Ollman's "Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method" (Book Note)

 

Radical intellectuals often express frustration at what they perceive as an excessive focus on conceptualization, finding dialectical language unnecessarily complex and obscure. A significant challenge for rational minds engaging with dialectics lies in the fluidity of Marx's concepts, which can resemble bats, showing both birdlike and mouselike attributes depending on the context (Pareto, cited on p. 4). Among the clearest elucidations of Marx's dialectical approach is the extensive body of work by Bertell Ollman, a selection of which is compiled here.

 

Ollman contends that Marx primarily employed dialectical presentation in his unpublished notebooks rather than in works intended for publication. This preference stems from Marx's belief that conceptualization shapes perception. Dialectics, according to Ollman, is apt for a world characterized by mutually dependent dynamic processes, making it particularly relevant to capitalism—a vast, intricate, integrated, and holistic system whose structure often remains obscured, contributing to fragmentation in individual and social existence.

 

Analyzing Marx's method into six categories—ontology, epistemology, inquiry, intellectual reconstruction, exposition, and praxis—reveals his deep commitment to viewing the world as a systemic whole. Epistemologically, Marx dissects this whole into structured, interdependent, relational units. His inquiry delves into the links constituting this whole, culminating in conceptual reconstruction. Exposition, driven by heuristic and political motives, and praxis, involving conscious action, also play significant roles. Ollman emphasizes Marx's adoption of a philosophy of internal relations from Hegel, Leibniz, and Spinoza, which doubles into ontology and epistemology.

 

Contrary to banal realism, Marx, according to Ollman, sees reality's essence lying in the fundamental relations between entities rather than merely their existence apart from the investigator's experiences. The substantial existence of nature, Marx argues, is only comprehensible as a whole, with parts serving as relational constructs abstracted from reality, their interdependence constituting the whole. This perspective extends common sense, positing that a thing incorporates the conditions of its existence and that the whole is inherent in each of its parts. Marx regards the relations among things as "internal," including their interactive context. Ollman terms such entities, along with their necessary conditions and outcomes, "relations." Internal relations, he argues, are systematically necessary, while external relations entail contingency. Since the theoretical object is in constant flux, a thing encompasses its evolutionary process, along with its systemic relations.

 

In essence, Ollman's interpretation underscores Marx's dialectical approach as a powerful cognitive tool, particularly suited to understanding the complexities of capitalism. Marx's methodological framework encompasses ontology, epistemology, inquiry, intellectual reconstruction, exposition, and praxis, with a focus on the philosophy of internal relations. This perspective challenges conventional realism by emphasizing the interdependence and systemic nature of entities, positing that understanding reality necessitates grasping its relational dynamics. Ollman's elucidation enriches our understanding of Marx's dialectical methodology and its implications for comprehending social and economic systems.

Marx's epistemology is rooted in an ontological commitment to society as a system, leading to a rationalist imperative for systemic coherence as a truth criterion. Abstraction, among Ollman's four epistemological aspects, plays a central role. In everyday consciousness, perception follows intuitive, socialized abstraction, with concepts situating abstractions within existing knowledge's social flux. The transition from everyday to systematic consciousness, driven by ontological commitment and epistemological imperative, shifts focus from independent factors to understanding specific relational meanings of concepts. Abstraction delineates boundaries, analyzing wholes into manageable cognitive units for mental reconstruction, facilitating inquiry, organization, and exposition, focusing on change and interaction in a internally related systemic reality. Theory employs abstraction to carve up reality for its purposes.

 

Ollman breaks down abstraction into perspective, level of generality, and extension. Perspectives may involve categories such as individual, class, or group interests. Levels of generality range from unique individuals to broader entities like modern capitalism or the material world, each highlighting specific attributes. Abstractions at higher levels constrain possibilities at lower levels, while actions at lower levels may ground those at higher levels. Extension, spatial and temporal, influences a concept's meaning. Ollman emphasizes that claims of identity and identity-in-difference, central to dialectical contradiction, require an abstraction broad enough to encompass both sameness and difference. For instance, rent, profit, and interest are distinct but identical as forms of surplus value in a wider abstraction. Ollman suggests that Marx's epistemology combines empiricism and rationalism, employing realist notions of conditions of existence deduced from past and present societal observations. Marx avoids teleology and historical determinism by viewing future alternatives as present potentials and the present as a precondition for the future.

Ollman's work presents a valuable contribution, particularly in its accessible treatment of a complex and contentious body of thought. His pragmatic approach to dialectics is likely to persuade intellectually curious individuals of the necessity for a nuanced understanding of knowledge development. However, while Ollman's treatment of earlier developments in dialectics is robust, his handling of more recent developments is less satisfactory.

 

Ollman criticizes contemporary "new" or systematic dialectics for purported gaps that may not actually exist. His delineation of dialectic in terms of "moment" and "form," appearance and essence, resembles aspects of the very systematic dialectics he critiques. Nonetheless, Ollman's insights into Marx's dialectic—uncovering relationships, acknowledging its unfinished nature, revisions, and multiplicity of perspectives—have significantly influenced contemporary dialectical thought. Contemporary dialectics has built upon Ollman's groundwork, recognizing the centrality of developmental and organic interconnections, utilizing capitalist contradictions to glimpse post-revolutionary futures, critiquing capitalism through its defenders, addressing both capitalist reality and its conceptualization, and emphasizing synthesis in dialectical explanation.

 

While Ollman's contribution is immense, his characterization of contemporary dialectics as neglecting dynamic development in favor of organic structure seems erroneous. Instead, contemporary dialectics agrees with Ollman's insight that past development is best understood from the present vantage point, a notion Ollman aptly phrases as "studying history backward." Systematic dialectics, though narrower in focus compared to Ollman's comprehensive account, is integral to understanding capitalism's value-form methodology, critically building upon Ollman's foundations.

 

Similarly, Ollman's discussion of critical realism in Chapter 10 appears superficial and possibly misinformed. It prompts broader reflections on the relationship between being and consciousness often overlooked by realists. Rather than privileging either epistemology or ontology, as Ollman suggests, a dialectical approach seeks to problematize any simplistic dichotomy between them. Ollman argues for the interdependence of perception and conception, bridging this divide with the term "epistemontology," capturing the paradoxical unity-in-difference between them.

 

For Ollman, reality as perceived is conceptualized, reflecting an ontological commitment to the objects of those concepts, which, in turn, shape perceptual possibilities. However, Bhaskar's naturalism blurs the distinction between ontological commitment to a mind-independent world and the social reality shaped by everyday consciousness. Reflexivity ensures that agents' conceptions drive actions, potentially reproducing and transforming social reality. Social reality, while independent of the scientific observer's mind directly, remains entwined with the phenomenological mind, which is inherently social and constitutive of society.

Dialectics, with its flexibility in scope and focus, allows concepts to shift meaning as they adjust their denotation over relations, influenced by both theoretical concerns and the nature of relations and systems. Ollman grapples with the tensions of "epistemontology," conceiving dialectic as both a predicate of the ontological totality, capitalism, and the epistemology to grasp it. While Ollman's emphasis on the philosophy of internal relations positing all reality as a single totality may seem implausible, Bhaskar's idea of multiple totalities with internal relations within each is preferred. Despite some repetition, Ollman's work offers pragmatic insights into dialectical investigation, serving as a potential handbook on Marxist dialectical method. However, the later chapters lack the depth of critique promised, with the final chapter on Japan's capitalist class being largely descriptive. While dialectics may be unproven for many social scientists, Ollman's focus on its application to political science makes this collection valuable for radical social scientists.