Abstract
The Gordian knot foiled all attempts to undo it until Alexander the Great came along and cut it open with his sword. This legend is often presented as a model of what it means to act decisively and to think outside the box. Few seem to have given much thought to the threads that were cut into small pieces and rendered useless by Alexander’s act.
The problems of our world are intertwined in much the same way as the threads in the Gordian knot, and the typical way of dealing with them, particularly now, particularly in our society, also seems modeled on Alexander’s solution. Except that here, the separate pieces into which they have been reduced are not only useless but positively harmful as a means of understanding these problems and, therefore, also as a means of resolving them. Marx even has a term for what’s left after this massacre has done its work. It is ‘ideology’, or the separation of what cannot be separated without distortion, and it is found throughout the common sense and learned discourse of our time, with the separation of knowledge into different academic disciplines serving as chief enforcer, should that prove necessary.
And dialectics? Dialectics is about unravelling the Gordian knot and the world for which it stands, without tearing it to pieces. It does so because reality, being what it is, requires such an approach, especially if we are to acquire an adequate understanding of the ‘bigger picture’, or how capitalism works as a whole, where and how we fit into it, and what can be done to help bring about the kind of world we so badly need. What’s at stake? Only everything.
Most knowledge may be said to derive from ‘connecting the dots’ or from ‘breaking up’ what is taken to be the whole in any sphere into its constituent ‘dots’, or ‘parts’. The question that remains is that of where the dots come from, and what they consist of. The more popular answer is that they exist in the world as logically separate and easily separable things (‘factors’, in the social sciences) that can enter into relations with other things, but can also remain independent of them. Set apart from each other at the moment of conception, such things are also viewed as static and unchanging until something from outside interrupts their ‘peace’ and brings about a change of one kind or another. This view, which is usually taken to reflect everyone’s perception of the world, is called the ‘philosophy of external relations’.
An alternative view on the nature of the parts into which reality is divided is that they are themselves relations, such that the main connections referred to above are contained as aspects of each part in turn, the main difference between them being the vantage point that each provides for viewing and investigating the others, and the whole to which they all belong. But it is not only these relations that are held to be internal to all the elements that are directly or indirectly related to one another. The same applies to the changes that these relations have undergone, are undergoing now, and are likely to undergo in the future. The world of separate and static things has been replaced here by a world of evolving relations (or mutually dependent processes). In this view, which is called the ‘philosophy of internal relations’, nothing has disappeared from (or been added to) ‘what’s out there’, but everything has been reorganised in order to appear at least a little and often a great deal differently than before. How to study such a world; what to prioritise; how to put together the results of such studies – for oneself and then for others; what kind of criticisms are relevant; how to conceive the relation between theory and practice; and even what kind of questions to ask have all undergone the equivalent of a revolution.
For Marx, whose ‘ultimate aim’, as stated in the Preface of his major work, Capital, Vol. I, is ‘to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society’ (i.e. capitalism, the totality to which he devotes most of his attention), the philosophy of internal relations and the dialectical method to which it has given rise provide the indispensable means to carry out such a study. The law of motion referred to here is really a double motion: organic, having to do with the interaction between the different components of capitalism (starting with its mode of production) at any given moment of time; and the other historical, involving the sum of the changes that occur over time to the organic movement as a whole, with each of these movements affecting and being affected by the other (which is why Marx can refer to them as a single ‘law of motion’).
Only a philosophy that views all the elements involved in this ‘law of motion’ as both relations and processes can avoid the twin dangers of treating capitalism ahistorically, and its history as a sequence of largely independent happenings in which the evolution of the mode of production plays little if any part. Only a philosophy of internal relations, too, makes it possible to recognise the main patterns that appear in the movement of these relations, or in the relations between these processes (while most of those operating with a philosophy of external relations will not see these patterns no matter how hard they look), and to transform them into the well known but little understood ‘dialectical categories’ of ‘contradiction’, ‘quality–quantity change’, ‘identity–difference’, ‘metamorphosis’, ‘appearance–essence’, ‘precondition–result’, etc. that supply Marx with much of the structure with which he organises his dialectical study of capitalism.
It may take a little longer, but there is an alternative to opening the Gordian knot with a sword.
The articles brought together in this volume were first delivered as lectures at a conference on ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Internal Relations’ held at York University in Toronto, in May 2012. All our contributors believe that the relational and processual character of Marx’s subject matter deserves a priority and an emphasis that is seldom accorded it. How they argue for this common view, what they believe is at stake here, and how they deal with the problems that come up in this discussion can differ a great deal. Thus, while there is general agreement among all our authors on the importance of ‘a’ philosophy of internal relations, it would be wrong to consider us as being representatives of a single school of Marxist thought. Readers should keep this in mind as they go through the various topics treated in this volume.
They are as follows:
In Chapter 1, Bertell Ollman recounts the role Vilfredo Pareto’s observation, ‘Marx’s words are like bats. You can see in them both birds and mice’, had on his own adoption of the philosophy of internal relations with (in Ollman’s view) its necessary accompaniment in the process of abstraction to shape and re-shape the meanings of Marx’s major concepts. The difference between what is ordinarily understood as a ‘paradox’ and Marx’s use of the term ‘contradiction’ is offered as one of the most striking examples of the usefulness of this approach. A detailed bibliography of works dealing with the philosophy of internal relations can be found at the end of this special issue.
In Chapter 2, Sean Sayers sketches the history of the debates between advocates of the philosophy of internal relations and its analytical critics, such as G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell early in the 20th century, and G. A. Cohen, the founder of analytical Marxism, more recently.
In Chapter 3, LouAnn Wurst uses a range of archeological case studies to explore larger themes relevant to a philosophy of internal relations, including its methodological implications, capitalist dispossession, the dialectical integration of present, past and future, and the coexistence of capitalism’s ‘law of motion’ with a history full of struggle and contingency.
In Chapter 4, Dennis Badeen argues that Marx’s organically based atomism provides a critical account of the ahistorical character of orthodox economics. Organically based atomism explains the appearance of social atomism under capitalism as a result of capitalism’s organic interdependencies.
In Chapter 5, Paul Paolucci argues that if Marx’s scientific research and his political views are internally related, then any interpretation of either that omits the other can and will result in the kind of distortions we know as metaphysics, ahistoricism, false universalisation, inversion, reductionism, idealism, obscurantism, incommensurableness, and tautology. The same ‘logical failure’ is also said to produce the same range of ideological outcomes in the social science writings of most of Marx’s competitors.
In Chapter 6, Anne Pomeroy details the differences between Leibnizian and Whiteheadian versions of internal relations, arguing for the Whiteheadian version because it promotes a view of a social-relational dialectical reality, is more adequately based for a theoretical understanding of mediating agency within Marx’s critique of capitalism, and informs our practice in developing radical consciousness.
In Chapter 7, Edward Winslow considers the philosophy of internal relations as a way to explain historical development as internally related stages of human development culminating in the actualisation of human freedom.
In Chapter 8, Kevin Brien clarifies how, using the philosophy of internal relations, the movement from the abstract to the concrete-in-thought, using the concept of praxis, integrates the humanism of Marx’s early work with his theory of historical materialism.
In Chapter 9, David McNally uses the philosophy of internal relations to place the politics of class and identity in dialectical relation, demonstrating how working classes are internally related to multiple social differences.