Book title: Dialectics of Revolution: Hegel, Marxism, and its critics through a lens of race, class, gender, and colonialism
Author: Kevin B Anderson
Released: 2020
Review by: Victor Osprey

What is Marxism? Is it a philosophy, a science – or both? What distinguishes science from philosophy, and is it a distinction as easy to determine as we might imagine? After all – what even is science? And what does dialectical reason, or indeed philosophy in general have to offer when it comes not only to understanding but to changing society?

Kevin Anderson, a long-time scholar-activist and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, has set himself exactly this task in the latest book, Dialectics of Revolution. Taking the form of a collection of essays, Anderson examines Marx, Engels, Lenin and Bukharin – and especially Hegel – in considerable detail, alongside the ‘Western’ Marxists Herbert Marcuse and Georg Lukács. Coming from his distinctive Marxist-Humanist perspective, drawing upon the work of Russian-American Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya, Anderson provides a substantive explication and defence of dialectical reason throughout and in dialogue with its critics.

This red thread serves as a launching pad for the topics examined in the essay. These range from Lenin’s encounter with Hegel, to Lukács 1948 work The Young Hegel, the relationship of critical theorists like Marcuse to Hegel, and other related subjects.

Underlying the whole text is a proposition as to what Marxist (or what Anderson may prefer to call Marx’s) philosophy can give philosophically and politically to struggles around race, class, gender, and colonialism. In other words, the unity of theory and practice – praxis.

Science as compass, philosophy as guide?

The interrelationship between science and philosophy goes back thousands of years, with each interpenetrating and influencing the other in conceiving reality, social processes, and the natural world. The separation of science from philosophy into strictly delineated fields is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the intellectual life of humanity.

When it comes to socialist theory, the extent to which it is a ‘science’ has long bedevilled the movement. One approach has been to attempt to mirror the hypothetical-deductive model approach of the natural sciences, as if Marxism were a branch of chemistry. Another approach rejects this positivist tendency, instead pushing Marxism’s merits as a philosophy and an ideology in itself. For example, the insights derived from dialectical and historical materialism and indeed the critique of political economy, without attempting to prove it is an exact science that could be replicated in a lab like other fields of knowledge.

The former, and similar currents in the social sciences attempts to prove that their methodology is on par with physics, and believe this necessary to be taken seriously as a ‘science’ in the sense of being a lookalike of physics. However, it is perfectly acceptable for science simply to be a field of study; the difference between chemistry and Marxism is that humans cannot change the laws of chemistry or biology, only make use of them as far as they are understood. Whereas societal formations and social relationships are human made, and thus their laws can be changed, which is where Marxism as a social science has genuine insights in comprehending and transforming such social structures.

Marx and Engels, deeply influenced by the natural sciences of their time for all that they were dialecticians and dialectical thinkers anchored in German philosophy, relied on now partly outdated science as a metaphor and stimulant to their theoretical conception of mutually interacting and excluding agents. Taking Engels as an example, he toyed with rapid developments in chemistry ‘to get a better understanding of interacting and mutually determining systems. In other words, abstract dialectics could be seen in the metaphorical mirror of chemistry.’¹

As author Joost Kircz notes, attempting to prove whether nature is or is not dialectical according to human-made models (Hegelian or not) may be an intriguing intellectual exercise; what is more important however is how it spurred creative thinking around the concepts of mutually interrelated and determining systems, and how they could be extrapolated further and built upon. Whether applied to the natural sciences or, perhaps more appropriately, the social structures investigated by the social sciences.

Evolutionary biology is one example of a crude scientific materialism that, while superficially super-scientific, is an abstract materialism, largely excluding history and its processes – in other words, a non-historical, non-dialectical materialism. As Kevin Anderson notes: ‘Sociobiology/evolutionary biology denies historical materialism’s notion that human consciousness grows and develops through history, which is a product of the self-creation of human beings.’² It has also regularly been used as a ‘scientific’ justification for predetermined racist conclusions.

Marx’s debt to Hegel, and to ‘German’, ‘philosophical’ critical science precisely comes in handy in teasing out the limitations of the ‘hard’, positive sciences, without simply rejecting them. French Marxist Daniel Bensaïd summed up the contribution of positive sciences nicely: ‘They are a necessary moment in the movement of knowledge – on condition that we not stop there.’³ ‘German science’ forms part of an intellectual tradition which French rationalism and English empiricism have always rejected, despite themselves regularly falling into the trap of scientism; of taking the scientific conclusions of the moment for a permanently settled reality. Critique in the sense of Marx’s approach instead undertakes to critique an established science and its underlying intellectual assumptions while critically assimilating its real insights – hence Marx’s conception of his task as the critique of political economy.

Bensaïd further elaborated in an interview about the ‘misinterpretation’ of Marx as a scientist, in whose shadow was constructed a scientistic, doctrinaire Marxism⁴:

Marx points out the difference between what he calls “German science” and “English science”. For him, English science means the exact or positive sciences. He is very admiring, sometimes excessively so, of the progress of physics, chemistry, geology… And then there is German science, Wissenschaft, which is not ‘science’ in the French sense of the term: it is the dynamic movement of knowledge. Very few people in France realised this. In particular, the early Althusser, the one of the 1960s, built his fame on a complex scientificity, on a wish for Marxism to be so scientific that Marxists could be recognised by their academic peers as serious people, and not as signatories of petitions, as intellectuals for hire. Hence the (unaccomplished!) search in Marx’s work for an untraceable ‘epistemological break’: when did Marx become a scholar, instead of an ideologue and philosopher?

Louis Althusser, Marxist philosopher and long-time member of the French Communist Party sought as part of his effort to make Marxism more scientific to de-Hegelise Marx, to ‘drive the shade of Hegel… back into the night.’⁵ Althusser downplayed the extent of the continuity between Lenin’s conception of the dialectic and Hegelian idealism – a difficult task, given the assertions made in more than 200 pages of notes and commentary Lenin wrote on Hegel in 1914-1915 (published as the Philosophical Notebooks).

Raya Dunayevskaya herself criticised making a fetish out of science: ‘glorification of science is the mark not only of the ruling classes… but also of theoreticians busy revising Marxism… genuine historic revisions have always used “science” in the fight against “the Hegelian dialectic”… Eduard Bernstein was the first, back at the end of the 19^th century; Louis Althusser is the latest but he is sure not to be the last since, of necessity, these proponents of “science” and opponents of “philosophy” are sure to keep reappearing…’⁶

Although it may be said among certain sections of the ruling class these days the glorification of science no longer holds as much purchase as it once did, with these types preferring instead outright mysticism and submerging into wells of conspiracy theory.

Nonetheless, there was value in Althusser’s effort, despite its foundational flaws and unhelpful schemas (an artificial distinction of a break between young, humanist Marx and old, scientific Marx, and the attempt to excise Hegelianism like a leftover evolutionary tail).

Notably his understanding that ‘unlike a science, an ideology does not provide us with adequate instruments of knowledge’ and how ideology as a system of representations ‘is distinguished from science in that in it the practico-social function is more important than the theoretical function (function as knowledge).’⁷

Or as Norman Geras, a then-sympathetic critic of Althusser puts it in more nuanced fashion: ‘The problematic of a science (or ideology) governs not merely the solutions it is capable of providing but the very problems it can pose and the form in which they must be posed.’⁸

Despite his appreciation, Geras reserves significant criticisms for Althusser, stating that his account of science is idealist, and goes as far as to say Althusser’s account of the relation between Marxist theory and politics is both ‘theoretically incorrect and harmful.’⁹

Moreover, if Althusser begins by stressing the universality of knowledge in its content, ‘he ends by denying the historicity of its condition and processes of production’, a point exactly like Kevin Anderson and Marxist-humanists of various shades would make.¹⁰

And to top it all off, in what is perhaps his severest critique, Geras elaborates how Althusser’s concern to stress the scientificity of Marxism ‘fails to provide an account of what distinguishes this particular science from the other sciences.’¹¹

In effect, the differences between Marxism, mathematics, the physical and natural sciences are submerged rather than highlighted, all so Althusser can assimilate the entry of Marxism into the hallowed halls of a high respected science.

The problem is, when cracks are identified in that carefully constructed, apparently scientific edifice, the whole thing tends to come crashing down soon afterword; much like what happened after an initial wave of Althusserianism swept the world, then quickly receded in the wake of serious problems identified with Althusser’s approach and account of things years later.

A more all-rounded and nuanced conception of the interrelationship between science, philosophy, and the distortion of Marxism by Stalinism and other factors into economic reductionism (to take one example) is provided by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács.

Lukács details how this degeneration of Marxism was¹²:

directly connected with the fact that the specialisation of knowledge led to the separation of the sciences from each other… the working class movement and its ideology adopted this division of labour, the independence of scientific disciplines from each other. Marx had defined the economic as the material foundation of a more total historical process.

By the 20^th century, the economic had become a more or less ‘exact’ individual science, and this was largely replicated in the workers’ movement, including its Marxist component. Marx had seen the economic as one factor of social evolution, organically interconnected with other social causal determinants. Individualised sciences for Lukács, removed from their interdependence with other causal agents, ‘easily slides into mere tactics’, distorting the ‘Marxist conception of the economic [into] mere industrial productivity.’¹³

Thus, the turning of economics into an isolated science laid the methodological basis for its ability to be manipulated.

As a result, when the moment came, Stalin was able to first distort the meaning of the economic ‘on the theoretical level, and this distortion then became an instrument for his brutal manipulation of socialist development. When Stalin distorted the economic as a specialised positivist science, when he detached it from any political connectedness, he could claim to be building socialism by exclusively concentrating on industrial growth while totally ignoring the question of socialist democracy.’¹⁴

This sat entirely at odds with Marx’s notion that the economic is ‘more than just technology, more than a specialised individual science, but one causal factor within a larger total social formation.’¹⁵

The larger total social formation remains a major focus of Marxists today, influenced by a form of dialectical reason deeply indebted to Hegel’s intellectual offerings.

The alternative of dialectical reason – and its critics

Dialectical reason as a mode of analysis and thinking has come under sustained assault for some time, with its popularity significantly declining in the last half century in the face of other ideas like positivism, pragmatism, poststructuralism and postmodernism.

Explaining and elaborating foundational Hegelian thinking is first necessary in order to understand the discussion and criticism that follows.

Hegel’s classic example of the dialectical process is the master-slave dialectic.

Despite the inherent power imbalance, the master lacks something – the fulfilment of their need for acknowledgement. Being acknowledged by the slave is insufficient, as they are merely a thing to the master, and vice-versa. The twist is that while the slave works and the master receives the products of consumption, in their work the slave fashions and shapes material objects, becoming aware of their consciousness as objectively creating the fruits of their labour.

As author Stuart Jeffries explains¹⁶:

Clearly, this connects with the Marxist notion of man as essentially a producer, one who defines himself or rises to self-consciousness, even personal fulfilment, through meaningful work. For the slave, Hegel thought, labour, even at the direction of a slave master, makes him realise he has a mind of his own and means that the situation is not stable; its tensions generate a dialectical movement that leads to a higher synthesis. That synthesis leads to another dialectical tension, to another synthesis, and so on, at least in Hegel’s conception of history. Forty years after Hegel set out this dialectical process, Marx argued that if the object produced through labour is owned by another (be that another slave-owner or a capitalist), the worker has lost his own objectified essence. Such is alienated labour.

For Hegel, history was the unfolding of these dialectical processes towards the self-knowledge of what he termed the Absolute Spirit.

One of the key propositions of Hegelianism is that all the phenomena of any one epoch – its law, philosophy, economy, polity – are ‘merely the externalisations of one moment of the development of the Idea, i.e., of one internal spiritual principle which is the essence of those phenomena, manifesting itself in each and all of them…’¹⁷

In other words, ‘Hegel conceives every social totality… as having a unique spiritual principle to which all the diverse realities can be reduced, since each of them is only an expression of it.’¹⁸

Hegel’s dialectical conception of the social totality was profoundly idealist, while Marx’s dialectic, by turning Hegel on his head, functioned as a materialist inversion of Hegel’s dialectic. This gave it an interpretive power an idealist dialectic alone could never have, getting at the root of social phenomena and their historic emergence.

German Marxist and prominent member of the Frankfurt School Herbert Marcuse broke down the critical virtue of a materialist version of dialectical thought in the 1960 preface to his book, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory¹⁹:

Dialectic thought… becomes negative in itself. Its function is to break down the self-assurance and self-contentment… to demonstrate that unfreedom is so much at the core of things that the development of their internal contradictions leads necessarily to qualitative change: the explosion and catastrophe of the established state of affairs.

Although Hegel’s dialectic of negativity critiques the existing world on the basis of a ‘principle of freedom’ such freedom is ‘relegated to the realm of pure thought, to the Absolute Idea’ according to Marcuse.²⁰

Expanding the boundaries of dialectical reason beyond the realm of ideas, and its role as a ‘negative philosophy’, i.e., the negative and critical stance towards the world as illustrated in German philosophy, was a task was taken up by a wide range of Marxist and Marx-inclined figures in the 20^th century – like Marcuse.

Ranging from activists and scholars to rank-and-filers in the socialist and workers’ movement, theoreticians, and organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense.

They faced up to the charge levelled at dialectics by pragmatist, postmodernist and post-structuralist camps positing that it was a totalising, false perspective incapable of conceptualising particularity and difference.

That is, dialectics did not have room for the perspectives of oppressed racial, ethnic and national minorities, or of women, because it can only grasp grand totalities like progress and capitalism, not special oppressions at the interstices of society.

On the contrary, the Czech Marxist Karel Kosík, an original philosopher of Marxist humanism in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, regarded dialectics as fundamentally ‘the opposite of doctrinaire systematisation or romanticisation of routine ideas’; his concept of the pseudoconcrete serves a useful function in this regard.²¹

For Kosík, the pseudoconcrete represents ‘the collection of phenomena that crowd the everyday environment and the routine atmosphere of everyday life’ i.e., the world of ‘man’s fetishized praxis (which is not identical with the revolutionary-critical praxis of mankind).’²² The pseudoconcrete would include unsubtle totalities that crowd out differences and the ability to understand them, standing essentially at odds with revolutionary-critical praxis and communist potentialities.

Interestingly enough, the late 19^th century founders of pragmatism first embraced and then broke with Hegel. Pragmatist William James called Hegel’s philosophy a form of ‘vicious intellectualism’, because Hegel sought truth through reason instead of the multiple truths of a relativistic worldview.²³

Perhaps this is a partial explanation for the hostility of the esteemed German jurist, political theorist, and prominent Nazi Carl Schmitt, who wrote that on the day Hitler came to power, ‘Hegel, so to speak, died.’²⁴

Indeed, a contemporaneous review of Marcuse’s book on Hegel noted how ‘Hegel’s philosophy was fundamentally rationalist, while the philosophy of national socialism is fundamentally irrationalist.’²⁵

Another review came from the US Communist Party orientated journal Science & Society. While highlighting the ‘interesting argument’ of Marcuse demonstrating the Hegelian component in Marx’s philosophy, it came down on the side of positivism, declaring it scientific and therefore revolutionary.

If that latter approach represented a dead end, the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, influenced by poststructuralism and sharing the postmodernist critique of totality, essences and dialectic, took it even further.

Rorty wished to uproot not just Marxist dialectics but the entire tradition of critical dialectical thinking from Plato onwards.

In the name of pragmatism, given no alternative to capitalism exists, Rorty concluded in 1992 that the only hope for getting the money to end intolerable inequalities is to facilitate the activities of those like Henry Ford – and Donald Trump.

Thus, the political-philosophical nadir of pragmatist philosophy was reached; acceptance and conciliation with the untrammelled existence of the likes of Donald Trump. Needless to say, it failed to reach even that low bar. A system facilitating such individuals, far from moderating inequalities, has only made them worse.

Poststructuralists proposed, instead of dialectical reason, a philosophy of difference, with the goal of, as Gilles Deleuze and Daniel Cohn-Bendit put it in 1986, a ‘culture of dissensus’, striving for ‘a deepening of individual positions and a resingularisation of individuals and human groups. What folly to claim that everyone – immigrants, feminists, rockers, regionalists, pacifists, ecologists, and hackers – should agree on a same vision of things!’²⁶

Kevin Anderson’s response is brief and effective: ‘How the various spheres of the left, even if taken seriously in each of their particular manifestations, could eventually come together with enough force to challenge the rule of capital is probably not advanced by such a formulation. It should also be noted that Cohn-Bendit and Deleuze conspicuously leave aside the labour movement from their list of movements…’²⁷

Long-time collaborators and communists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, influenced by postmodernism, took a more distinctive approach. Critiquing dialectics, they saw their project as being in sync with both Marx and Lenin while asserting ‘the postmodernist project must be nondialectical.’²⁸

They alleged that Hegel’s theory of contradiction subsumed difference ‘into totality and teleology’, and labelled all forms of the dialectic as part of the logic of modern domination.²⁹

Dialectics relegate, as they put it, ‘the multiplicity of difference to binary oppositions and its subsequent subsumption of these differences in a unitary order.’³⁰

Hardt and Negri are referring specifically to the process in Hegel’s Science of Logic where identity is broken down into difference, with difference then subsequently subsumed by contradiction.

Reconciling the particular into the universal is a legitimate criticism of dialectical philosophy. Is it an inherently negative feature, or actually the basis to address and overcome the issues and oppressions poststructuralists and postmodernists identify?

The particular and the universal – race, class, gender, colonialism

Hegel’s notion of the concrete universal is undeniably related to Marx’s own views about universal emancipation.

Drawing upon Hegel, the pull of the universal upon the particular, steering it in the direction of universal human emancipation is evident in Marx’s body of work, for all that he addressed the particular.

Particulars like race, ethnicity and nationalism, especially in relation to subjects like Ireland, Poland, and the United States during the Civil War.

He distinguished between more narrow forms of group consciousness and more emancipatory ones, as when he emphasised how Irish Fenian nationalists had a class politics that opposed all landlords, pointing to the possibility of class unity across ethnic and national lines.

Such writings ‘belie the notion that Marx’s conceptualisation of capitalist modernity constitutes a “totalising” grand narrative under which the particulars of race, ethnicity, and nation are subsumed.’³¹

Or indeed gender, given Marx considered gender oppression a foundational form of social hierarchy and domination. Marx paid special attention to gender and family relations in non-Western societies like stateless Native American ones, perceiving elements of gender equality and women’s social power ‘far beyond the limited women’s rights of his time.’³²

The women’s rights of Marx’s time were themselves a focus of his, concerned as he was with the social conditions of life for women across varying class strata. This included middle and upper-class French women driven to suicide by parents or husbands.

One of the specific tasks Raya Dunayevskaya set herself was to reinterpret absolute idea as absolute negativity, ‘rather than as any kind of ultimate metaphysical rest in a closed totality.’³³

In other words, a reinterpreted dialectic that didn’t emphasise totality to the exclusion of difference and identity.

This enabled the dialectic to connect to the rich variety of progressive movements for change – the emerging LGBTI+ movement, women, ethnic and national minorities, without giving up on a universal drive towards emancipation in its most absolute and complete form.

Through the dialectical vision of a new society as a unifying point, free of the domination of capital and its value form alongside racism, sexism, and other oppressions, Dunayevskaya ‘avoids the pseudoconcrete that envelops so many of the postmodern philosophies of difference.’³⁴

If dialectical thinking seeks to stay relevant, it must not seal itself away from questions of difference, otherwise it would atrophy into a fetishized ‘classical’ perspective, instead of remaining a living, critical philosophy in the present.

Moreover, dialectical reason can critically assimilate genuine insights from poststructuralism and postmodernism without ceasing to be dialectical reason. If it didn’t, it would cease to be a critical science.

Criticism

Kevin Anderson’s book is well deserving of a wide readership and audience, given the clarity with which it explicates and summaries key ideas, debates, and the histories it engages.

In terms of criticisms, there is slight repetition in the text, understandable due to it being a compilation of essays thematically if not chronologically linked. Some of the repetition is not entirely unwelcome, as it reinforces points made earlier and then provides greater detail.

A background in Hegel or the particular ideological and intellectual controversies and debates would certainly help, though it is not a requirement to understand the essential arguments in each of the essays.

The main objection is to Anderson’s assessment of Engels.

While Anderson is careful to note the ‘highly significant’ contributions of Engels, he largely agrees with ‘the philosophical critique of his tendency towards positivism by Lukács… his reductionist writings on gender even after studying Marx’s far subtler treatment in the 1879-92 notebooks… his disparagement and misreading of the strength of the Union side in the U.S. Civil War, and his editing of Capital, Vol. I.’³⁵

Fair enough, although it is also fair to say that most of the criticisms of Engels in general are equally applicable to Marx. Intellectually, some figures have sought to ‘rescue’ Marx from Engels, ascribing to Engels alone the blame for Second International determinism (Althusser and Lukács) and the crudities of the Stalinist version of dialectical materialism.

Dialectical materialism, at least in its Stalinist version, had strongly positivistic qualities, especially evident in the work of its English popularisers like Maurice Cornforth, and French popularisers like Georges Politzer. Engels was much more nuanced than either, although a positivistic element can be read into certain writings of his.

As Joost Kircz explains: ‘The Diamat ideology of Stalinism is a prime example of taking creative reasoning out of its socio-historical context and recasting it in eternal truisms.’³⁶

Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, Karel Kosík and Raya Dunayevskaya, whatever the strengths and limitations of their own politics and perspectives, were four individuals who sought to do the opposite without ceasing to be dialecticians or Marxists.

Moreover, for all the real determinism evident in the thinking in the Second International’s leading thinkers, it is perhaps sometimes a little overstated.

Exaggerating the differences between the two life-long intellectual partners strikes this author as a largely unnecessary and unfruitful exercise. To be fair Anderson makes an effort not to do that – but it does read like that is the direction he is more than once heading in.

While nobody could disagree with Anderson that we need to assess what Engels had to offer critically, like with other Marxist figures (Luxemburg, Bukharin, Lenin, Trotsky) the framing of them as ‘post-Marx Marxists in a negative sense’ (and here Anderson is following Dunayevskaya) seems unhelpful.³⁷

Does it matter whether or not such figures ‘do not measure up to Marx’ as Anderson puts it?³⁸ What about aspects of their political and intellectual activities that arguably exceeded those of Marx? It seems to lead ultimately into an argument about who was better, smarter, or less compromised intellectually and politically as a result of the historical role they played in their time.

The ‘power of the negative as the creative element’, words written by Dunayevskaya (echoing Marx’s 1844 manuscripts) was a central concern of hers, and it is for Anderson.³⁹ Such power points in the direction of new beginnings, the ‘dialectic of negativity as the moving and creative principle’ as Marx described it.⁴⁰

To give the last word to Karel on dialectics – it ‘dissolves fetishized artifacts both of the world of things and the world of ideas, in order to penetrate to their result.’⁴¹

For communists today, that is just the first step in unlocking ‘the present that is in the future’ as CLR James once said, and dissolving the present day structures that uphold oppression and unjustifiable hierarchies.⁴²

All so the red shoots of a universalist emancipatory project breaking through the concrete – and pseudoconcrete – can flourish in the air of freedom.

1 Kircz, J 2014, ‘Elements of an essay on human change’, in R. Farris (ed.) Returns of Marxism: Marxist Theory in a Time of Crisis, IIRE, Amsterdam, p. 187.

2 Anderson, K 2020, Dialectics of Revolution: Hegel, Marxism, and its critics through a lens of race, class, gender and colonialism, Daraja Press, Ottawa, p. 157.

3 Bensaïd, D 2009, Marx For Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, Verso Books, London, p. 207

4 International Institute for Research and Education 2021, ‘What it means to be Marxist’ (2007), https://iire.org/node/965?fbclid=IwAR2BeKiMEcy3txDUe72Ds-o3Gpj4bO_j0TjQmR0vUUZRRb-rc9gbnuSpqsU

5 Anderson, K 2020, Dialectics of Revolution: Hegel, Marxism, and its critics through a lens of race, class, gender and colonialism, Daraja Press, Ottawa, p. 115.

6 Dunayevskaya, R 2017, Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution: Selected Writings, Haymarket Books, Chicago, p. 433

7 Geras, N 1983, ‘Althusser’s Marxism: An Assessment’, in New Left Review (ed.) Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, Verso Books, London, pp. 255-56.

8 Ibid, p. 244.

9 Ibid, p. 259.

10 Ibid, p. 264.

11 Ibid, p. 266.

12 Lukács, G 1968, Democratisation Today and Tomorrow: Part II.The Pure Alternative: Stalinismor Socialist Democracy. 6. Stalin’s Method, marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/democracy/ch06.htm

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Jeffries, S 2016, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, Verso Books, London, p. 143.

17 Geras, N 1983, ‘Althusser’s Marxism: An Assessment’, in New Left Review (ed.) Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, Verso Books, London, p. 249.

18 Ibid, p. 249.

19 Jeffries, S 2016, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, Verso Books, London, p. 143.

20 Anderson, K 2020, Dialectics of Revolution: Hegel, Marxism, and its critics through a lens of race, class, gender and colonialism, Daraja Press, Ottawa, p. 101.

21 Ibid, p. 165-6.

22 Ibid, p. 166.

23 Ibid, p. 161.

24 Ibid, p. 97.

25 Ibid, p. 98.

26 Ibid, p. 159.

27 Ibid, p. 160.

28 Ibid, p. 160.

29 Ibid, p. 160.

30 Ibid, p. 160.

31 Ibid, p. 186.

32 Ibid, p. 222.

33 Ibid, p. 168.

34 Ibid, p. 169.

35 Ibid, p. 220.

36 Kircz, J 2014, ‘Elements of an essay on human change’, in R. Farris (ed.) Returns of Marxism: Marxist Theory in a Time of Crisis, IIRE, Amsterdam, p. 174.

37 Anderson, K 2020, Dialectics of Revolution: Hegel, Marxism, and its critics through a lens of race, class, gender and colonialism, Daraja Press, Ottawa, p. 222.

38Ibid, p. 222.

39Ibid, p. 168.

40Ibid, p. 164.

41Ibid, p. 201.

42Ibid, p. 191.