Hegel and the Spirit of Social Movements
Hegel today, my god why? Can we somehow wield that old dead man as a weapon against Tony Abbott?
The starting point of my talk today is a political one. Two key processes are defining our world – the fall out from the global economic crisis and the ongoing popular uprisings throughout the Middle East. Both events have disrupted neo-liberalism; the power of negativity has not spared the arrogant liberal myth of the end of history. In Australia class stability has reigned for the recent past and the liberals are out like dogs to attack us. The core of this talk rests upon the simple demand to comprehend crisis and revolution in history. The alternative to this is seeing them as blind catastrophes or unexplainable irrationality.
Hegel’s way of doing science is crucial for this comprehension. It was Hegel who invited us “to cross the security zone of the (reflective) understanding and plunge into a search for a knowledge that cannot be reduced to measuring, estimating, describing and calculating relations,” his science “is not meant to be a narration of happenings but a cognition of what is true in them, and further, on the basis of this cognition, to comprehend that which, in the narrative, appears as mere happening” (Science of Logic). This way of doing science asks us to overcome abstract thinking that can only explain ‘the facts’ in terms of abstract laws unrelated to the concrete totality(Bensaid, Marx For Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique).
To think abstractly is to be bound by facts in their abstract isolation. It means to be enslaved by empty and one-sided catchphrases. It is thinking unable to grasp the immanent development of social being. Consequently, to think abstractly, is to remain at the level of the immediacy. Objectively for us, our immediacy is the immediacy of a historical and transient form of society – capitalism – and the fetishistic way it appears.
Unfortunately we can’t stare at The Age and expect to grasp the essence of our age. If we could do so, all theory would be superfluous. The actual make up of social phenomena is not immediately apparent. This was an important problem Hegel tried to solve – how could we understand the world if its essence was not coincident with the way it appears? For Hegel, “there is something more to be done than merely rove from one quality to another, and merely to advance from qualitative to quantitative, and vice versa: there is a permanence in things, and that permanence is in the first instance their Essence”(Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of The Philosophical Sciences). Immediacy is always mediated.
For Hegel, who was neither a conservative nor liberal, these questions had serious political stakes. How to carry out the anti-feudal struggle? For us, the stakes revolve around the over throw of the destructive power of capital. Hegel’s political tasks and ours today are two divergent class projects, yet Hegel’s method lives on. This is the only way to make sense of Frederick Engel’s statement that “the German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy”.
It should be no surprise that there exists an intimate relationship between Hegel’s dialectical method and revolutionary politics.
Marx himself thoroughly worked through Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to politically come to grips with the coming German Revolution of 1848. Rosa Luxemburg defended the dialectical method against the slogans ‘Back to Kant’ put forward by revisionists in the German Social Democratic Party – a trend that did a disservice to both Kath and Marx. Lenin returned to Hegel’s Logic and then History of Philosophy to make sense of the collapse of the Second International in the age of wars and revolutions. In his political interventions we witness a brilliant application of the dialectical method in its concrete richness. The high point of Marxist philosophy – when the Owl of Minerva took flight after the October revolution – embodied in the works of Karl Korsch, George Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, all engage seriously with Marx’s Hegelian heritage. In the ‘midnight of the century’ Trotsky returned to the question of dialectics to confront the twin monsters of Stalinism and Nazism. Then after the Hungarian workers revolts of 1956 figures such as Raya Dunayaskaya attempted to reassert the Marx-Hegel relationship as a central question.
One common thread unites each of these figures – the political imperative to respond to crises that history presents in its diverse novelty. When all seems confused, lost or chaotic, returning to Hegel has been a necessary moment of reorientation. We simply cannot just junk Hegel for Marx. “Hegel is for Marxism the equivalent of the Red Sea in the exodus from the land of slavery,” there is no option other than to pass through it in a movement for liberation(Michael-Matsas). Because, as Daniel Bensaid pointed out, commenting on Lenin’s famous remark about the Marxists who didn’t bother to read Hegel, “those who believed it possible to proceed directly to Marx, bypassing Hegel, could understand nothing of him”(Bensaid, Marx For Our Times).
This poses us the question of what it means to relate to Hegel. Here are some preliminary points.
Firstly, it is best to let rest any attempt to return to a pure or authentic Hegel without political antagonism and mediation. Hegel demands us to recognize and formulate sharp contradictions. Early in his polemics with the other Young Hegelians, Marx says, for Hegel “science was not something received, but something in the process of becoming… they forget that [Hegel’s] relation to his system was immediate, whilst theirs is only a mediated one”(Marx, To Make the World Philosophical). Unleashing ourselves from the cult of purity doesn’t mean we can be arbitrary in our use of his texts. Rather, it means recognizing our task as the ‘knowledge of the present’, and rescuing those parts of his work that ‘remain a vital intellectual force for the present’(Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness). On the left, this helps to explain the divergence between readings of Hegel from Marcuse, Lukacs or Raya Dunayaskaya.
Secondly, Hegel is profoundly impacted by the social antagonisms arising out of the dual revolution – French Revolution and British Industrial Revolution. He faced the antagonisms of modern bourgeois freedom head on. In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right he says that it is, “apparent that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty”. In this framework Hegel coined the term Notrecht where Hegel defends the ‘Right to Life’ – a starving person has the right to violate private property as a precondition of concrete freedom. Rights were one-sided and abstract for Hegel if they did not include material right or positive right. This is one reason why Hegel is attacked by liberalism, because he establishes “a relationship between politics and economics, between freedom and actual living conditions”(Losurdo). It must be remembered that the Right to Life emerged out of the most radical sections of the French Revolution’s legacy. Hegel’s Notrecht according to Stathis Kouvelakis“aims at revealing the explosive potential caused by the social question, and at condemning the unreconciled, violent traits that continue to exist in the existing social relations. Hegel’s hope is that an intervention from the political power will succeed in bringing about a reconciliation”(Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution from Kant to Marx).
From this the third point follows. Through Marx’s saying that German Idealism was the French Revolution translated into philosophy, we should recognize that the key intellectuals tied to German Idealism like Kant, Fichte and Hegel all sought to answer questions of theory and practice, form and content and subject and object(Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). This took place necessarily on the terrain of bourgeois immediacy with its insoluble antinomies. But just as importantly it took place within the political confines of German Road of top-down political reform to inaugurate the gains of the bourgeois revolutions. In response to the events in France, Hegel proposes a reformist solution to the fate of the German nation. This involved welcoming the revolution abroad whilst opting for reformism at home. He wanted to do away with the ancien regime, smash the power of the aristocracy and do away with absolutism. He counted on top-down state reform to do this. Stathis Kouvelakis points out that, “he advocated a rationalization of state institutions, carried out within the framework of a constitutional monarchy that would modernize and pursue the anti-feudal initiative”. This road is quite different to the French road, in that it rids the process of a mass revolutionary element. This strategy could displace antagonism, but it could not write it out.
Lastly, every Young Hegelian figure entered into these modern historical problems. These problems were sharpening. Gramsci pointed out in his Prison Notebooks that, “In studying Marx’s Hegelianism one should remember that Marx participated in German university life very shortly after Hegel’s death, when there must have been a most vivid memory of Hegel’s ‘oral’ teachings and of the passionate discussions about concrete history which these teachings generated – that is, discussions in which the historical concreteness of Hegel’s thought must have stood out much more clearly than it does in his systematic writings.”
The French Revolution opened the road to a public sphere from which, theoretically, democratic debate could be carried out to influence state policy. Given that Marx originally began political life as a journalist, “to make the world philosophical,” the free press was an important asset to this project. But in the early 1840s when the King of Prussia was banning neo-Hegelians from university positions, the Left Hegelian tendency had to respond. To respond they had to turn themselves to the world. This was not a new position of Marx, in his doctoral dissertation written between 1839-41, he recognized that, “there are moments when philosophy turns its eyes to the external world, and no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical person… throws itself on the breast of the worldly Siren.” At the time of writing for the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx was a radical liberal. No matter how radical Marx was in his writings at this point, “Marx’s strategy for democratization… leads back, like the strategy of many others to the vicinity of the German road. The revolution is legitimate, but it is other people’s business… thanks to state reform, stimulated by the practical philosophy that has invested the public sphere, it will prove possible to resolve existing contradictions peacefully and productively”(Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution from Kant to Marx).
In 1843, the government banned the RZ, causing a political crisis that would define Marx’s relationship to both Hegel and the Left-Hegelian milieu decisively. Was it possible to continue the road of radical reform? Or would another path be necessary?
In his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx arrives at the need for revolution in Germany, “in Germany,” he says, “no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage.” This is a radical departure from the ‘German Road.’ This document is of interest to us also, because it is here that Marx demonstrates the need for praxis – theoretical practical activity – whereby theory becomes a “material force when it grips the masses.” Famously, it is this document where Marx names the working-class as the subject that has “radical chains,” and that is the only universal interest that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the rest of society. With the strategic move to a revolutionary working-class perspective (which was still of course, in development), Marx opened a new horizon for the relation of theory and practice. This new horizon significantly overcomes the contemplative bourgeois standpoint by introducing a subject from whose point of view can judge and change history. Hegel says in his Logic of the Concept that, “the Absolute Idea is, in the first place, the unity of theoretical and practical idea”. But which subject would inherit this?
For theory to become radical, it “must grasp things to the root. But for man, the root is man himself.” Marx’s new conception of theory and practice is a synthesis of a politics without theory and a theory without politics. Practical politics without theory and theory without practice are both one-sided reflections of each other. They are the either/or limits of the reflective understanding. But, “Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy.” Though, it is also crucial to see that it is not enough for theory to ‘grip the masses’, but in the same document, “Marx clearly defined the conditions in which a relation between theory and practice becomes possible. “It is not enough that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive towards thought(Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness).” It may appear that our theory or aims exist outside the world or independent of the world, but this is an illusion. For Hegel, “the aims of man are generated by the objective world and presuppose it, find it as the given, existent”(Hegel, Science of Logic). The key link is mass revolutionary activity that emerges within the objective world and confronts objective political obstacles; it is this key development that allows Marx to overcome the terror of political impotence – the antinomy between what is and ought to be – of which Hegel did so much to resolve.
This developing revolutionary perspective could be seen through Marx’s letters to Ruge. If we keep in mind the backdrop of political crisis, he says, “apart from the general anarchy which has erupted amongst the reformers, each is compelled to confess to himself that he has no clear conception of what the future should be.” Marx’s criticism of Hegel was necessarily tied to finding a new way forward for emancipation from the antagonisms of Germany itself. In doing so, he remained quite Hegelian where others faltered. He rails against any opposition of “actual and ideal,” against “the total contrast between that which is and that which must be,” an opposition that easily secures an evasion of political struggle.
For both Hegel and Marx, “what is actual is reasonable”. Far from being a device for conservatism, this phrase is thoroughly radical. For Hegel it was the movement of Spirit whom came forth in actuality with new progressive principles, where rationality clashed with the old forms of existence whom were not real – like the power of aristocratic particularism. For Marx it became the actual movement of class struggle that abolishes the present state of things in history. Marx’s letters to Ruge mark a midway point in these transitions implicit in his previous writings and his later turn to critique of political economy (social becoming). His quote, “We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: ‘Stop fighting, your struggle is of no account. We want to shout the true slogan of the struggle at you.” This is a brilliant picture of the developing new world outlook.
Ironically, Marx accuses Ruge of not understanding Hegel’s Phenomenology. After Ruge became discouraged from politics, pitying himself in the face of the objective political crisis he could not see a way out of, Marx argued that, “Ruge ‘accomplished in himself’ a fundamental category: he personified, ‘with surprising faithfulness, the ‘honest conscience,’’ and acted like those who, when faced with difficult situations and the failure of certain ideals, first of all reconfirm their ‘inner sincerity’ and assume the ‘halo of honest intentions,’ ‘just as Hegel prophesized in 1806’”(Marx, Heroes of Exile).
A lot is at stake in the Hegelian conception of the rationality of the actual that Marx inherits in a manner dedicated to praxis. In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel says that philosophy isn’t meant to create some ideal counter posed to existing conditions, but that, “to apprehend what is is the task of philosophy,” rather than to “teach the world as it ought to be.” To teach the world, as it ought to be is to think and act arbitrarily. If one’s theory “really goes beyond the world as it is and builds an ideal one as it ought to be, that world exists indeed, but only in his opinions, an unsubstantial element where anything you please may, in fancy, be built.” For Hegel, reason must be recognized “as the rose in the cross of the present”(Hegel, Philosophy of Right). Here is the rose, dance here! Marx uses this quote in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, then says, that people act when “a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Here is the rose, dance here!(Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)”
So to reiterate, change, for both Marx and Hegel is not the outcome of a moral postulate, but of both an objective dialectic and objective necessity. We can turn our back on this dialectic, but we can’t escape it. The whole point is to discern “the point at which one’s partisan position intersects with a certain configuration of objective spirit, making possible the irruption of the new, its breakthrough and actual advent,(Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution from Kant to Marx)” inaugurating a struggle with open outcomes. For Hegel, these breakthroughs “wavered between the great individual and the abstract spirit of the people,” whilst for Marx it was the class struggle within the immanent development of history where strategic interventions have to be made.
So let’s recap to Marx’s ‘overcoming’ of Hegel in 1843. Marx’s theoretical break “was predicated on a political break”(Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution from Kant to Marx). Hegel saw that the antagonisms of bourgeois society were explosive but could not assign an independent political potential to the working-class. It simply suffered and was rabble-roused. This was simultaneously a limit of his thought and the German road of reform. Hegel’s essay on the English Reform Bill, a brilliant analysis of the inequality in Britain, ends by basically arguing that any departure from the [German] road of reform could end in revolution(Hegel, Essay on the English Reform Bill).
But Marx broke from this German Road. His break was bound up with the historical crisis that forced the radical German intelligentsia to choose another political road. It is thus important to grasp the political dimension of the Marx-Hegel relation. This choice the German intelligentsia could not escape. Marx did so by putting his finger on the universal potential of the emergent working-class. For him this was the only hope of breaking with the old order in the coming revolution. In breaking with the German road of top down reform, it was necessary to break with the German Ideology and to begin from ‘the real premises of human material life’ – the production and reproduction of social life, the profane history of human labour.
I would like to depart at this point from my discussion of Marx’s political break with Hegel and discuss the concept of immanence. This concept necessarily flows from the previous rejection of the rigid separation of ideal and real, subject and object, theory and practice.
From Spinoza to Hegel the concept of immanence has been important. It is the conceptual antidote against a reality cut in two – a reality here on earth and another out-there in itself, a rigid subject facing an equally rigid object and so forth. A dialectical human history can’t be cut in two. Gramsci writes in his Prison Notebooks that, “Marx continues the philosophy of immanence, but he rids it of its whole metaphysical apparatus and brings it into the concrete terrain of history.” He argues that labour unifies humans and nature where history becomes(Gramsci).
The immanent development of capitalism opens the possibility overcoming dualistic thought between subject and object, theory and practice. But overcoming dualism is a possibility only through the revolutionary self-activity of the working-class because left without such an intervention the objective dialectic of capitalism is a blind, alien and destructive necessity. The social butchery in Greece is a modern example of this blind butchery. This argument implies that no other standpoint than that of working-class praxis can unify theory and practice or subject and object or ideal and actual. Any path that cannot grasp this will inevitably retreat into the only place where bourgeois society says we have freedom – our individual will. This retreat reinforces the blind destructive power of capital’s dialectic where the terror of political impotence remains.
For both Hegel and Marx, true knowledge was always the object knowing itself. You can see this at work in great workers’ revolutions. In 1917 Lenin writes, “the masses are learning rapidly from the experience of the revolution”(Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It). This statement holds the key to showing us which vantage point capitalism can truly know itself. But this new conception runs into the class limits of classical German philosophy. Hegel oscillated between the abstract individual and objective spirit of the nation in order to explain world historic events in the absence of a concrete historical subject – the working class – that could abolish the present state of things. Hegel’s oscillation unfortunately could only lead to mythologizing. George Lukacs pointed this out. It is not a sign of irrationalism but a testament to Hegel’s radical participation in the era of bourgeois revolution. The Hegelian-Marxist conception of the relation between the working-class and truth renews from head to toe traditional philosophy’s account of the relation of philosophical concepts to common sense – common sense being thought stuck in abstract, fragmented immediacy as qualitatively distinct from theory with a capital ‘T’ or the old fashioned position is the rigid separation of truth and opinion(Thomas).
Antonio Gramsci argued that philosophies of immanence prior to Marx – Hegel at the forefront – had the weakness that they could not build a relationship between the subaltern classes and intellectuals in a common project to transform the world. This weakness flowed from the fact that the intellectuals tied themselves to the state that claimed to represent the universal interests. Hegel’s demand for intellectuals to subordinate themselves to the ethical Idea or the ‘universal caste’ is a case in point. This weakness meant they could not integrate themselves into the life of the working-class. For that matter, the working-class itself was not in a position to resolve the problems of society as a whole until the mid-19th century. It is only this integration that can dialectically relate ‘knowing to understanding to feeling’ and, crucially, ‘vice versa, from feeling to understanding to knowing’ or else the relation is a bureaucratic one of state and passive subaltern mass. Marxism’s activist conception provides a ladder from common sense to knowing that involves mass revolutionary activity as a pedagogic tool, in the process of doing so overcoming an abstract and rigid separation between common sense and philosophy(Thomas).
These points immediately put to the forefront Alexander Herzn’s saying that Hegel’s philosophy is the ‘Algebra of Revolution’. Unfortunately it has been quoted more often that it has been taken seriously. Though it is really the key to grasping Hegel for our present. I would like to let the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer draw a vivid picture of radical mass politics in Indonesia before the Suharto coup to give an example of Hegel’s thought as the Algebra of Revolution. He wrote, “‘In such times [of radical mass upheaval] … the rage for politics roared along like a tidal wave, out of control. Each person felt as though she, he could not be truly alive without being political, without debating political questions. In truth, it was as though they could stay alive even without rice. Even schoolteachers, who had all along lived “neutrally”, were infected by the rage for politics–and, so far as they were able, they influenced their pupils with the politics to which they had attached themselves. Each struggled to claim new members for his party. And schools proved to be fertile battlefields for their struggles. Politics! Politics! No different from rice under the Japanese Occupation.’”(Toer)
Such a situation is the result of a leap breaking the path of gradual linear development. But this rage for politics with its attendant mass debate unfolds from the immanence of being’s development. Is this not being reflecting into itself? Can’t we see the movement engage in a process of ‘peeling away layers of the onion,’ from the surface to essence? Is this not a moment of essence so to speak, where debate and discussion amongst workers, students and the poor try to understand the past that lead to the present, wrestling with appearance in the process of reaching the essence? Or to put it another way, is not the attempt to deal with the mediations that led to the immediate political problems that must be overcome strategically? Is this a moment where the masses attempt to grasp necessity to open the path to freedom? This is a process that demands class consciousness to raise itself to an understanding of the pure essentialities of the whole. If this is indeed the case, it is only mass political events like this that can lift the veil of capitalism’s fetishistic structure where it appears to be a blind vampire like monster out of control. Mass events like this can also break down the illusion of a rigid divorce between subject and object, because as Hegel says, “thinking means that, in the other, one meets one’s own self”(Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of The Philosophical Sciences). This grasping of necessity has an important strategic dimension for the working-class movement. Marxism as a tradition preserves these experiences for future excavation, because this blind monster can only be stopped if the immense majority understands the essential and necessary workings of its nervous system to strategically navigate a path to freedom. This process is necessarily antagonistic. But it is through this practical navigation that humans can demonstrate the objective correctness of their ideas, notions, knowledge and science.
This methodological inheritance from Hegel of subject/object dialectic is in my opinion – here I follow George Lukacs – the most important. It sees that dialectics is not simply about concepts in motion and fluidity that simply reflect a world in flux. Such a conception is a “flux or fundamental movement external to the observer, who only contemplates it from the bank” of Heraclitus’s river in becoming(Kouvelakis, Lenin as a Reader of Hegel). The key limitation of this conception is that it leaves working class self-activity out of the picture. But it also naively assumes that one can stand ‘above the fray,’ in a tower looking down upon a changing world.
Crucially though, dialectical method cannot be thrown onto, in an alien fashion, the immanent development of its subject matter – the profane world to be changed. The great Hegelian-Marxist Antonio Labriola summed up the demand for a “philosophy that is immanent to the things on which it philosophizes”, “from life to thought, and not from thought to life; this is the realistic process”(Labriola). This position necessarily reawakens the need the return to the standpoint of the working-class – since; this is the only standpoint from which the object can comprehend itself. Marx’s entire theoretical and practical life is predicated on this wager – or why else the battle over the working day or the necessary, blind and destructive power of economic breakdown?
With this inheritance, Marxist theory is an independent whole without need of addition – but it demands our theory and engagement, to ‘live a life parallel to the object’, or else our conceptual forms would be rigidly severed from their content. Hegel himself places this demands upon theory when he writes that, “True scientific knowledge… demands abandonment to the very life of the object,” in order to follow its logical necessity. “There is no need, therefore, to impose formalism on the content from without; the content itself is a passage to formalism, which ceases to be external formalism, since the form is the native becoming of the concrete content”. Our theory must flow from the historical and profane world of capitalism and the struggles against it. (Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit).
Theory that flows immanently from capitalism must necessarily deal with its commodity structure and the fetishism it engenders. Lukacs, dealing with this problem made a very insightful point. He said, “unbeknownst to Hegel of course – here the real laws of movement, the real social being of bourgeois society, mirror themselves, conceptually in ‘the logic of essence’. If Marx, in overturning Hegel’s philosophy, has at the same time rescued its real core, then he precisely rescued most from the logic of essence – demythologized of course. For here in purely mental, in mythologized form, is precisely a reflection of the social being of bourgeois society”(Lukacs, Tailism and the Dialectic). The only way to understand world events is to dive into their past – from immediacy to mediation in order to grasp their necessity and reveal their human make-up. This process is the core of the Second Book of Hegel’s Logic translated into ‘materialism’. But this rescue operation will remain impotent without the ‘free action of the subject’ – and this is a political question of the consciousness and combativity of the working-class movement.
In his lecture notes to the Shorter Logic Hegel argues “necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood”. Today, it is the necessity produced by an alienated world of dead labour haunting our present. Therefore the only subject that can truly act on its understanding of this necessity into the realm of freedom is the working-class through praxis – this is at the same time a philosophical and political problem. It can be defeated politically yet simultaneously retain its philosophical truth. Rosa Luxemburg, battling against the blind necessity of capital marching towards world war one, posed this solution saying, “moral indignation does play a major role in our protest movement against world policy. It will only become a political factor if it is connected with an understanding of the laws of this historical phenomenon, if it is directed not against its external forms but against its essence, not against its consequences but against its roots; in a word, if it is the revolutionary outrage of a mass ready to take by storm the capitalist social order as such”(Luxemburg). This is the only way to ‘activate the emergency break’ so to speak and stop short of the abyss.
In conclusion I’d like to turn to Lenin. What ever you may think of him, he is the unsurpassed figure of this conference on Hegel and Social Movements. No other figure in world history has both grasped Hegel’s Logic and led a mass emancipatory movement to power. He argued that, “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary practice”, but crucially also, “correct revolutionary theory… assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement”(Lenin, Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder). Hegel, unknowingly, anticipated this synthesis saying that, “each of these by itself is still one-sided, possessing the Idea itself only as a sought-for beyond and an unattained goal; each, therefore, is a synthesis of endeavor, and has, but equally has not, the Idea in it; each passes from one thought to the other without bringing the two together, and so remains fixed in their contradiction”. Facing capitalism in the 21st century, this synthesis needs to be labored toward. The “last great wave of insurgency against the system in the late 1960s and early 1970s failed to break through,” on a scale like the October Revolution. The system was restructured through crises that disorganized many of the forces involved in that insurgency just as defeat demoralized the left. “The demoralization was made more profound by the way the great majority on the left worldwide identified with the societies of the old Eastern bloc, societies which had, in fact, been absorbed into the systems dynamic of competitive accumulation(Harman).” This situation of theory and practice’s divorce is no doubt tragic. But new struggles throughout the world have opened up, from Greece to Egypt to Indonesia, inaugurating struggles with open outcomes. This fact invites us to wager on the possibility of a better world. These outbreaks of rebellion and situations of crisis, of which all turning back is impossible, force us to answer the key intellectual question of our time: Is the tragedy of human existence really insurmountable?(Goldmann) Hegel’s work pointed a way out of this tragedy. That is why, until the eternal repetition of the same defeats is broken with, the insurgent sun, which rises in the sky of history, will always point back to him(Benjamin).
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