The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom - Book Reviews

Monthly Review, Jan, 2003 by Paul Le Blanc

What [French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty] is trying to do here is to sum up Marx's conception of the dialectic as TOTALITY....The human factor is the decisive factor and if that is so it is the total human being, not any single portion of him. And because this is so, and because all history is the history of the class struggles for freedom, Hegel's "Absolute Idea" was in actuality TOTAL FREEDOM. That is how Hegel and Marx met, so to speak, and why Hegel's abstract ideas are in actuality the reflections of this historic movement...

To some extent, the limitations of the three books are offset by the strengths of each. That is, they disagree with each other. Nimtz tells us that Marx and Engels carried Out an "irreparable break...with philosophy in general and German philosophy in particular," and were especially intent on "clearing away the Hegelian cobwebs" of their student days. Such assertions become untenable in the face of Dunayevskaya's impressive labors, not to mention Rees's survey. Of course, the focus of each book is different. Nimtz restricts himself to Marx and Engels, but for Dunayevskaya this is one person too many--she creates a wall to protect Hegel and Marx from what she dismisses as "post-Marx Marxists, beginning with Engels." Rees doesn't accept this, insisting that a fundamental methodological continuity places Marx with Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukacs, Trotsky, and Gramsci all within the same revolutionary camp. Rees complains that Dunayevskaya and her one-time co-thinker C. L. R. James "map the categories of Hegel' s philosophy directly onto the history of capitalism in an unmediated and abstract manner." And, in fact, there is a remarkably abstract quality to Dunayevskaya's discussion of practical politics, including questions of strategy, tactics, and organization. And it is precisely here that Nimtz's strengths come through.

Revolutionary Practice

Nimtz honors Hal Draper's "insufficiently heralded work on Marx and Engels." Draper's four fat volumes, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press) plus his three-volume Marx-Engels glossary, register, and chronicle, as well as Richard N. Hunt's two-volume Political Ideas of Marx and En gels, broke much of the ground that Nimtz covers. But here, in a single volume of 300 clearly written and well-documented pages, we get not only a survey of much previous scholarship but, more important, a survey of the writings (including the correspondence) and the political activities of the two revolutionaries. An initial chapter on the context and beginnings of Marx's and Engels' revolutionary partnership is followed by three chapters on their involvement with the Communist League and the revolutionary upsurge of 1848-1849. Next comes a fine chapter comparing the thought and political activity of Marx with that of liberalism's intellectual hero Alexis de Tocqueville. Another chapter shows that the long "lull" in the class struggle, stretching from 1850 to 1861 was one in which Marx and Engels remained engaged in practical and organizational work--which formed an important prelude to their involvement in the International Working Men's Association (the First International of 1864-1876), to which Nimtz devotes three more chapters. The final chapter focuses on Engels' political work in the years between Marx's death and his own.