The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom - Book Reviews

Monthly Review, Jan, 2003 by Paul Le Blanc

Fortunately, such theoretical tangles do not intrude into most of this study. Somewhat more intrusive is the way Nimtz discusses the organizational question--he makes reference to the "the Marx-Engels team" and "the Marx party" so frequently, and in such varied contexts, that confusion is inevitable--especially since "the Marx-Engels team" appears to be simply another way of saying "Marx and Engels," and what is meant by party is more often than not referring "to a political tendency and not an organized current" (and can include sometimes just Marx and Engels, sometimes those who agree with the basic ideas of the Manifesto, sometimes old friends from the stormy days of 1848, sometimes those who agree with Marx and Engels inside the First International). But as Marx's biographer Franz Mehring put it, "their supporters, as Marx himself admitted, did not represent a party." Nimtz prefers a different way of putting it--that, more often than not, "the party was still not convinced that circumstances required an o rganized formation."

The point that Nimtz is making here, however, seems entirely valid. Marx's detractors and even some of his partisans generally miss a key aspect of what he was doing. To the extent that they look at his practical political activity at all--especially his conflicts with others inside the labor and socialist movements--they tend to see a tactless, impatient, and argumentative ego, somehow lining up and manipulating various pals, more often than not hurling polemics and mobilizing cliques that were "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." What Nimtz is able to highlight is a much more consistent, coherent, principled mode of operation on the part of a numerically fluctuating current of co-thinkers. It has political meaning. There is a correspondence between analysis, strategy, and tactics. What Marx and Engels and their various comrades hoped to accomplish was related to how they functioned--even without an organization--and they were able to have a profound impact in the broader organizations and movement s of which they were part. All of this contributed to the later crystallization of socialist workers parties in a number of countries. More work needs to be done to understand all of this more clearly, but Nimtz is pointing us in the right direction.

The Dialectics of Struggle

In The Algebra of Revolution, John Rees highlights the philosopher Hegel's immense intellectual labors, which combined a deep commitment to human freedom with a profoundly historical sensibility embracing the notion that reality unfolds and moves forward through the interaction of contradictory tendencies. Each of these tendencies contain elements of "truth" that can only be understood adequately as part of a complex, multifaceted, always-evolving totality. Hegel developed concepts and categories to help comprehend the almost impossibly complex, dynamic, contradictory reality in which all of us are enmeshed. Rees, like Dunayevskaya before him, demonstrates that this dialectical outlook and method were absorbed into the very being of Marx, to be transformed by him but never abandoned.