Dialectics of revolution : Hegel, Marxism, and its critics through a lens of race, class, gender, and colonialism

  • Release Date: September 21st, 2020
  • Publisher: Daraja Press
  • ISBN-13: 978-1-9888327-5-3
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OVERVIEW

This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin’s encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukács’s The Young Hegel and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. Dunayevskaya’s intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life.

Table Of Contents

Introduction
Part 1: Marxism and Hegel

  1. Dialectics in brief
  2. Hegel, the French revolution and after
  3. Lenin’s encounter with Hegel
  4. Lenin, Bukharin, dialectics, and imperialism
  5. Marcuse, Hegel and critical theory
  6. Lukács on the young Hegel

Part 2: Dialectics today

  1. Dialectical reason and its critics
  2. Derrida on Marx: Return or deconstruction?
  3. Resistance vs. emancipation, from Marx to Foucault
  4. Class, Gender, Race, and Colonialism
  5. Marx at the Margins: Ten years later
Reviews

Sean Sheehan, “The Colour of Marxism,” ThePrisma: The Multicultural Newspaper (UK, June 7, 2021)

This is a collection of essays of paramount importance written by one of the most noteworthy authorities on Marx and Hegel within the field of Western Marxism. … Anderson is uniformly brilliant in his analysis of Marx as a multidimensional thinker who developed a multilinear pathway for revolution for societies outside of Western Europe, putting to rest the charges of determinism and Eurocentrism and patriarchal thinking that had tempted many in the left away from critical engagements … Dialectics of Revolution makes it clear why Anderson is among the leading lights writing on Marxism and revolution today.

Peter McLaren, author of Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution

Kevin Anderson’s Dialectics of Revolution collects four decades of Anderson’s studies of Hegel, Marx, dialectics, and revolution. … Anderson provides much provocative material in developing critical theory and revolutionary practice for the contemporary era.

Douglas Kellner, author of Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism

This deeply intellectual, and yet highly accessible, work breathes new life into dialectical Marxism, reconciling the debates over identity politics and class struggle and positing a dialectical Marxist-humanism. … that recognizes that the revolutionary struggle for freedom is the struggle against class, racism, sexism, and all forms of oppression. … This book is not only timely and relevant but urgently necessary.

— Lilia Monzo, author of A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity