Sevgi Doğan - Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social

Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social

Studies in Marxism and Humanism

Series Editors: Kevin B. Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara, andM Peter Hudis, Oakton Community College

In the spirit of the dialectical humanist perspective developed by Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987), rooted in the thought of Marx and Hegel, this series publishes across a broad spectrum focusing on figures and ideas that are fundamental to the development of Marxist Humanism. This will include historical works, works by Dunayevskaya herself, and new work that investigates or is based upon Marxist Humanist thought.

Titles in the Series:

The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory ,

edited by Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell

The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture, and Dialectical Thought

by David Black

Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social

by Sevgi Doan

... To my father and my mother...

To the Gezi Resisters!

Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social

Sevgi Doan

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ISBN 978-1-4985-7187-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

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Contents

Who are the true Marxists and where are they?

These are vexing questions. While some scholars working on Marx deliberately distance themselves from his views and proclaim that they would not want to be identified as a Marxist, many scholars and partisans claim the title for themselves, denying it to other schools and interpretations or rival parties. I leave aside Marxs famous line I am not a Marxist; my question concerns which approach to or interpretation of Marxs work succeeds in penetrating it to its core. Which theoretical and practical reaction to his writings would be the one that he would have endorsed, the one that gets him right? The opening questions are further afflicted by a practical concern: growing inequality between nations and the proliferation of alternative visions of political struggle and emancipation have made it ever more difficult, and even impossible, to identify an international working class to build solidarity with.

Having found a deep personal connection to Marxs works in my years as a graduate student in the United States, believing myself to have experienced the truth of what he describes about capitalism, I was particularly excited to begin teaching classes on him at Middle East Technical University upon my return to Turkey after acquiring my doctorate degree. There was a great hunger and demand to learn about Marx in Turkey, as this is a country which has, like many developing countries, had its own love affair with Marxism, a love affair that has had its share of both the blood and the poetry, survived coups and dictatorships, and left an ongoing legacy embodying values that unmistakably carry the signs of Marxist teachings, kneaded into Anatolian soil and its culture, such as commitment, love, solidarity, and humanism.

The author of this book, Sevgi Doan, was an undergraduate student taking classes on both Marx and Hegel with me. Responding in the same spirit to the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, we were able to form a very cooperative and productive relationship, which has lasted many years, and has continued to bear fruit even after she moved to Italy to get her doctorate degree. To me, she embodied precisely those values which I take to be representative of a true Marxist. Emerging from a synthesis of those values is individuality, which can acquire a myriad of distinct endemic hues, and still remains a key element of Marxs philosophy. It is the subject of this book.

The individuality under discussion is neither that of the liberal understanding or one that emerges from intersecting subjectivities as the post-Marxists would have it. It represents a drive for self-actualization, along with the awareness that one can attain self-actualization only within ones limitations and relations with the larger whole, and the accompanying desire for social change. What the partisans have in common with the post-Marxists is that they both fail to understand or choose to undermine the importance of the individual for Marx and for the contemporary human subject, tending to allow for its dissolution or resolution into collectivities or multiple identities. The liberal understanding of the individual, on the other hand, is a mere illusion, as Doan observes at the outset of her study. Against the prevailing view that Marx overlooks the importance of the individual and subordinates the individual to society, Doan finds in Marxs theory the only adequate solution to the problem of the individual.

Lexical definitions and metaphysical accounts built on Aristotelian ontology lead us to conceive of the individual as a single, self-subsistent entity. While traditional liberal ideology insists on an analogous conception of the human individual, contemporary thinkers have amply described (in unctuous or in distraught terms) the many ways in which it has become impossible to maintain, not only the autonomy of the human subject, but also its biological unity and identity under present-day capitalism. This situation is also tightly connected to the disappearance of economic independence. Doan poses anew the problem of the individual, by first establishing it as a fact that the (human) individual is a limited and dependent being, both in the biological and in the sociological sense, and yet insisting on the importance of it as engaging the problem of human agency and freedom.

Hegelian philosophy provides a first step toward the development of a solution in the form of a dialectical structure, which provides for the basis of the individual in the universal. Drawing from this Hegelian approach the insight that the concept of relations, and in particular, a reciprocal relation between the individual and the universal, is essential to our understanding of the individual, Doan proceeds to direct the focus of the book to the age-old question of how to explicate the unity between the individual and the universal.

The striking conclusion Doan reaches from her investigation is that the Hegelian dialectic results in a loss of relationships for the individual. This is a surprising assertion to make since Hegels system is based on the primacy of relations, but Doan argues that the reduction of the individual to self-consciousness undercuts the individuals actual connections to the outside world, other individuals, and its species-life. Those are the connections and true relationships that are, according to Doan, reclaimed by Marxs critique of Hegel. Marxs critique of Hegel is often expressed as a critique of Hegels so-called idealism. Doans reformulation of this ontological critique as a critique of loss of relationships broaches a fresh perspective which bypasses the hurdles of the old Hegels idealism versus Marxs materialism debate while still maintaining that a proper emphasis on relations is in fact closely related to materialism. She convincingly illustrates her point by indicating the parallels between idealism and an emphasis on reason and theory, on the one hand, and materialism, and an emphasis on feelings, perceptions and praxis , on the other. The book contains elaborate discussions highlighting the connections between feeling, desire, consciousness, practice and labor, leading to the conclusion that to solve the problem of the individual is to establish the lost connection between what we think and what we do.