Oplan-Tokhang’s Transnational and Theoretical Dimensions: Can the Philippines’ Revolution Re-emerge?

• In Event: 4366 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 15. Revolution and Social Change

Abstract

I have argued (Rockwell, 2018) that (1) the necessity and freedom dialectic is at the core of G.W.F. Hegel’s (1976) Science of Logic, carried through in his Philosophy of Mind (1973), (2) Marx (1981) appropriates this dialectic in his concept of a post-capitalist society, most succinctly articulated in his description of the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, which he presents most directly in Capital: v.3, and in the core sections of Capital: v.1 (1990), especially “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”, and (3) this same dialectic has been an unrecognized but key characteristic of the post-Marx Hegelian-Marxian theoretical tradition developed in Herbert Marcuse’s (1941, 1961) and Moishe Postone’s (1995) Critical Theory and Raya Dunayevskaya’s(1988) Marxist-Humanism. However, most of my previous work on this dialectic of necessity and freedom has focused on the nature of late capitalist highly technologically developed society. In this paper I begin to explore the implications of the Hegelian-Marxian necessity and freedom dialectic for understanding the historical and potential future relationships of the Philippines and the U.S., which must take account of the different levels of technological development. The key concepts that emerge in such a comparison are the value and material forms of wealth and “historical time”. Postone develops the latter most extensively in his “reinterpretation of Marx’s mature critical theory.”

Author

• Russell Lee Rockwell