"This problem can and must be related to the modern way of considering the educational doctrine and practice, according to which the relationship between teacher and pupil is active and reciprocal so that every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil is a teacher. But the educational relationship should not be restricted to the strictly ‘classroom’ relationships by means of which the new generation comes into contact with the old and absorbs its experiences and its historically necessary values and ‘matures’ and develops a personality of its own which is historically and culturally superior. This form of relationship exists throughout society as a whole and for every individual relative to other individuals. It exists between intellectual and non-intellectual sections of the population, between the rulers and the ruled, elites and their followers, leaders [dirigenti] and led, the vanguard and the body of the army. Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilisations."
—Antonio Gramsci, Q10,II§44
"One could say therefore that the historical personality of an individual philosopher is also given by the active relationship which exists between him and the cultural environment he is proposing to modify. The environment reacts back on the philosopher and imposes on him a continual process of self-criticism. It is his ‘teacher’. This is why one of the most important demands that the modern intelligentsias have made in the political field has been that of the so-called ‘freedom of thought and of the expression of thought’ (‘freedom of the press’, ‘freedom of association’). For the relationship between master and disciple in the general sense referred to above is the only realised where this political condition exists, and only then do we get the ‘historical’ realisation of a new type of philosopher, whom we could call a ‘democratic philosopher’ in the sense that he is a philosopher convinced that his personality is not limited to himself as a physical individual but is an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment. When the ‘thinker’ is content with his own thought, ‘subjectively’ free, that is abstractly free, he nowadays becomes a joke. The unity of science and life is precisely an active unity, in which alone liberty of thought can be realised; it is a master-pupil relationship, one between the philosopher and the cultural environment in which he has to work and from which he can draw the necessary problems for formulation and resolution. In other words, it is the relationship between philosophy and history."
—
Antonio Gramsci, Q10,II§44
"Fascism, to take a wornout example, is not an external opposite to liberal democracy but has its roots in the liberal democracy’s own inner antagonisms. This is the reason why negativity must be counted twice: to negate the starting point effectively, we must negate its own ‘inner negation’ in which its content comes to its ‘truth’ (fascism, although opposed to liberal capitalism, is not its effective negation but only its ‘inner’ negation: to negate liberal capitalism effectively, we must therefore negate its very negation). This second, self-relating negation, this (as Hegel would put it) otherness reflected into itself, is the vanishing point of absolute negativity, of ‘pure difference’ - the paradoxical moment which is third since it is already the first moment which ‘passes over’ into its own other. What we have here could also be conceptualised as a case of retroactive determination: when opposed to its radical Negative, the first moment itself changes retroactively into its opposite. Capitalism-in-itself is not the same as capitalism-as-opposed-to communism. When confronted with the tendencies of its dissolution, capitalism is forced to negate itself ‘from within’ (to pass into fascism) if it is to survive."
"Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality."
—Leon Trotsky, The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939)
"The materialist doctrine that men are the product of circumstances and education, that changed men are therefore the products of other circumstances and of a different education, forgets that circumstances are in fact changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated."
"Orthodox Marxism … does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders."
—
Georg Lukács History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics : What is Orthodox Marxism? (via
a-higher-level)
"It is apparent from this that there is no abstracting from the class struggle to yield the “ordinary process of accumulation”. Likewise there is no external or causal relation between capital accumulation and class struggle: the dynamic of capitalist accumulation is a dynamic of class struggle. Proletariat and capital stand in a relation of reciprocal implication with each other: each pole reproduces the other, such that the relation between the two is self-reproducing. The relation is asymmetric, however, in that it is capital which subsumes the labour of proletarians."
—
The Moving Contradiction: the systematic dialectic of class struggle.
Endnotes #2, April 2010: Misery and Value Form
beautifully put.
(via marxandsparks)
Dialectical wet dreams.
"Fascism, to take a wornout example, is not an external opposite to liberal democracy but has its roots in the liberal democracy’s own inner antagonisms. This is the reason why negativity must be counted twice: to negate the starting point effectively, we must negate its own ‘inner negation’ in which its content comes to its ‘truth’ (fascism, although opposed to liberal capitalism, is not its effective negation but only its ‘inner’ negation: to negate liberal capitalism effectively, we must therefore negate its very negation). This second, self-relating negation, this (as Hegel would put it) otherness reflected into itself, is the vanishing point of absolute negativity, of ‘pure difference’ - the paradoxical moment which is third since it is already the first moment which ‘passes over’ into its own other. What we have here could also be conceptualised as a case of retroactive determination: when opposed to its radical Negative, the first moment itself changes retroactively into its opposite. Capitalism-in-itself is not the same as capitalism-as-opposed-to communism. When confronted with the tendencies of its dissolution, capitalism is forced to negate itself ‘from within’ (to pass into fascism) if it is to survive."
