Dialectics and Revolution, Now

By Savas Michael-Matsas

1. "Why Dialectics? Why Now?"

Recently reformulated by Bertell Ollman (1), in this direct and urgent manner, the question about the actuality of dialectics includes the paradox of its terms and their mutual relationship - “dialectics� and “now�:

- How dialectics stands in front of the challenge of “Now�, of the present moment in historical time.

-How the “Now-moment� of history is viewed and challenged by dialectics.

It is well known that dialectics, either Hegel’s, “the basis of all dialectic� according to Marx (2) or, above all, Marxist materialist dialectics has supposedly fallen into disrepute, following the (mis)use of dialectical materialism as “state philosophy� (the accurate description is by Georges Labica) by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet state and of other “Soviet� type states in Eastern Europe, it is often argued that dialectics has been buried, once and for all, under their ruins.

It would be a fatal error, however, to equate communist emancipation with Stalinism and materialist dialectics with “dia-mat�, this monstrosity that was used as an apologetic defense of bureaucratic rule, a technology of pseudo-knowledge adapted to a technology of power. What relation can possibly exist between dialectics as “the study of contradictions in the essence of the objects� (3), and the empiricist methods of a bureaucracy frightened by the very idea of contradictions and desperately trying to escape from their influence by mismanaging them? This is the same bureaucracy, which, while using dia-mat as state philosophy, found it necessary to abolish the law of negation of negation by Stalin’s diktat!

The question of whether or not dialectics has survived the historical tragedy of the October Revolution cannot be judged by its false identification with its antithesis, the bureaucratic construct of dia-mat. In a different historical framework, Marx had already made a sharp distinction between mystified, apologetic forms of the dialectic and its rational, critical and revolutionary form: “In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors…� (4) Mystified “dialectical materialism� as ideological transfiguration and glorification of the bureaucratic state of things in so-called “actually existing Socialism� is definitely dead and buried. But materialist dialectics still remains a living scandal and abomination to the bourgeoisie and its ideological defenders. The judgement of Now, of the present as History, should not be confounded with the bourgeois prejudices prevailing now and spread globally by the assumed “victors� of the Cold War.

A method which is critical and unapologetic towards the existing state of things has not only to be self-critical but also critical of the concept of time, particularly of the concept of “now� itself. When we pose the question “Why dialectics? Why now?�, we should not forget that just as dia-mat is not dialectics, so the “Now� of the question is not the now considered as a point in an infinite series on a line of gradual progress of “empty, homogeneous, historical time�. As Walter Benjamin rightly warned: “In the now the truth is charged with time to the point of explosion.� (5) The Now-Moment, Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, is not an indifferent point on a homogeneous continuum but the edge of a heterogeneous time, the point of the rupture of the continuity, the opening of History to possibility, what the ancient Greeks called Kairos/Και�ός, the right Moment, �υν Και�ός, the Now Moment, or Και�ο� ακμή, the edge of Time as Moment.

Time is central in all considerations of dialectics. Bertell Ollman, in asking the question “Why dialectics? Why now?�, has himself suggested an answer by exploring the future (communism) as the potential within the (capitalist) present.

Following the path opened by Benjamin, these temporal relations can be approached by the formation of a new constellation of dialectics with Now, where, (to continue in Benjaminian language), dialectics “flashes its lightning image in the Now of its recognizability." (6). In other words, the dialectic has to be searched in the Now of the present world in crisis as the moment of its recognizability at the edge of time. And vice versa: the Now Moment has to be grasped by a dialectic that challenges it by discovering its inner contradictions that drive it to its negation.

2. Crisis as a school of dialectics

In the famous 1873 “Afterword� in the second German edition of “Capital�, Marx sums up, in a way that is superb in its density, the main elements of the dialectical method that made it a scandal and an abomination to the ruling class and the ruling ideology. Inseparably connected with the materialist reversal and re-working of Hegel’s Logic, Marxist dialectics “includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing states of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up�, discovering the ‘work of the negative’ within the positive, the “contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society.� On this basis it grasps the link between movement and change, transition, for it regards “every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature no less than its momentary existence�. Last but not least, “it lets nothing impose upon it�, rejecting all pre-established dogmas and all intrusions external to the process of discovering the truth. Composing all previously mentioned elements into one integral whole, materialist dialectics “is in its essence critical and revolutionary� (7)

It is understandable how in this post-1989/91 age of “obscure disaster� (Alain Badiou) (8), our rulers’ “common sense� should feel such outrage confronted with such dialectical reasoning. Amidst the celebrations for the “final and complete triumph� of liberal capitalism and for the “end� of everything else - end of communism, end of revolution, end of classes and of class struggle, end of ideologies, of philosophy, of art, of History etc - to demand the “comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things� in the post-Cold War chaotic world, to explore the “work of the negative within the positive� is indeed “scandalous� in their eyes. What it demands is to grasp the dialectic of negativity of globalized capitalism, its “momentary existence� and, above all, its “transient nature�, letting nothing impose itself upon the theoretical and practical struggle for emancipation, no prevailing conservative, philistine prejudice from the Right nor any organized skepticism of a defeatist Left, defying irreconcilably the status quo by a critical and revolutionary approach to the Now moment. Above all, it strives to grasp the present as an edge of time and an opening of history, a not yet unexplored landscape of possibilities, a new unknown horizon for a historical praxis to change the world.

In the conclusion of his summary on method in the 1873 “Afterword�, Marx warned all his enemies about the lesson that the dialectic would teach an approaching capitalist crisis. “By the universality of its theater and the intensity of its action [the crisis] will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German Empire.� (9).

Empires, their rulers and their docile servants, are bad students. Usually they learn nothing and forgive nothing. This applies both to the old, “holy� Prusso-German Empire as well as to the new, unholy North American global Empire about which the neoconservatives in Washington fantasize. Even in the hour of doom, when the proverbial writing is on the wall, the new Balthasars and their imperial guards are unable to understand the written rules or the logic of their own doom, namely dialectics.

No one can doubt that the lesson, or rather the “revenge� of dialectics that Marx predicted is already upon us: the capitalist crisis is here, the universality of its theater covers the entire planet, and the intensity of its action is already strongly felt both in the metropolitan centers and in the countries of the periphery. The transformation into the opposite is taught not by textbooks but by the devastating experiences of the last fifteen years.

The initial euphoria and the triumphalism of the capitalists following the implosion of the Soviet Union have rapidly been dissipated. The pipedream of the establishment of an eternal and peaceful kingdom of liberal capitalism on earth was rapidly transformed into a nightmare of perpetual wars, from the Balkans to Central Asia, from the dismemberment of former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan and the Iraqi inferno. The declarations about universal peace after the end of Cold War were replaced by the terror of a permanent “war on terror� where, to paraphrase Brecht, peace itself is reduced into an unconventional ‘extreme case’ of war. The rhetoric on human rights has become transformed into the horror of Abou Ghraib and Guantanamo. “Exporting democracy� has become the synonym of brutal occupation abroad and of importing police state techniques at home, abolishing the State of Law by law, establishing in the metropolitan centers in Europe and the US a “State of Emergency�, which as Benjamin had predicted, is transformed from an exception into a rule. Civil peace has been transformed into civil strife with continuous attacks on civil liberties and preparatory steps for the possibility of civil war clashes in big urban centers.

The material basis for all these violent manifestations is the crisis of capitalist globalization itself. “Globalization� as the dominant myth of the last two decades was presented as the “final and complete victory� of capitalism on the planet, as the free movement of capital beyond the recurrent threat of systemic crises, but also as the driving force for enrichment for all, both in the countries of the privileged center and of the poor periphery.

Obviously, over the last two decades, finance globalization has become the driving force for exactly the opposite: for mass impoverishment on an unprecedented scale, for the decline of ‘Third World’ continents like Africa into the limbo of a ‘Fourth World’, and for the creation of vast ‘Third World’ zones inside the ‘First World’ metropolitan centers. There are concentrated masses of working poor, of “new poor�, of wageless workers, of new and old kinds of socially excluded, as well as the victims of gigantic waves of mass immigration that “globalization� has driven from the social catastrophe of their home countries in the South and East to the social misery and over-exploitation in the West and North. Capitalist globalization has become the most powerful driving force for global pauperization, and for the over-concentration of the wealth of the world in the hands of a tiny minority of finance speculators and corporate brigands. The monstrous exacerbation of social inequalities on a global scale, this dialectic of poverty is the indictment for the poverty of all anti-dialectics.

Finance globalization was itself a product of crisis and a generator of an even greater one. The liberalization of the movement of capital and the globalization of financial markets emerged as a temporary way out of the unprecedented crisis of over-production of capital, once the equally unprecedented post-World War II capitalist expansion had reached its limits in the early 1970s. The global domination of this “consummate automatic fetish, the self expanding value, the money-making money […] a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice�, as Marx prophetically predicted (10), produced across the length and breadth of the globe the most wild fetishist illusions in capitalist history. The implications on mass consciousness and ideology should not be underestimated. Among other things, this is the powerful source of anti-dialectics and of the idolatry of the simulacrum in our days.

But the flight to the international skies of speculation, the tremendous expansion of fictitious capital as a way out of stagnating surplus capital, in the long run exacerbated the crisis of over-accumulation. Globalization of capital has reproduced on an extended scale, and globalized all its contradictions, bringing them to the point of explosion. A series of financial shocks followed by social upheavals erupted in the late 1990s. From the international crash of 1997 centered in the Asian–Pacific region to Russia’s default in 1998, to the burst of the financial bubble of the “dot.com� economy on Wall Street in 2000, and from the Enron and Parmalat scandals to the state bankruptcy of countries once lauded as “success stories� of so-called neo-liberalism (like Argentina in 2001), the universality of the theater and the intensity of action of the world systemic crisis of capitalism has become clear for all to see. Furthermore, these financial earthquakes were internally related to a generalized destabilization that produces internationally social unrest and popular revolts, anti-imperialist mobilizations and class battles with revolutionary potential, from Latin America (Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela) to Europe (the mass social movements culminating in the NO vote to the EU constitution in France) and the Middle East (the Palestinian Intifada, the Iraqi Resistance). The emergence of the powerful movement against capitalist globalization in the battles that took place in Seattle and Genoa, as well as the biggest anti-war demonstrations in history in February 2003 on the eve of the imperialist war against Iraq, are unmistakably the manifestation of the social forces unleashed in the battlefield by the crisis of capitalist globalization.

The world crisis, as Marx explained “must be regarded as the concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.� (11). The Logic of contradictions in their totality is precisely dialectics.

Lenin made the remark that “if Marx did not leave behind him a ‘Logic’ (with a capital letter), he did leave the logic of “Capital� and this ought to be utilized to the full in this question.� (12). The study of this dialectical logic is now more than ever urgent: contradictions exploding into crisis, the transformation into their opposite of all the features of a previous period, a post-Cold War world in an extremely painful transition… the list could go on. Avoiding dialectics now is an expression of the fear of contradictions, a turning away from the demands of an epoch of transition, a refusal to transform the present hell into its opposite; one which clings to the forlorn hope of an afterlife of a liberal parliamentary capitalism with a “human face�.

3. Under the star of a catastrophe

An epochal turn, marked by historical upheavals, wars, revolutionary upsurges of the oppressed masses or retreats and counter-revolutions, is always the moment of recognizability of dialectics. It is the moment making possible the recognition of a void in History – the Real in Lacanian terms; an apparent impossibility demanding and preventing its penetration by cognition. On the border of this void in History dialectics can be traced, leaning and hovering over the void like the Rouah Elohim (the Spirit of God) over the waters of the abyss in the beginning of the Torah. Out of this encounter with impossibility, in a period of historical transition and of crisis of transition, arises the need to form a new constellation between dialectics and the demands of the Now-Moment.

Dialectics, as Hölderlin wrote in 1805, (in a very dense poetical/philosophical commentary on Pindar’s fragments that he had translated anew, closely interconnected with his profoundly dialectical Remarks on Sophocles’s tragedies Oedipus and Antigone (13), is “the art of being sure in one’s understanding in the midst of positive errors.� (14). At crucial turning points, when everything appears estranged, alien (Fremde), an intense training in dialectics is particularly demanded: “If our understanding has been exercised intensely, it retains its strength, even in diffusion; inasmuch as it easily recognizes the Alien (das Fremde) by its own honed sharpness, and so is not easily confused in unknown situations" (15).

The German poet, an unrepentant Jacobin writing in post-Thermidorian conditions of bourgeois reaction, “in lean years� [in dürftiger Zeit] (16) no less obscure than ours, turns to “the art of remaining faithful in changing circumstances.�. He remains faithful to the Revolution in permanence by an “Unfaithfulness of Wisdom� [Untreue der Weisheit], by refusing any fixation to an unchangeable Same, abstract Identity, devoting himself into a new re-working of the texts by Pindar and Sophocles, and in this way establishes a new understanding of the dialectic of modernity in relation to antiquity.

Dialectics in modern times always makes its appearance under the star of a catastrophe, when the old world is passing away and the new one has not yet fully arisen.

1789 produced the dialectical insights of Hölderlin and Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic. The European crisis and Revolution of 1848 became the first arena for Marxian dialectics. 1905 and the first Russian Revolution was the birth place for the dialectical theory of Permanent Revolution by Trotsky. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the collapse of the Second International led Lenin to turn to Hegel’s Logic and to the entire dialectical tradition starting from the ancient Greeks as a necessary theoretical preparation for the first victorious proletarian revolution in 1917. The epic tragedy of the German Revolution in 1919 gave the impulse to the great dialectical contributions by Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. The 1933 catastrophe, with the victory of Hitler’s Nazism and the political death of a bureaucratized Comintern, pushed Trotsky to follow Lenin’s path in a fresh study of Hegel’s Logic. Benjamin’s 1940 Theses on the Concept of History, a major attack on the anti-dialectical gradualist conceptions of social democracy and Stalinism that led to disastrous policies, were drafted when “it was midnight in the century�…

And Now? The question remains open.

4. Metamorphosis

A dialectical materialist, Benjamin stresses, “cannot consider history otherwise than as a constellation of dangers…� (17). And as a materialist, he or she recognizes that real dangers cannot be confronted solely with theoretical explanations or rationalizations but by a historical praxis of transformation of the existing conditions. Materialist dialectics is a theory permanently revolutionizing itself, as well as a method to revolutionize the historical practice of the revolutionary class striving to transform social conditions; it is a critical-revolutionary practical activity, mobilizing the oppressed in a real, “actual state of emergency� (Benjamin, Thesis VIII) against the “fictitious state of emergency� declared by the ruling classes and their terrorist “Patriot� Acts.

In a founding Ur-Text of Marxism, Marx’s 1844 Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, this dialectical method of revolutionary mobilization is presented in a condensed form into a famous sentence: “These petrified relations must be made to dance by singing to them their own melody!�[man muss diese versteinerten Verhaeltnisse dadurch zum Tanzen zwingen, dass man ihnen ihre eigne Melodie vorsingt!] (18).

Bertell Ollman has appropriately chosen this phrase as a guiding principle and as a motto to his book entitled, precisely, Dance of the Dialectic.

Three elements are included in the Marxian sentence summarizing the entire dialectical project: a) a critical recognition (discovery) of the petrifaction of historical social relations; b) the discovery and artful “singing of their own melody�; c) the active transformation of their present petrifaction into its opposite, a rhythmical movement, a dance of liberation.

Let us look more closely at these three elements of historical materialist dialectics.

a. Petrifaction

The first step for a critical study of social relations is the recognition of their historicity, their conditional, transient nature; that is to say, the study of their transition, the discovery of their actual historical character, and the particular moment of their life-process. “Petrifaction� refers to the epoch of historical decline of a social formation, when it becomes an anachronism in relation to the demands of the maturing potential of social development. In other words, in this metaphor there is contained in nucleus the historical materialist conception that Marx develops later on into the dynamics of the social productive relations and social productive forces of human labour as the driving force of historical change and of revolution in class society.

Marx’s metaphor was referring in the first place to Germany on the eve of the 1848 Revolution, an Ancien Régime fossilised in modern capitalist society. Later the metaphor was extended to include all declining social formations, repeating as a farce what primarily was a tragedy in history.

Contemporary, “globalized� capitalism, despite all its pretensions to be an ultra-modernizing force, is in reality “our� Ancien Régime. Modernity was born under capitalist conditions but is not identical to them. There is not just unity but also a growing contradiction between modernity and capitalism that apologists always try to forget or hide, a contradiction which globalization led to its extreme exacerbation. Modernity is the tendency to universality, the ceaseless transgression of all limits, a limitless force generated by capital as self-expanding value, but which comes into a sharper and sharper conflict with the limits inherent to the capital relation. As Marx emphasized in Grundrisse: "…the universality for which capital ceaselessly strives , comes up against barriers in capital’s own nature, barriers which at a certain stage of its development will allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier in the way of this tendency and will therefore drive forward its transcendence through itself.� (19). The world socialist revolution is precisely the emancipation of this universalizing tendency of modernity, suffocating now in the petrified conditions of a capitalism in decline and crisis, by the self-emancipation of a universal class, the modern proletariat.

Of course, there might possibly be the objection that contemporary finance globalization is characterized by an extreme “fluidity� rather than a motionless petrifaction. But this fluidity, the extreme velocity of finance transactions on a planetary scale, represents the free movement of abstract capital (as Hilferding correctly called finance capital); capital abstracted from the conditions of its origins in the production of surplus value. Finance globalization is the apotheosis of a social and economic system whose regulative principle is abstract labour, the exchange of “masses of congealed labour time� (20), frozen time or, if you like, of petrified time. World capitalism, a society where “the individuals are now ruled by abstractions� (21), as Marx pointedly wrote, despite or rather because of the extreme mobility of these abstractions in today’s conditions, clashes sooner rather than later with its own barriers, its own rigidities, and as every financial shock shows, with its own petrifaction. To repeat, then: it is now our Ancien Régime.

The petrifaction of relations of social life under capitalism means their reification, a reversal of life relations, a specific form of alienation of social life where, as is explained in the famous chapter on ‘Fetishism’ in Capital I, material relations between persons assume the fantastic form of social relations between things (22).

In Marx’s theory of alienation and fetishism can be found not only the continuity but above all the discontinuity of his method with that of Hegel. While for the idealist Hegel alienation is the same as objectification of the Idea and Nature is described as “petrified Intelligence�, for the materialist Marx alienation is historically based on the division of labour; thus it is not always identical with the objectification of the social powers of human beings and, under capitalism, it assumes the peculiar form of a reification/petrifaction of social relations, dominating the material conditions of life.

Life itself with all its various demands is subjugated to the demands of capital accumulation, giving to bourgeois power its specific character that Michel Foucault described as “bio-power�. Petrified human life suffers, and in every attempt to escape pain its petrifaction becomes more overwhelming. It looks like Prometheus as he is presented in the modern legend by Franz Kafka who, bound on the rock and trying to escape the clawing beaks of the eagle, “pressed himself in his agony deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it� (23).

Petrified life, however, remains life. Petrifaction might be putrefaction but as Marx explained in the French edition of Capital, “in history, as in nature, putrefaction is the laboratory of life" (24). It produces, by self negation of the old, the elements of the new. Capital’s globalization does not only represent its domination on a world scale but also, as Paresh Chattopadhyay has shown in an excellent paper (25), drives this “dialectic of negativity� to its extreme, to the point of explosion and revolutionary transformation. Even in his miserable petrified condition, Prometheus remains alive, defying all the oppressors and resisting tyranny, expecting to hear the song of freedom, his own Promethean melody sung by an Other, the liberating forces.

B. The Song of Dialectics

How is a transition possible from petrified social conditions to a dance of life? This extraordinary event of metamorphosis cannot be arbitrary or “organic�, nor can it be gradual, without a revolutionary break in continuity. Marx draws a clear demarcation both from political subjectivism as well as from the objectivism of reformism. First, he separates himself resolutely from reformism of all kinds, old and new: “…within bourgeois society, based as it is upon exchange value, [emphasis in the original] relationships of exchange and production are generated which are just so many mines to blow it to pieces. (A multitude of antagonistic forms of the social entity, whose antagonism, however, can never be exploded by a quiet metamorphosis…)� [emphasis added] (26).

Capitalism as a minefield of contradictions will not explode automatically by itself, nor will it change peacefully in “a quiet metamorphosis�. Capitalist globalization and its militarization have transformed the entire planet into a most dangerous minefield. Only those who try to reform, to “humanize�, globalized capitalist inhumanity can have the reactionary pipedream of “a quiet metamorphosis� of the present inferno. The systemic “mines�, which are now blindly exploding all over the world through wars, mass impoverishment and unspeakable forms of barbarism, have to be activated by a revolutionary agency, the mobilization of the oppressed masses and their organized vanguard, in order “to blow it to pieces�.

This mass activity should not be blind or arbitrary. It has to be “the conscious expression of the unconscious process� of history, of the demands of historical development. Marx warns against any manifestation of historical idealism and blind voluntarism: “…if we did not find latent in society as it is, the material conditions of production and the corresponding relationships of exchange for a classless society, all attempts to explode it would be quixotic" (27).

In the exploration and discovery of these material conditions, the critique of the “anatomy of civil society�, of political economy, the method presented in the Logic of Marx’s Capital is vital; we have not yet finished re-reading the magnum opus. Through this critical exploration we have to discover the specific logic of contradictions moving a specific type of society, the peculiar “melody� inherent in the petrified social relations that we have to sing in order to make them dance. Hölderlin, again translating and commenting on Pindar’s fragment 140b, speaks in Von Delphin (28) [Of the Dolphin] about this melody, which is able to move and make appear forms hidden in the depths of nature and history:

Which in the waveless sea’s deep of flutes. The song delightfully has moved

This is the Song of Nature itself, der Gesang der Natur which, when it is sung “ in such a time each being utters its tone, its faithfulness, the way in which it relates itself within itself.� (29). What is essentially hidden beneath the surface appears in response to the song of its own melody. Materialist dialectics is the ability to find the specific logic of the specific object, the art to sing the song of nature, the real das Lied von der Erde. Dialectics, this “most revolutionary element in Marxism�, as Lenin put it, is also its Orphic principle. Thus, the question now becomes: how can the specific melody be discovered and then properly sung?

The melody, the specific logic, the inner connectedness of contradictions that moves an entity has to be abstracted from it, discovered within it, and not imposed upon it. Dialectics is not a pragmatic technology of knowledge, a set of rules to be applied from without on the object of cognition. The melody has to be found and learned in its inner source. How? Following explicitly Heraclitus, Lenin indicates the path: “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts […] is the essence (one of the “essentials�, one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics […] the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society.� (30). These are the “mines to be exploded� that the “destructive character" (31) of Marxism has to find. Or, to use our other metaphor, or the particular “tone�, the “melody� within the petrified conditions to make them dance, according to its Orphic principle.

It is down the same Heraclitean path that Hölderlin proceeds in his reading, translation and commentary of Pindar’s fragment 213 under the title Das Unendliche [The Infinite] (32). The poet poses the most acute political question of his (and our) times: when real human beings are involved in building on earth the City (or Plato’s Utopian Republic, the Jacobin revolutionary Republic, or a Workers Republic in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat), how are Justice and the cunning of political Reason, its stratagems and deceptive tactics related?

First of all, to avoid ideological distortions and sheer apologetics of the status quo, a critical recognition (discovery) is needed of the contradiction in the transition, which indeed exists between justice in a realm of freedom and current political reason in the Revolution itself. Hölderlin stresses that “the wavering and the conflict between justice and the cunning are resolved only in a relation of interpenetration [in durchgängiger Beziehung]�, of transition and transformation from one to another, to its opposite.

It is this relation of interpenetration between the historical goal and the actual movement which negates the existing state of things that is rejected both by reformists and abstract Utopians. From Bernstein to the present day fetishists of the “social movements per se�, the goal of a universal human emancipation in a classless society is liquidated into the everyday movement; on the other hand all kinds of abstentionists and sectarians isolate socialism from the actual class struggle.

To discover this vital relation of interpenetration as connection (Zusammenhang) between justice and political reason, the connection, Hölderlin writes, has not to be ascribed to either of them but to a third by which they are connected infinitely (exactly), for that I have a divided mind (33). With the final sentence the German poet interprets the last verse in Pindar’s fragment 213:

Δίχα μοι νόος ατ�έκειαν ειπείν Divided I have a mind to say it exactly

The Pindarian verse is the polar opposite of the conclusion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: you can say exactly the connection only by a mind divided in contradictory parts. An inner division in cognition - its movement through contradiction, its dialectical character - is necessary so as to capture the inner splitting of a single whole in mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies.

The relation of interpenetration always involves the interpenetration of the object and the subject of cognition through practice. It is the union of dialectical cognition with revolutionary practice. From this standpoint, we have to pay attention to the word ‘atrekeia’/ατ�έκεια used deliberately by Pindar. Hölderlin translates it as genau (exactly) and interprets it as “infinitely�. Ατ�έκεια in ancient Greek in general, and in Pindarian poetry in particular, however, has a dual meaning: it means “unswerving accuracy�, exactitude; but at the same time it is also the name of the goddess of Justice, particularly venerated by the Locrians in the West (34), in Magna Grecia (South Italy) where according to a tradition the first written Legal Code was established. In this sense, Pindar’s verse in fragment 213 speaks both about the accurate statement made by a dialectical mind as well as about Justice itself. Dialectical cognition and justice in social relations exist in a relation of interpenetration. It is not accidental that Hölderlin in his commentary on Pindar’s famous fragment 169 on the law (which has been revived today by Giorgio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer) stresses that “the strictly mediate is the law (35). Mediation as universal law, “king of all both mortals and immortals�, has to be grasped, according to Hölderlin, both as “the highest ground for cognition� as well as what stabilizes “those living conditions in which, in time, a people has encountered itself and encounters itself" (36), in other words, as a relation of interpenetration of cognition with the material conditions of life. The finding of the “third�, the mediatory force connecting and driving beyond the polar opposites is now more than ever the central problem of dialectics.

Hölderlin grasps mediation in a very different, actually opposite way from his old friend in Tübingen, Hegel. It is on this implicit and explicit critical terrain of the Hegelian conception of mediation and of negation of negation that Marx likewise meets Hölderlin. Mediation, in Hölderlin, is not reconciliation but involves a qualitative rupture, a “caesura�, an “infinite separation�, as he writes in his “Remarks on Oedipus and Antigone" (37); it is a revolutionary upturn (Umkehr). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (38) rightly reminds us that in Hölderlin’s historical milieu the word “Umkehr� referred clearly to the Revolution that had just taken place in France. Revolution itself is the mediation, the Third force connecting the cunning of political Reason, strategy and tactics of the revolutionary movement with Justice in an emancipated society.

Revolution is an ongoing process, full of contradictions and zig zags, leaps forward and regressions, encompassing an entire historical epoch of transition. The emancipatory struggle has neither to wait indefinitely in the antechamber of revolution with the pretext of the ‘immaturity’ of the current conditions, nor does it have to be dissipated into a chase for the gradual perfectibility of these conditions; instead it has to actualize the potential of the situation for revolutionary purposes, from the standpoint of the final victory. For the Song of Dialectics has always had as its refrain the melody of the Internationale: “C’est la lutte finale!�

c. The Dance of Revolution

The most crucial element in a revolution, as it is well known, is time itself. As Trotsky stressed, a dialectical analysis is always “the highest qualitative and quantitative estimation of the objective reality from the standpoint of revolutionary action" (39). In that concrete analysis of the concrete situation, the correct estimation of the right moment of time, of Kairos/Και�ός is central. As another Pindarian verse says

νοήσαι δε και�ός ά�ιστοs

to seize the right moment is the best aim of cognition (40).

But this recognition of ‘Kairos’ does not exhaust the whole task: it is crucial to “make the petrified conditions dance by singing to them their own melody�, but the dance itself of the specific conditions in every country has to follow what the great Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Máriategui calls “the rhythm of world history�, determined today by the world character of the economy, of politics, of culture and consequently by the world character of the revolution itself.

This world character did not disappear with the lowering of the red flag in the Kremlin; on the contrary. The world historical circle opened in 1917 has not been closed as general opinion, i.e. bourgeois ideology, claims. All the tumultuous developments of the last 15 years, the non-stop wars from the Balkans to Iraq and Central Asia, the new rounds of the so-called “orange (counter) revolutions� in the former Soviet space surrounding the Russian heartland etc., demonstrate that a confrontation is continuing on a world scale to determine the fate of the heritage of the last century of wars and revolutions, as well as the fate of the world in the 21st century. The dance of the revolution is in front, not behind us.

Máriategui stressed the over-determination of national circumstances by the rhythm of world history in an effort to elaborate the Program of the revolutionary Party in his days. The question of “dialectics and revolution now� cannot avoid the crucial question of revolutionary organization. Lenin’s question, “What is to be done?�, and the entire problematic on revolutionary organization cannot be bypassed. It has to be dialectically re-elaborated on the basis of the historical experience of our epoch, including the tragic experience of Stalinism and the struggle against it.

Figures like St Paul or St Francis of Assisi, for whom special attention has recently been paid by a number of radical thinkers, could perhaps be remote precursors but in no way a substitute or a model for the revolutionary militant in the post-Bolshevik, post-1917 period.

In an epoch of advanced capitalist globalization in insoluble crisis, we have to re-invent, but without any historical amnesia, the International as an artful Meistersinger of the Song of Dialectics and as the vanguard in the Dance of the World Revolution - the fiery Carmagnole of the 21st century.

August 2005

NOTES

1. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic-Steps in Marx’s Method University of Illinois Press 2003 pp.155-168

2. Letter of Marx to Kugelman of March 6, 1868 in Letters on “Capital� by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, New Park Publications 1983 p.166

3. V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, Completed Works vol. 38 Progress-Moscow 1981 p.252

4. K. Marx, Afterword in the Second German Edition 1873, Capital vol. I, Progress- Moscow 1986 p.29

5. Walter Benjamin, Paris Capitale du XIXe siècle -Le Livre des Passages Cerf 1989 p.479

6. W. Benjamin op. cit

7. K. Marx op. cit. Emphasis added

8. Alain Badiou, D’un désastre obscur, Edition de l’Aube 1991

9. K. Marx op. cit

10. K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Part III, Progress-Moscow 1975 pp.455-456

11. K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Part II, Progress-Moscow 1975 p.510. Emphasis added

12. V. I. Lenin op. cit p. 317

13. Hölderlin, Remarques sur Œdipe- Remarques sur Antigone, French translation by F. Fédier, 10/18 Paris 1965

14. Friedrich Hölderlin, Pindar Fragments and Commentary (1805) in Poems and fragments translated by Michael Hamburger, Anvil 2004 pp. 704-705

15. Op. cit. the translation is slightly altered

16. F. Hölderlin, Brod und Wein [Bread and Wine] in Poems and fragments op.cit. pp. 326-327

17. W. Benjamin, op. cit. p. 487

18. K. Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung in Marx- Engels Werke, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1976 p. 381

19. K. Marx, Grundrisse, in Marx- Engels Collected Works, Progress-Moscow 1986 vol.28 Marx:1857-1861 p. 337

20. K. Marx, Capital I op. cit. p.47

21. K. Marx, Grundrisse op. cit. p. 101

22. K. Marx, Capital I, op. cit. p. 78

23. Franz Kafka, Prometheus in The Great Wall of China and Other Short Stories Pocket Penguin 2005 p. 49

24. K. Marx, Le Capital Vol 1(1875) in Oeuvres: Economie 1 Pléiade

25. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx on Capital’s Globalization - The Dialectic of Negativity, Economic and political Weekly vol. XXXVII, No 19 May 11, 2002

26. K. Marx , Grundrisse, op. cit. pp.96-97

27. op. cit p. 97

28. F. Hölderlin, Pindar Fragments and Commentary(1805) op. cit p.711

29. Op. cit translation slightly altered

30. V. I. Lenin, op. cit. p. 357-358. Emphasis in the original

31. See W. Benjamin, The Destructive Character in Selected Writings vol. 2 1917-1934, Harvard 1999, pp. 541-542. 32. Hölderlin op. cit. pp. 716-717

33. Op. cit. Translation slightly altered

34. Pindar, Olympian Ode X, 13

35. Hölderlin, op. cit. p.713

36. op.cit p.713. Translation slightly altered

37. Hölderlin, Remarques…op. cit. p.62-63

38. See Hölderlin Œdipe le Tyran de Sophocle, translated from the German by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Christian Bourgois 1998 Notes p. 246

39. L. Trotsky, The New Course, Allagi- Greek edition by the EEK (Workers Revolutionary Party) 1980 p.58

40. Pindar, Olympian Ode XIII, 48