The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom - Book Reviews

Monthly Review, Jan, 2003 by Paul Le Blanc

All too many in the Marxist tradition have shrugged off or quietly set aside or (worse) dogmatized this approach, resulting in a deterministic Marxism: history and economics become the powerful "objective factors" which inevitably move forward, regardless of what people think and try to do (which are the secondary and subordinate "subjective factors"). Such seemingly hardheaded, "scientific" fatalism has all-too-often passed for profound Marxist wisdom. This can cause working-class militants to passively wait for revolutionary inevitabilities, which, as the history of the twentieth century demonstrates, never materialize.

In contrast, Marx and Engels saw objective and subjective factors as an interacting unity of opposites, with the working class itself (thanks to the role in the labor process and the quality of human consciousness) combining the subjective and objective. "Once this notion, the unity of subject and object, has vanished.., the working class is no longer seen as the identical subject-object of history," Rees argues. "That is, it is no longer seen as a class whose struggle transforms it from being an exploited class lacking in socialist consciousness and unable to control the society that it produces into a class capable of consciously fighting to banish exploitation and able to run society according it its own needs." What Hegel taught was what Marx and Engels intensified-human freedom is possible and necessary, what people do and fail to do makes a difference, the working-class majority can become conscious of its situation and determine its own future.

This activist outlook, as the work of Nimtz has so effectively shown, is central to the actual lives and political efforts of Marx and Engels. Rees goes on to show us that it is precisely this dialectical-activist element that is built into the mass strike conceptions of Rosa Luxemburg, the theory of permanent revolution of Leon Trotsky, and the understanding of the party/mass struggle dialectic of Lenin, which was further elaborated by the Hegelian Leninists, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, through their own intense revolutionary experience in Italy and Hungary. The longest chapter in this volume is that dealing with Lukacs, a splendid exploration consistent with Lukacs' recently discovered and published masterpiece of 1926 (for which Rees has written a fine introduction), Tailism and the Dialectic. Rees's book helps to demystify something about which much complicated (and also simplistic) nonsense has been propagated. While making a passing reference to "the characteristic Hegelian triad of thesis, antith esis, and synthesis," he is scornful of the idea that the Hegelian dialectic can be reduced to this "eternal trichotomy," approvingly quoting Plekhanov that "it does not at all play in Hegel's work the part which is attributed to it by people who have not the least idea of the philosophy of that thinker."

Rees is more inclined to accept, as "useful reminders of forms in which dialectical contradictions sometimes work themselves out," the three "laws" identified by Engels: unity of opposites; transformation of quantity into quality; and negation of the negation. The unity of opposites involves the dynamic linkage between interpenetrating yet contradictory elements--for example, the relationship between workers and capitalists as essential components of the capitalist system. The transformation of quantity into quality involves the process by which gradual "numerical" alternations can result in qualitative change--water turning from a liquid into a solid or gas depending on the rise or fall of the temperature, or an escalating number of workers and workplaces being involved in a strike changing a situation from an economic dispute to a politically-charged general strike to a social revolution. The negation of the negation involves the development of some aspect of reality in which its original state is overcome or transcended (negation), but rather than being simply obliterated, the elements of the original aspect of reality are preserved (negation of the negation) in the process of transformation. For example, a liberal's fundamental belief in human rights and freedom of expression might be preserved in his or her later rejection of liberalism for socialism.