ent­a­tion of cri­ti­cism is neither apo­lo­get­ic nor un­real­ist­ic.³⁹ Marx long ago pro­nounced that “in its ra­tion­al form, [the dia­lectic] in­cludes in its pos­it­ive un­der­stand­ing of what ex­ists a sim­ul­tan­eous re­cog­ni­tion of its neg­a­tion, its in­ev­it­able de­struc­tion; be­cause it re­gards every his­tor­ic­ally de­veloped form as in a flu­id state, in mo­tion, and there­fore grasps its tran­si­ent as­pect; and be­cause it does not let it­self be im­pressed by any­thing, be­ing in its very es­sence crit­ic­al and re­volu­tion­ary.”⁴⁰ Len­in sim­il­arly stressed many years later that cap­it­al­ism could only be over­come by “a long and per­sist­ent struggle on the basis of cap­it­al­ism it­self.”⁴¹

Epi­stem­o­lo­gic­ally, Rosa Lux­em­burg un­der­stood that Marx­ism was it­self a product of the im­man­ent cri­tique of French re­volu­tion­ary so­cial­ism, Ger­man ideal­ist philo­sophy, and Brit­ish polit­ic­al eco­nomy: “Marxi­an the­ory is a child of bour­geois sci­ence, but the birth of this child has cost the moth­er her life.”⁴² One of the ba­sic pre­cepts of dia­lect­ic­al think­ing, then, or one of its rules of thumb, is “the judg­ment of works by im­man­ent cri­ter­ia [immanenten Kriterien],” to quote the Marx­ist lit­er­ary crit­ic Wal­ter Ben­jamin.⁴³ “Dia­lectic is not a stand­point,” ar­gued his col­league Ad­orno a few dec­ades later, “but rather the at­tempt, by means of an im­man­ent cri­tique, to de­vel­op philo­soph­ic­al stand­points bey­ond them­selves and bey­ond the des­pot­ism of a think­ing based on stand­points.”⁴⁴ When Lukács, fol­low­ing Marx and En­gels, in­voked the “stand­point of the pro­let­ari­at,”⁴⁵ this was not as some sort of Archimedean point out­side of the world. Rather, it was as a point in­side the cap­it­al­ist mode of pro­duc­tion from which the so­cial to­tal­ity could be glimpsed.⁴⁶

Proud­hon’s 1840 treat­ise What is Prop­erty? was ap­pre­ci­ated by Marx and En­gels for just this reas­on, for un­der­tak­ing “a cri­ti­cism of polit­ic­al eco­nomy from the stand­point of polit­ic­al eco­nomy.” Even if it treated his­tor­ic­ally-evolved im­passes as im­mut­able, they ac­know­ledged that “the first cri­ti­cism of any sci­ence is ne­ces­sar­ily in­flu­enced by the premises of the sci­ence it is fight­ing against.”⁴⁷ Some twenty years fol­low­ing this ini­tial en­counter, Marx re­called that Proud­hon “im­it­ated Kant’s treat­ment of the an­ti­nom­ies.”⁴⁸ If later on “Proud­hon at­temp­ted to present the sys­tem of eco­nom­ic cat­egor­ies dia­lect­ic­ally,” namely by in­tro­du­cing “Hegel­i­an ‘con­tra­dic­tions’ in place of Kant’s in­sol­uble ‘an­ti­nom­ies’ as means of de­vel­op­ment,” for Marx this was an in­fe­li­cit­ous turn.⁴⁹ Gran­ted, “Proud­hon had a nat­ur­al in­clin­a­tion for dia­lectics. But as he nev­er grasped truly sci­entif­ic dia­lectics, he nev­er got fur­ther than soph­istry.”⁵⁰ Of course Hegel dis­tin­guished sharply between dia­lectics and soph­istry, “the es­sence of which con­sists pre­cisely in up­hold­ing one-sided and ab­stract de­term­in­a­tions in isol­a­tion from one an­oth­er, de­pend­ing on the in­di­vidu­al’s re­spect­ive in­terests and par­tic­u­lar situ­ation.” ⁵¹ Len­in used this dis­tinc­tion in his own work:

The great Hegel­i­an dia­lectics that Marx­ism made its own, hav­ing first turned it right side up, must nev­er be con­fused with the vul­gar trick of jus­ti­fy­ing the zig­zags of those politi­cians who swing over from the re­volu­tion­ary to the op­por­tun­ist wing of the party, with the vul­gar habit of lump­ing to­geth­er par­tic­u­lar state­ments and de­vel­op­ment­al factors be­long­ing to dif­fer­ent stages of a single pro­cess. Genu­ine dia­lectics does not jus­ti­fy the er­rors of in­di­vidu­als… but stud­ies the in­ev­it­able turns, prov­ing that they were in­ev­it­able through a de­tailed study of the pro­cess of de­vel­op­ment in all its con­crete­ness. One of the core prin­ciples of dia­lectics is that there is no such thing as ab­stract truth; truth is al­ways con­crete.⁵²

Here Len­in was simply quot­ing Hegel,⁵³ a line first brought to light by Plekhan­ov. “Dia­lect­ic­al lo­gic de­mands we go fur­ther,” Len­in stated else­where. “To really know an ob­ject, one must grasp and in­vest­ig­ate all of its sides, all of its in­ter­con­nec­tions and ‘me­di­ations’.”⁵⁴ (Ad­orno’s warn­ing is well taken, however: “Only if [truth] is present can the much-mis­used say­ing that ‘the truth is con­crete’ prop­erly come in­to its own, com­pel­ling philo­sophy to crack open the minu­ti­ae of thought. We must philo­soph­ize not about con­crete de­tails but from with­in them, by as­sem­bling con­cepts around them”).⁵⁵ In the mean­time, however, Len­in ac­cused Kaut­sky, Plekhan­ov, and Vandervelde of “sub­sti­tut­ing ec­lecticism and soph­istry for dia­lectics.”⁵⁶ Such ec­lecticism and soph­istry has hardly gone away since Len­in wrote these lines; one need only glance at any num­ber of re­cent titles for proof.

Notes

¹ Karl Marx. “Let­ter to Friedrich En­gels of Decem­ber 9, 1861.” Trans­lated by Peter and Betty Ross. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 41. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1985). Pg. 333.
² Vladi­mir Len­in. “On the Ques­tion of Dia­lectics.” Trans­lated by Clem­ens Dutt. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 38: Philo­soph­ic­al Note­books. (Pro­gress Pub­lish­ers. Mo­scow, USSR: 1976). Pg. 357.
³ C.L.R. James. Notes on Dia­lectics: Hegel, Marx, Len­in. (Lawrence Hill Pub­lish­ers. West­port, CT: 2005). Pg. 170.
⁴ Vladi­mir Len­in. “Con­spect­us of Hegel’s Sci­ence of Lo­gic.” Trans­lated by Clem­ens Dutt. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 38. Pg. 229.
⁵ Theodor W. Ad­orno. Hegel: Three Stud­ies. Trans­lated by Shi­erry Weber Nich­olson. (MIT Press. Cam­bridge, MA: 1993). Pg. 75.
⁶ Vladi­mir Len­in. What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the So­cial Demo­crats. Trans­lat­or not lis­ted. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 1: 1893-1894. (Pro­gress Pub­lish­ers. Mo­scow, USSR: 1960). Pgs. 183-184.
⁷ Georg Lukács. Len­in: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. Trans­lated by Nich­olas Jac­obs. (Verso Books. New York, NY: 2009). Pg. 21. Trans­la­tion amended.
⁸ Le­on Trot­sky. “Cul­ture and So­cial­ism.” Trans­lated by Bri­an Pearce. Prob­lems of Every­day Life and Oth­er Writ­ings on Cul­ture and Sci­ence. (Pathfind­er Press. New York, NY: 1973). Pg. 233.
⁹ Le­on Trot­sky. My Life: An At­tempt at Auto­bi­o­graphy. Trans­lated by Joseph Hansen. (Pathfind­er Press. New York, NY: 1970). Pg. 122.
¹⁰ Le­on Trot­sky. “The ABC of Dia­lect­ic­al Ma­ter­i­al­ism.” Trans­lated by John G. Wright. Prob­lems of Every­day Life. Pg. 323. Chris Ar­thur sim­il­arly says of the So­viet eco­nomy that “if the law of value en­forced through cap­it­al­ist com­pet­i­tion is no longer op­er­at­ive we have a clock without a spring.” The New Dia­lectic and Marx’s Cap­it­al. (Brill Aca­dem­ic Pub­lish­ers. Bo­ston, MA: 2004) Pg. 222.
¹¹ Le­on Trot­sky. “The Curve of Cap­it­al­ist De­vel­op­ment.” Trans­lat­or un­lis­ted. The Chal­lenge of the Left Op­pos­i­tion Se­lec­ted Writ­ings and Speeches, 1923-1925. (Pathfind­er Press. New York, NY: 1975). Pg. 275.
¹² Le­on Trot­sky, “Prob­lems of Civil War.” Trans­lated by A.L. Pre­ston. Chal­lenge of the Left Op­pos­i­tion. Pg. 198.
¹³ Theodor W. Ad­orno. In­tro­duc­tion to So­ci­ology. Trans­lated by Ed­mund Jeph­cott. (Stan­ford Uni­versity Press. Stan­ford, CA: 2000). Pg. 38.
¹⁴ Ad­orno defines so­ci­ety as it presently ex­ists as “an ant­ag­on­ist­ic, di­vided, class so­ci­ety in which the in­terests of groups are es­sen­tially, ob­ject­ively in con­flict.” Ibid., pg. 66.
¹⁵ Georg Lukács. “What is Or­tho­dox Marx­ism?” Trans­lated by Rod­ney Liv­ing­stone. His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness. (The MIT Press. Cam­bridge, MA: 1971). Pg. 11.
¹⁶ Trot­sky, “The ABC of Dia­lect­ic­al Ma­ter­i­al­ism.” Pg. 323.
¹⁷ “If there really is a gradu­al pro­cess whereby those who are ob­ject­ively defined as pro­let­ari­ans, ac­cord­ing to some threshold, are no longer con­scious of them­selves as such or em­phat­ic­ally re­ject this con­scious­ness, then no pro­let­ari­an will fi­nally be left know­ing he is a pro­let­ari­an.” Ad­orno, In­tro­duc­tion to So­ci­ology. Pg. 23.
¹⁸ Ant­o­nio Lab­ri­ola. Es­says on the Ma­ter­i­al­ist Con­cep­tion of His­tory. Trans­lated by Charles H. Kerr. (Charles H. Kerr & Com­pany. Chica­go, IL: 1908). Pgs. 169-170.
¹⁹ G.W.F. Hegel. En­cyc­lo­pe­dia of the Philo­soph­ic­al Sci­ences in Ba­sic Out­line, Part 1: The Sci­ence of Lo­gic. Trans­lated by Klaus Brink­mann and Daniel Dahl­strom. (Cam­bridge Uni­versity Press. New York, NY: 2010). Pg. 129.
²⁰ Georg Lukács, “Re­ific­a­tion and the Con­scious­ness of the Pro­let­ari­at.” His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness. Pg. 177.
²¹ Hegel, En­cyc­lo­pe­dia, Part 1. Pg. 39. Trans­la­tion mod­i­fied.
²² Karl Marx. “Pre­face to Con­tri­bu­tion to a Cri­tique of Polit­ic­al Eco­nomy.” Trans­lated by Yuri Sdob­nikov. Col­lec­ted Writ­ings, Volume 29: 1857-1861. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1987). Pg. 263. Trans­la­tion mod­i­fied.
²³ Karl Marx. The Civil War in France. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 22: 1870-1871. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1986). Pg. 335.
²⁴ Karl Marx. Cri­tique of the Gotha Pro­gram. Trans­lated by Peter and Betty Ross. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 24. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1986). Pg. 85.
²⁵ Hegel, En­cyc­lo­pe­dia, Part 1. Pg. 233. Trans­la­tion amended.
²⁶ Karl Marx. Eco­nom­ic and Philo­soph­ic­al Manuscripts. Trans­lated by Mar­tin Mil­ligan and Dirk J. Stru­ik. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 3: 1843-1844. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1975). Pg. 332.
²⁷ Friedrich En­gels. Lud­wig Feuerbach and the End of Ger­man Clas­sic­al Philo­sophy. Trans­lat­or un­lis­ted. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 26: En­gels, 1882-1889. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1990). Pg. 360.
²⁸ Ibid., pg. 359.
²⁹ “Who­ever placed the em­phas­is on the Hegel­i­an sys­tem could be fairly con­ser­vat­ive in both [re­li­gion and polit­ics]; who­ever re­garded the dia­lect­ic­al meth­od as the main thing could be­long to the most ex­treme op­pos­i­tion [in both spheres].” Ibid., pg. 363.
³⁰ “Marx did not ‘ap­ply’ Hegel to clas­sic­al polit­ic­al eco­nomy, but con­tex­tu­al­ized Hegel’s con­cepts in terms of the so­cial forms of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety. The ma­ture cri­tique of Hegel is im­pli­cit in the un­fold­ing of the cat­egor­ies in Cap­it­al — which, by par­al­lel­ing the way Hegel un­folds these con­cepts, sug­gests the de­term­in­ate so­ciohis­tor­ic­al con­text of which they are ex­pres­sions. In terms of Marx’s ana­lys­is, Hegel’s con­cepts ex­press fun­da­ment­al as­pects of cap­it­al­ist real­ity but do not ad­equately grasp them.” Moishe Po­stone. Time, Labor, and So­cial Dom­in­a­tion: A Re­in­ter­pret­a­tion of Marx’s Crit­ic­al The­ory. (Cam­bridge Uni­versity Press. New York, NY: 1993). Pg. 81.
³¹ Friedrich Ni­et­z­sche. On the Gene­a­logy of Mor­al­ity: A Po­lem­ic. Trans­lated by Car­ol Di­ethe. (Cam­bridge Uni­versity Press. New York, NY: 2006). Pg. 60.
³² Friedrich En­gels. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eu­gen Dühring’s Re­volu­tion in Sci­ence. Trans­lated by Emile Burns. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 25: En­gels. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1987). Pg. 124.
³³ Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Found­a­tion of the Cri­tique of Polit­ic­al Eco­nomy. Trans­lated by Mar­tin Nic­olaus. (Pen­guin Books. New York, NY: 1973). Pg. 454.
³⁴ “Cap­it­al­ist pro­duc­tion… be­gets its own neg­a­tion… the neg­a­tion of the neg­a­tion.” Karl Marx. Cap­it­al: A Cri­tique of Polit­ic­al Eco­nomy, Volume 1. Trans­lated by Ben Fowkes. (Pen­guin Books. New York, NY: 1976). Pg. 929.
³⁵ Ibid., pg. 916.
³⁶ Karl Marx. “Speech at the An­niversary of the People’s Pa­per.” Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 14: 1855-1856. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1980). Pg. 656.
³⁷ Rolf Hos­feld. Karl Marx: An In­tel­lec­tu­al Bio­graphy. Trans­lated by Bern­ard Heise. (Berghahn Books. New York, NY: 2013). Pg. 29.
³⁸ Po­stone, Time, Labor, and So­cial Dom­in­a­tion. Pg. 88.
³⁹ “As an im­man­ent cri­tique, the Marxi­an ana­lys­is claims to be dia­lect­ic­al be­cause it shows its ob­ject to be so.” Ibid., pg. 142.
⁴⁰ Marx, Cap­it­al, Volume 1. Pg. 103.
⁴¹ Vladi­mir Len­in. “Left-Wing” Com­mun­ism: An In­fant­ile Dis­order. Trans­lated by Ju­li­us Katzer. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 31. (Pro­gress Pub­lish­ers. Mo­scow, USSR: 1966). Pg. 56.
⁴² „Die Marx­sche Lehre ist ein Kind der bürgerlichen Wis­senschaft, aber die Ge­burt dieses Kindes hat der Mut­ter das Leben gekostet“. Rosa Lux­em­burg. „Karl Marx“. Ges­am­melte Werke, Bd. 1, 2. S. 369-377.
⁴³ Wal­ter Ben­jamin. “The Concept of Cri­ti­cism in Ger­man Ro­man­ti­cism.” Trans­lated by Dav­id Lachter­man, Howard Ei­l­and, and Ian Balfour. Se­lec­ted Writ­ings, Volume 1: 1913-1926. (Har­vard Uni­versity Press. Cam­bridge, MA: 1996. Pg. 155.
⁴⁴ Theodor W. Ad­orno. “Why Still Philo­sophy?” Trans­lated by Henry W. Pick­ford. Crit­ic­al Mod­els: In­ter­ven­tions and Catch­words. (Columbia Uni­versity Press. New York, NY: 2005). Pg. 12.
⁴⁵ In­di­vidu­als are re­volu­tion­ary in­so­far as they “aban­don their own stand­point in or­der to ad­opt that of the pro­let­ari­at [so ver­lassen sie ihren ei­gen­en Stand­punkt, um sich auf den des Pro­let­ari­ats zu stel­len].” Karl Marx and Friedrich En­gels. Mani­festo of the Com­mun­ist Party. Trans­lated by Samuel Moore and Friedrich En­gels. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 6: 1848. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1976). Pg. 494.
⁴⁶ See the sec­tion on “the stand­point of the pro­let­ari­at” in Lukács, His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness. Pg. 149.
⁴⁷ Karl Marx and Friedrich En­gels. The Holy Fam­ily, or Cri­tique of Crit­ic­al Cri­ti­cism: Against Bruno Bauer and Com­pany. Trans­lated by Richard Dix­on and Clem­ens Dutt. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 5: 1844-1845. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1975). Pg. 31.
⁴⁸ Karl Marx. “On Proud­hon.” Trans­lat­or un­lis­ted. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 20: 1864-1868. (In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers. New York, NY: 1985). Pg. 27.
⁴⁹ Ibid., pg. 29. Marx even ac­cep­ted re­spons­ib­il­ity for this: “Dur­ing my stay in Par­is in 1844, I came in­to per­son­al con­tact with Proud­hon. I men­tion this here be­cause to a cer­tain ex­tent I am also to blame for his soph­ist­ic­a­tion, as the Eng­lish call the adul­ter­a­tion of com­mer­cial goods. In the course of lengthy de­bates of­ten last­ing all night, I in­fec­ted him very much to his det­ri­ment with Hegel­ian­ism, which, ow­ing to his lack of Ger­man, he could not study prop­erly.” Ibid., pg. 28.
⁵⁰ Ibid., pg. 33.
⁵¹ Hegel, En­cyc­lo­pe­dia Lo­gic. Pg. 129.
⁵² Vladi­mir Len­in. One Step For­ward, Two Steps Back. Trans­lated by Ab­ra­ham Fine­berg. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 7: Septem­ber 1903-Decem­ber 1904. (Pro­gress Pub­lish­ers. Mo­scow, USSR: 1961). Pg. 409.
⁵³ “Everything true is con­crete.” G.W.F. Hegel. Ele­ments of the Philo­sophy of Right. Trans­lated by H.B. Nis­bet. (Cam­bridge Uni­versity Press. New York, NY: 1991). Pg. 41.
⁵⁴ “Dia­lect­ic­al lo­gic holds that ‘truth is al­ways con­crete, nev­er ab­stract,’ as the late Plekhan­ov liked to say after Hegel.” Vladi­mir Len­in. “Once Again on the Trade Uni­ons.” Trans­lated by Yuri Sdob­nikov. Col­lec­ted Work, Volume 32: Decem­ber 1920-Au­gust 1921. (Pro­gress Pub­lish­ers. Mo­scow, USSR: 1965). Pg. 94.
⁵⁵ Theodor Ad­orno. Lec­tures on Neg­at­ive Dia­lectics. Trans­lated by Rod­ney Liv­ing­stone. (Polity Press. Malden, MA: 2008). Pg. 198.
⁵⁶ Vladi­mir Len­in. The Pro­let­ari­an Re­volu­tion and the Reneg­ade Kaut­sky. Trans­lated by Jim Ri­ordan. Col­lec­ted Works, Volume 28: Ju­ly 1918-March 1919. (Pro­gress Pub­lish­ers. Mo­scow, USSR: 1965). Pgs. 229-230, 233-234, 323, 325.