Bertell Ollman

Going Beyond the State

Timothy Mitchells article “The Limits of the State” in the March 1991 issue of this Review stimulated an unusual variety of interested comments. John Bendix, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Bertell Ollman offer critiques and suggestions from quite different points of view. In response, Mitchell clarifies further the distinctiveness of his own approach and its implications.

Why Dialectics? Why Now?

The common, of course, was the land owned by everyone in the village. By the late middle ages, feudal lords were claiming this land as their own private property. In universities today, we can discern two opposing kinds of scholarship: that which studies the people who steal a goose from off the common (‘Goose From Off the Common Studies’, or G.F.C. for short) and that which studies those who steal the common from the goose (‘Common From the Goose Studies’, or C.F.G. for short). If the ‘mainstream’ in practically every discipline consists almost entirely of the former, Marxism is our leading example of the latter.

Marxism and the Philosophy of Internal Relations; or, How to Replace the Mysterious 'Paradox' with 'Contradictions' That Can Be Studied and Resolved

The problems most people have in understanding Marx come not only from the complexity of his theories, but also from the frequent changes in the meanings of his concepts. The present article attributes this unusual practice to Marx’s ‘philosophy of internal relations’, which serves as the foundation for his dialectical method, and his use of the process of abstraction (breaking up our internally related world into the ‘parts’ best suited to study it). The ‘flexibility’ found in Marx’s use of language is the linguistic counterpart of the different abstractions he believes necessary in order to capture the complex workings of capitalism. Marx’s dialectical categories, especially ‘contradiction’, are good examples of this process at work.

How to Study Class Consciousness, And Why We Should:

According to Marxist theory, a socialist revolution requires a class conscious working class.* Consequently, most socialist political activity is directed one way or another to raising workers’ consciousness. Yet relatively few Marxists have gone beyond theoretical analysis to studying the class consciousness of real workers. In part, this is due to the belief, widespread among Marxists, that such consciousness is a necessary byproduct of capitalist economic crisis, or the belief, equally widespread, that class consciousness can only be observed in political actions (in both cases, studying class consciousness now is impossible or irrelevant). In part, this neglect is due to a postLenin overemphasis on developing political strategies and organizations, on the assumption that class consciousness is sufficiently advanced once effective leadership is provided for revolutionary activity to occur (in which

The Meaning of Dialectics

There is so much misinformation about dialectics that it may be useful to start by saying what it is not. Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis which serves as an all purpose explanation, nor does it provide a formula that enables us to praise or predict anything, nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic as such explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking which brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world. It includes how to organize a reality viewed in this manner for purposes of study, and how to present to others, most of whom do not think dialectically, the results of what one finds.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Academic Freedom in America Today: A Marxist View

Three brief case studies: in 1915, Scott Nearing, a socialist professor of economics, was fired from the University of Pennsylvania for publicly opposing the use of child labor in coal mines. With an influential mine owner on the Board of Trustees, the president of the university decided he had to let Nearing go. As far as I can discover, he is the first professor fired from an American university for his radical beliefs and activities. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Theses on the Capitalist State

(1) One major aim of Marxs analysis of capitalism is to explain how people can make their own history and be made by it at the same time, how we are both free and conditioned, and how the future is both open and necessary. (2) In Marxs theory of politics, the capitalist state is conceived of as a complex social relation of many different aspects, the main ones being political processes and institutions, the ruling class, an objective structure of political/economic functions, and an arena for class struggle.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Dialectics and World Politics

ion, Marx, on the other hand, became very skillful in making and remaking the abstractions that he needed in his work. Marx’s use of the process of abstraction takes place in three different modes: these are abstraction of extension (or how far into any entity’s relations in space and changes over time he travels in drawing its provisional boundaries); abstraction of level of generality (or what ‘slice’ of history, as determined by the degree of generality of its qualities—essentially, how many people and conditions, how large of a space, and how long of a period—he brings into focus to study the distinctive interaction between the entities that fall on each level); and abstraction of vantage point (or the place from which he begins a study of any cluster of relations and the perspective that gives him on the rest). The first and third of these modes of abstraction are relatively easy to grasp, but the second one, abstraction of level of generality, needs—and deserves—some elaboration, especially as it plays the key role in Marx’s analysis of capitalism, almost always his main subject. In the Preface to Capital, vol. I, Marx says the chief purpose of this work is ‘to lay bare the law of motion of modern society’. But to trace the interaction between the functions that make capitalism work as it does and evolve as it has (really a double motion, organic and historical, that Marx treats as one here because they are internally related), Marx had to limit his focus, at least initially, to capitalism in general (what I have referred to as ‘level 3’). The society in which capitalism existed then and still now, however, contains many features that come out of its being a human society (my ‘level 5’), a class society, that is a society divided up into classes, of which capitalism is but one form (my ‘level 4’), a recent (or ‘modern’) version of capitalism (since capitalism goes through stages during the era of its dominance, changing in some respects while retaining most of its basic structures) (my ‘level 2’), and, finally, out of a collection of qualities that are unique to the people and conditions that exist at any given time (what today constitutes the main fare of our media) (my ‘level 1’). While the conditions that fall on all of these levels interact with each other in the present, to grasp the distinctive ‘law of motion’, organic and historical, that goes on in each of them—and each has its distinctive dynamic—it is necessary to concentrate on one level at a time before investigating the interaction that goes on between them. This is what Marx usually does with capitalism in general in his later writings in political economy, shifting occasionally to the modern capitalism of his day whenever he wants to highlight the interaction between these two levels. Without allowing for different levels of generality, it is only too easy for non-Marxists and even many Marxists to mix together elements from several different levels in their analyses (for Marxists that usually means levels 2, 3, and 4, and for non-Marxists, levels 1, 2, and 5), and miss completely Marx’s single greatest achievement, which was laying bare capitalism’s law of motion. The internal relation Marx posits between his ontology and his epistemology is what makes his philosophy, the combination of the two, a materialist one, for a view of reality that rules out the possibility of a simple reflection theory of knowledge and a view of epistemology that puts such great emphasis on the process of abstraction could only be true and manageable together. Its materialism lies in what it is and brings out about reality and us, as parts of it, in constant and complex interaction with the other parts, in which everything we are and do, including our thinking, plays a role as both ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. Next to this, what is usually called ‘materialism’ or ‘idealism’ appears . . . .well, undialectical. Dialectics and World Politics 575

Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution

When Moses invented ten fundamental laws for the Jewish people, he had God write them down on stone tablets. Lycurgus, too, represented the constitution he drew up for ancient Sparta as a divine gift. According to Plato, whose book, The Republic offers another version of the same practice, attributing the origins of a constitution to godly intervention is the most effective way of securing the kind of support needed for it to work. Otherwise, some people are likely to remain skeptical, others passive, and still others critical of whatever biases they perceive in these basic laws and hence less inclined to follow their mandates.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

What Constitutes a “Stolen Election”? Toward a Politics of Delegitimation

To the question “A Stolen Election?” (The Nation, November 29, 2004) – and after offering different interpretations for some of the evidence collected by those who answer “yes” – David Corn, the political correspondent of the magazine, replies with a resounding “maybe” (while directing most of his doubts and sarcasms at the “conspiracy theorists”). Could the two sides in this dispute be using different definitions? Stealing an election, after all, is not as obvious as robbing a bank. Stealing an election is more like fixing a deck of cards, where most of the stealing takes place out of sight and the outcome is never is doubt. As regards the recent presidential election, then, we must ask: (1) whether the process of voting, including the machines and methods used and the conditions that applied, lacked the transparency needed for everyone to see and to understand what was going on; (2) whether checking the result to ensure that votes were attributed to the right party and that all were counted and counted correctly was often impossible; (3) whether large numbers of voters from groups likely to vote for the losing candidate experienced great difficulty in registering or voting, either at the poll or by absentee or provisional ballot; (4) whether almost all of the admitted incidents of blocked or lost or changed or added votes favored the winning candidate; (5) whether key people in positions to create these “problems” – such as the Republican owner of the company producing most of the electronic voting machines, the Republican Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio, and President (sic) Bush himself – had said or done things earlier which showed that they could not be trusted; (6) whether these and similar problems surfaced in 2000, and, if so, whether the declared winners in that election – in the White House, in Congress and in the states – acted to obstruct the kind of reforms that would