Probings and Re-Probings

Essays in Marxian Reawakening

Sankar Ray, Shaibal Gupta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000485615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

'Controversy was the breath of Marx's life and he revelled in it. We are therefore not at all apologetic', wrote Puran Chand Joshi in the preface to Karl Marx: A Symposium, published in 1968 commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of Marx, adding further, (It is) 'in the best Indian tradition to operate with belief and hope that it is only through the clash of ideas that truth emerges.' At a time, when a Marxian renaissance has been taking place in academia, Joshi's words reverberate with a new vitality, an evanescence of 'official Marxism' and official Marxist parties notwithstanding. There is no denying that the so-called Marxists now pay dearly for wavering 'between a rather mechanistic interpretation of crisis and its opposite: the conviction that capitalism could only be overcome by an act of will.'

This book is the outcome of an international conference on Karl Marx organised by ADRI in Patna between June 16 and 20, 2018 keeping the new Marxian reality in mind. Over 50 scholars from across the world sent papers to the Conference, covering topics such as economics, politics, society, philosophy, etc. ADRI welcomed them with an open mind in sync with the Marxian reawakening that treats Marx historically and critically.

This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

1

Ancient Indian Dialectics and Marx

Shannon Brincat

Introduction

India is the birthplace of dialectical thinking in our world—or it is the first written record of such a form of philosophical and critical thinking. My research has been concerned with tracing how dialectical thinking developed in the Axial Age, across a range of civilisations. In this paper, I highlight some of the key aspects of dialectics in Ancient Indian thought—elements that I believe need to be reclaimed in contemporary critical theory to revitalise dialectical thinking today. There are a number of ontological assumptions that inform my conception of dialectics: (i) that the world, and everything in it, undergoes constant change (the doctrine of flux); (ii) that everything in the cosmos is internally related (however closely or distant that relation may be) (which is the idea of interconnection or interdependency, otherwise known as the philosophy of internal relations), and; (iii) that these processes of the internal relations between all things are the forces for the change that we observe and experience as humans in the phenomenal world. Humankind has been fascinated with this constancy of flux, desiring to better understand this existential given of our word between interdependency, internal relations, and change. Yet this has also been equally concerned with a knowledge interest: to help direct ourselves, to guide humanity toward a more emancipatory future. And my firm belief is that the best way to understand our world—and perhaps even guide this process of change toward desired ends—is through dialectical analysis. It is not only the best approach for grasping transformation and change, it is the only one that takes this ontology as the basis of its method. This is why dialectics was so fundamental to Marx’s thought, and why I think it must remain so for any self-professed critical theory of society today.

We can examine dialectics in any number of ways. Firstly, we could focus on the way it has been defined or how it has been conceived by individual thinkers. This this would mean particular forms of dialectics would then stand in for the whole (i.e. the Hegelian system). Whilst there is much to say about how such towering figures advanced dialectical thinking in some of the most important and profound ways, they do not cover all of its aspects nor are they without their significant limitations (Hegelian objective idealism, for example). Secondly, we could look at how a particular school of dialectical thought deploys this form of analysis (i.e. Dialectical Materialism, or Daoist Dialectics, and so on). But this would only broaden the circle by degree—certain forms necessarily excluded. The third option, and what I have undertaken in my research, is to define dialectics by its constitutive elements: its logical components (from non-contradiction to context, from vantage point to syllogism and many others); its methods (such as dialogue, and open-ended, truth seeking inquiry); and its ontology (internal relations and flux). It is from these expansively defined constitutive elements that we can then examine how dialectics has been composed and added to, expanded and contracted, in human thought—whether of individual dialectics or dialectical schools—over time. Using this constitutive method allows us to do at least four things: to historically trace how dialectics has emerged to what it is today; to compare the various forms of dialectical thinking as against other dialectical forms, schools, and individual thinkers; to evaluate different dialectical forms by what they emphasise and what they leave out in their dialectical analysis; and to a purposive reconstruction—one that is more inclusionary of the many different strands of dialectics and which can retrieve those aspects otherwise lost or down-played. Taken together, this can help lead us toward a more robust method of dialectics for thinking through today’s problems.

We can identify dialectical thinking thousands of years before it was understood by Hegel and mastered by Marx, by tracing its origins outside of the Western philosophical canon, and instead locating its emergence from the period that Karl Jaspers named the Axial Age (so from around 800 BCE to around 300 or 200 BCE). This historical narrative identifies a number of civilisations that begin to pivot (hence the name)—as if on an axis—away from long accepted myths and localised knowledge towards thoughts of transcendence. Transcendence, here, is not in the Kantian sense but rather a shift toward second-order thinking, largely beginning with movements in thought to speculation about the cosmos and our relation to it, rather than acceptance of myth or deity. It is in this moment of the so-called ‘Great Transformation’ that dialectical thinking emerges, and in ways that reveal it to be seemingly global (though not universal) in its formation. That is, dialectics emerges across a variety of cultures whose contact was minimal though by no means independent of each other.¹ And from here we can observe the remarkable shared characteristics across the Vedic, Buddhist, Daoist, Greek, Jewish, Persian, and on into Islamic and Scholastic dialectical systems. This begins within the Axial period, as Jaspers wrote:

“What is new about this age…is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognising his limits he sets himself the highest goals.”²

By approaching this era via the historical record provided in philosophical texts, we can begin to move beyond the usual tropes that dismiss these dialectical systems under gross misunderstandings: that Indian dialectics remains magical (or lost to the domination of the Brahmins); that Budhist dialectics remains mystical (concerned with release of the soul and not release on earth); or that Daoism remains strictly authoritarian (via its veneration of monarchy rather than balance). There is ample evidence of such readings, to be sure. But they do not cover everything, nor does their presence taint everything else so that these systems must be dismissed in their totality. Rather, it is more productive for us to reconstruct these dialectical systems in order to find what we can use of them today: to retrieve from them old or lost ways of thought that can help us to analyse and understand social life today…

So What is Dialectics?

Dialectics means many things, to many different people. But consistent across most of its forms are three elements: an ontology of flux and relations, methods of dialogue and logic, and a purpose (or knowledge-interest) in the possibility of consciously directing change. Dialectics is not a theory and does not do anything: instead, I think it is best conceived as a way of thinking—an ‘approach’ to thought itself—that helps one to bring into view the relations between things and the possibilities for change within this expansive context of interactions. This is its unique feature and the reasons for its utility for research and critical thought.

The ontology of flux is relatively uncontroversial as nearly everyone would agree that change is constantly taking place in some form—‘one can never step into same river twice’ as the old saying of Heraclitus reminds us. The unique aspect of dialectics here is that the emphasis on flux forces analysis to include how things happen as part of what a thing or phenomena is. It is not a simple cause/effect model other surfaced notion of causation but a historical and relational notion of change. It replaces the idea of a thing or phenomena as separate and static, with “process”—process contains the things history and its possible futures as the thing in-itself. Hence Marx saw the historical relation of capitalism as the conditions of emergence for communism. The key aspect of dialectics is that it places reality as flux at the forefront of its analysis.

The methods of dialogue are also relatively straight forward. For example, some of the first forms of dialectical thinking in Ancient India adopted a question/answer method between various ascetics, the so-called vāda-vitandā approach. In the Western canon this method is best known through Plato’s dialogues that involve the method of Elenchus (how two or more people engage in a debate over a specific problem until they reach a point of contradiction and attempt to work through it to resolution or exhaustion). Sometimes these dialogical forms become so sophisticated that they develop into fully articulated or formalised systems of logic: and we can observe these in Ancient India through Nyaya logic, and also in the Gelugpa Budhist tradition (that continues today in Tibet), or even the closed logic of the Christian Scholastics. It was this openness to critique that typified the Axial period in the Upper Ganges where the many different orthodox and heterodox schools competed and integrated many ideas and concepts throughout this formative period.

Yet if there is one key part of dialectics that I would emphasise—and one that has also been consistently affirmed by Professor Bertell Ollman, the leading figure in Marxist-dialectics as well—it is the philosophy of internal relations. This could be otherwise labelled the study of the ‘relations inside the whole’ because ‘internal’ may wrongly imply we are looking at the individual make-up of a particular thing/ object, when we are in fact concerned with the whole in which it relates.The philosophy of internal relations treats the relations in which anything stands as essential parts of what that thing is: the parts of the whole are not separated from each other but are inherently related. Changing one part of one thing, changes all the other individual units and the whole as well. As such, the assumed identity of one thing, abstracted and separated from all others, is not really the thing in-itself but is mere appearance: one-sided, and ultimately false. And this is really the revolutionary aspect of dialectical thinking because it overturns the commonsensical and superficial view that makes things/objects appear static and independent of one another, leading to a distorted and incomplete picture because these relations are abstracted away. Instead, dialectics looks at how a certain thing or phenomena has become what it is, and, the broad set of relations (its interactive context) in which it is located. The philosophy of internal relations goes to the history of the thing and its possible futures in relation to all other things. So whereas non-dialectical thinkers look for external causal agents to explain change, dialectical thinkers attribute the main responsibility for all change to the inner contradictions of the system in which it occurs and which form the possible tendencies—the horizon—of future change. But these are tendencies only: dialectics is not a teleology leading to prediction or some determined end.

Now, in West this philosophical tradition of internal relations stretches from Parminides, through to Spinozza and Hegel, to Marx and Dietzgen. But it has earlier and non-Western counterparts that formed in ancient India. For example, Buddhism’s notion of (Pratītyasamutpāda) ‘interdependent origination’ that draws attention to the realisation that every thing and every event is the result of previous things and events. Here, no thing or event is born of itself—a thing is both ‘that which is put together’ and ‘that which puts together’. We can think of later examples, outside of India, such Daoism’s Ten Thousand Things (sometimes translated as ‘myriad creatures’). This phrase expresses the multiplicity of things in the phenomenal world (all things under ‘sky and earth’), not only in their status as objects (with internal yin/yang forces) but in their relations with one another that produces the cosmic constancy of change. A passage from the Zhuangzi states: “So we say: That is derived from This, and This is also dependent upon That.”

It is this relationalism that, in turn, leads to the dialectical notion of change symbolised as a spiral. So perhaps best known is Engels account that, following Marx, says that dialectics reveals that everything is made of the mutual penetration of polar opposites (or contradiction), and the negation of this relation leads to gradual change. He calls this the ‘spiral form of development’—Or what Katie Brown calls the ‘cycles of elevating proportion’. Change progresses in a spiral-movement (i.e. it is not circular or necessarily progressive).³ Nothing is lost in this process; new things arise in their interconnection with others, and preserved in the arms of the spiral. This spiral image does not make an implicit judgement on whether change is progressive or regressive, it is what is possible within given relations themselves.

Dialectical thinking is not particular or unique to any civilisation but emerged across a range of civilisations during the Axial Age, albeit in ways that differ in terms of emphasis according to the social problems that this form of critical thinking was directed (i.e. some who emphasise change/ flux, others on dialogue, and logic, others on relations). What appears common to them all is the use of dialectics in terms of exploring metaphysical questions. When myth and accepted custom were questioned, it was dialectics—the method of doubt—that was germane to open discussion on questions that could not be proven or demonstrated.

The shift—the axis—in human consciousness that took place in India, and elsewhere, involved three changes:

1. The movement from the mythos/mundane to the transcendental or metaphysical;
2. The beginnings of a recognition of historical unity (or what Jaspers calls ‘solidarity’);
3. And the realisation of ‘historical self-comprehension’, the idea that humans could direct their own history

In this milieu, thinking was greatly advanced by taking a dialectical approach: thinking became its own object; critical thought was used to attempt to convince or persuade others (and hence the importance of rational argumentation and dialogue); the exploration of contradictions and opposites that remained related to one another rather than considered as binary or exclusive; and perhaps most importantly, the questioning of all previously accepted ideas, customs, and traditions. In this revolutionary period, according to Jaspers, thinkers began to ask “radical questions”:

All this took place in reflection. Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object. Spiritual conflicts arose, accompanied by attempts to convince others through the communication of thoughts, reasons and experiences. The most contradictory possibilities were essayed… opposites which nonetheless remained related to one another, created unrest and movement to the very brink of spiritual chaos…. As a result of this process, hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas, customs and conditions were subjected to examination, questioned and liquidated. Everything was swept into the vortex.⁴

There were sociological and material conditions that provided the context for this shift and which where shared across all of these civilisation regions: the formation of small city-states with independent (or sovereign) existence; reciprocal intercourse of trade; massive improvements in agriculture; and widespread urbanisation. The question of the degree of inter-civilisational cross-fertilisation of ideas between these civilisations, and especially dialectics as a method of thought, can only be speculated on.

Jaspers gives an unfortunate religious and Eurocentric interpretation to this process—how he “orders” history—which we can readily dismiss. Rather, the most important question when ordering this history is looking for the “profound common element” to these Axial Age civilisations which, I argue, lies in how each of these societies began to think dialectically. Regardless of the degree of the interrelation between these civilisational groups (something that only future historical work will be able to uncover) all of these civilisations developed sophisticated dialectical systems because of an urgent imperative or knowledge interest to: think through oppositions/contradictions as inherently related. Rather than conceptualising beginning/end, dark/light and so on as binary oppositions and separate, thinkers began to see them as correlatives, that is, mutually implicated in the other. This breakthrough allowed these societies to engage with new transcendental and metaphysical questions in an open form, that of rational dialogue between opposed ideas rather than through force or authority—and this was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Note
• Introduction
• 1. Ancient Indian Dialectics and Marx
• 2. Marx’s Theory of Prehistory: In Memory of György Márkus. My Great Master Whom I Never Met
• 3. The Origins of Marxist Oriental Studies in the USSR and its Stalinist Distortion
• 4. A Short History of Black Marxism in the USA
• 5. From Early Marx to Véquaud’s Countercultural Indophilia: Similar Aesthetics Founded on Romanticism and Communitarian Utopia
• 6. Sartre and Alienation A Marxian Perspective: A Marxian Perspective
• 7. The Untimely Marx: Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and the Political Dimension of Critical Economics
• 8. Guevara and Marx: Critical Remake of an Old Film
• 9. Historical Process and Gender Essentialism from a Dialectical Point of View: A Contribution to a Marxian Feminist Theory
• 10. Revolution, Emancipation and Social
• 11. Manufacturing Profits: Modes of Surplus Extraction at the Lower End of the Global Value Chain
• 12. From Hegemony to Full Control: Which Kind of Elite, If Any, is Necessary for the Masters of the Universe? Reading Antonio Gramsci About the Role of the Intelligentsia, Yesterday and Tomorrow
• 13. Karl Marx and the Opium War
• 14. Marx or Utopia and Ideology Against Wisdom
• 15. Exploitation and Oppression Under Bourgeoisdom
• Contributors