The dialectic refers to a process in which objects of interest (e.g., “capital,” “society”) are understood as developing through contradictions structured in relationship to an essence, a force which both sets things as they are (and appear) and yet propels them into a beyond (as they could be). Marx (1977, 103) wrote that he used a dialectical method he had extracted (removed from its “mystical [idealist] shell”) from Hegel. Arguing the impossibility of divorcing Hegel’s dialectic from his idealism, Althusser (1970) proposed overdetermination as an alternative materialist framework.
We begin with Hegel’s dialectic before turning to Marx’s use of it and then to overdetermination as it was proposed by Althusser and developed further, later, by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff.
Before Hegel, as the idea of “progress” (“science,” “history”) was taking shape, Kant had posed a formidable challenge to any certainty regarding this progress. Considering “knowing” and “being” separate domains of existence, Kant had philosophically produced an unbridgeable gap between them: the unknowability of the “thing in itself.” To answer Kant, German Idealism rejected his premise of the separateness of knowing and being. Hegel’s dialectic became a way of thinking their “unity.”
German Idealism initially theorized this unity unidirectionally: Fichte (subjective idealism) made being the product of knowing (the “I”), Schelling (objective idealism) made knowing the product of being. Similarly situating knowing and being as two poles (one active and the other passive) of existence, both Fichte and Schelling placed them in a relationship of reflection, with the active element completely shaping the passive one, the latter thus being conceived as the mirror image of the former. With being and knowing thus philosophically absorbing each other, neither Fichte nor Schelling could give to history or science a positive place in their philosophies. They both turned to “genius” (“intuition”) as the guarantor of the sought-for certainty of knowledge. They both produced formal (“ideal”) systems, in which particular ideas or practices out of the axes of these systems could only be thought of as misrepresentations and could as such be erased or repressed. Both Fichte and Schelling took political positions that Hegel found problematic, Fichte viewing society as “tyranny” (over the “I”), and Schelling supporting authoritarianism (to weed out the ignorance of the masses) (Lukács 1976).
Considering Fichte and Schelling unable to respond to Kant, Hegel produced a philosophical system in which both being and knowing were active. Lukács labels Hegel’s idealism “absolute” not only because it included both “subjective” and “objective” domains, but also because the system he produced, by including them both as active elements, was greater than the sum of its parts: it made a place for elements that the separate idealisms of Fichte and Schelling could not accommodate positively. The codetermination of knowing and being required Hegel to include as positive elements of his philosophy all ideas that have practical effects on the world, even if/when they can (actually or potentially) be shown to be or to have been errors in some respect or another (compare with Schelling’s attitude toward popular ideologies). Hegel’s world thus has to be a totality, comprehending and treating as positive both elements of Truth/truths and Its/their limits. Of course, Hegel’s philosophy remains “idealist” because of the presence of a (one) source directing the codetermination of knowing and being. This direction is necessary if the choreography of knowing and being is to result in the required (versus Kant) certainty. The term “idealism” happens to comport well with the content(s) Hegel gave to this source: Notion (Reason, Spirit). Philosophically, however, the term refers to the presumption of the existence of one source, irrespective of the content of that source (a postulate that everything derives from “Matter” is as much an idealism as a postulate that everything derives from “Notion”). As we will see, only the existence of such a source could philosophically guarantee the unity of knowing and being Hegel was constructing.
Hegel laid out the “dialectical” (versus “formal”) logic necessary for his system in his Logic: Part I is the Objective Logic (dealing separately with “Being” and with “Essence”); Part II is the Subjective Logic (dealing with knowledge, the Notion) (Blunden 1997). The part on Essence is “by far the most important part” of the entire opus (Engels 1940, 26). Essence both has a structured relationship to the world as it is, and contains aspects that propel it (the world) into some other state (and, eventually, into an absolute unity of knowing and being). “Essence” is what makes existence not a state, but a process, history.1
Hegel’s dialectic has been summarized with a few fundamental laws. Engels (1940, 26) lists them as: 1) the “transformation from quality into quantity and vice-versa” (emphasis in original), illustrating the iterative process through which a quality (an entity, e.g., capital) undergoes quantitative accumulations that, at some point (when the contradictions within it break its unity—see note 2 below), precipitate its transformation into another quality (e.g., capital moving from manufacturing, to machinery, to centralization, to socialization)—this law summarizes the nature of Being; 2) “the interpenetration [unity, in other renditions] of opposites,” pointing to the contradictory nature of being2—this law summarizes the nature of Essence; and 3) “the negation of the negation,” which Engels argued was the “the fundamental law for the construction of the whole [Hegelian] system,” speaking to the stage-structure of transcendence (see note 1 for the repeated transitions in the master-slave narrative). All three laws are important, but, for reasons that should become clear later, we will pay more attention to the second, the “interpenetration of opposites,” and to one of its manifestations in particular, the interpenetration of content and form.
In Hegel’s master-slave narrative, we saw that “content” (i.e., the being-and-knowledge of equality), although essence could be presumed always to push it beyond itself, could “exist” only in a particular form at a particular stage of the development of Spirit (i.e., the religious form in the stage of feudalism). The part of essence within the content that was yearning for more concrete determinations of equality could not exist per se, since the real being of equality was only given in its religious form. That part of the essence, therefore, cannot be discovered in the realm of ideas (that would have presupposed a sufficiency of thought Hegel could not accept), or in a logical analysis of the form in itself. It rather has to be discovered through an analysis of concrete ways in which the form imposed its logic on the content and of the fault lines (contradictions) in these ways. It is the task of theoretical work to discover, through analysis and synthesis,3 these fault lines and to deduce from them the essence pointing to the next phase of history.
We note, in conclusion, that the parts of the Logic have a circular relationship. In describing the world, we do not go from being to essence to ideas; or from ideas to essence to being; or even from essence to being on the one hand, and to ideas on the other. Rather, Being (universal, particular), Essence (unity of opposites, form and content), and Notion (abstract and concrete) coexist and codetermine each other in their structures (e.g., the codetermination of content and form). We can thus enter Hegel’s circle of existence at any point, move along its circumference, and return to the point of entry. But it is also important to note that this circle of Hegel does have a center (the search for certainty, the unity of knowing and being), which totalizes (captures every concreteness within) the space it defines by rotating a radius uniformly around itself. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, but it also always finds its perch at the center of the world.
We focus here on Capital (Marx 1977) and the work that, beginning in 1857 (Marx 1973), led Marx to it.4
When thinking of Hegel’s influence in Capital, contradiction comes to mind most readily. In fact, Marx starts by highlighting the dual nature of the commodity (use and exchange value) so as later to be able to theorize all the potential contradictions of that duality. We however begin our discussion of Marx’s relationship to the dialectic with the categories of content and form. When Marx wrote that, in the beginning chapter on value, he “coquetted with the mode of expressions peculiar to [Hegel]” (1973, 33), he had in mind “content andform” (the substance of value and the form of value in exchange) as well as “quality and quantity” (value and exchange value). Indeed, the two pairs mutually constitute each other.
It is instructive to trace the path that leads Marx to give prominence to the content-and-form relation. Marx (1973) sets out to work on his comprehensive critique of political economy (Grundrisse) on the occasion of the 1857 economic crisis and of an inadequate (in his mind) “socialist” response to that crisis, the Proudhonist Darimon’s proposal for a “free credit” monetary reform of capitalism (Negri 1984). A decade earlier, Marx (1963) had criticized Proudhon’s own concentration on money (as the presumed source of economic instability and injustice). He criticized as dilettantish Proudhon’s use of the Hegelian idea of contradiction as a simple “opposition” of good (represented by labor as the source of value) and evil (represented by the corrupting force of money), and condemned, as petty bourgeois, his proposal to resolve the contradiction one-sidedly (on the side of money, with “labor notes”). In 1857, Marx is confronting the one-sided Proudhonist schematism again.
Marx pays attention to the category of form immediately as he starts writing the Grundrisse (within 10 pages, in the printed edition). “Proudhon and his associates,” he writes, “never even raise the question [of ‘the relation of circulation to the other relations of production’] in its pure form.… Whenever it is touched upon, we shall pay close attention” (Marx 1973, 123).5 Marx’s intention to “pay close attention” to this question “in its pure form” means that he is visualizing a definite (pure in itself) space on which to fix the connection between production and circulation. Arguably, it is here that we can “see” Marx making an initial connection with the Hegelian category of form and taking a step toward the possibility of a grammar of content and form for his critique of Proudhonism.
Marx found a grammar of content and form also useful in his criticism of classical political economy. When he wrote to Engels that Hegel’s Logic “had been of great use” to him in “discover[ing] some nice arguments,” he gave his “complete demoli[tion of] the theory of profit as hitherto propounded” as the example (Marx and Engels 1983, 248; letter of January 16, 1858)—a clear reference to his invention of the concept of surplus value. It is not difficult to “see” how it is Hegel’s form-and-content relation that gave Marx (who already had the general form-and-content relationship in mind as a result of his engagement of Darimon) the idea of conceptually splitting profit into two related but separate modes, the mode of substance and the mode of form. In Hegel, as we saw, content is both given by form (does not exist other than in its form) and yet different from it (it contains, as we have seen essence do, both the form and a surplus to the form). A sympathetic sensitivity to this relationship could thus easily have suggested to Marx the analytical task of coming up with a concept (on the side of content/substance) that both included and was different from (larger than) “profit.” The concept, of course, needed its own distinct measure (as labor-value) in relation to the separate money-form measure of profit (price of production). The concept only needed a name: surplus value.6
Marx found the content-and-form relation useful in yet a third way. Hegel’s essence could not be known in advance of an investigation of the concrete and contradictory ways in which it found embodiment in the world (see notes 1 and 3). Marx deplored the dilettantish Hegelianism of his “utopian” rivals who thought that essence (the determining force) could be known philosophically, prior to a thorough investigation of its concrete manifestations. In addition to criticizing Proudhon thus (see above), Marx derided Lasalle for his attempt to derive money directly (i.e., ideally) from its function as a medium of exchange (as “the unity of affirmation and negation,” as an example of “the transformation of all things into their opposites”), without paying attention to the concrete ways of this function (letters to Engels of February 1, 1858 and February 25, 1859 [Marx and Engels 1983]). In contrast to Proudhon and Lasalle, Marx repeatedly prided himself (as Engels repeatedly praised him) for his “scientific” mode of investigation, his extensive analyses of concrete relations as a condition of his abstractions.7 Hegel’s form-and-content relation formalized Marx’s appreciation of scientific work in a way that exposed the philosophical dilettantism of his adversaries, and this too must have carried weight in his decision to formulate his work as an application of the Hegelian method (in its inverted form, of course).
We can see the entire architecture of Capital (four volumes) through the lenses of the content-and-form relationship. Marx sets up the analysis in the first chapter of Volume I, where, after introducing the commodity as containing within its unity the duality of use and exchange value (thus laying out the possibility of crisis at the very beginning)8 and after defining the terms of its measure (socially necessary labor-time), he moves directly to discuss the content (substance of value) and form (the form of value in exchange) relation. It is the grammar of content-and-form that allows Marx to define the specific mode of being of social labor in capitalism (the money form), and to do so in a way that would then enable all the concrete investigations that the remainder of Capital documents. These include 1) finding themotive force of capitalism (in Hegelian terms, the essence propelling itself beyond itself, the M – C – M' relation)—in chapters 2 and 3 of Volume I; 2) analyzing the forms (absolute and relative), mechanisms (capitalist accumulation, reserve army) and conditions (primitive accumulation) of the production of surplus value—in the remainder of Volume I; 3) analyzing the concrete processes of circulation and distribution associated with these forms, mechanisms and conditions—in Volumes II and III; and, last but not least, 4) analyzing the modes of knowing corresponding to real forms of being of social labor and of surplus value—respectively, in the section on commodity fetishism and in Volume IV (Theories of Surplus Value). It is in these concrete investigations, of course, that Marx finds the actualities of the contradictions (in both knowing and being) that the initial simple duality of the commodity (use and exchange value) could only posit potentially. The overall architecture of the work has a remarkable resemblance to the architecture of Hegel’s Logic.
Althusser (1970) proposed the approach of overdetermination in order to distance Marxist theory from Hegel, and from the Hegelian contradiction in particular, in connection with the question of a revolutionary conjuncture. Althusser looked to 1917 (Lenin) for an example of good thinking about revolutionary conjunctures. His own political conjuncture, however, was defined by the question of what Marxist theory needed to be in the 1960s (and beyond), after the grammar of Soviet Marxism, and the inadequacy of the concept of ideology associated with it, were showing themselves to be poor guides for a more effective practice of politics.
Althusser (Chapter 5 of Althusser and Balibar, 1970) argued that Marxism had become characterized by essentialism, a habit (enabled by the Hegelian concept of contradiction, as tension emanating from within an essence conceived as a unity of two opposites)9 of reducing “society” to the expression of an essence. He saw a tendency for Marxist theory to reduce itself to two theoretical variations of essentialism, economism and humanism. In both, the dynamics of society are explained in terms of the operative dichotomous contradiction (forces and relations of production, or alienation), with the concrete relations of society being recognizable only as manifestations of that contradiction.10 Althusser argued that Marxism needed a different theoretical apparatus, one capable of understanding the concrete relations of society in terms of whatever specificities they possessed on their own—the revolutionary conjuncture, as Lenin had learned, was visible in the conjunction of these specificities. He proposed “overdetermination” as such an apparatus. He received attention from Marxists who felt some need for a framework capable of addressing critical problems-issues-agencies-sites they were confronting in their times (e.g., race, gender, post-coloniality, governmentality, culture-ideology-desire) in a way that recognizes both the effects of class and the independent effects of these problems-issues-agencies-sites in the concrete relations of society.
Althusser borrowed the term overdetermination from Freud, who used it while developing the psychoanalytic method of free association in the interpretation of dreams (Freud 1938). Effective (i.e., enabling an identification of the source of patient symptoms; creating, we could say, a psychoanalytic revolutionary conjuncture) interpretation of the meaning of dreams could come only through the method of free association (i.e., there was no fixed point from which to deduce this meaning) because dream narratives were produced by the unconscious working to repress consciousness of the symptom-source, via processes of displacement and condensation. Overdetermination is the name Freud gave to the unstructured processes of condensation and displacement through which the dream images are constituted in the relationship between the unconscious and the preconscious. Thus not recognizable in the dream narrative, the source of the pathos could only be accessed by having the analysand freely disassociate the narrative’s images from the narrative’s logic and focus on the separate concretenesses of the images: it was, then, in the free association of these separated images with the analysand’s tenuous memory bank that the path could be found to the source of the pathos. Althusser had been looking for a Marxism that no longer relied on a narrative certainty and took instead to investigating the concrete conditions of revolutionary conjunctures. It is easy to see him becoming attracted by the Freudian suggestion, then, that what is given to consciousness (the “dream” narrative for psychoanalysis, the narrative of “society” for Marxism) is an overdetermined effect, and that the way out of pathology (psychic in one case, social in the other) was therefore through an engagement with the polyvalent associations ensconced in the separate concretenesses (images for dream interpretation, sites and practices for social analysis) of being.
To place overdetermination within Marxism, Althusser (and his collaborators) had to theorize, again and differently, certain specific parts of the theory. Thus Althusser found himself re-theorizing “ideology” materially (Althusser 1971) and, later, materialism itself as “aleatory.” Similarly, Etienne Balibar found himself re-theorizing the relation between forces and relations of production (in Althusser and Balibar 1970). But Marx’s texts themselves also had to be rethought. If the concretenesses of the world could no longer be read as manifestations (reflections) of the essence and its dichotomous contradiction, Marx himself could no longer be read as revealing that essence and contradiction. He had to be read, instead, as an instance of partisan (on the part of workers, theorized as a class, and on the part of revolutionary change) theoretical intervention in the world. This explains why Althusser attempted to understand Marx, not from the standpoint of an already known concept of surplus value, but from the standpoint of his search for that concept in the course of his theoretical struggle with political economy (in Althusser and Balibar 1970).
Now, we saw that Marx found Hegel “of great use” in just this search, his invention of the surplus value concept. There could thus seem to be a discrepancy between Marx’s appreciation and Althusser’s negation of Hegel. This appearance of discrepancy is created by a striking parallelism between the deficiencies Althusser was criticizing in official Marxism and the deficiencies Hegel had criticized in Fichte and Schelling: the deficiencies, political and philosophical, inherent in any schematic approach to the certainty of knowledge. And the appearance of discrepancy is further heightened by the fact that both Hegel and Althusser manufacture their remedies for these deficiencies from the same raw material, concreteness/es.
The discrepancy, however, disappears if we look at matters from the perspective of the broadly different philosophical frameworks within which Hegel and Althusser operated. Hegel had operated within the framework of a search for certainty. A century later, Althusser was operating within a quite different framework, when the idea of certainty had become profoundly shaken by both philosophical and political considerations. In this context, what matters is not just Hegel’s and Althusser’s similar regard for the concrete but also the broader framework within which that regard is ensconced. It is this difference in frameworks that explains Althusser’s attack on Hegel on just those points where his (Hegel’s) concretes are structured into a certainty producing centered totality, on the idea of essence and essentialist theoretical practices, on the idea of contradiction as a duality (the thing, any thing, and its other) structured into a unity, and on the idea of history as a process with a beginning and an ending.11
Althusser’s call for a framework of overdetermination can be understood as an attempt to take any Marxist attention to the concrete out of the mystical shell of essentialism. Marx had argued that he had used a dialectic extracted from the dialectics of the mystical shell of idealism. Althusser (1970, 89–94) argued that the extraction requires more than the inversion by which the development of the contradictory unity of forces and relations of production takes the place of Hegel’s Spirit. It requires detaching the concrete from the center that essence requires. It thus requires a radical reconstruction both of the interpenetration of knowing and being that had characterized Hegel and of the analytical tendencies of Marxism insofar as it found itself bound to the architecture of that particular interpenetration. Althusser made the call for that detachment and took a number of steps, by himself and with others, toward that detachment. But it was within the school of Rethinking Marxism, and particularly in the work of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, that the interpenetration ofknowing and being and the analytical tendencies of Marxism received the thorough reconstructions Althusser had suggested.
Resnick and Wolff (1987) took the interpenetration of knowing and being significantly beyond Althusser’s initial proposal. While Althusser’s initial formulation had remained tied to some notion of the economy and class as a determining Subject, even if only “in the last instance” (perhaps the only way available at the time to assert a Marxist “interpretation” of the world), Resnick and Wolff developed overdetermination as a framework for conceiving society and history as the processes “without a subject” toward which Althusser himself increasingly moved after 1970. They conceived of overdetermination as a process in which concretenesses reign over any abstractions (economy, society, or even class, or gender, or race, or governmentality) that would pretend to bind them into a structure (or even into independent substructures to be constituted into one), around a center (or even centers). In Resnick and Wolff, these abstractions remain part of the discourse, but they do so only as tools in the narrative process and as having effects in shaping behavior, but they are scrupulously deprived of any real separate being in themselves and thus of the ability to be determining, even “in the last instance.”
In this conception, in fact, the interpenetrations that give us the world are not so much between knowing and being as they are among practices (actions, activities), shaped as these are by thoughts/ideas/identities, more or less coherently coordinated around “named” processes (economic, cultural, political, psychic), within sites (factories, households, corporate centers, government bureaus, schools, etc.). These practices, processes and sites have no “being” in themselves: any site is constituted in relations with practices, processes and other sites, and it does not exist other than through these relations; and the same mode of constitutivity and non-being applies to processes and practices (Resnick and Wolff 1987, 24). The interpenetration of overdetermination is not a mutual interaction of separate entities (qualities, beings), not the case that an X and a Y interact. It is rather a process by which entities, an X and a Y, get their beings only through the overdetermined (and hence uncentered) process of mutual constitutivity. Overdetermination does not require that the presence of separate entities (e.g., capital, the corporation, the household, the state, capitalism) be denied. What it does require is that this presence be never taken for granted, as a given or as something that has the ability to reproduce itself out of its own essence and force. What it requires is that the presence always be taken, in its being or in its reproduction, as something to be explained, and this not only in a way that does not presume the outcome but that, in explaining the outcome, makes clear the possibility of a different outcome (including, of course, the elements of a revolutionary conjuncture).12
In the perspective of overdetermination, what Marx did was to think of the ways in which something called “capitalism” would have to be pulling a variety of practices, processes, and sites together if a certain set of class relations (capitalist surplus value relations) was to be said to exist. There is nothing in this conception (and in this lies its main axis of opposition to, or at least contrast with, Hegelian formulations) that requires one to think of capitalism in essentialist terms (in the terms of center and of totality suggested by Hegelian habits)—in terms, that is, that reflect an inherent power of capital to reproduce itself (the accumulation drive working in specific ways) and to totalize the entire space of the world (all sites, practices and processes) at the service of that power. That essentialist conception left little or no space for Marxist theory to recognize and engage the complexity of the class process in relation to all other processes in “society” in the initial mode of production and in the mode of reproduction of that process, but also in the modes of resistance to it, and most importantly, in the mode of a revolution against it.
Space does not allow me to go into any details about the concrete ways in which Resnick and Wolff themselves and their collaborators (too many to mention here), have filled in the space for analysis defined by the contours of overdetermination as Resnick and Wolff drew them. They have addressed issues of Marxist theory;13 subjectivity and desire (for a revolution against capital); gender and race in relation to class; development; labor history; the intersection of capitalist class processes with other class processes and non-class processes; knowledge; communism as a horizon of difference; and others. It will have to suffice for me to say that all of this work produces a narrative of capitalism as a decentered totality, pointing to the decentered modes of its reproduction—asking us to understand that capitalism reproduces itself not by virtue of any power of its essence, but by virtue of a project, complexly determined and complexly carried out (i.e., overdetermined and overdetermining) to manage the decenteredness of life, and asking us to understand as well the decentered nature of any revolutionary conjuncture creating the possibility for something else.
1 Marcuse (1954) provides an outline of the master-slave narrative which Hegel (in his Phenomenology of Spirit) offered as the history of the march of Spirit toward a unity with itself. Once Spirit posits the world as its other, “essence” propels it (through the concrete struggles of humans for knowledge and freedom) toward a state of unity with Spirit. It does so, however, in stages, not in one moment. Initially, empty of knowledge of nature and society, humanity creates slavery. Dialectically, thereafter, slavery creates the notion of freedom as its negation: the slave embodies the part of the essence that yearns to an “other” world (the master embodies the part of essence that corresponds to the world as it is). It is slaves who are in an objective position (being) to develop the subjective side (knowing). They develop knowledge both of nature (the thinking necessary for work: abstract thinking, mathematics, theory/principles, practice/applications, etc.) and of society (applying the idea of principles, generalized from the thinking about work and nature, allows slaves to invent the idea of freedom—out of their very lack of it). This, however, represents only one stage in history, in the march of Spirit and of the world toward a state of full unity. The notion of freedom emerging out of slavery is not yet one with the fullness of Spirit. Emerging, in the only way it can out of slavery, in the one-sided form of an “idea,” it gives rise to a one-sided (on theside of knowing) civilization of religion, feudalism. Although it represents progress vis-à-vis slavery, feudalism limits the scope of spirit to the realm of religion, and keeps it from finding the full concreteness it yearns for in the world of nature and society (freedom of politics, of commerce, of science, of production). The age of religion thus reproduces, though at a higher stage, the master-slave relationship. Here, absolute monarchy embodies the part of the essence that corresponds to the world as it is; it is the rising bourgeoisie that embodies the part of essence that yearns to an “other” (fuller in its various concrete determinations of being) world. Hence the age of citizenship, of science, of commerce, the modern world (and, in some formulation, the end of history).
It is worth noticing that this narrative begins with Spirit positing as “its other” a bare, undeveloped, undetermined state of the world. In contrast to Kant and Schelling, Hegel could not present the world as just “there” to be “recognized.” He needed the recognition to emerge from a process that began with “no-thingness.” Had he posited an initial being with any concreteness, he would have faced the problem of how to guarantee knowledge of that concreteness, and he would then have seen his system collapse into Schelling’s. However, it is important also to realize that if the process beginning with nothingness was to result in the full-of-concreteness unity of knowing and being that Hegel needed, this beginning had to be posited by a force (what Hegel called Spirit) containing within itself both nothing (abstraction) and everything (concreteness). (We will see that this is relevant to Marx’s beginning with the “commodity.”) Fundamentally, Hegel’s essence is this combination of nothing and everything, abstraction and concreteness. History and science are, then, nothing but processes through which the initially empty abstraction is progressively filled with increasing (wider and/or deeper) levels of concreteness.
2 The quantitative accumulations precipitate the contradictions within the qualities. Hegel’s contradiction is different from the contradiction (antinomy) of formal logic. The Hegelian contradiction is a condition of tension within an entity, not a condition of opposition between different entities. Being a condition of “being,” it is a matter of oppositions in the world, not of opposition of mental images and definitions—a contra-diction, not a contra-diction.
3 Lenin (1972, 220) included “the union of analysis and synthesis” in his own list of the most important laws of the dialectic.
4 Marx’s relationship to Hegel in these writings received considerable attention in Rosdolsky (1992). Bellofiore, Starosta and Thomas (2014) and Moseley and Smith (2015) are products of a more recent wave of interest in the influence of Hegel on Marx. For a reading of the Grundrisse (Marx 1973) in a non-Hegelian, and even anti-Hegelian, key, see Negri (1984 and 2014).
5 On the same page, Marx described Darimon’s idea of free-credit as “only a hypocritical, philistine and anxiety-ridden form of saying: property is theft.” And he continued: “Instead of the workers taking the capitalists’ capital, the capitalists are supposed to be compelled to give it to them” (emphasis in the original).
6 This does not address either the mathematical form Marx gave to the relationship between surplus value and profit (the transformation procedure) or the necessary complementary concept of labor-power. It does however explain the very possibility for Marx to think of the problem of “profit” in terms of such a relationship. It also explains how Marx came to think of including interest and rent as additional expressions of surplus value (if one, then more than one).
Murray (2015) also discusses the connection between Marx’s concept of surplus value and the concepts of Hegel’s Logic. Our discussion focuses on the relation of mutual constitutivity between content and form and does not presuppose that Marx comes to confront the problem of “profit” with an already constituted concept of surplus value. Murray’s discussion focuses on a relationship of expression between essence (surplus value) and a form of “appearance” (profit), which seems both to presume that Marx’s has a concept of surplus value to begin with and to tie Marx unnecessarily to a concept of essence as the source of appearances (content as the source of form).
7 The issues were political as well as philosophical. Marx worried about the often authoritarian, or even reactionary, politics that the abstract schematisms of dilettantish idealism tended to allow or, worse, produce. He sharply criticized both Proudhonists and Lasalleans in this vein.
8 Recall that the beginning has strategic value in Hegel.
9 The dichotomous nature of the Hegelian contradiction is necessitated by Hegel’s idea that essence posits difference not simply as otherness but as its otherness. This was the necessary condition of the unity of knowing and being Hegel was producing—the price that had to be paid for Hegel’s history to have, philosophically, a beginning and an end (see note 1).
10 Althusser mentioned Gramsci as an exception. But Gramsci, he thought, had not theorized the conditions for his own exception.
11 Of course, this is not to say that more Hegel-engaging Marxists did/do not recognize problems with the association of Marxism with a structure of essence and the certainty (teleology) tendencies it can produce. According to Buchanan (2010, 129), “Fredric Jameson insists” on linking the dialectic with “a scandal of the unexpected,” but makes clear that Jameson’s “surprise” is a surprising revelation of essence and so it does not open up a non-essentialist horizon. Gert Reuten (2015) introduces an element of contingency and “underdetermination” in the Marxian dialectic, but it seems to me that “underdetermination” suggests a horizon of determination, whereas overdetermination rejects the horizon in principle.
12 Laclau and Mouffe (1985) had applied the concept of overdetermination exclusively to the nature of identity (i.e., the irreducibility of identity to any fixed place in society), thus problematizing the concept of a “subject.” Resnick and Wolff developed the notion more broadly, to refer to the nature of being (ontology) as well of knowing (epistemology)--for a discussion of the different political frameworks (anchored or not anchored in “class”) of these two absorptions of the concept of overdetermination, see Özselçuk (2009). Resnick and Wolff (1987, 25–30) address the question of subjectivity through the concept of an entry-point (subjects are differentiated exactly by the entry-point they adopt) and situate this very concept only generally consistently with the framework of overdetermination (a subject’s adoption of an entry-point is an overdetermined effect). Özselçuk and Madra (2005) and Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg (2012) use a Lacanian framework to produce an explicit outline of a process of subject formation consistent with the framework of overdetermination.
13 Wolff and Resnick (2012) themselves produced a reconceptualization of the analytical categories of value, surplus value, prices, distribution, crises, and reproduction and transformation in a way that took them out of an essentialist framework.
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