Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism

NOTES

NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. As an example of this newfound popularity, for the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, Verso Books released a special “anniversary edition” of the text suitable for display on one’s “coffee table.” See Alexander Cockburn, “The Communist Manifesto Part Deux: A Leftist Mind at Sea, Commie Manifesto,” The Nation, June 15, 1998 and Barbara Erenreich, “Communism on Your Coffee Table,” Salon Books Website http://www.salon.com/ books/feature/1998/04/cov_30feature.html. 2. John Cassidy, “The Return of Karl Marx,” The New Yorker, October 20 and 27, 1997. 3. Carol C. Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology: Individual and Community in Marx’s Theory of Social Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), p. xxv. 4. Ibid., p. xi. 5. Ibid., p. xxv. 6. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 338–339. 7. Ibid., p. 339. 8. Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology, p. xi. 9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans., Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: NLB, 1976), p. 23. 10. William James, Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1948), p. 3. 11. Even though this enterprise seems unconventional, it is not without precedent in the field. First, Whitehead himself wrote on social, political, and economic 195 issues and numerous secondary sources have treated these views exclusively or at length. See in particular, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967); The Aims of Education (New York: Free Press, 1967); Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1968; Science and the Modern World; and Whitehead’s American Essays in Social Philosophy, ed. A. H. Johnson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959). For works combining the thought of Marx and Whitehead, see Russell L. Kleinbach, Marx via Process (Washington, DC: Washington University Press of America, 1982); James L. Marsh and William S. Hamrick, “Whitehead and Marx: Toward a Political Metaphysics,” Philosophy Today 28 (Fall 1984): 191–202; James L. Marsh, Process, Praxis, and Transcendence (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); Howard L. Parsons, “History as Viewed by Marx and Whitehead,” Christian Scholar 50 (Fall 1967: 273–289; James Leyor Smith, “On Whitehead, Marx, and the Nature of Political Philosophy,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy 24 (1975): 101–112; Clark M. Williamson, “Whitehead as Counterrevolutionary: Toward a Christian-Marxist Dialogue,” Process Studies 4 (Fall 1974): 176–186. Some of these works focus attention primarily on the historical aspects of the two philosophies. Kleinbach’s Marx via Process, for example, utilizes Whitehead’s notion of consciousness to elucidate Marxist praxis. Several of the others concentrate on the theological aspect of process and its implications for liberation theology or critical socioeconomic theory, but none so far has attempted the thoroughgoing integration of the two philosophers on the level of the ontological-metaphysical. It might surprise some to discover a connection between Marx and Whitehead lurking within Bertell Ollman’s Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) I was quite thrilled to find out from Professor Ollman a short time ago that the original version of his dissertation contained numerous references to Whitehead’s philosophy. Unfortunately, those were removed from the final version. But one can still see the remnants in Professor Ollman’s elucidation of the philosophy of internal relations. 12. This general statement is all important and will constitute the basis on which Marx builds his dialectical materialism, but this cannot be adequately dealt with at this juncture. We will return to it again after the dialectical metaphysics has been laid out. 13. It should be noted again that Marx’s prohibition against the use of transhistorical and universal notions only applies to those which do not themselves emerge from our concrete experience. It is not that one cannot make such claims, but that they must be grounded in the real. As I will show later in chapter 3, Marx himself employs general or universal categories. The point is not to avoid abstraction but to make sure that the levels of abstraction retain their thoroughgoing dependence on each other. 14. It is interesting and helpful here to note the similarity of this claim to Heidegger’s formulation of Dasein as always already Mitsein. See his Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962). 15. This claim as to the dialectical nature of...