[Xmca-l] Re: Hegel for Social Movements
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Mon Sep 2 17:20:35 PDT 2019
So you'd prefer a Popular Front in which the Communist
leadership appeals to the workers over the heads of their
leaders , and who are being "misled," to defy their leaders
and join the Communists?
All this belongs to history, David. We do not have giant
movements like the Comintern and the KMT leading mass
movements of workers. I am looking at the reality in modern
neoliberal countries.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 3/09/2019 9:41 am, David Kellogg wrote:
> Andy:
>
> In the closing page of your book, you argue that
> solidarity is the Urphanomenon of the socialist movement,
> and even that when solidarity becomes a universal concept,
> socialism will be already achieved. As you have said
> elsewhere, a lot has to happen before that comes about!
>
> On the penultimate pages, though, you argue that
> solidarity involves struggling with others under their
> direction: "You do it their way, and not your own".. Now I
> think I see why you found the transitional programme
> "fake". In it, Trotsky firmly argues that the Soviet Union
> and the Comintern had absolutely no business struggling
> for the liberation of China from foreign domination under
> the direction of the Guomindang (the KMT). Similarly, a
> gay or a black worker who joins a trade union in the US
> has to struggle under the direction of the union
> leadership, and has no right to raise demands that that
> leadership would disapprove of?
>
> Who exactly decides who these directors are? Is the
> present day Democratic Party the directorship of the
> struggle against Donald Trump and Republicanism? Are the
> Remainers in the Tory Party the defenders of democracy in
> Britain? Is Jeremy Corbyn?
>
> 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
>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 9:56 AM Andy Blunden
> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>
> Right. I never saw chs 5&6 of Thinking and Speech as
> being about Linguistics. I took them as being about
> /concept development/. There is indeed a vast synergy
> between Hegel and Vygotsky, when you line LSV's
> developmental psychology with Hegel's Logic. Striking.
> And the /differences /in detail are interesting too.
>
> But this close comparison of Vygotsky and Hegel is the
> topic of another book. This is for social movements. I
> "use" Vygotsky and CHAT people will see it, but until
> the last few pages it is a kinda hidden agenda.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 2/09/2019 7:20 am, David Kellogg wrote:
>> Andy--
>>
>> So it's not "Hegel for Linguists"? I'm not so sure.
>> It depends what kind of linguist you are, I think.
>> Systemic-functional linguistics is an explicitly
>> Marxist approach (see Halliday's "The Influence of
>> Marxism", in "Halliday in the Twenty-first Century"),
>> and Halliday himself got his start in linguistics in
>> one of the great social movements of the twentieth
>> century--the Chinese revolution. Ruqaiya Hasan
>> certainly knew Hegel better than I did.
>>
>> The reason I mention it is that, we are
>> re-translating Chapter Five of T&S to be Chapter Ten
>> of Pedology of the Adolescent (we thought this would
>> involve minor changes, but our language skills have
>> changed alot since we did T&S twelve years ago).
>> Being rather "visual-illustrative" (there's a good
>> Russian word for this, but no very good word in
>> English), I got caught up in your God's Eye View of
>> the Hegel universe on p. 157. And the left leg of it,
>> the Logic, still looks to me like a map of Chapter
>> Five/Ten.
>>
>> Syncretic heaps are pure being--they are based on
>> quantity, quality, and measure. Complexes are
>> syncretic heaps which are reorganized by reflection,
>> by appearance, and ultimately (pseudoconceptually) by
>> actuality. The real concept is the unity of subject,
>> object, and idea--but also a recapitulation of the
>> syncretic heap (Subject only), the complex (Object),
>> and the Act-ual.
>>
>> Vygotsky struggles a little with the Logic because
>> it's kind of "outside in": the genetic law insists
>> that every function appears twice, first inter- and
>> then intra-personally. That means that the child's
>> own development happens for others before it happens
>> for the child himself or herself. And that means that
>> the starting point is not one but two.
>>
>> So for example Paula Towsey, in her paper in MCA
>> ("Wolves in Sheep's Clothing", Towsey and Macdonald
>> 2009), says that Vygotsky uses "pseudoconcept" in two
>> contradictory ways--first, as an umbrella term that
>> covers ALL the complexes (and that's how she's
>> labelled her pictures). Secondly, as a unique
>> stage WITHIN complexes--the highest, transitional
>> form, the bridge to the concept.
>>
>> I think one way to resolve this contradiction is to
>> say that Chapter Five/Ten is abstraction in
>> action--it's a kind of desert island on which
>> children play without adults, and the child's forms
>> of thinking display what they would be without any
>> adult influence. But what we see in "real" life is
>> mostly pseudoconcepts, because in real life the
>> starting point is not one but two.
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 1:58 AM Helena Worthen
>> <helenaworthen@gmail.com
>> <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> OK, OK, I get it. I am a bit behind in doing my
>> reviewing assignments because of shifting house
>> from Vermont back to CA. My first reaction after
>> whipping through Andy's first chapter was an
>> uncanny sense that this book was indeed written
>> directly with me in mind. I guess “Me” would mean
>> any person who started out not being “political”
>> (in my case, an English comp and literature
>> person) and came into the world of social
>> movements by bumping up against reality often
>> enough and now wants to make sense of it.
>>
>> OK, I’ll get on it!
>>
>> H
>>
>> helenaworthen@gmail.com
>> <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>> helena.worthen1
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Sep 1, 2019, at 6:30 AM, Andy Blunden
>>> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Glad you're enjoying it, David. I hope that I
>>> will have my copies soon too! Both you and
>>> Helena have managed to get copies before me!
>>>
>>> Your questions: (1) Hegel does tend to deal with
>>> topics in terms of the very end points and
>>> extremes, and this has brought a lot of
>>> criticism and misunderstandings down on his
>>> head, especially from our generation. Mainly I
>>> deal with it by simply ignoring the passages of
>>> Hegel which go to God and the Absolute Idea,
>>> World History and so on. I recently put an
>>> article on my website and Hegel and Teleology,
>>> in which I specifically advised people to read
>>> Hegel without obsessing on these excesses. I
>>> should have put something to this effect in the
>>> book. You are right there.
>>>
>>> (2) Hegel's writing on language are in the
>>> Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, and they are
>>> not very interesting, I thought, in the context
>>> of linguistics today. But I can imagine that if
>>> Linguistics was your thing, then reading the
>>> Logic you would see Language everywhere. It is
>>> like that. But my book is "Hegel for Social
>>> Movements" not "Hegel for Linguists."
>>>
>>> (3) I must have not made myself clear, David,
>>> somehow. Hegel completely supported the Haitian
>>> Revolution and he was a complete Realist in
>>> International Relations, which he called "the
>>> animal kingdom of the spirit." He said states
>>> should honour treaties that they have entered
>>> into, but that's all. Quite confronting for the
>>> modern reader. It was Kant who promoted a
>>> "United Nations" and Fichte who used recognition
>>> of national sovereignty as a model for
>>> intersubjective relations. For Hegel, there was
>>> nothing higher than the nation state.
>>>
>>> The term "immanent critique" actually dates from
>>> the Frankfurt School. Hegel never used the term.
>>> But the Logic is clearly the model of immanent
>>> critique. Hegel was actually pretty dogmatic in
>>> how he critiqued his contemporary protagonists.
>>>
>>> Andy
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>> On 1/09/2019 8:15 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
>>>> 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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