Dance of the dialectic: steps in Marx's method

Abstract

Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003,232 pages (paper).Bertell Ollman has spent the past three decades reconstructing Marx's methodology and finding the most approachable ways to present it to audiences not necessarily trained in the specialist language of Marxist philosophy. It was Ollman, after all, who in 1978 released the anti-Monopoly board game Class Struggle to help, says the game box, kids from 8-80 prepare for life in capitalist America. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method continues this project. This book is a compilation of selections taken from Ollman's previously published books and articles, re-arranged as a general primer on the dialectical method that he claims to be both indispensable for understanding Marx's analysis and necessary now for demystifying the hidden workings of 21st-century capitalism. As a treatise on method stripped of many of the technical discussions that have long occupied Marxist scholarship (such as value), this potted version of Ollman's theories shows just how provocative his can be for anthropologists seeking to throw our own methodological heritage up for reconsideration.Ollman has always wanted to distinguish sharply between the tools investigators use to interpret reality and those they use to explain it. With respect to Marx's work, this translates to reading the Grundrisse and the 1844 Manuscripts differently from Capital since they were written for different purposes: the former to identify the objects of analysis, the latter to help others understand these findings. Ollman is more interested in the former, where he sees Marx using dialectics like a geneticist might use a microscope, an instrument that in the right hands makes the invisible visible. The central objects thrown to light by dialectics, however, are not objects at all but and histories sedimented for the moment as things. As the author explains, Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the commonsense notion of 'thing' (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of 'process' (which contains its history and possible futures) and 'relation' (which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations) (p. 13).Where Ollman's becomes most useful for anthropologists is in his ability to translate this focus on social as subject matter (p. 23) from epistemology into a research program, from methodology to method, without losing any of its richness. The core sections of the book, chapters 2 through 5, offer a new coupling of Ollman's trademark philosophy of internal relations with the process of abstraction as an instruction for, in his words, putting dialectics to work (p. 59). This involves commencing a to and fro procedure which entails first of all abstracting things and positions into the that constitute them, secondly tracing how the transformations of each over time involve changes in the interconnections between them, and finally re-abstracting them into some level of generality to identify latent patterns, tendencies and points of conflict. …