Tony Smith, Dialectical Social Theory and its Critics:  From Hegel to
Analytical Marxism and Postmodernism, State University of New York
Press, 1993.  173 pages.  Paper $14.95  Hardcover $44.50
 
      Following on his earlier work, The Logic of Marx's 'Capital' (SUNY
Press, 1990), Tony Smith's new book on dialectical social theory
constitutes a significant attempt to veer Marxist studies in a
fundamentally new direction -- in the direction of dialectical theory.
With the additional weight of Bertell Ollman's recently published,
Dialectical Investigations (Routledge, 1993), Smith's growing body of
work counteracts the analytical Marxist critique of Marx's Hegelian
dialectical connection as unscientific and obscurantist.  Earlier
existentialist and "Western" Marxist tendencies had made much of Hegel,
so that it might seem that there is nothing really new here.  But the
most influential works in this body of thought -- including the early
Lukacs, the Frankfurt school, and Sartre -- tended to emphasize a narrow
range of Hegel's work.  Especially important was Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit, which permitted the development of psychological and cultural
possibilities of Marxism.  But Hegel's central philosophical work, the
Science of Logic, has been largely neglected.
 
      What was neglected was the highly sophisticated methodological
resources that Marx always presupposed from Hegel.  Underestimation of
the importance of this Hegelian background leads to serious
misunderstandings of Marx.  This point was made by Lenin in his notes on
Hegel:  "It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and
especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and
understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.  Consequently, half a century
later none of the Marxists understood Marx!"(1)  The crisis of
socialism and Marxism today is in no small degree a consequence of an
undialectical conception of socialism in the USSR, especially in the
years following Stalin's "second revolution".
 
      The "analytical Marxist" decomposition of Marx's work into a set
discrete and fixed theses about the nature of capitalism -- usually with
an ever-diminishing number of defensible ones -- tends to support the
idea that Marxism must be relegated to the 19th century, when those
theses appear to be best exemplified.  Postmodern postmarxism, in an
anti-analytical vein, is opposed to any such rationalistic theses so as
to connect with the seemingly uncognizable whirl of the late twentieth
century.  But such approaches fail to comprehend the nature of
dialectical social theory, which has built into its central concepts the
possibilities of change that are supposed to refute it.  From analytic
Marxism to postmodern postmarxism, Smith provides a response to the
major non-dialectical or anti-dialectical interpretations of Marxism.
In short, clearly written chapters, Smith first sketches a well-
illustrated account of dialectics in Hegel and Marx.  He then
persuasively shows how the various "Marxists", now over one-hundred
years after Marx, still have failed to understand Marx, and for very
same reason that was suggested by Lenin.
 
      Part one, the first four chapters, explores the Hegel-Marx
connection in terms of both methodological commonality, as well as
differences regarding substantive social-historical theory.  The first
chapter outlines the Hegelian theory of systematic analysis of complex
realities, as set forth in the Logic.  Especially original is Smith's
intriguing interpretation of Hegel's abstruse expositions of the forms
of the syllogism.  The second chapter turns to another poorly understood
part of Hegel's work, his discussion of the dialectical evolution of
Greek drama, in the culminating sections of the Phenomenology.  Here
Smith shows how Hegel's treatment of tragedy and comedy in ancient
Greece sheds light on Marx's approach to alienation and the labor theory
of value.  In chapter three Smith argues that Capital can best be
understood as an example of the "systematic dialectics" of the central
categories of capitalist society, not "historical dialectics", as some
commentators have argued.  In systematic dialectics, categories are
analyzed in a sequence determined by the system under investigation, not
in the order of their original historical emergence.  Chapter four
replies to Richard Winfield's defense, in The Just Economy, of Hegel's
socio-economic theory against that of Marx.  In the final four chapters
making up part two, Smith then develops lucid expositions of Lucio
Colletti's neo-Kantian critique of the Hegelian dimensions of Marxism,
the analytic Marxisms of Jon Elster and John Roemer, and the postmodern
postmarxism of Jean Baudrillard.
 
      At the heart of the dialectical method, Smith argues, is the
complex interrelation between "individuality", "particularity" and
"universality".  Each of these central categories of social life can be
a focal point in relation to which the others are understood.  But a
systematic investigation of social complexity must avoid reduction to
any one of them.  Each is mediated by the others in a system involving
unity-in-difference.  Thus capital is the universal that is subdivided
into a diversity of particular moments -- money, means of production,
labor power, commodity -- all of which are mediated by the actions of
individuals.  It would be just as much a mistake to reduce everything to
the allegedly all-powerful action of the universal, capital, as it would
be to attempt to derive the general features of the system from the
goals pursued by individuals.  But as in the Greek tragedies,
individuals feel themselves to be subject to the alien necessity of
fate, so under capitalism do the creations of individuals appear to them
in the form of a fatalistic destiny over which they have no control.
Counterpoised to this fatalism, Hegel noted the opposing,
individualistic moment, that of the Greek comedies, in which the gods --
the particular and universal powers of life -- are downgraded to being
"nothing but" the inventions of atomistic individuals.  This contrasts
with the unity of the individual and the community that Hegel detected
in Christianity, a notion that foreshadows Marx's conception of a
socialist community of individuals linked in solidarity.
 
      But perhaps all this is just obscurantist speculation?  Jon Elster
rejects dialectics as the "yoga of Marxism" in part because the
connection between the categories of Hegelian dialectics is neither that
of cause and effect, axiom and theorem, or fact and condition of
possibility.  He neglects a fourth form of relation, clearly stated by
Marx -- that the essential feature of dialectics is the organization of
categories in a progression from abstract to concrete.  "Dialectical
logic", writes Smith, "is nothing more than the set of rules that
operate when transitions from simple and abstract categories to complex
and concrete ones are made." (97)
 
      The abstract category defines an abstract or simple social form.
This form constitutes a structural tendency for individuals to behave in
ways that will give rise to a new structure, one that will be of greater
complexity or concreteness.  The transition from the first form to the
second one is the result of "microfoundations" in the conscious actions
of individuals conditioned by the first structure.  There is nothing
speculative or mystical, for example, about the transition in Hegel's
Philosophy of Right from the category "contract" to the category
"wrong".  Individuals motivated simply by self-interest -- the simplest
social form of modern Western society from which Hegel's study begins --
and without the more complex forms of law and social organization that
are examined on more concrete levels of categorial complexity, will tend
to violate their agreements with one another.  Hence, there is an
empirical basis in individual behavior for following "contract" with
"wrong" in the progression from abstract to more concrete forms of
social life -- within the complexity of a social system that is examined
in this methodical step-by-step fashion.  The same can be seen in Marx's
progression from "commodity" to "money" to "capital".
 
      But if neither Hegel nor Marx overlooks the behavioral
probabilities of individual action within given social forms, the
"rational choice Marxism" of Elster exaggerates the importance of
individual choice, failing to appreciate adequately the mediation of
individual choices by the moments of particularity and universality.
Elster underestimates the dependence of individual behavior on the
particular social forms within which they act, as well as the systematic
unity of a multiplicity of such forms of social life that constitutes a
social system.  The criticisms of dialectical Marxism by Colletti,
Roemer and Baudrillard likewise fail to understand essential
characteristics of the dialectical methodology that is at the heart of
Marx's work.
 
(1)  V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 38, Moscow 1963, p. 180.
 
                                        James Lawler
                                        Suny at Buffalo