(2011 December, Lap Lambert), ISBN 978-3-8473-3222-0
A THEORY OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY
AND
SOCIAL DIALECTICS
Ercan Gündoğan
For Nesrin, as
always
CONTENT
Preface
This monograph follows the
writing style of the Enlightenment philosophers and can be read as a treatise
or scientific essay in which there is no division between literal, philosophical
and academic forms of writing. I applied to this form in my previous books as
well. Academic writing form cannot be separated from the academic mode of
thinking, which shows that the researchers and university professors occupy a
specific place within the capitalist social division of labour by fulfilling an
ideological function. They are specialists of the ever-increasing number of the
academic disciplines that are not connected to a whole and hence, do not even communicate
each other. Overspecialization in the bourgeois sciences is a structural tendency
that is not resisted. Interdisciplinary study areas also suffer from that
tendency as they are just specialized on the cross lines of non-connected and countless
number of disciplines. Departments within the faculties are changed into
interdisciplinary “programs” to meet the demands of the market. However, as a
counter tendency, meta-theories, or grand theoretical frameworks have been
developed by the Marxist scholars and theorists. They are surely indifferent to
the official academic divisions of the bourgeois sciences and aim to theorize
economic, political and ideological phenomena as the different levels of the
whole of social relations. They recognize that the scientific divisions do not
only divide science by making it impossible, but also our intellectual power as
they divide politics from economy and ideology upon the ground of the
capitalist division of labour. Actually, the divisions as such contribute to
the ever increasing divisions of our life into seemingly independent spheres.
Our lives, acts and thoughts must be combined in theory and practice by
combining economy, politics and ideology.
I would like to repeat
what I said in my juries of master, PhD and associate professorship as a
response to the question of what my fields of interest and study areas had
been: In each jury, I said that I was interested in what Marx had been
interested in and my fields of study were what Marx’s had been. They are the
dialectical connections among political economy, politics, ideology, history
and philosophy of the bourgeois social relations; in other words, what I call
is “social dialectics”, which is the name of the book you now read.
“Love, work, and knowledge
are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it”, says Wilhelm
Reich. Therefore, as I did before, I dedicate this book as well to my wife Nesrin again, for love, work and
knowledge we always share.
Acknowledgment
of intellectual debts
More
than any theory, Marxism develops collectively. From Sain Simon to post-Marxists
of our day, a conscious socialist theorising empowers, sophisticates and details
it. Like any socialist, I also own too much to other socialists, their
theoretical or practical contributions. In this study, I exploit an immense
amount of socialist knowledge without referring to its all individual
producers. Inspirations and indirect impacts cannot be always referred.
Especially covert dialogues and criticisms can be seen only between the words.
However, the reader can easily see how much I benefitted from Gramsci,
structuralists, Mao, post-structuralists, post-Marxists, eco-socialists and
socialist feminists. However, the reader can also see how much I appreciated
and benefitted from Marx and Lenin, Wilhelm Reich, Lucas, Frankfurt School writers
and David Harvey. In Turkey, although Yalçın Küçük always inspires me, I rarely
refer to him since his writings are dispersed into numerous books and articles
with many repetitions. However, I share his style of thinking and writing when I
develop my theses and arguments.
Nevertheless,
the theorists and circles from which I have benefited much are just the
components of my approach rather than my perspective itself. Those components
are not always positive, but many times, negative. I mean that I tried to
correct or replace them with better ones since, I think, a contribution may be
harmful in the long term. This is the situation of structuralist Marxism.
Alternatively, a contribution can be seen as progressive for a period and be
negatively exploited in the other periods. This is the case of Gramsci’s theory
and Maoism. The former, at the beginning, was a contribution to
Marxist-Leninist theory by emphasising the difference of the advanced
democracies in the West. Now, it is used as only the base of radical democracy.
The latter as a contribution to socialist practice has become the main foundation
of peasant socialism and socialist nationalism, which conceives and replaces
socialism with anti-imperialism. However, on the other side, there are still
theories which have to be developed further. This is the position of Marxism
and Leninism.
