Communist University

Money

2012-01-27T08:02:00.003+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 3a

Illustration from Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan”

Money

“The commodity that functions as a measure of value, and, either in its own person or by a representative, as the medium of circulation, is money.”

It would not be remarkable that in a work called “Capital” and in a chapter called “Money”, Karl Marx would proceed to define it; except that bourgeois economists cannot do so, even up to today.

Marx’s definition of money (“the perfected form of the general equivalent”) sits within a concrete overview of all the circumstances of capital, whereas bourgeois economists can never present a full picture of society, but only disconnected snapshots of abstract parts of the whole.

The second title of the book is “Critique of Political Economy”. Karl Marx had read everything of consequence that had been written, from the time of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” (1651), and had made notes of it in a manuscript called “Theories of Surplus Value”, which is also sometimes called “Capital, Volume 4”. The table below is a list of names of political economists mentioned in that work, sixty altogether; and there are many others that are mentioned in the text or in the footnotes of Volume 1, including in the chapter given as a download for today, below.

Karl Marx was not an economist. Capital is not a book of economics. It is a critique of the entire body of Political-Economic thought up to the time of its writing, with conclusions drawn about the development of Political Economy (not economics) into the future. Political Economy is the study of human political relations, and not just money relations.

In this chapter Marx describes Money and Price, the conversions between Use-Value and Exchange-Value, and then the transformation of commodities into money and back again from money into commodities, which is the series “C – M – C”. Marx spends time on this quite simple description, because he is going to build on it later. Therefore it is advisable to read it at least once in full. But don’t get stuck. If you stick, skip.

Scrooge McDuck: miser

Finally, Marx deals in this chapter with hoarding of money, and with the practical use of money. All of these things are going to be useful while we go through the book.

Top picture: a 17^th-century vision of the bourgeois state, from the cover of Hobbes’ “Leviathan”. Above: a 20^th-Century vision of a miser (hoarder), “Scrooge McDuck”. Below (table): some authors covered by Marx during his preparations for writing “Capital”.

Names of “political economists” studied in Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value” (Capital, Volume 4):

Sir James Steuart	John Stuart Mill	Massie	Robert Torrens
Quesnay	Germain Garnier	Buat	James Mill
Turgot	Charles Ganilh	Anonymous English Author	Prévost
Paoletti	Ferrier	Rodbertus	Thomas De Quincey
Adam Smith	Earl of Lauderdale	David Ricardo	Samuel Bailey McCulloch
Schmalz	Count Destutt de Tracy	Anderson	Wakefield
Verri	Nassau Senior	Darwin	Stirling
Say	Pellegrino Rossi	Roscher	John Stuart Mill
Storch	Chalmers	Hopkins	Ravenstone
Ramsay	Necker	John Barton	Ramsay
Mercantilists	Linguet	Nathaniel Forster	Cherbuliez
Ricardo	Sir Dudley North	Carey	Barbon
Sismondi	Locke	James Deacon Hume	Richard Jones
D’Avenant	Berkeley	Hodgskin	Proudhon
Petty	Hume	Thomas Robert Malthus	Luther

The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, Chapter 3, [part], The Medium of Circulation, Money.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Exchange

2012-01-26T07:19:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 3

Exchange

In his 1863 plan for the work, Karl Marx proposed to begin Volume 1 of Capital with “1. Introduction. Commodity. Money.” In the published version, four years later, an additional short item – Exchange – was introduced between Commodity and Money.

This is a helpful, short, readable chapter that manages to reprise the definition of Commodity and the description of its implications given in the preceding chapter, while prefiguring the definition of Money that arrives in Chapter 3.

So this chapter on Exchange is a useful summary. In this regard it is typical of the work as a whole. Marx takes care in Capital, Volume 1, to allow the reader to rest at intervals and re-look at the material in a different way, or else to show off the new parts again in their relation to the whole.

Marx begins this chapter on Exchange by saying, of commodities:

“In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent.”

“In the course of our investigation we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic stage are but the personifications of the economic relations that exist between them.

“All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands.

“At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products into commodities is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one special commodity into money.

“What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money, in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in gold, because it is money. The intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind.”

The section of Chapter 3 on Price is also included in today’s instalment.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, Chapter 2, Exchange, with part of Chapter 3, on Price.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Commodities

2012-01-18T21:31:00.002+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 2

Commodities

So far in this course we have had a general introduction, and then looked at Marx’s 1847 “Wage Labour and Capital”, the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, and Marx’s 1865 “Value, Price and Profit”.

Now, and for the remaining eight parts, this course will use text from Marx’s greatest single work: Capital, Volume 1. We will take nearly all of it, conveniently divided, in sequence, starting with Chapter 1 – Commodities (download linked below).

Chapter 1 of Capital Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital (attached) is a text that has been the material for many a political school. It begins with this great definition of commodities:

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

“A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.”

And it later says:

“A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it.”

The second section of the chapter explores this dual character of commodities.

The third section, which contains quite a lot of formulas, is omitted for the sake of brevity. Sections of the book that have been left out can be read on Marxists Internet Archive.

The fourth and last section of the chapter is on the Fetishism of Commodities, meaning that in a capitalist society the relations between commodities replace the relations between people.

In commodities, writes Marx, “the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

If there is a single purpose for Marx’s book it is to re-make human relations so that they are relations between humans again, or in other words, Marx’s purpose is to restore human beings to themselves.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, Chapter 1, Commodities [abridged], Karl Marx (9048 words)

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, Chapter 1, Commodities [abridged], Karl Marx, 1867.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Value, Price and Profit

2012-01-13T20:48:00.003+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 1b

Capitalist, drawn by George Grosz

Value, Price and Profit

This is a course on Marx’s “Capital”, Volume 1 (to be followed immediately thereafter by a course on Volumes 2 & 3). In the next part we begin the book itself, with Chapter 1 of Volume 1. In this instalment we conclude our preliminary look at the preceding literature.

“Wage Labour and Capital” gave us notice of the “problematic” faced by Karl Marx in 1847. By 1857 most of the theoretical problems had been solved. By 1863 Marx had a sketch plan that closely resembled the shape of the full Volume 1 that was published four years later in 1867. By 1865 when he did “Value, Price and Profit” (see the attached documents), Marx had no doubt solved the literary problems of the work, and was by now able to summarise in a concise way, if necessary.

This short work, “Value, Price and Profit”, has served various purposes. It debunks the argument, still used by employers today, that wage rises will cause unemployment. Hence “Value, Price and Profit” has been a mainstay for generations of shop stewards and union negotiators.

Secondly, and prefiguring Lenin’s argument against “Economism” four decades later in “What is to be Done?”, it states clearly that trade unionism, without political organisation, will never succeed in throwing off the yoke of capital (see the excerpt from Chapter 14, attached).

This abridged version of “Value, Price and Profit” can also to some extent serve as a “mini-Capital”, or in other words as the short version of “Capital” that many people crave. It will at least help us to get a better grip on some of the key concepts such as Labour, Value, Labour-Power, Surplus-Value and Profit.

The two quoted paragraphs that follow are particularly instructive. Hobbes’ 1651 book “Leviathan” was a tremendous groundbreaker; Karl Marx noticed that Hobbes had “instinctively hit upon this point overlooked by all his successors”, namely the distinction between Labour-Power and Labour, which Marx had worked so hard and so long to see clearly (see the remarks about the hunt for surplus value in our earlier post on Wage Labour and Capital)

‘What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.

‘One of the oldest economists and most original philosophers of England — Thomas Hobbes — has already, in his “Leviathan”, instinctively hit upon this point overlooked by all his successors. He says: "the value or worth of a man is, as in all other things, his price: that is so much as would be given for the use of his power." Proceeding from this basis, we shall be able to determine the value of labour as that of all other commodities.’

“Value, Price and Profit” includes a counter-intuitive surprise in Marx’s statement that: “Profit is made by Selling a Commodity at its Value” (top of page 8 in our download version). Capitalism would still exist, even if it could shed its nasty price-gouging habits. Because capitalism is not a simple swindle, but is a system and a class relationship.

Capitalism would also still exist if Labour Power was always paid for at its full value.

The source of the “self-increase of capital” is located in the workplace, and not in the marketplace.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Marx’s “Value, Price and Profit”, 1865, Chapters 6 to 10 and excerpt from Chapter 14.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

2012-01-13T13:30:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 1a

Various editions of the Communist Manifesto

Bourgeois, Proletarians and Communists

The Communist Manifesto was written in London by Dr Karl Marx when he was 29, with the help of his 27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and it was published in January or February of 1848. It has been a “best-seller” ever since, is constantly republished, and is always in print.

Bourgeois and Proletarians

Marx and Engels saw the new masters, the formerly slave-owning but now capitalist bourgeoisie, also known as burghers, or burgesses, that had originally grown up in the towns under feudal rule, and had by then in some places taken over from the feudal lords by revolution.

Marx and Engels were already convinced that sooner or later, this bourgeoisie was going to be overthrown by the working proletariat (i.e. free citizens owning nothing but their Labour-Power) that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.

Commissioned to write the Manifesto by the Communist League, Marx and Engels fell behind the agreed deadline, but came through with a magnificent text published just prior to the February, 1848 events in Paris - events which brought the proletariat as actors on to the stage of history to an extent that had never been seen before, thoroughly vindicating Engels and Marx.

The timing was great. The text turned out to be a classic to such an extent that every line of it is memorable. The first two parts (“Bourgeois and Proletarians”, and “Proletarians and Communists”) given in the attached two files.

Short though it is, the Manifesto is so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with meaning and practically impossible to summarise. So without summmarising, here are some of the most extraordinary sentences of the first section of the Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

Proletarians and Communists

The second part of the Communist Manifesto contains statements about the Communist Party, about the family, about religion, and frank statements about the bourgeoisie.

It is included here with this set of readings of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, particularly because it shows, within the broadest possible context, the centrality of the relations of production that create and sustain the effect known as capital, which then in turn defines everything else in bourgeois society.

It also looks forward to the way that society can be changed yet again, and thus serves to remind us that Marx’s work is always intentional, and is never merely empirical, descriptive or disinterested.

“The average price of wage labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer,” wrote Marx and Engels, already making a great step forward from Marx’s “Wage Labour and Capital” that had been published in the previous year, 1847.

“But does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labour, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labour for fresh exploitation.”

“…a vast association of the whole nation… in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text - Marx’s and Engels’ 1848 “Communist Manifesto”, Parts 1 and 2.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Marx's Capital: Wage Labour and Capital

2012-01-12T14:09:00.002+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 1

Wage Labour and Capital

This is the first main post of our Communist University series on Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1, which is to run over ten weeks in the first quarter of 2012.

“Wage Labour and Capital” and the Hunt for Surplus Value

Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, is a great work of literature and it covers many things; but more than any other thing, it is about Surplus Value, or “the secret of the self-expansion of capital” as Marx sometimes like to call it.

This week’s main work, “Wage Labour and Capital”, and especially Engels’ remarks about it, show that in 1847 Karl Marx was as yet not able to explain Surplus Value in terms of commodity Labour Power, as something distinct from Labour itself.

“Wage Labour and Capital” was given as a lecture to the German Workingmen's Club of Brussels (Belgium) in 1847. When he first gave the lecture, Karl Marx did not make a distinction between the act of Labour, and its prior potential, called Labour-Power. The latter is the commodity that the worker sells each day to the capitalist in exchange for the privilege of staying alive.

The capitalist makes the worker work and takes all the product of the worker’s Labour, giving back only just enough for the worker to survive as commodity Labour Power, and so to be up for sale again on the next working day.

The above is the reason for Frederick Engels’ 5-page 1891 Introduction to the subsequent editions of “Wage Labour and Capital”. It is the reason why Karl Marx had to press on with his researches for another 20 years until Capital Volume 1 was published in 1867 (and beyond). Only in 1867 was the true theory of Surplus Value fully published and placed permanently in the public realm.

Our starting point

Hence the main thing to read here, for the purposes of our series, is Engels’ Introduction to “Wage Labour and Capital”. This Introduction is the main reason for including this text in the series. In other respects it is redundant to our needs. But it provides our starting point, and it defines the theme which will serve us throughout all the remaining parts of the series on Capital, Volume 1.

If you do go on from the Introduction to read the full text of “Wage Labour and Capital”, then please note that this is not Marx’s original version. It is the one doctored by Engels, as he explains in his Introduction.

Labour-Power and Surplus Value

The distinction between Labour and Labour-Power is the necessary basis upon which an understanding of Surplus Value can be built, and Surplus Value is the key to the whole project that Marx worked on for about forty years from at the latest 1844 until his death in 1883.

Said Engels: “Classical political economy had run itself into a blind alley. The man who discovered the way out of this blind alley was Karl Marx.”

This is true, but in 1847 it was not yet fully true. Engels’ Introduction to “Wage Labour and Capital” reveals Karl Marx’s quest. From this point on in this series, side-by-side with Marx, we are going in search of the mysterious beast called “Surplus Value” and all of its implications.

To sum up: Labour-Power is what you bring to your employer’s front gate in the morning. The employer normally pays you for it, in full (as Marx points out in “Value, Price and Profit”). After that, the entire product of any Labour you may do during the working day belongs to the employer.

“The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labour” wrote Marx, later on, in Capital, Volume 1 (Chapter 18).

The above serves to introduce the original reading-texts: Marx’s 1847 “Wage Labour and Capital”, but more importantly for our present purposes, Engels’ 1891 Introduction to the same work

PDF files of the reading texts are attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Use Your Head

2012-01-09T21:22:00.002+02:00

Pedagogy 2

Use Your Head

This is the last preliminary posting before the courses re-start next week. It is a “conspectus” (overview) of Tony Buzan’s book, “Use Your Head”. Please find the file attached. The first instalment of the course proper will be sent out on Thursday, 12 January 2012.

The original author Buzan does not propose, or proceed from, any overt political premises. He appears at first sight to resemble a utilitarian bourgeois “management guru” or a “motivational speaker”. His work stands out from the others of that kind only because of its great practical effectiveness, and not because of any open political aspect.

But Buzan’s work also fits in very well, politically, with our Communist University pedagogy, because it is dialectical. And it is intentional.

Practical

From a practical point of view, Buzan’s appeal is that he offers assistance with faster, more purposeful reading; with memorising; and with note-taking, particularly using his invention, the “mind-map” technique. An example of a mind-map is reproduced above.

These techniques are just what students need to help them get through their studies, and just what conventional education often failed to give them. Students used to be obliged to learn before having learned how to learn. Buzan filled this gap very well.

But what underlies Buzan’s approach? It is not that he was just lucky to stumble upon three techniques, like an old-time prospector discovering gold in a lucky strike.

Dialectical

What distinguishes the mind-map, in particular, from other forms of note-taking characterised by lists and bullet-points, is that it begins and ends as a “unity and struggle of opposites”. It is a representation, in one glance, of the way in which any concrete phenomenon, or discrete system, is the product (or resultant) of many abstract dynamic forces (or vectors) pulling in different directions.

The mind-map is therefore a very good illustration of exactly what is meant by “dialectics”.

Intentional

The other main underlying characteristic of Buzan’s approach is its “intentionality”, to use a term from Paulo Freire’s vocabulary.

Towards the end of Chapter 1 of Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Freire quotes Alvaro Vieira Pinto saying that intentionality is “the fundamental property of consciousness”, remarking that this concept is “of great importance for the understanding of a problem-posing pedagogy”.

Buzan’s approach is full of intentionality. There is no question, for Buzan, of wandering, or learning for learning’s sake, in a random, eclectic way. Buzan says that you must be looking for a result.

Karl Marx, in the 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach, said that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. That’s intentionality.

Intentionality, as well as dialectics and dialogue, are common themes in Freire, Buzan and Marx – and in the Communist University.

This introduction serves to introduce the original reading-text which is the CU’s Conspectus of Tony Buzan’s “Use Your Head”.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Pedagogy by the method of Paulo Freire

2012-01-05T21:28:00.000+02:00

Pedagogy 1

Paulo Freire, 1921-1997

Pedagogy According to Paulo Freire

The Communist University has a tradition of starting every year with a reflection upon our methodology, and on the theory of pedagogy (i.e. theory of learning and teaching) in general, and on the way that practical pedagogy relates to politics.

The great 20^th-century theoretician of liberation pedagogy was Paolo Freire. It was Freire who gave us the word “conscientise”. It was Paulo Freire, more than any other, who showed how the bourgeois education system, with its “banking” theory of pedagogy, is not well designed to educate. Instead, its primary purpose is to reproduce the class relations that suit the ruling class. Please read Paulo Freire’s own words about this, in the attached file.

Education, which should by nature liberate the student, is made by the ruling class into a means of repression, said Freire.

How can revolutionaries ensure that education ceases to reproduce oppressive landlord-dominated or bourgeois-dominated class relations, and instead starts to generate socialism and communism?

Problematising Education

To ask such a question is to “problematise” education. To ask such a question is to begin a “dialogue” about education. Freire thought that for the political education of the oppressed, if it was not to be patronising and therefore counter-productive, by reproducing and reinforcing the features of the oppressive state, then the educational method for this revolutionary purpose would have to be different and new.

In the dialogical method that Paulo Freire devised and called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, or otherwise Critical Pedagogy, there is no elementary, junior, senior, matriculation, undergraduate, post-graduate, doctorate or professor level. Teachers are learners and learners are teachers; yet all are free-willing “subjects”, having “agency”, capable of leadership.

As much as there may be a room and a gathering of individuals, each known by name, and a “codification” which is the text or other object for the occasion, yet the dialogue admits no limits. The Freirean gathering is not sheltered. It is one of the essentials of Freirean Pedagogy that we refuse the fiction of the sheltered classroom. Instead we recognise that the oppressor is around us and even within us, while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual, socialising pedagogical dialogue.

In Freirean practice, there is no such thing as a basic level, or an advanced level. All that we can do is to begin a process of “problematising”, beginning with education itself.

As a rule, the CU uses original authors, and not commentaries on their original texts. In that spirit, text attached today is the second chapter of Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, here supplemented with a glossary of “critical pedagogy” terms (the link to the download is below). This text provides an opportunity to reflect upon what you are trying to do by learning and teaching. You may ask each other: What is political education for?

For the late Freire (pictured above), and for the Freireans of today, all education is a political act and a social act, an act of liberation and of self-liberation.

There will be one further preliminary posting. The first instalment of the course proper will be sent out on Thursday, 12 January 2012.

This introduction only serves to introduce the original reading-text. In this case it is Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Capital, Volume 1: A Quest for a Secret

2012-01-05T10:57:00.002+02:00

Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Part 0

First Edition, 1867

A Quest for a Secret

Capital, Volume 1

Next week, the Communist University begins posting a ten-part course on Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. This will be the first of four ten-week courses to be run through this and its related e-mail channels in 2012. The first Johannesburg Communist University live session is scheduled to take place on 25 January 2012.

The course on Capital, Volume 1 will be followed by three further ten-week courses, on Capital Volumes 2 and 3, on The Classics, and last but not least, our course “No Woman, No Revolution”. This year’s courses therefore amount to a comprehensive run-through of the most fundamental texts of Marxism – all three volumes of Capital, plus the most salient of the other Marxist Classics, plus indispensable material on revolutionary women.

Karl Marx’s “Capital, Volume 1”, published in 1867, is the most outstanding product of a long project that Marx begun in the 1840s, when he was still a young man in his twenties.

Volume 2, edited by Marx’s lifelong comrade and intellectual collaborator Frederick Engels, was published two years after Marx’s death, in 1885. Volume 3 was published in 1894, one year before Engels’ death.

The entire project is a quest for a full explanation of what Marx called, at the end of Chapter 18 of Volume 1: “The secret of the self-expansion of capital.”

This secret is what Marx called Surplus-Value, gained by purchasing the commodity Labour-Power at its full value, and then putting it to work and expropriating the entire product of the actual Labour expended. This constantly-repeated process sustains the otherwise unstable thing called Capital, rather as a table-tennis ball may be kept in the air by a fountain of water or of air.

In studying this book, it helps to be able to follow the development of Marx’s quest for “the secret of the self-expansion of capital” consciously.

Karl Marx’s thought did not spring forth fully-elaborated in one moment. Especially in the early years, Marx had to work very hard, and his quest was still work-in-progress when he died. All this is apparent from works produced prior to 1867, as much as from Volume 1 itself, and from the papers he left for Engels to put together for publication, up to the very last page the last chapter of Volume 3, which ends: “[Here the manuscript breaks off.]”.

Reading it as a quest, which it was, makes it more understandable.

The size of Capital, Volume 1

One challenge presented by Volume 1 is its uneven shape and large size. The Communist University’s method, strongly influenced by the work of Paulo Freire, relies on certain simple principles and practices. We discuss original texts. We use extracts from books to create “Short Texts” that can be used as Freirean “codifications”. The point is not to learn the work s if for an examination, but to have a discussion, and thereby to socialise our collective understanding of it.

In the case of “Capital”, this principle of discussion is no less crucial; but the huge size of the project made the search for “Short Texts” difficult. Please note that the source of all our texts for this series on Capital Volume 1 has been Marxists Internet Archive. You can consult that text to fill in any omissions you may find in the material presented.

The shape of Capital, Volume 1

Capital, Volume 1 contains 33 chapters. Most of them are short, but there are five long ones, starting with Chapter 1 (Commodities). Chapter 3 (Money) is also long, as is Chapter 10 (The Working Day), Chapter 15 (Machinery and Modern Industry), and Chapter 25 (General Law of Capital Accumulation).

The structure of the book is deliberate, not accidental. Commodity is the right point of departure, and together with the subsequent two chapters on Exchange, and Money, it sets the scene for Chapters 4 and 5 which give the outline “General Formula for Capital”.

The remaining 28 chapters are a carefully-paced rolling out of the idea of Surplus-Value, with all its implications, in short, easy, and sometimes repetitive steps. Exceptions are Chapters 10, 15 and 25, which are “books within the book”. Yet these inner books are also part of the quest for “the secret of the self-expansion of capital”.

Consequent design of the CU series on “Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1”

The above considerations led to the following decisions (which will be explained further in the introductions to the individual texts):

The series begins with Marx’s 1848 study-circle text called “Wage Labour and Capital”, and specifically with Engels’ 1891 Introduction to the first publication of that text, because it explains why Karl Marx worked for so many years on the question of Surplus-Value, a question that had not been fully answered in 1848, by anyone.
There are also two other texts showing the development of Marx’s work in the two decades prior to 1867. These help to get an overview of the main work, and should assist the reader/student to get a grasp of Karl Marx’s overall intention. One of these consists of parts from the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”. The other is extracts from Marx’s 1865 talk to workers called “Value, Price and Profit”.

The above three instalments constitute the first part of our ten-part course.

Capital Volume 1 itself is reduced, where necessary, in the following ways:

Some text is left out (i.e. “redacted”). This has been done with the third section of Chapter 1, with six of the ten sections in Chapter 15, and with part of Chapter 25.
Footnotes are sometimes left out. This is regrettable! The footnotes to “Capital” are a treasury of great worth. For this reason, wherever there is spare space in terms of working to multiples of four pages for printing purposes, footnotes have been retained.

Capital Volume 1 is then re-divided in the following ways:

Short Chapters are combined together.
Long Chapters are divided.
In one situation (Chapters 2 and 3) a chapter is divided and part of it is added to the previous chapter

The above results in a division of Capital Volume 1 into 20 parts, which are than divided in an appropriate way among the remaining 9 parts (weeks) of the course, with one main text in each part and the others given as alternative or additional reading.

So that we end up with a ten-week course – our standard CU course length. After completing Volume 1, we will follow on with a ten-week combined treatment of Capital, Volumes 2 and 3.

By completing this collective, co-operative reading of Marx’s Capital, you will join a relatively small group of people in this world who have actually read it all. You will know by then that it is an enjoyable work and not at all the terrifying thing that may at first appear to be.

To download the full Capital, Volume 1 course in PDF files, please click here

CU next year

2011-12-29T14:41:00.002+02:00

CU next year

The Communist University publishes in multiple media, but the only register of "students" is the Communist University Google Group, and some other Google Groups.

Taken together with the YCLSA Discussion Forum the CU channel has about 4000 (four thousand) subscribers. Parallel channels contain another approximately 2000 subscribers, for a grand total of more than six thousand, all together.

There are no fees, and there is no certification. We will return to the question of certification, below. First let me give you some more information.

The year-end break is a time of completing preparations for the next year, and preparations for the CU in 2012 are well advanced. There will be a fuller announcement in early January. In the mean time, here are some details.

We will us take it in parts. This is because the Communist University is multi-media, and because it is necessarily to some extent different in each different medium.

E-mail

We start with the Google e-mail discussion groups. The 12 (twelve) Communist University courses are serialised in 40 instalments via these groups, between January and November each year. That is four ten-week courses, delivered via three parallel channels. The whole 2012 schedule looks like this:

SADTU Political Education	Communist University	CU Africa
*African Revolutionary Writers*	*Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1*	*Development, Rural and Urban*
*Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace*	*Karl Marx’s Capital, Vols. 2 and 3*	*National Democratic Revolution*
*Hegel, Dialectics, Right and Logic*	*The Classics*	*State & Revolution*
*Basics*	*No Woman, No Revolution*	*Philosophy and Religion*

For each of the three e-mail channels, there is a corresponding blog, where the serialised course material is archived each time it goes out. The blogs also carry information and links that amount to permanent access to all of the course material, to the above schedule, and to suggested dates for your study-circle live sessions.

Live sessions

Among other things, the CU functions as a systematic server of political education material to people's self-organised study circles around South Africa, Africa and the world.

The schedule of posting and meeting dates is designed to facilitate the synchronisation of the e-mailings, such that the material can be printed in hard copy and distributed in good time for the subsequent scheduled meeting dates. The several hundred reading texts of original revolutionary literature are formatted for printing as booklets (A4 folded to A5). The reading texts are attached to the e-mails, and are also constantly available as downloadable files.

Principles of learning for political purposes

In all cases, the CU believes that for politically-useful learning to take place, there must be dialogue, and not monologue. Hence the "many-to-many" e-mail discussions, and hence also the nature of our live sessions, which are seminars, and not lectures. In our pedagogical practice we follow the teachings of the late Paulo Freire.

Hard copy

Work has been under way for many months towards a re-launch of the (now) twelve Communist University courses as Print-On-Demand course packs of booklets, packaged in a specially-designed and convenient way. The full design was realised in hard copy only yesterday, for the first time.

These packs should be available for political schools all over the country via a well-known chain of print-shop franchises. At the same time, the newly re-formatted text files will be made available on the Internet, and may also be circulated in a CD format.

The above are the main CU media at present. There can be more. For example, if people wish to carry the CU into other media like Facebook, or talk-show radio, or any other, they are welcome to do so, provided that the two-way dialogical character is maintained as far as possible in each medium.

Let us now proceed to the question of

Certification

Certification is a major operation that involves the creation of a permanent bureaucracy of reliable record-keeping, and a stable formalisation of the courses.

The formalisation of the courses is well under way in terms of the defining of the 12 Communist University generic courses listed in the table above. But there is no external validating authority that will sanctify the CU's efforts in this regard.

There are no resources and there is no legal entity that can hold resources as Communist University. There is no organised collective behind the CU other than the group (study circle) that meets in Johannesburg, currently at the Vincent Mabuyakhulu Conference Centre, on Wednesday evenings during the CU season.

One way forward might be to award peer-group recognition. This would be given, in the first place, to those who have mastered the principles and the practice of critical pedagogy (the Freirean "praxis"). It would be some kind of certificate that could be signed by all the available peers. In Freirean education, the teachers are learners and the learners are teachers, so it would be appropriate to that extent. Peer recognition is the historically oldest form of "degree", by the way.

We should note here that there is a contradiction between open-ended Freirean education, and "qualification". Freire would criticise the latter as being part of the "banking" theory of education that he opposed.

Further discussion

As always, we must go to discussion, if all of the above is to be internalised, and equally importantly, socialised.

Please ask more questions and please, all CU subscribers, do give your contributions on the question of certification.

VC

Living Communism

2011-11-11T12:15:00.001+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 10a

Corporate image of a collaborative project

Living Communism

Bourgeois propaganda would have everyone believe that communism is an impossible utopia, and that class relations as we know them now are all-pervasive in human society, to the exclusion of every other kind of social behaviour.

But, on the contrary, the development of class relations and the State (which as Lenin says, is not only the inevitable product of such relations, but also the proof of their irreconcilability) did not expunge all previous forms of human relation.

Humans already had language, and language is a powerful, stateless system. It has no fixed centre.

There are many other examples of communistic human relations which have survived, like language, and remain as the bulk of our social fabric. There are even apparently new kinds of communistic social structures appearing, such as the Internet.

What Andy Blunden has done in the writing that we have sampled for the sake of illuminating the questions raised in particular by Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”, is to begin to theorise the communistic patterns of social activity, mediated by artefacts, that characterise human social existence in general.

This is the on-going body of humanity upon the back of which the class struggle is carried, for the time being, like the cross of Christ.

Andy Blunden’s book (from which these excerpts, downloadable via the link below, are taken) is called “A Critique of Activity Theory”. It is concerned in part with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, or “CHAT”, but we can pass over the specifics of “CHAT”, and look at what Andy means by “collaborative projects” in these chapters.

Collaborative Projects and Artefacts

Collaborative Projects are how people do stuff. Even capitalist companies are collaborative projects.

One characteristic that Andy Blunden identifies is that collaborative projects are always mediated by an artefact, or artefacts. Artefacts are things made by people (but words are also artefacts, by the way).

What Andy therefore begins to theorise is the social place of things, or goods, made by people. This is different from the understanding of such goods as being commodities, which is all that capitalism can manage to see them as.

Another insight of Andy’s is the way that collective agency is both expressed, and also formed, within collaborative projects. We may say that we are humanists, believing in the rational free will of social beings. But how does this actually proceed? Andy provides a description, rooted in politics, philosophy and educational theory.

Our own method, following Paulo Freire, is to have dialogue involving two or more people, centred on a “codification’, which is an artefact (text or image), conforms to the structure of a “Collaborative Project”.

But the aim within this course on Hegel is not necessarily to follow Andy into educational theory. The aim within this particular course is to consider what may already exist under the shell of the class-divided bourgeois State, so that what will remain if and when that State withers away can be apparent to us now, today.

What is the living communism of today? This is the question that is being answered, intentionally or otherwise, by Andy Blunden’s writings sampled here.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Collaborative Projects, 2011, Andy Blunden (9923 words)

Further reading:

New tools for Marxists, 1995, Ron Press (5101 words)

New Tools for Marxists

2011-11-10T13:23:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 10

Polynodal semi-chaotic social-system diagram

New Tools for Marxists

This is the last part, and the second last item, in our series on Hegel’s Logic. It is the late SACP stalwart Ron Press’s article “New Tools for Marxists” (see the download linked below) on the application of Chaos Theory to revolution, written in the heat of the post-1994 election moment.

History has not actually ended. Closure is not appropriate. Hegel’s theories have served us well and will continue to serve. There are not two branches of philosophy. We live in a Hegelian world, no matter what the reactionaries and the post-modernists may wish to think. The unity of human history is a hegemonic idea. Science is well established and universally revered, if not always for the right reasons.

If, because of the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation ago, we are forced to conclude that the Bolsheviks failed in their revolution three generations earlier, then it is more than likely that the reason they failed was lack of philosophy.

Philosophy and the withering away of the State

The revolutionaries must have a clear philosophical theory of how the coming classless society is going to work without a state.

In “New Tools for Marxists”, Ron Press wrote:

‘“…the standard Marxist idea that society passes in a linear manner from primitive communism via class struggle to the ultimate victory when the working class replaces capitalism with a classless society is an unattainable myth. Especially when a classless society was taken to mean the establishment of order and stability, in fact stasis. The theories outlined above indicate that stasis means the inevitable sudden crossover into chaos and collapse.

‘Lenin in State and Revolution continued the work of Engels and Marx in outlining the parameters which form the basis for the definition of systems indicated by points (a) and (b). It is interesting that they did not define the form or structure which socialism will have. Lenin recognised these new structures when they emerged. He initiated the slogan “all power to the soviets”.’

Ron Press is saying that the theory of the State, and of the “withering away” of the State, in Marx, Engels and Lenin is not wrong, yet these three did not have the full theoretical means to appreciate in full how “stateless” systems can, and already do, work in nature and in human society.

The revolutionaries of today need a Hegel for today: a Hegel up-to-date.

Let’s finish with two short quotes from our late comrade Ron Press:

“In the Soviet Union the “Soviet” i.e. committee system was destroyed by restricting the bandwidth of communication, and making one node all powerful.”

“But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the study of complexity it is that a complex system given a very “simple” goal (in our case the well being of humankind) develops its own best methods of operation and organisation. Solutions emerge from the system itself.”

Solutions emerge from the system itself.

Hegel could have said that.

Please download and read this text via the link:

New tools for Marxists, 1995, Ron Press (5100 words)

Further reading:

Collaborative Projects, 2011, Andy Blunden (9923 words)

Lenin on the Theory of Knowledge

2011-11-04T12:13:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 9a

Pablo Picasso, 1937: “Guernica”

Lenin on the Theory of Knowledge

The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge

Lenin’s 1908 “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” is a full-length book, but a difficult one to include under any particular category. It is a polemic against Ernst Mach and his Russian followers, whom Lenin said had little to distinguish themselves from the 18^th-century subjective idealist Bishop Berkeley. This controversy does not seem so important today as it was then.

Our text from Lenin’s book is “The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge” (download linked below).

It begins: “We have seen that Marx in 1845 and Engels in 1888 and 1892 placed the criterion of practice at the basis of the materialist theory of knowledge.” This shows up some of our difficulty in the field of Marxian philosophy. As the footnote says, Lenin is referring to Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) and to the works by F. Engels: “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (1888) and the “Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of his “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.

The latter pamphlet is made out of excerpts from Engel’s “Anti-Dühring”, while the “Theses on Feuerbach” are part of “The German Ideology”, a book written between 1845 and 1847 by Marx and Engels and then abandoned “to the gnawing criticism of the mice”.

Karl Marx had a Doctorate in Philosophy but he did not write a book of philosophy as such, except insofar as his long “Capital” project could be taken as philosophy, and there are indeed some philosophical statements here and there among the preparatory works and in the three originally-published volumes of “Capital”.

So, what is linked from this post comprises the major part of the philosophical work of Marx, Engels and Lenin. It is a tiny amount when compared to the world’s literature on philosophy.

It is therefore clear that the classical literature does not provide us with a full, exclusively Marxist exposition of philosophy. Perhaps this is fitting, because Marxism is after all not outside of the main stream of learning. As we have seen, it is a continuation of, as well as a reaction to, Hegel’s work, while Hegel’s work stands in a similar relation to Kant’s, and so on.

Taken together, all this means that for the philosophy that is necessary for revolution, the revolutionaries will have to go beyond Marx and Engels, and study the full discipline of philosophy, its history, its development and its meaning. This is exactly what Lenin began to do in the early 1900s.

In “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” Lenin quotes Hegel several times in passing, and briefly, though not in this particular chapter. It would seem that Lenin’s interest in Hegel really only got going later, at about the time (1914) when he prepared his ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s book “The Science of Logic”’. The Lenin Philosophy Archive on MIA is here.

Lenin is saying in this short chapter that that the test of truth is practice, and this provides us with a continuity in relation to our previous instalment, from Ilyenkov.

The next part will be the last in this Hegel series.

Picture: Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. Picasso was the most distinguished painter of the 20^th Century, and a communist. His famous mural depicting the fascist aerial bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica is now at the United Nations.

Please download and read this text via the link:

The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge, Lenin, 1908 (2273 words)

Further reading:

Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete, Evald Ilyenkov, Ilyenkov, 1960 (3751 words)

Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete

2011-11-03T13:05:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 9

Pablo Picasso, 1908: “Three Women”

Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete

There is no a priori humanity, or presupposition of humanity. There may be a God, or not. What is human is not given, but made, by humans. We are made as humans by the knowledge that we continue to get and to share, socially.

The knowledge that humanity has accumulated, altogether, is science. Objective things-in-themselves that are parts of the universe become known through labour and are thereby brought into that sphere which is humanity. So, the Object becomes part of the Subject.

Similarly, thoughts and decisions become facts of a social and political kind and become objects of science, including Scientific Socialism. In this way, Subject becomes Object.

These reversals, inversions (or “reciprocal actions” as Clausewitz might have called them), are critical transformations and are noticed and incorporated into the philosophy of Hegel and of Karl Marx.

We cannot say that everything is thought, and we equally cannot say that everything is matter; and to say that reality is an unqualified mixture of thought and matter is only to enter a hall of mirrors.

Hegel creates an escape from this maze into a better, and dynamic, form of understanding.

Hegel’s solution is to demonstrate how the movement takes place, not once and for all, but constantly. In the previous part of this course, Andy Blunden’s lecture explained it like this:

“The categories of Being which come into being and pass away, continue to come and go indefinitely. The succession of oppositions which overtake one another in Essence continue to generate polar opposite pairs of determinations. As these unfold, a new form of social practice develops self-consciousness, with a succession of new qualities, new entities, new relations, both incidental and necessary, registered in thoughts and purposive activity and representations, and judged and people may draw from these experiences a more concrete understanding of the new social practice as it develops. So in terms of time, all these relations are happening at the same time, although there is a logical dependence of the later categories on the former.”

This movement is an ascent from the abstract to the concrete.

What is “concrete”? It is the unity and interaction of the parts of a system. It is a dialectical unity-and-struggle-of-opposites. In philosophy, “concrete” has nothing to do with being hard or permanent. In philosophy this word has a special meaning.

Our main document in this part is “Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete” from Chapter 2 of Evald Ilyenkov’s “Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital”. Ilyenkov (1924-1979) was a first-class Soviet philosopher. The full Ilyenkov Archive on MIA is here. Here are a couple of quotes from Ilyenkov:

“As we know Hegel was the first to understand the development of knowledge as a historical process subject to laws that do not depend on men’s will and consciousness. He discovered the law of ascent from the abstract to the concrete as the law governing the entire course of development of knowledge.”

“In reality, the immediate basis of the development of thought is not nature as such but precisely the transformation of nature by social man, that is, practice.”

Picture: Pablo Picasso’s “Three Women”. “Cubism” in visual art was a conscious attempt to represent the relationship of the abstract and the concrete on a two-dimensional surface.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete, Evald Ilyenkov, Ilyenkov, 1960 (3751 words)

Further reading:

The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge, Lenin, 1908 (2273 words)

Subject, Object and Idea

2011-10-27T12:48:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 8

Subject, Object and Idea

Our course on Hegel is in ten parts. It is not exhaustive. It is designed, like all the Communist University Courses, to stimulate dialogue, in the belief that the kind of learning that we seek is the social and political kind of learning that happens in groups. This part will contain only one item, which is the eighth of Andy Blunden’s ten 2007 lectures on Hegel's Logic. It contains several quotations from Hegel, and there will be more in this post, below. We are not abandoning the main CU principle of relying on original writing and (as a rule) avoiding secondary commentators.

Hegel is indispensible because, among other things:

Without knowledge of the historical Hegel and Hegelianism, it appears as if Marx and Engels came from nowhere, whereas the history of ideas is continuous, and dialectical
Without knowledge of Hegel’s way of thinking, and in particular his Logic, some of Marx, especially parts of Capital, appears obscure, incomprehensible or even weak and “illogical”
Modern philosophy all descends from Hegel or from reactions to Hegel; it is incomprehensible without Hegel (i.e. not just Marx, but all of Hegel’s successors)
The revolutionary battle must be won in philosophy as much as anywhere else, if not more so
Hegel’s is the philosophy that we need for our revolutionary practice

Hegel is difficult for us because:

His work appears at first sight to be voluminous, self-contradictory and obscure
The body of scholars that maintain Hegel’s position in public thought is too small, and conflicted
Hegel offers a real transformation, which is in itself a difficult thing to accept and to internalise

The last line of Andy Blunden’s lecture Subject, Object and Idea (download linked below) contains the following:

“No-one else has produced anything that can rival [Hegel’s] Logic; and he left no room for imitators.”

And the first line of his second-last section of this lecture, “Hegel’s critique of the individual/society dichotomy” Andy Blunden writes:

“So what we have seen is that Hegel presented a critique of all aspects of social life by an exposition of the logic of formations of consciousness, which does not take the individual person as its unit of analysis but rather a concept. A concept is understood, not as some extramundane entity but a practical relation among people mediated by ‘thought objects’, i.e., artefacts.”

Quite so. Hegel presented a critique of social life. All of Hegel’s “Beings”, “Essences”, “Notions” et cetera, all the way up to and including “The Idea” and “The Spirit”, are ways of understanding people as social creatures (or “political animals” as Aristotle called them).

This is from the “Shorter Logic”:

“The Idea is truth in itself and for itself - the absolute unity of the notion and objectivity. Its ‘ideal’ content is nothing but the notion in its detailed terms: its ‘real’ content is only the exhibition which the notion gives itself in the form of external existence, while yet, by enclosing this shape in its ideality, it keeps it in its power, and so keeps itself in it. The Idea is the Truth: for Truth is the correspondence of objectivity with the notion - not of course the correspondence of external things with my conceptions, for these are only correct conceptions held by me, the individual person. In the idea we have nothing to do with the individual, nor with figurate conceptions, nor with external things. And yet, again, everything actual, in so far as it is true, is the Idea, and has its truth by and in virtue of the Idea alone. Every individual being is some one aspect of the Idea: for which, therefore, yet other actualities are needed, which in their turn appear to have a self-subsistence of their own. It is only in them altogether and in their relation that the notion is realised.

“The individual by itself does not correspond to its notion. It is this limitation of its existence which constitutes the finitude and the ruin of the individual.” (Shorter Logic, §213)

Not only does Hegel produce a thorough working-out of the relation of the individual to society, but he also unifies the Subject-Object dichotomy with the rest of the social logic. Without Hegel such unification would be impossible, and we would be left with nothing but nonsense like this cartoon:

To conclude this opening to the discussion, let us return to something we have quoted before. It is from an afterword of Karl Marx’s concerning the very work “Capital” that Lenin says cannot be understood without Hegel’s “Logic”:

“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

“The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago [but although] I openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker… with him [dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

The great Marx was arguing against Right Hegelians and anti-Hegelians at that stage, and in defence of Hegel. Unfortunately this saying of Marx is sometimes taken to mean that Marx had somehow “refuted” Hegel, demolished him and sent him into the dustbin of history, whereas the opposite is the case. Marx “openly avowed [himself] the pupil of that mighty thinker”, and certainly followed Hegel in believing that such “refutations” do not happen. In the Marxian as much as in the Hegelian world, the past is contained in the present, and is not lost.

Marx’s remark could lead to another error. It is clear that Marx is not saying here that he, Marx, stood Hegel on his head. He says that Hegel stood dialectic on its head. In fact, as we have seen, Hegel’s method involves constant reversals and Marx follows Hegel in that respect. So Marx might have better confined himself to saying that Hegel stood dialectic on its head once too often. We cannot say that all the reversals must be taken out of Hegel because it is largely in this way of reversals that Hegel is able to achieve the unprecedented transformations that he does undoubtedly achieve; and likewise with Marx himself. What we can say is that sometimes Hegel makes mistakes and offers a reversal that we may reject. But even then we should not be too hasty. Andy Blunden says:

“We should take [Hegel] at his word when he says that Spirit is the nature of human beings en masse. All human communities construct their social environment, both in the sense of physically constructing the artefacts which they use in the collaborating together, and in the sense that, in the social world at least, things are what they are only because they are so construed. The idea of spirit needs to be taken seriously. It may seem odd to say, as Hegel does, that everything is thought, but it is no more viable to say that everything is matter, and if you want to use a dichotomy of thought and matter instead, things get even worse.”

Please download and read this text via the link:

Subject, Object and Idea, 2007, Blunden (3641 words)

The Subject and the Syllogism

2011-10-21T13:10:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 7a

Syllogism

The Subject and the Syllogism

“The Notion is the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realised. It is a systematic whole, in which each of its constituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and is put as indissolubly one with it. Thus in its self-identity it has original and complete determinateness.

“The onward movement of the notion is no longer either a transition into, or a reflection on something else, but Development. For in the notion, the elements distinguished are without more ado at the same time declared to be identical with one another and with the whole, and the specific character of each is a free being of the whole notion.” (The Shorter Logic, The Notion §160-1)

Lenin in “The State and Revolution” writes about the true theory of development. He is referring to the dialectical logic of Hegel. This is not the theory of “service delivery”, or of the “developmental state”. It is the theory of how humans, taken all together, became what they now are, and how they continue to develop as humanity as a whole, into the future.

What are we getting from our studies of Hegel? One thing we are getting is a theory of development that can help us to make sense of “developmental” state, which is otherwise little more than a “buzz word” in our times.

So, for example, in the quotation above we may substitute the word “nation” for the word “notion”, and it makes sense, and is compatible with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ statement in the Communist Manifesto that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.

We have also noted that Karl Marx used Hegel’s ways and means to work out what became “Capital”, the most influential book in history.

We have got pointers or signposts which will help us as we continue to read, study and discuss.

Do we all need to fully master Hegel at once? No, but as a Party we do need a significant number of the communists to have mastered Hegel. The knowledge of Hegel needs to be kept alive by a virtual collective of communist scholars.

The rest of us need to be constantly moving towards a better understanding of Hegel. We need at least to have an appreciation of why we have to have some understanding of Hegel if we are properly to understand Marx; and in this course we have probably achieved that much, at least, by now. We need to appreciate that for the Party, Hegel is indispensible, and not a disposable option. That is why this ten-part course on Hegel is one of the twelve Communist University Generic Courses and must remain so.

The Subject

The downloadable study text for this instalment (see below) is Andy Blunden’s seventh lecture, on The Subject in Hegel’s Logic.

What is “The Subject”? In philosophy in general, the fundamental question is the relationship between human Subject and the material Objective universe. Simply put, life is a dialectical unity-and-struggle-of-opposites between Subject and Object, where the one cannot exist without the other. Paulo Freire is eloquent about this, notably at the end of Chapter One of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” where he writes, among other things:

“A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.”

The first page of Andy Blunden’s lecture gives depth to this basic understanding of The Subject and then introduces a Hegelian elaboration of The Subject. This may typify the difficulty of Hegel: Just when you thought that you had secured yourself to a firm philosophical rock, Hegel seems to be taking a hammer to it and setting you adrift again. Please do not fear: nothing is going to be lost.

Nor are we in the realm of mysteries. On the contrary, what we find is that Hegel is providing ways to think about quite familiar things, which may not have been in the realm of philosophy before, like The Judgement of Solomon, the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and we can add, the South African Freedom Charter. Hegel is making a theory of how these determined movements forward can and do, in Hegel’s words, “emerge out of the throng of disputation”.

Hegelian philosophy, as obscure as it may seem, turns out to be the only philosophy that can help us with the actual political life we lead.

Almost at the end of this lecture Andy Blunden says:

“…the notions, judgments and syllogisms of the section on Subjectivity, render themselves as typical of the forms of consciousness encountered within such formal organisations. Lenin’s insistence in 1901 that to be a member of the Party an individual had to participate in one of the Party’s branches or activities is rational in this light.” (Read it! This is one occasion when the introduction will not suffice without the reading of the actual text.)

Earlier, Andy had written:

“[Hegel’s] Doctrine of the Notion is made up of Subject, Object and Idea. The Idea is the unity of Subject and Object, the process in which the objectification or institutionalization of the Subject continues to drive the development of the active and living subject. This development of the Subject itself, the inner development of the subject which continues within and alongside its objectification, has the form of the movement towards an all-round developed relation between individual, universal and particular.”

So we can note that there is a connection between Notion, Subject and Object, and then that the development of the Subject involves the individual, universal and particular, which three are soon reduced to “I”, “U” and “P”; and all this moves towards an articulation of socio-political behaviour which is practically useful to the point of being indispensible.

Syllogisms

Andy Blunden goes into the question of Hegel’s specific “syllogisms” very carefully, so we can simply recommend that reading. But what is a “syllogism” as such? And what is different about Hegel’s syllogisms, as compared to other ones?

One difference is that Hegel’s syllogisms are all made up of one each of “I”, “U” and “P”; Individual, Universal and Particular. Andy Blunden shows very well what that means.

But syllogisms in general are also typically like the “Socrates” syllogism ("All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.") - a tight, undoubtedly true series of two premises and a conclusion, where because the premises are true, therefore the conclusion must also be true.

There are other syllogisms where the conclusion does not necessarily fully “follow” from the premises. Such a syllogism may appear to be a “non sequitur” (Latin for “does not follow”), or at least as a possible “non sequitur”. Andy Blunden gives several examples of such “deficient” syllogisms in his lecture.

Are such half-true syllogisms any use? Yes! Hegel has found a way to make use of them, and this way of Hegel’s works because of the distinction between Individual, Universal and Particular.

It is a bit like “approximation” in mathematics. When the student first comes across it, approximation appears to violate and betray everything that was hitherto taught about truth and certainty. But when approximation is done scientifically it creates a degree of certainty out of uncertainty that cannot be got in any other way.

So it is with Hegel’s syllogisms.

We are now getting very close to the precise reference for Lenin’s remark that: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.” It should not be too difficult to find in Marx’s Capital a lot of syllogisms of the Hegel type, which are only understandable in the Hegel way.

Please download and read this text via the link:

The Subject - Universal, Particular and Individual, 2007, Blunden (4751 words)

Further reading:

Preface to the Philosophy of Right, 1820, Hegel (5511 words)

The Philosophy of Right

2011-10-20T11:48:00.003+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 7

Basics

No Woman, No Revolution

African Revolutionary Writers

The Classics

Development, Rural and Urban

National Democratic Revolution

Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”

Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace

Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1

Karl Marx’s Capital, Volumes 2 & 3

Philosophy and Religion

Hegel, Logic

The 12 Courses of the CU (linked)

The Philosophy of Right

In the second paragraph of his Preface to the Philosophy of Right (download linked below) Hegel wrote: “A compendium proper, like a science, has its subject-matter accurately laid out … its chief task is to arrange the essential phases of its material.”

This much can apply to our “Communist University”, in relation to this course on Hegel, and to the other 11 courses (see above for the full “compendium”).

But Hegel wants to emphasise where his own compendium becomes the exception to the general rule, so in the next paragraph he says:

“This treatise differs from the ordinary compendium mainly in its method of procedure. It must be understood at the outset that the philosophic way of advancing from one matter to another, the general speculative method, which is the only kind of scientific proof available in philosophy, is essentially different from every other… True, the logical rules, such as those of definition, classification, and inference are now generally recognised to be inadequate for speculative science. Perhaps it is nearer the mark to say that the inadequacy of the rules has been felt rather than recognised, because they have been counted as mere fetters, and thrown aside to make room for free speech from the heart, fancy and random intuition… In my Science of Logic I have developed the nature of speculative science in detail.”

And Hegel says that he is now going to apply this new kind of Logic in his new book on the Philosophy of Right, of which this document is the Preface.

Is it the Philosophy of Right and Wrong? Or is it the Philosophy of Rights, as in Human Rights? You be the judge.

When reading Marx’s Capital, we too are apt, like Hegel’s contemporaries, to “fall back upon the old-fashioned method of inference and formal reasoning” , i.e. the pre-Hegel method. Whereas Marx is using the Hegel method, so that if we are not aware, then we may be seriously baffled by some of what Marx is arguing as he “advances from one thing to another”.

This is why we study Hegel in the first place – so as the better to understand Marx.

The linked document of Hegel’s is readable and full of good things to discuss. Therefore it can stand as a discussion text without more elaboration.

But one thing that we can say at this moment is that Hegel is clearly investigating, as a philosopher, how it is that people's minds become made up about things, both as individuals and as society, and how it is that minds are later changed again. This is how politics is done. Hegel’s work is of direct, practical interest to political people.

“The ingenuous mind adheres with simple conviction to the truth which is publicly acknowledged. On this foundation it builds its conduct and way of life. In opposition to this naive view of things rises the supposed difficulty of detecting amidst the endless differences of opinion anything of universal application.”

In the next instalment of this part we will take one more of Andy Blunden’s lectures, and in the next part, take the remaining three of Andy’s lectures, for what is in them that can help us with Marx. In the final two lectures we will look at other commentaries and relevant texts, including from Evald Ilyenkov, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Ron Press.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Preface to the Philosophy of Right, 1820, Hegel (5511 words)

Further reading:

The Subject - Universal, Particular and Individual, 2007, Blunden (4751 words)

From Ontology to Dialectics

2011-10-14T11:16:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 6a

From Ontology to Dialectics

From Being, through Essence, to Notion. We have been through this sequence once with Andy Blunden. Now he takes us through it again. Click on the link below to download two of Andy’s lectures, compiled together.

Did you ever wonder quite what makes Quantity turn into Quality? Hegel gives a much fuller explanation of this than Engels did in “Anti-Dühring”. Not that Engels was to blame. How was he to know that his own brief works would be more familiar to posterity than those of his master in philosophy, Hegel?

Ontology is a philosophical word for the way things follow one from another. The illustration above is a computer person’s visualisation of “ontology”, for the purposes of designing computers and software.

Hegel undermined the idea of ontology. Andy Blunden explains how, and why, it can’t just be “one damned thing after another”.

In the second of Andy’s two lectures, Andy moves into the “Essence” part, where we are dealing with dialectics in the Hegel way.

Andy Blunden’s lectures need little introduction, because they contain enough that is clear and could be understood and discussed by any study circle.

We must move through the material. The next time we pass along this road we will recognise many landmarks that we have noted this time, and next time we will also notice some more that we did not see this time.

Please download and read this text via the link:

From Ontology to Dialectics, Andy Blunden, 2007 (6739 words)

Further reading:

Excerpts on Essence and Notion (2186 words)

Excerpts on Essence and Notion

2011-10-13T10:07:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 6

G W F Hegel, 1770-1831

Excerpts on Essence and Notion

Andy Blunden’s two lectures, for which he chose the excerpts from Hegel that are downloadable via the link below, begin with Being and go via Essence, to Notion, a journey that we have already taken with him once. Hegel also makes the same trip twice, once in the Shorter Logic, and another time in the Science of Logic.

So let’s just say that repetition is no bad thing when it comes to study.

We will return to Andy’s marvellously illuminating lectures in the second instalment of this part of our course on Hegel, but let us note for now part of the quote from Hegel’s “Shorter Logic” that Andy gives in the beginning of the first of these two lectures:

“Most commonly the refutation is taken in a purely negative sense to mean that the system refuted has ceased to count for anything, has been set aside and done for. Were it so, the history of philosophy would be, of all studies, most saddening, displaying, as it does, the refutation of every system which time has brought forth. Now although it may be admitted that every philosophy has been refuted, it must be in an equal degree maintained that no philosophy has been refuted. And that in two ways. For first, every philosophy that deserves the name always embodies the Idea: and secondly, every system represents one particular factor or particular stage in the evolution of the Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means that its barriers are crossed, and its special principle reduced to a factor in the completer principle that follows.”

And then at the end of the two Andy Blunden lectures, he writes: “Development is the struggle of opposites which do not disappear”.

This is the unity-and-struggle-of-opposites that we have picked up from Marx and Engels but which actually comes from their predecessor, Hegel, in exactly the manner that Hegel describes in the quotation above it.

It is wrong and doubly wrong to say that Marx and/or Engels refuted and did away with Hegel, as some have said and many more have assumed was the case. Hegel remains, and will always remain, “a factor in the completer principle that follows”.

Now frankly, in the Communist University, we would always love to find in any book the most concise, lucid passage, and if possible a single paragraph or sentence, that gave us the whole content of the book summed up. Through Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Lenin we have sought and found the richest and most concentrated “short texts” to use for the stimulation of our dialogues.

Equally frank is Hegel, a very careful man, who has warned us from the start that he does not want us to be doing any such thing with his work.

Be that as it may, the four excerpts that Andy Blunden picked out on this occasion may be the closest we come to a short text from Hegel, in his own words, which would go towards fulfilling Lenin’s insistence that we must “thoroughly study and understand the whole of Hegel’s Logic.”

They cover Action & Reaction, Content and Form, Notion, and Development.

There are many cards in the Hegel pack. These four are as near to being a “full house” as we are likely to find. Not forgetting that our first business with Hegel is to understand what Marx got from Hegel.

Hegel is not always obscure. The following is clear enough:

“Real works of art are those where content and form exhibit a thorough identity. The content of the Iliad, it may be said, is the Trojan war, and especially the wrath of Achilles. In that we have everything, and yet very little after all; for the Iliad is made an Iliad by the poetic form, in which that content is moulded.

“The content of Romeo and Juliet may similarly be said to be the ruin of two lovers through the discord between their families: but something more is needed to make Shakespeare's immortal tragedy.”

Please download and read this text via the link:

Excerpts on Essence and Notion (2186 words)

Further reading:

From Ontology to Dialectics, Andy Blunden, 2007 (6739 words)

Hegel: Extracts about Being, Essence and Notion

2011-10-07T11:28:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 5a

G W F Hegel, 1770-1831

Hegel: Extracts about Being, Essence and Notion

This is the halfway point in our course on Hegel. Our mission is to thoroughly study and understand the whole of Hegel’s Logic. How are we getting on?

Thanks to Andy Blunden’s lecture we got an overview of Hegel’s Logic in the previous post. In his next two lectures, Andy returns to the sequence Being-Essence-Notion in more detail.

What have we been doing so far? We have not been reading whole books of Hegel. We are not even at the stage where we can, as Tony Buzan would have it, skip over the difficult bits and come back later to fill in the gaps. We are still in the situation where, when reading Hegel, we find that most of it is incomprehensible, and only intelligible in spots, here and there. So we are making a virtue of that, and:

We are taking mostly relatively short spots of Hegel, learning how to handle them, and beginning to absorb them, and to become familiar with them.
We are also looking for any kind of overview material, including contents pages, as well as material like Andy Blunden’s summarising lecture on Being, Essence and Notion. The overviews will give us clues as to where to locate the small pieces that we are picking up.
We are not forgetting, also, that this is the Communist University, and that what we do here is to set things up for live dialogue between real people. We have done so, and we will continue to do it. It remains for the recipients of these posts to organise their Freirean dialogues around the material.

Today’s main item consists of eleven short extracts from various works of Hegel that are given by Andy Blunden in broad support of his lecture on Being, Essence and Notion. They are from the Shorter Logic, the Philosophy of Right, the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic and the History of Philosophy.

Perhaps this is an appropriate time to make some provisional general remarks.

Hegel describes a movement through history that does not discard the past but treats it as a component part of the present and of the future.

Further: “[Hegel]’s supreme merit, as far as ethics and social and political philosophy are concerned, is that the concrete universal explicates affirmative intersubjective relations and makes possible an account of social institutions that is a third alternative to abstract atomic individualism and collectivist communitarianism.” [Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, p. 112, Williams 1997]

If all this is so then Hegel has given us a way of seeing life that was not available before, and is better than what was available before.

Hegel does not lean on any “a priori”, presupposition, or Prime Mover. Hegel shows how creation of something from nothing is a daily occurrence. It is commonplace, except that nothing is lost, and accumulated quantity will generate qualitative change.

This new vision clarifies things that Euclidean geometry and its logical cousins cannot clarify, or even see at all.

Hegel talks of Spirit, and is classified as an Idealist, and was followed by noisy “materialists” such as Feuerbach. These and other things, not least of them the shear difficulty of reading Hegel directly, have led people to misunderstand Hegel, who does not oppose the material against the spiritual. On the contrary, Hegel solves the contradiction between the material and the spiritual.

In Hegel, the human is both the creator, and the created.

“Materialists” think that they have solved the dichotomy of mind and matter by awarding priority to matter. But all this does is to replace a divine creator with an inanimate one, thus perpetuating a “Big Bang” type of theory and continuing to fail to explain creation as a constant, continuing and necessary presence.

In this way “materialists” become a version of what they thought they had overthrown. They continue to lack a strong theory of development, progress, or revolution.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Excerpts from Hegel on Being, Essence and Notion (1952 words)

Further reading:

Hegel’s Logic - Being, Essence and Notion, 2007, Blunden (4951 words)

Being, Essence and Notion, The three divisions of Hegel's "Logic"

2011-10-06T13:17:00.004+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 5

“Immediacy”: Unselfconscious Being

Being, Essence and Notion

The three divisions of the Logic

Lenin wrote: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital… without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.” Our mission, given by Lenin, is therefore to thoroughly study and understand the whole of Hegel’s Logic.

We soon find that there are actually two Logics: The Shorter Logic, and The Science of Logic; but they are similar and are both divided by three main headings: Being, Essence and Notion.

This time we are going to reverse the order and take Andy Blunden’s lecture as the main item, simply because Andy has done a great job.

There is a movement from Being, through Essence, to Notion. This is not to deny the importance of the argument and the detail, but to say that what distinguishes Hegel’s Logic is that it shows how things develop from nothing to something. It is not a static philosophy of positions and definitions. Nor is it an owners’ manual for the mind. It is a science of creation, and development. The beginning is Being, which is “immediate” with as yet no past and no future. Hence our illustration of the unselfconscious puppy-dog, above.

The following are extracts from Andy Blunden’s lecture, finishing with a reference back to Marx’s Capital, that may assist readers to get a quick overview of Andy’s overview of Hegel’s “Logic”:

“I should mention here as an aside that all Hegel’s major works have the same structure: he identifies the simple concept or notion which marks the unconditioned starting point for the given science, and then he applies the method, the model for which is given in the Logic, in order to elaborate what is implicit in the given concept; he develops ‘the peculiar internal development of the thing itself.’

“So, the Logic begins with a critique of Being, what is contained in the concept of ‘Being’. The Logic is really the study of concepts; so, the Concept is the truth of Being, whilst Being is the Concept still ‘in itself’. The Third Book of the Logic is the Doctrine of the Notion (or Concept which is same thing), that is, the Concept for itself. But in the Doctrine of Being, the Concept is still just ‘in itself’.

“If there is to be some thing amidst the infinite coming and going, the chaos of existence, the simplest actual thing that can be is a Quality, something that persists amidst change. And if we ask what it is that changes while it remains of the same quality, what changes when the thing still remains what it is, then this is what we call Quantity. But a thing cannot indefinitely undergo quantitative change and remain still what it is, retain the same quality; at some point, a quantitative change amounts to a change in Quality, and this Quantitative change which amounts to a Qualitative change, the unity of Quality and Quantity, we call the Measure of the thing.

“Thus there are three grades of Being: Quality, Quantity and Measure. We apply these categories to things that we regard as objects, the business of the positivist sociologist, the observer. Even a participant in a not yet emergent social change or sociological category, has to play the role of sociologist to be conscious of it.

“Essence is reflection… When people reflect on things, they do so only with the aid of what they already know. So reflection is a good term. It is new Being, reflected in the mirror of old concepts. It’s like what Marx was talking about in the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”:

‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.’ (18th Brumaire, I)

“The third part of the Logic is the Doctrine of the Notion. Notion is a translation of the German word Begriff which is also translated as ‘concept’.

“The Doctrine of the Notion begins with an abstract notion, and the process of the Notion is that it gets more and more concrete.

“The first section of the Notion is Subjectivity, or the Subject. And here for the first time we get a glimpse of Hegel’s conception of the subject: it is not an individual person in any sense at all, but a simple element of consciousness arising from social practices which implicate the whole community, reflected in language, the whole social division of labour and so on.

“The process of the Doctrine of the Notion is the abstract notion becoming more and more concrete. This process of concretization takes place through objectification of subjectivity, that is, through the subject-object relation. The first thing to grasp about the Object, which is the second division of the Doctrine of the Notion, is that the Object may be other Subjects, Subjects which are Objects in relation to the Subject or Subjects which have become thoroughly objectified. Objectification is not limited to the construction of material objects or texts; it’s a bit like ‘mainstreaming’, or being institutionalized. The process of development of the Subject is a striving to transform the Object according to its own image, but in the process the Subject itself is changed and in the process of objectification becomes a part of the living whole of the community.

“The unity of Subject and Object, the third and last grade of the Doctrine of the Notion, is the Idea. The Idea can be understood as the whole community as an intelligible whole, it is the summation of the pure essentialities of a complete historical form of life. It is the logical representation of Spirit, or of the development and life of an entire community, in the form of a concrete concept.

“So the starting point of a science is the Notion which forms the subject of the science, not Being. This is worth mentioning because there is a widespread fallacy about the relation between Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic. Some writers have put Capital up against the Logic, and in an effort to match them, start by equating the commodity relation with Being, on the basis that the commodity relation is the “simplest relation” or on the basis that the commodity relation is immediate. But the first thing to be done in a science, according to Hegel (and Marx followed Hegel in this), is to form a Notion of the subject, the simplest possible relation whose unfolding produces the relevant science. In the case of Capital, this abstract notion, the germ of capital, is the commodity relation. In the case of the Philosophy of Right, it was the relation of Abstract Right, that is private property. The problem of the origins of value or of the commodity relation is a different question, and Marx demonstrates his familiarity with the Doctrine of Essence in the third section of Chapter One, where the money-form is shown to emerge out of a series of relations constituting historically articulated resolutions of the problem of realizing an expanded division of labour.”

Please download and read this text via the link:

Hegel’s Logic - Being, Essence and Notion, 2007, Blunden (4951 words)

Further reading:

Excerpts from Hegel on Being, Essence and Notion (1040 words)

Preface to the Phenomenology

2011-10-04T13:17:00.001+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 4c

Andy Blunden

Preface to the Phenomenology

On scientific knowledge

This, the Preface to Hegel’s “Phenomenology” (download linked below) is a full-length, full-strength reading of the difficult man’s own work. It has 72 numbered passages and 21485 words. It is longer than a normal Communist University reading text.

So be it.

For Hegel’s Phenomenology, MIA gives an Index, a fuller Contents page, the Preface, an Introduction, and the remainder of the work, in numbered passages up to number 808. In the spirit of Tony Buzan, let us show here the contents of the preface, listed within the main Contents:

Headings in Hegel’s “Preface to the Phenomenology”
Passages	Head #	Heading
1-4
5-6	2.	The element of truth is the Concept and its true form the scientific system
7-12	3.	Present position of the spirit
13-16	4.	The principle is not the completion; against formalism
17	5.	The absolute is subject –
18-25	6.	– and what this is
26	7.	The element of knowledge
27-29	8.	The ascent into this is the Phenomenology of the Spirit
30-32	9.	The transformation of the notion and the familiar into thought ...
33-37	10.	– and this into the Concept/Notion
38-40	11.	In what way the Phenomenology of the Spirit is negative or contains what is false
41-46	12.	Historical and mathematical truth
47-49	13.	The nature of philosophical truth and its method
50-58	14.	Against schematizing formalism
58	15.	The demands of the study of philosophy
59	16.	Argumentative thinking in its negative attitude ...
60-67	17.	... in its positive attitude; its subject
68-70	18.	Natural philosophizing as healthy common sense and as genius
71-72	19.	Conclusion: the author's relation to the public

This document is given for discussion. Like all the others, this blog-post or covering e-mail message is only intended as a potential opening to discussion and not as an explanation nor, least of all, as a didactic prescription. What we will do now is to give some short quotations from the document, but first just remark that it becomes clear why Andy Blunden (pictured above) recommends this document, because it contains some quite direct and straightforward statements by Hegel, which may well help us as we go along.

Extracts from Hegel’s “Preface to the Phenomenology”

Passage 2

“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety.”

“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another.”

“But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.”

Passage 11

“… it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition.”

“The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation. It is indeed never at rest, but carried along the stream of progress ever onward.”

“But it is here as in the case of the birth of a child; after a long period of nutrition in silence, the continuity of the gradual growth in size, of quantitative change, is suddenly cut short by the first breath drawn - there is a break in the process, a qualitative change and the child is born.”

Passage 12

“In the same way, science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in its initial stages.”

Passage 13

“Intelligibility is the form in which science is offered to everyone, and is the open road to it made plain for all. To reach rational knowledge by our intelligence is the just demand of the mind which comes to science.”

Passage 17

“In my view - a view which the developed exposition of the system itself can alone justify everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.”

Passage 23

“The need to think of the Absolute as subject, has led men to make use of statements like “God is the eternal”, the “moral order of the world”, or “love”, etc. In such propositions the truth is just barely stated to be Subject, but not set forth as the process of reflectively mediating itself with itself. In a proposition of that kind we begin with the word God. By itself this is a meaningless sound, a mere name; the predicate says afterwards what it is, gives it content and meaning: the empty beginning becomes real knowledge only when we thus get to the end of the statement. So far as that goes, why not speak alone of the eternal, of the moral order of the world, etc., or, like the ancients, of pure conceptions such as being, the one, etc., i.e. of what gives the meaning without adding the meaningless sound at all?”

Passage 27

“It is this process by which science in general comes about, this gradual development of knowing, that is set forth here in the Phenomenology of Mind. Knowing, as it is found at the start, mind in its immediate and primitive stage, is without the essential nature of mind, is sense-consciousness. To reach the stage of genuine knowledge, or produce the element where science is found - the pure conception of science itself - a long and laborious journey must be undertaken. This process towards science, as regards the content it will bring to light and the forms it will assume in the course of its progress, will not be what is primarily imagined by leading the unscientific consciousness up to the level of science: it will be something different, too, from establishing and laying the foundations of science; and anyway something else than the sort of ecstatic enthusiasm which starts straight off with absolute knowledge, as if shot out of a pistol...”

As much as Hegel is usually careful never to give an impression of summarising his work, yet here in this Preface are many statements of a rather concrete nature.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology: On scientific knowledge (21485 words)

Further reading:

The Subject Matter of the Logic, Andy Blunden (4648 words)

Use Your Head (Conspectus) Tony Buzan (4174 words)

Excerpts from Hegel's Logic (608 words)

Use Your Head

2011-10-03T12:54:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, 04b

A Buzan-type Mind-Map

Use Your Head

Tony Buzan is not an overtly political author and may be little different from a “motivational speaker”, but his work has helped millions of students and it has always been part on the Communist University’s “recommended” list. A downloadable file of our “Conspectus” of Buzan’s book “Use Your Head” is linked below.

While we have always stressed the apparently apolitical intentions of the author of this practical manual of study, yet its attraction for us may be that it does, in fact, correspond very well with our Marxist philosophy and more particularly with Marxism’s Hegelian roots.

So let us explore that. But first, let us revise Tony Buzan’s advice. Hegel’s books are generally agreed to be among the most difficult ever written. If ever we needed Tony Buzan, it is now.

Reading, memorising and note-taking, the Tony Buzan way

Buzan places practical means and methods in the hands of students who are faced with the most extremely difficult books to read and understand. “Use Your Head” was published in 1974. In 2004, your VC made a “Conspectus” of the book. Note that this word, conspectus, is a favourite of Lenin’s. It means a “seeing together”. It means the same as “synopsis”. It is something like “overview”, which is a term that Buzan uses.

Much faster reading can be achieved by applying a better understanding of how reading physically happens, by doing away with a number of wrong ideas, and by applying a few useful techniques.

Much better memory of what is learned can be achieved by taking more breaks and by doing more short reviews of the learned material.

Much more useful notes can be taken if the Buzan “mind-map” technique (see the illustration above) is used. All of these things are briefly explained in the main linked download below, and in Buzan’s books which are still widely available.

The Buzan Organic Study Method

The Buzan Organic Study Method is a set of prescriptions that work together very well indeed. Particularly important are The Browse, the planning (i.e. Time and Amount), Overview, Preview, Review, looking for and using summaries/conclusions/reading from the back, and the advice on Difficult Sections, which is:

“Moving on from a difficult area releases the tension and mental floundering that often accompanies the traditional approach. ‘Jumping over’ a stumbling block usually enables the reader to go back to it later on with more information from the ‘other side’. The block itself is seldom essential for the understanding of that which follows it.” It is easier to fill in a hole if you are working from both sides – the far side as well as the near side. This is particularly good advice when dealing with a difficult writer like G W F Hegel.

Buzan the Hegelian?

Now let us look again at Tony Buzan with Hegelian Marxist eyes.

What is a Mind-Map? It is a representation of the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. This is a key Hegelian idea and is especially important for the matter we are pursuing in response to Lenin, which is the alleged impossibility of understanding Marx’s “Capital” without good knowledge of Hegel.

Later we are going to see that the Soviet Philosopher Evald Ilyenkov wrote an entire book about the ascent from the abstract to the concrete in Marx’s “Capital”. Tony Buzan may well be innocent of any association with this idea, but his “mind-maps” are perfect representations of it.

Secondly, consider this about Buzan’s “Organic Study Method”. Yes, it is organic – a good, humanist and Marxist word. But more than that it resembles Hegel’s work in the following way: it proceeds but does not arrive. If you are looking for a main event, or a final conclusion, you do not find it in the Buzan Organic Study Method. Is Buzan a closet dialectician?

As Andy Blunden puts it, describing the thought of Hegel: The Idea is a process. Whether by accident or by conscious design, Tony Buzan’s method fits in very well with Hegel.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Use Your Head (Conspectus) Tony Buzan (4174 words)

Further reading:

The Subject Matter of the Logic, Andy Blunden (4648 words)

Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology: On scientific knowledge (21485 words)

Excerpts from Hegel's Logic (608 words)

The Subject Matter of the Logic

2011-09-30T19:57:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 4a

Lenin: page 100 of his notebook for “Conspectus of Hegel’s book The Science of Logic”

The Subject Matter of the Logic

We will come to Tony Buzan in the next instalment of this part of our course on Hegel, but let us also consult him briefly here, before we look at Andy Blunden’s lecture on “The Subject Matter of the Logic” (download linked below). Buzan wrote:

“One of the interesting facts about people using study books is that most, when given a new text, start reading on page one. It is not advisable to start reading a new study text on the first page . . .

“What is essential in a reasonable approach to study texts, especially difficult ones, is to get a good idea of what’s in them before plodding on into a learning catastrophe . . . [in other words to find out quickly what the text is about]

“What this means in a study context is that you should scour the book for all the material not included in the regular body of the print. . . Areas of the book to be covered in your overview include:

results	tables	subheadings
summaries	table of contents	dates
conclusions	marginal notes	italics
indents	illustrations	graphs
glossaries	capitalised words	footnotes
back cover	photographs	statistics
index	bibliography	acknowledgements

Never did we need more clues of this kind than when studying Hegel. In this regard we can return to Lenin. A facsimile of page 100 of Lenin’s notebook for “Conspectus of Hegel’s book The Science of Logic” is given above. Although Lenin uses only one colour and no illustrations, yet his notes do quite resemble one of Tony Buzan’s “mind maps”, as we shall see.

It was in this work that Lenin wrote “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!”

In the very next note, Lenin wrote: “Hegel actually proved that logical forms and laws are not an empty shell, but the reflection of the objective world. More correctly, he did not prove, but made a brilliant guess.” This is a good clue and it corresponds to part of what Andy Blunden has to say, as we will see.

Our wonderful resource, the Marxists Internet Archive, has kindly listed, with hyperlinks, Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks on a single web page; and this is a good moment to remember that Andy Blunden’s terrific, fully browsable “Hegel by Hypertext” is also part of the same Marxists’ archive.

Andy’s Blunden’s lecture on the Subject Matter of the Logic

This lecture was given in 2007 as part of the on-going Australian Hegel Summer Schools. It is readable (but do please skip what you don’t understand). From it we can get certain strong clues about Hegel.

One is that Hegel treats sciences as thoughts thinking themselves. His logic is not a single key that can be applied to every kind of thing. He finds that each science thinks in its own way. It follows that his logic is a much more exhaustive work of moving through the entire field of knowledge, describing what is to be found there as a natural history of “second nature”. What he seeks to understand is how thought, (science) can arise without “presupposition”, otherwise called “a priori”, given or innate understanding.

Now may be a good time to think again about Marx’s “Capital” in this context. Marx’s quest (pursued from the 1840s, and finished in the late 1850s, after which “Capital” Volume 1 was composed and published in 1867) was also for one thing, and quite a similar thing: Marx’s quest was for “the secret of the self-increase of capital”.

Both men were looking to explain something that came from nothing; Hegel as a philosopher, for science in all cases; Marx for the phenomenon of the new ruler of the world: capital.

Contrary to what some of Marx’s followers (including at times, Lenin) have said to the effect that he had discovered a key to understand the world, Marx’s three actual volumes of “Capital” turn out to be analogous to Hegel’s, in that there is no single key that opens all doors, but actually many keys that have to be found. As with Hegel, much of what is found by Marx is thoroughly “counter-intuitive” as we would say these days. In other words, what is obvious is not always true, and what is found is not to be corrected to fit preconceptions. “Consistency” is not usual, and has no logical, let alone moral, force.

Specificity matters. History matters. Logic is not independent of its content and its history. Hegel and Marx are at one to this extent. Specificity is never lost, even though the essence of logic is movement, or development, and the developing logic is what Hegel, for want of a better word, calls Spirit.

We are not ready for closure yet. We may never be, with Hegel. But one thing we could derive from what we can see so far is to say that development is the essence of society, and is not something that is done to society, or that society does when it is not sleeping. Development is not an option. It is never absent. There is only development, and nothing else. If we are not developing towards heaven, then we are developing towards hell. “Those not busy being born are busy dying,” as one of Bob Dylan’s songs says.

Andy Blunden wrote a whole book on the Meaning of Hegel’s Logic, available free on MIA. Another very helpful work of Andy’s is Getting to know Hegel. The latter is an Appendix to Andy’s great work-in-progress book on “The Subject”. This man is helping us!

Please download and read this text via the link:

The Subject Matter of the Logic, Andy Blunden (4648 words)

Further reading:

Use Your Head (Conspectus) Tony Buzan (4174 words)

Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology: On scientific knowledge (21485 words)

Excerpts from Hegel's Logic (608 words)

The Logic

2011-09-29T16:14:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 4

The Logic

Some academics try to illustrate Hegel with diagrams, like the one above. They don’t help very much. The following one is supposed to represent the scheme of Hegel’s “Encyclopaedia”, as if it was the world represented by an unfamiliar projection:

What this diagram suggests, among other things, is that Hegel’s headings (or constructs) are not eclectic or random, but do form part of an organic, or concrete, whole, as you would expect from the one who bequeathed “The Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete” to Marx and Engels. Here below is another diagram, allegedly showing Hegel’s “11 forms of dialectic”. We must resist the temptation to reduce Hegel to the level of a corporate inspirational speaker. But we may be reassured to know that Hegel’s dialectical concerns (e.g. Unity and Struggle of Opposites; Particular and General; Being and Nothingness; Form and Content; Cause and Effect) are not infinite in number, but are actually quite few.

At least it is reassuring to be able to feel that such organic-seeming totalisations of Hegel as the above two-dimensional diagrams are possible. It is also useful to be shown that Hegel’s system is not the relentless march of the triads that the diagram at the top and some of its variations are apt to suggest. The shape is neither even, nor symmetrical. Hegel’s thought is not strained. It takes its own shape.

The indistinctness of the diagrams is not a big problem at this stage. We would not want to take them too literally or to trust them too much. They are not Hegel’s work and the present distance from where we are now to the point of being able to check the diagrams against Hegel’s actual work is long. It would require us to read and internally digest several of the most difficult books ever written, on the way.

But we don’t need to do all that. Marx is going to straighten out Hegel for us, anyway. What we need is enough of Hegel so as to fully understand Marx, in keeping with the task set for us by Lenin*. Lenin says: If you don’t have Hegel, or at least his “Logic”, then you don’t have Marx. We are going to get sufficient of Hegel in this course so as to have our Marx on a firm foundation.

The way we will begin this part is with a few spots that we will locate and explore. They will be tiny in relation to the whole but they will furnish is with some reference points, as well as begin to make us used to the great man’s style.

At the end of this part, we will take a very much larger portion of Hegel for reading. We must not have a course where we end up still being virgins in relation to the works of the main writer that we are studying. In between, we will look at what Andy Blunden has written about Hegelian Logic and also try to get some assistance from Communist University standby Tony Buzan. So there will be four instalments altogether within this fourth part of our course on Hegel.

So in this instalment we are using a compilation of four short extracts from Hegel’s Logic and The Shorter Logic (see the link to the download, below). Hegel’s work is usually divided into numbered passages (not always single paragraphs) that are usually given a sign such as § or φ.

Andy’s first given quotation is §62 from The Science of Logic. Hegel is saying that negation leads lower forms of consciousness to a higher form of consciousness. He says that for science it is therefore necessary to be able to see that the negative is as good as the positive, and that negation is what moves things on to a result; and that a result is not an “immediacy”, where immediacy is simple, latent, unmoved being.

Hegel is writing of the common consciousness and therefore of science, and this view of science is the one that Marxism has.

Andy’s second quotation is §121 from The Science of Logic. This is the famous Hegel! This is the Hegel that drives people crazy, or makes them to think that Hegel is crazy. But Hegel, contrary to what appears, is not wasting time. To say that being is nothingness is the beginning of finding out what has substance, and how human beings are able on a daily basis to create, God-like, something out of nothing.

Andy’s third Quotation is §133 from The Shorter Logic, where Hegel is writing of Form and Content, as a struggle of opposites that define each other and constantly change places. Perhaps this is a good time to remember that this Communist University is not a didactic, but rather a dialogic University, and so to refrain from trying to “define” everything, but instead to leave the door open for discussion. Asikhulime!

Andy’s last quotation, §160-1 from The Shorter Logic, is about The Notion, and brings at last what is Hegel’s special gift to posterity, something we need right now in South Africa, which is a revelation of the nature of this thing called Development.

Because dialectic is not a magic for itself, but it is an understanding of development, and how humans develop themselves as humanity. And this is what we need to know.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Excerpts from Hegel's Logic (608 words)

Further reading:

The Subject Matter of the Logic, Andy Blunden (4648 words)

Use Your Head (Conspectus) Tony Buzan (4174 words)

Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology: On scientific knowledge (21485 words)

* “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” – Lenin

‘Critique of Pure Reason’

2011-09-27T14:57:00.001+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, 03c

Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804

‘Critique of Pure Reason’

With Immanuel Kant, we will need some word-definitions. “Empirical” means sensed or found; a priori means first, or before; a posteriori means after.

The Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (download linked below) is a “propaedeutic”, which is another word for introduction, or preliminary course. An “organon” is the whole course, or the whole work. “Hume” is David Hume, a Scottish philosopher.

Right at the beginning, Kant is trying to persuade his reader that although things are learned by experience, yet it is possible to have known something before. This is a clear self-contradiction of Kant’s, but he insists on it. He continues:

“In what follows… we shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience. Opposed to it is empirical knowledge, which is knowledge possible only a posteriori, that is, through experience.”

Kant then claims that the a priori knowledge is by nature collective, or in other words social, knowledge.

The source of collective consciousness is a matter of great interest to revolutionaries. Kant says it is already there. Few revolutionaries will agree with Kant.

Kant then prays for a science which will classify the details and describe the extent of a priori human knowledge, of which he says, in conclusion, that the first part will be “the transcendental doctrine of sensibility.”

Are we any the wiser? At least we have this much: That Kant tried to have his cake and eat it. He wanted to have unreasonable reason. He wanted reason without a source or origin. Later, he even wanted religion that would be “within the limits of reason”. Also, he wanted to create a taxonomy of “antinomies”. That is a list or catalogue of things that contradicted each other, as if to list them would excuse them.

Kant seems to be rehearsing and trying to legitimate the bourgeoisie’s necessary (for them) habit of believing two contradictory things at the same time, or, which amounts to the same thing, taking possession of all arguments and pretending that they all support the bourgeois position.

Part of this mental trickery is to endlessly categorise things. See the above cartoon, which can also be found in “Philosophy for Beginners”, by Richard Osborne, a very helpful illustrated manual. According to Osborne’s book, one of Kant’s slogans was: “Purposiveness without purpose.” How pathetic!

Altogether, Kant appears like the fore-runner of the typical modern bourgeois journalist or “analyst”. He can march the reader up the hill, and march the reader down again, purposively, but without purpose.

In this regard, please note that from the very first line, Kant is referring to “our” and “we”. But who is this “we”? It is an a priori “we”. It is a “we” that always pretends to be class-neutral, but is not in fact class-neutral. It is a “we” that does not willingly reveal its nature. It hides.

So long as the world is Kantian, so long does in remain in the tiresome hands of “analysts”.

Back to Hegel

If Hegel is at all heroic, it must be partly for this: that Hegel refuses Kant, and thereby rescues philosophy from Kant’s dreadful pedantry. Hegel seeks to build a knowledge of the common, collective consciousness from history, by a process that can be understood, and observed, as a unity and struggle of opposites, or in other words dialectic.

Andy Blunden calls this man-made collective world of understanding “second nature”. This is the social environment, where the physical environment external to human beings is “first nature”.

Hegel opens the door that Kant keeps shut. It is the door to honest class-consciousness, which when open, reveals the road to revolutionary thought. It was Marx and Engels who realised this potential in Hegel’s philosophy. Conversely, understanding Hegel (as Lenin pointed out*) is going to help us to understand Marx. And that is our goal: Not Hegel for Hegel’s sake, but Hegel for the sake of understanding Marx, Engels, and everything that followed.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Introduction to ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, 1787, Immanuel Kant (6889 words)

Further reading:

Young Hegel excerpts, Phenomenology, Consciousness and Kant (1004 words)

The Master-Servant Relation from Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’ (3890 words)

The Young Hegel and what drove him, 2007, Andy Blunden (4159 words)

Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant, 2007, Andy Blunden (4889 words)

Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant

2011-09-25T20:38:00.001+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, 03b

Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant

Andy Blunden’s second lecture contains this useful passage:

“Most writers interpret Hegel by importing into their reading of Hegel Kant’s concept of subject. This is wrong. Now it is true that on occasion, especially when he is commenting on Kant, Hegel does use the word ‘subject’ in the Kantian sense, that is to say, as meaning an individual, an individual adult citizen, to be a little more precise. This is invariably the sense in which the Kantian subject is used today, and the same sense is usually, rather kaleidoscopically, read into Hegel. Normally, Hegel simply uses the word ‘person’ to convey this meaning. For Hegel, ‘subject’ is not a philosophical synonym for ‘person’. It is really important to remember this.

“The word subject went through some transformations since the Romans translated Aristotle, particularly with Descartes, but the core idea that Kant has imparted with the word is the coincidence of three things: the cogito of Descartes, the bearer of ideas and knowledge, the idea of self-determining agent who bears moral responsibility for their actions, and identity or self-consciousness. All three of these entities coincide in the Kantian subject, and Hegel is true to this concept, but it is not an individual person.

“The individual is just a single atom of the whole entity constituted by the collective activity of the community as a whole. Of course, nothing other than an individual human being can think or bear moral responsibility for actions, but they cannot do so as isolated atoms; the content of our thinking is thought-objects which are constituted by the activity of the entire community and past generations. And our actions are vain and meaningless except insofar as they take on significance through the relation of the individual to the whole community. The point is, how to elaborate this idea of thought and moral responsibility as collective activities, and at the same time develop the conception of individuality which constitutes the essence of modern society.

“In the “System of Ethical Life,” Hegel approached the question of labour not so much from the standpoint of how individuals acquire knowledge, as how the universal, that is, a culture, is constructed. At the basic level, people work with plants, and then animals, and then machinery, and in doing so produce crops, herds and means of production which are passed on to future generations. Likewise, in using words the language is maintained and developed and passed on to future generations, and finally, in abstracting the knowledge of culture and imparting it to a new generation in the raising of children, people are constructing and maintaining their ‘second nature’, the universals which are the content of all thought. When an individual thinks, they think with universals actively maintained by and meaningful only within their community.

“So to provide an adequate concept of the subject, Hegel has to let go of the idea of an individual locus of experience, with access to universal principles of Reason existing in some fictional hyperspace on one side, and on the other side, unknowable things-in-themselves. The content of experience is thought objects which have been constructed by collective activity…”

What we are therefore gaining here, from Hegel, is a philosophy that can reckon with the collective subject, or what Marx and Engels referred to in the last paragraphs of the second part of the Communist Manifesto as a “vast association of the whole nation”. This is a democracy not as formality or mechanism, but as collective consciousness manifest as fact.

There is no possibility of communism without a conception of this kind.

In the same part of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that in the “vast association”, the “free development of each [would be] the condition for the free development of all”. The individual subject is not excluded. On the contrary, the individual subject is the basic building-block of society. There is no society without individuals. But what we have, as well, is the collective, social subject.

What we get with Hegel, it seems, and we must confirm this with more reading of the original texts, is the first philosophical treatment of the collective that is not merely presumptuous and declaratory of its existence. We get a working model of the collective subject, and we get a description of how the collective consciousness is formed, and how it is maintained.

Let us finish off this instalment with a direct quotation from one of Hegel’s predecessors - the great Spinoza - and in the last instalment of this third part of the course, look again at some of Kant’s original writing. Then we will follow Andy Blunden’s route through Hegel for three more parts, until we come back to look at some of Hegel’s successors, such as Marx, Lenin, and Ilyenkov.

Here is Spinoza:

“As far as the 'method for finding out the truth' is concerned, 'the matter stands on the same footing as the making of material tools.... For, in order to work iron, a hammer is needed, and the hammer cannot be forthcoming unless it has been made; but, in order to make it, there was need of another hammer and other tools, and so on to infinity. We might thus vainly endeavour to prove that men have no power of working iron.

“But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater perfection. . . . So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom.”

B. de Spinoza (1632-1677)

Improvement of the Understanding, Ethics and Correspondence

Picture: an anarchist ant.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant, 2007, Andy Blunden (4889 words)

Further reading:

Introduction to ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, 1787, Immanuel Kant (6889 words)

Young Hegel excerpts, Phenomenology, Consciousness and Kant (1004 words)

The Master-Servant Relation from Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’ (3890 words)

The Young Hegel and what drove him, 2007, Andy Blunden (4159 words)

The Young Hegel and what drove him

2011-09-24T09:05:00.001+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, 03a

Hegel and Napoleon Bonaparte, Jena, 1806

The Young Hegel and what drove him

Now that we have struggled with some of Hegel’s own words we may as well take advantage of some of Andy Blunden’s illuminating scholarship. See the download linked below for the first of Comrade Andy’s set of ten lectures on Hegel, called by him “The young Hegel and what drove him”.

Andy sketches the world of Hegel, corresponding in time with the first (English) Industrial Revolution, containing the Great French Revolution, and extending to the bourgeois military conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel actually saw Bonaparte in the streets of Jena in 1806. Hegel admired Bonaparte, and called him “The World Spirit on horseback”. “World Spirit” did not mean God.

Andy Blunden points out that in an age of liberals, Hegel was not a liberal. Andy’s remarks correspond with Christopher Caudwell’s “On Liberty”, where Caudwell points out that men without institutions are mere brutes. (“Unfortunately not only is man not good without institutions, he is not evil either. He is no man at all; he is neither good nor evil; he is an unconscious brute.”)

Andy Blunden says: “There is some basis for associating Hegel with notions of progress and a ‘cultural evolution’ in which all the people of the world are subsumed into a single narrative”. We must look to see if it is really with Hegel that the idea of one human history, and “one race - the human race” arrives. In a work like Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, written a little over half a century after the death of Hegel, and indeed in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, the idea of a single human revolutionary history is strong.

Lastly, Andy Blunden introduces Hegel’s “The Spirit”. Read about it and leave it to bed down in the mind. But note this passage of Andy’s (shortened):

“One of the difficulties that Hegel had to overcome was the problem of dualism… Kant’s philosophy got around mind-matter dualism at the cost of introducing a host of other such dichotomies and it was the need to overcome these dichotomies in Kant’s philosophy which was one of the main drivers for Kant’s critics [including] Hegel. For Hegel, it was all thought. We will presently come to how Hegel arrived at difference from this abstract beginning, but the idea of thought, of Spirit, shaping the world, served as a foundation upon which to build a philosophical system… Thinking [is] the activity of the human mind, but the content of that thinking is objective, it is given from outside the individual, it is the individual’s ‘second nature’. The objects around us and which are the content of our perception and thoughts are the objectifications of the thought of other people, or ourselves. We live in a world not of matter, but of thought objects, which are, like all objects, also material things.”

Here is a hyperlinked list of main Works of Hegel in English:

The German Constitution, 1798-1802 (HPW) Ø

Introduction to The Critical Journal of Philosophy, with Schelling (1801) Ø

Faith & Knowledge (1802) Ø

System of Ethical Life (1802-3) Ø

Realphilosophie I (1803-4) & II (1805-6) Ø

Phenomenonology of Spirit (1807) Ø

The Science of Logic Ø

Part I: The Doctrine of Being (1812)
Part II: The Doctrine of Essence (1813)
Part III: The Doctrine of the Notion (1816)

Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817 & revised up till his death in 1831)

Part I: The Logic Ø
Part II: The Philosophy of Nature Ø
Part III: The Philosophy of Mind

1 Subjective Spirit Ø
2 Objective Spirit Ø
3 Absolute Spirit

The Philosophy of Right, 1821 Ø

Please download and read this text via the link:

The Young Hegel and what drove him, 2007, Andy Blunden (4159 words)

Further reading:

Introduction to ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, 1787, Immanuel Kant (6889 words)

Young Hegel excerpts, Phenomenology, Consciousness and Kant (1004 words)

The Master-Servant Relation from Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’ (3890 words)

Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant, 2007, Andy Blunden (4889 words)

Young Hegel, Phenomenology, Consciousness and Kant

2011-09-22T15:12:00.007+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, 03

Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804

Young Hegel, Phenomenology, Consciousness and Kant

Our first two parts of our ten-part Hegel series are behind us. Starting now, and for the next five parts, we are going to track Andy Blunden’s prepared course of lectures on Hegel.

But rather than leading with Andy’s writings, we will take the excerpts from Hegel that have been chosen by Andy, compile them together, and treat them as our main discussion text. This will be in keeping with our long-time Communist University way of doing things, whereby we privilege the original writings of our subject, and discuss them.

We will mostly take Andy’s good texts as further, additional, optional or alternative reading. Today’s main discussion texts are two, linked below.

The first consists of five short quotations from Hegel and one from Immanuel Kant. More light may be cast upon them below, and in Andy Blunden’s writings, to follow.

Kant

As much as the world that Marx entered was a Hegelian world, so just as much was the world that Hegel, born 1770, a Kantian one. Kant was approaching fifty when Hegel was born. Kant was still going strong when Hegel published his first attempt to create a concrete and comprehensive philosophical system, the System of Ethical Life (1802).

Kant lived a long, respectable and orderly life in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the capital of the major German power of his time, Prussia. Kant said that things (phenomena) cannot be known. The “thing-in-itself” (ding-an-sich) is unknowable, according to Kant. Having evaded the basic question of philosophy in this way (i.e. the relationship of mind to matter), Kant freed himself to improvise an elaborate ad hoc bourgeois moral code, and he achieved an unparalleled authority in his lifetime.

Hegel said, in effect: Yes, things cannot altogether be known. But what we see is what we can know, and what we are able to see and to know is what we are, as humans. What we are able to see and to know is also something that develops. The way that it develops can be known, and is in fact dialectical.

In this way, Hegel rescued humanism from the arbitrariness, and the eclecticism, of the eighteenth-century encyclopaedists (e.g. Diderot), the romantics (e.g. Rousseau), the empiricists (e.g. Hume) and the so-called idealists such as Kant. We can argue about what Hegel meant by “Spirit” and “Idea” later, but what we can note here is the nature of the undoubted movement from Kant via Hegel to Marx.

Hegel restored the relationship of Subject and Object as it had been understood by Spinoza and the earlier rational humanists, but now rooted it in a systematic and especially a dynamic understanding, so that it could eventually become, in Marx’s hands, a full theory of change, and therefore a revolutionary theory.

The Master-Slave relationship

The second main downloadable linked text today is the famous Master-Slave passage from Hegel’s “Phenomenology”, which we must read, if only so as to discount it and put it aside.

We have already cautioned ourselves about this passage, which in the 20^th century, in the hands of Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir took on a populist life of its own as a reversion to anti-humanist static relationships and the vulgar reification of “The Other”, which what we have called “The Fake Other”.

For the purposes of this course we are from now on going to put this passage behind us, and proceed, as directed by Lenin, to comprehend Hegel’s “Logic” as best we can, the better to understand Marx’s “Capital”. In this matter we can usefully preview what Andy Blunden is going to have to say:

“Some interpretations of Hegel take as their point of departure the master-servant relation, §§178-196 of the Phenomenology. Very broadly speaking, those Hegelians who take this relation as their essential Hegel and those who take the Logic as their essential Hegel form two almost mutually exclusive schools of thought. What is special about the master-servant relation is that it is an apparently unmediated relation lacking any third point to mediate the relation. On the other hand, the Logic, along with the entirety of Hegel’s works, is all about mediation. It is really impossible to read the Logic from the standpoint of unmediated relations, and in fact, outside of that one passage of about 19 paragraphs, it is impossible to read any of Hegel’s work without making central the relation of mediation. And in any case, the master-servant relation is about how two subjects still somehow manage to mediate their relation even when there is no third party or common language or law to mediate the relation for them.”

The Master-Slave relation is an interesting metaphor and a small part of Hegel, but it is not the whole or principle Hegel.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Young Hegel excerpts, Phenomenology, Consciousness and Kant (1004 words)

The Master-Servant Relation from Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’ (3890 words)

Further reading:

The Young Hegel and what drove him, 2007, Andy Blunden (4159 words)

Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant, 2007, Andy Blunden (4889 words)

Introduction to ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, 1787, Immanuel Kant (6889 words)

Introduction to the System of Ethical Life

2011-09-19T09:47:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 2b

G W F Hegel, 1770-1831

Introduction to the System of Ethical Life

Here follows an approach to Hegel:

In the ancient world of the Greeks and the Romans, and in the Italian Renaissance, there was a Humanism that saw humanity as creating itself in the process of interaction with the external, physical world (in other words: through labour).

In philosophical terminology, this is the interaction between the human Subject and the Objective world. It generates the study of the relation between Mind and Matter, which has been the fundamental question of Philosophy in all eras.

Rational Humanism has always been challenged by more-or-less superstitious belief-systems. So, for example, the Humanists of the Italian Renaissance were overtaken by Platonists and Mannerists and the mystical Counter-Reformation.

The Italian Renaissance was followed by its mostly Protestant, North European equivalent, usually called “The Enlightenment”. Humanists of the Enlightenment such as Descartes and Spinoza were later contradicted by romantics such as Rousseau and Kant.

Hegel came into a Kantian world, wherein Kant was, in his own words, the “Critic of Pure Reason”. Kant wanted a way around pure reason. Kant wanted a license, or permission, to be irrational, or just lazy. Kant wanted to escape the most difficult questions. Kant wanted a short cut.

To recover philosophy from Kant’s cop-out, Hegel did not go back to a static vision of the Human Subject, whether individual or social, facing an objective wilderness that must be tamed.

Hegel shows more than that. Hegel shows that the Objective universe is really an observed universe, and is in that sense a Human creation. As much as it has objective existence separate from humans, yet what defines it is not that alone, but also the attention that it gets from humans. The Objective Universe is that-which-is-known, as well as that-which-is-other.

In the Introduction to “The System of Ethical Life” (download linked below) Hegel uses two terms in his first sentence, the meaning of which we need to note. “Intuition” means sense-perception. “Concept” means knowledge. “Perfect adequacy between intuition and concept” means that what is sensed is known. What is felt, is understood. When sense and understanding correspond, then we have what Hegel calls “The Idea”.

“But because they [Intuition and Concept] are then held apart from one another in an equation as its two sides, they are afflicted with a difference.” They must exchange their qualities. They do not remain separate. They develop,

“But what is truly the universal is intuition, while what is truly particular is the absolute concept. Thus each must be posited over against the other, now under the form of particularity, again under the form of universality; now intuition must be subsumed under the concept and again the concept under intuition.”

And so on. There is movement.

The word “subsumed” is typically Hegelian, and it carries over into Marxism.

We strive to understand these three paragraphs. What we can see is that Hegel is describing, not merely a static relation of Subject and Object, but a development of the relationship such that the opposing terms can change places, or one can be subsumed under the other, but their union, perfect or not, does not negate their identity. A simple relation is not perfect. There is more. The last line of the Introduction says:

“Or in this way the identity of the particular (i.e., the side onto which the intuition has now stepped) with the universal is determined as an imperfect unification or as a relation between the two.”

It may be better not to strain to understand such passages. It may be better to leave them open, so that meaning can accumulate around them as we look at more of Hegel’s output over the remaining eight parts of this course. As much as this is simply good study practice (e.g. as advocated by Tony Buzan), yet patiently deriving meaning from incomplete or "broken" data is also very Hegelian.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Introduction to The System of Ethical Life, 1802-3, Hegel (521 words)

Further reading:

Hegel Myths and Legends, Introduction, 1996, Stewart (6643 words)

The ‘Death of the Subject’ explained, 2002, C3, The Other, James Heartfield (3476 words)

The Fake “Other”

2011-09-17T09:02:00.002+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 2a

Edward Said, 1935-2003

The Fake “Other”

The fundamental question of philosophy is the relation between human and environment, or in other words, between mind and matter, or in philosophical terms, between Subject and Object.

Some philosophers, including the so-called “Post-Modernists” of our times, have considered that humans are products of circumstances, or effects of chemical processes, and do not have free will. In this view, human society is driven by forces outside its own consciousness, and beyond its control. These philosophers have consequently sometimes declared “The Death of the Subject”, as if to say that all ideas of free will, and of the conscious, self-propelling human development know as Humanism, are out of date now; and this view suits the bourgeois class at this time.

James Heartfield’s 2002 book “The ‘Death of the Subject’ explained” deals with many different anti-Humanist theories and concludes:

“Like Mark Twain’s death, reports of the ‘Death of the Subject’ are exaggerated. They have to be. The fulcrum point on which society turns is the freely willing subject. For all of the attempts to imagine a world without subjects, but only processes and objective forces, no developed society is conceivable without rationally choosing individuals at its core.”

In our study of G W F Hegel we will have to return to the question of the relation between the Subject and the Object, because it is central to Hegel’s contribution to philosophy in general and to Marxism in particular. Hegel took this relation and made it dialectical; in other words, he showed how its development happens.

But for the time being we are still concerned with what Hegel is not, and we will use Chapter 3 of Heartfield’s book (a downloadable file is linked below) to show why the by-now-commonplace concept of “The Other”, which appears in newspaper and magazine articles all the time, should not be attributed to Hegel, as much as Hegel does write about “the other” in his books.

Hegel’s other is another other, and this can be seen from Heartfield’s writing. Heartfield gives the 20^th-century history of this confusion, and he is not the only writer to have done so.

The vulgar concept of “The Other” is a fixed, alien and threatening presence, real or imagined. In this imaginary framework, individuals and societies are believed to have their behaviour affected by fear of “The Other”, perhaps unjustly. So for example, in the example of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” that Heartfield begins with, Said’s complaint is found to be that the Muslims are wrongly treated as “Other”, when they are not actually “Other”. The Muslims are unjustly “Other”-ised, according to Said.

From a philosophical point of view Said could have better held that there is no such thing as “The Other” in this fixed sense.

Heartfield then goes further back to show that the origin of the concept of “unbridgeable opposition between Self and Other” is Paris, France, in the 1930s and 1940s, in the persons of Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. Kojève imported and popularized a fake version of Hegel’s philosophy, and it took on a life of its own, even penetrating down to popular bourgeois journalism.

We will look at Hegel’s writing, including the famous Master-Slave dialectic, and we will see that, as with Ubuntu, the Hegelian Self and Other are not in “unbridgeable” opposition but are instead intimately linked, to the extent that they are the condition for each other’s development.

Please download and read this text via the link:

The ‘Death of the Subject’ explained, 2002, C3, The Other, James Heartfield (3476 words)

Further reading:

The System of Ethical Life, 1802-3, Hegel (521 words)

Hegel Myths and Legends, Introduction, 1996, Stewart (6643 words)

What Hegel is Not

2011-09-15T12:54:00.000+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 2

G W F Hegel, 1770-1831

What Hegel is Not

The 1996 Introduction to “The Hegel Myths and Legends” (download linked below) does not give a complete description of the downright deceptions that surround the work of Hegel, and it launches a few myths of its own.

But what this text can do is to give us an idea of how exceptionally plagued is the work of Hegel with misrepresentation, in a field, philosophy, where misrepresentation and vulgarisation is common. Jon Stewart writes categorically: “…the reputation of no other major philosopher has suffered such universal opprobrium on such a broad spectrum of issues as Hegel’s has.”

In this piece Stewart gives no indication that he is other than a bourgeois academic. For example, he is happy to relieve Hegel of the “wooden triad”, and then to hang the same “wooden triad” around Karl Marx’s neck. So, we are not reading Stewart for Marxism.

The “wooden triad” is the series “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” that is wrongly attributed to Hegel, according to Stewart. So why pass it on to Marx? Karl Marx was a brilliant student of philosophy in Berlin, beginning at the height of Hegel-mania just five years after the death of Hegel. We will not presume that Marx’s understanding of Hegel was any less than Stewart’s.

But Stewart is correct to point out “the extremely difficult nature of Hegel’s own texts.”

Stewart continues: “His complex philosophical system, couched in a stilted, abstract, and idiosyncratic language, has certainly been one of the major causes for the disparity of opinion. Where some see profundity and originality in the obscurity, others see simply gibberish and nonsense. The result of Hegel’s opaque writing style and neologistic vocabulary is that his works remain largely inaccessible to the nonspecialist.”

A neologism is a newly-invented word. An example from South Africa in 2010 would be “tenderpreneur”. Hegel invented words, and gave his own peculiar meaning to existing words.

Stewart’s round-up of information gives a good indication of the place of Hegel within bourgeois philosophy up to today. Hegel’s work was a catalyst, not just for the eruption of Marxism, but also of many strains of bourgeois philosophy. Stewart writes that Hegel’s philosophy [which] “marks the crossroads in the modern intellectual tradition, has given birth to virtually all of the major schools of contemporary thought: phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, critical theory, structuralism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, and so on.”

Between these strands there has been antagonism from time to time. One of the consequences has been the use of Hegel as a kind of whipping-boy. Stewart gives examples of this. A consequence of the calumnies that people have laid on Hegel in this way is that people come out of nowhere to attack Hegel, even today, because they are carrying grudges.

Therefore we will hold fast in this course to the Marxist understanding of Hegel, not only because we are Marxists, but also because Marxism will give us a steady vantage point and measuring-stick with which to size up Hegel. The warring factions of bourgeois philosophy will not provide such a steady standpoint or scale.

In the next item, we will examine the legacy of Kojève, Edward Said, and the case of “The Other”, and then we will take a first look at Hegel’s version of dialectics.

Please download and read this text via the link:

Hegel Myths and Legends, Introduction, 1996, Stewart (6643 words)

Further reading:

The ‘Death of the Subject’ explained, 2002, C3, The Other, James Heartfield (3476 words)

The System of Ethical Life, 1802-3, Hegel (521 words)

Hegel’s Introduction to the Encyclopaedia

2011-09-12T09:29:00.001+02:00

CU Course on Hegel, Part 1b

Hegel’s Introduction to the Encyclopaedia

Hegel’s “Encyclopaedia” is the collection of his printed lectures, begun relatively early in his career and enlarged and reorganised as time went on. This “Introduction to the Encyclopaedia” (download linked below) is dated 1830, one year before Hegel’s death.

The Contents of the Encyclopaedia is grouped into Preliminary - Logic - Nature – Spirit.

“Logic” in these Contents is divided into Logic Defined – Being – Essence – Notion.

There is a list of Hegel’s Works on Marxists Internet Archive. Clearly Hegel’s works can be organised and presented in different ways. Let us not be in too much haste to grab at it all.

Hegel himself is ultra-cautious. His Introduction to the Encyclopaedia begins with repeated strictures against people taking anything for granted. Hegel does not want people to try looking for short cuts. He does not want to be misunderstood, or misrepresented. Unfortunately, Hegel turns out (mercifully to him, after his death) to have become one of the most badly misrepresented philosophers in history. We will look at some of the false “Myths and Legends” that surround Hegel’s work like devilish sentries in the next part of this course.

In the last passage of the “Introduction to the Encyclopaedia”, §18, Hegel says:

“As the whole science, and only the whole, can exhibit what the Idea or system of reason is, it is impossible to give in a preliminary way a general impression of a philosophy. Nor can a division of philosophy into its parts be intelligible, except in connection with the system. A preliminary division, like the limited conception from which it comes, can only be an anticipation.”

In the beginning, §1, he writes:

“We can assume nothing and assert nothing dogmatically; nor can we accept the assertions and assumptions of others. And yet we must make a beginning: and a beginning, as primary and underived, makes an assumption, or rather is an assumption. It seems as if it were impossible to make a beginning at all.”

In §16, Hegel even manages to discount the entire Encyclopaedia, vast as it is, thus:

“In the form of an Encyclopaedia, the science has no room for a detailed exposition of particulars, and must be limited to setting forth the commencement of the special sciences and the notions of cardinal importance in them.”

All of this is to say: Wait. I will show you. Don’t even anticipate. Be patient.

Of course, this is at the very moment when he is presenting an introduction to a collection of his lectures, which any student is bound to take as a summary of his work. Students should and must seek out such summaries, lists of contents and short versions, so that they can begin to conceive of the outline of the whole work, and get some idea of what its conclusions are intended to be.

But indeed, Hegel is a good example of one whose message is new and different and which must therefore struggle uphill against peoples’ desire to be told only what they already know, and against their resentment at being pushed towards relinquishing their long-held prejudices. Hegel’s weariness of a lifetime of uphill struggle comes through when he writes, at the end of §3:

“One consequence of this weakness is that authors, preachers, and orators are found most intelligible, when they speak of things which their readers or hearers already know by rote - things which the latter are conversant with, and which require no explanation.”

In §6, Hegel discusses, from this point of view, one of his most famous sayings, often written (in English): “All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational”. This is a useful first mention of this very characteristic Hegelism from Hegel’s own pen, and set within some pages of his prose which are not impossible to read.

Hence, this Introduction will serve well enough as our first taste of Hegel’s own writing.

Image: Hegel and his students

Please download and read this text via the link:

Introduction to the Encyclopaedia, Hegel, 1830 (7998 words)

Further reading:

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Intro, 1844, Karl Marx (5606 words)

Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General, 1844, Karl Marx (8613 words)

Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 1 - Hegel, 1886, Engels (3649 words)

Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 4, Marx, 1886, Engels (6968 words)