[Xmca-l] Hegel for Social Movements

[David Kellogg]

I'm reading "Hegel for Social Movements", and I highly recommend it,
particularly to Helena. Although Andy doesn't say very much about his own
rich experience in trade unionism, it clearly illuminates a lot of his
examples.

I have three questions though. They are questions that I kept stumbling
over when I read the Logic and I have yet to really find anything that
answers them in Andy's book.

First of all, why is Hegel so big on purity? He is always talking about
pure being, and absolute idea. I guess I don't believe in purity--I not
only don't believe it exists, I am not even sure it should exist.

Secondly, one of the delights of Andy's book is that he likes to switch
back and forth between (e.g.) the Logic and the Grundrisse.  Bloomfield
remarks that when he read Capital he thought it was a book about
linguistics (because of the part on exchange value and use value, which
does look kind of Saussurean if you squint a little!) A lot of what Andy is
saying about how movements become first conscious of their own existence
(there is a line like that in Malraux's "Les Conquerants"--les coolies ont
decouvert ils existent, seulement qu'ils existent....), and then become
conscious of their internal differences--these seem to be statements about
the development of LANGUAGE and not simply language-pure consciousness. So
why so little explicit treatment of language?

Thirdly, Andy sometimes slips into Hegelian (rather than Marxist) politics,
e.g. on Haiti (p. 55) and and when he considers "international law" an
absolute (35). Haiti did not slip into neocolonialism because of some lack
of international civil society but BECAUSE of that "international
community" and still is!

(Andy--I thought "immanent critique" (the practice, not the term) was Kant,
not Hegel! How is Hegel's use of the practice different from Kant's?)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
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