Ideality and Intersubjectivity: Dialectics and Analectics in a Philosophy of Liberation

On the one hand, dialectical critique articulates theories of social transformation that do not shy away from an approach that is immanentist through-and-through. Transcendence in this approach is only the positive result of contradictions inherent to the totality; here, revolutionary subjectivity becomes aware of its other as the dynamism of change. On the other hand, analectical critique presupposes that the relationship to the other is primary, for the other lies beyond the totality in a transhistorical and trans-systemic dimension; it is a distinct narrative forever present as a novelty; it is the source of expression that itself cannot be expressed; it is a transnarrative.

Contemporary literature expresses vividly those two paradigms, which are useful for critical theory, thus encompassing also the praxis of decolonization:

Illustration 1. Octavia Butler in her Parable of the Sower has a fascinating affirmation of incompletion or rather of Becoming as the complete meaning of the Totality through her main character, Lauren, at the heart of the novel: “Change is ongoing. Everything changes in some way—size, position, composition, frequency, velocity, thinking, whatever. Every living thing, every bit of matter, all the energy in the universe changes in some way. I don’t claim that everything changes in every way, but everything changes in some way…. Earth-seed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. God will shape us all every day of our lives. Best to understand that and return the effort: Shape God.”¹

Illustration 2. Ursula Le Guin in one of her short stories gives voice to the drive towards exteriority that is founded on the confrontation with an other who is the source of the subject’s responsibility, of the self’s love and desire towards an infinity never comprehended but touched by a love for which no reason can account because it’s the never ending saying that cannot be said: “He had taken the fear into himself, and accepting, had transcended it. He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self.—But this is not the vocabulary of reason.”²

In this essay I articulate philosophically the two paradigms of decolonization in two principal sections: living labor and the logic of intersubjectivity that forms the framework of the process towards liberation.

<1> Living Labor
In this section, I offer two distinct interpretations of Marx’s concept of living labor. They will serve as the foreground for an analysis that contrasts (a) Dussel’s Levinasian reading of Marx with (b) a Hegelian one. The former has the anthropological virtue of rescuing the human from totalizing irrationality but has also a problematic relation to the mystification of the human and the unintended naturalization of historically constituted social relations; the latter has the anthropological virtue of thinking of the human as immanent to the relations of their existence without a mystification of the “something” that relates to an inexpressible exteriority, but it does so at the risk of dismissing the posthuman novelty produced by subjectivities that rebel against their constitution. I argue, however, that the Hegelian reading is closer to Marx’s view and is the more promising theoretical approach to the praxis of liberation.

(a) Dussel’s reading of the Grundrisse is deeply influenced by a Levinasian rather than a Hegelian perspective. Dussel states that in Hegelian Marxism the totality, that is, Being (Sein) or Essence (Wesen), is the origin and foundation (Grund) of the real. Instead, in Dussel’s interpretation, the origin is to be found in the exteriority of the source (Quelle) of value: “living labor … [is] ‘the living source of value’.” Thus, while living labor is anterior and exterior to capital, the value created by living labor is the being of capital. Therefore, living labor in its exteriority and anteriority is the source of being.

From the “exteriority” of “living labor” (which is neither “the capacity for labor” nor “labor power,” a denomination that Marx does not use with certainty until 1866), from the transcendental poverty (the “pauper,” as Marx writes) of the person, subjectivity, corporeality, of the worker as ‘not-capital’ (Nicht-kapital), transcendental, then, with respect to the ‘totality’ of capital, the ‘living labor’ is “subsumed” (“subsumption” is the trans-ontological act par excellence that negates exteriority and incorporates “living labor” into capital) in the “labor process.” It is from this perspective that Marx, quickly, set himself the problem of how “surplus value” (Mehrwert) appears and thereby discovered, for the first time in his life, the question of “surplus value.”³

Dussel makes this point again in his 2018 manuscript, Filosofía de Liberación Decolonial: “All capital is the subsequent development of categories based on this central discovery, originary and ontological point of departure (and even trans-ontological…) of Marx’s critical theory of political economy: From what is anterior to capital (exterior to capital), living labor is subsumed (that is, “in-corporated within”) as mere mediation in the Totality of capital.⁴

One of the key elements of Dussel’s interpretation of Marxism is that Marx’s scientific critique is based more on the critique of fetishism than the critique of ideology. If the critique of fetishism is a central pillar of Marx’s critical theory, then, Dussel argues, the subsumption of living labor in the totality of capital not only obscures living labor but also living labor’s relation to value as the source of the latter: “For Marx, to fetishize is to absolutize the term of a relationship… thus losing its meaning…. [C]ritical or scientific activity for Marx consists in explaining all categories from the category origin of all other categories: Living labor. If this relation with living labor is lost—living labor being the substance of value (that is, its “cause” in Hegelian terminology)—value is absolutized, and it is attributed to the thing and not living labor as its objectification.”⁵

This is a Levinasian interpretation of the concept of living labor: We have here a subjectivity anterior to, and irreducible to all social relations to which I can point as the truth because its proximity allows me to substitute for it a relation prior to all relations,⁶ including Marx’s concept of relationship. Hence, a key element of Dussel’s thought and of his interpretation of Marx is that the source is the subject as Other, and not the relationship as Other, a relation that disguises the ideality of intersubjectivity or, as Marx put it regarding fetishism, “a definite social relation between men… assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”⁷

Thus, for Dussel, the fundamental question is what the origin of any economic system is. The origin is always the concrete subject, “originary” moment of every possible economy.⁸ However, Dussel’s subject is not the subject of social relations and, therefore, of totalities, but the Levinasian subject, an ever present transcendence (or trans-ascendence as Levinas put it borrowing from Wahl⁹) of social relations.

The logic that informs Dussel’s philosophy of liberation is what he calls an “analogical pluriversality” by contrast to a “univocal universality.” While the latter imposes itself on others—the imposition of Self-same over the other in a logic of identity/difference—, the former allows for a process of dialogue among equals on the basis of a logic of analogies of “similarity and distinctness”¹⁰: It is grounded in fact on a metaphysics of duality that articulates “the incommensurable plenitude of reality itself” through “the cognitive finitude of the human being.”¹¹ Hence, the totality is discovered through analogy as “not-originary,” as rather derivative from a drive towards Alterity and a previous meta-physical encounter with the Other. Reality is, therefore, for this logos (i.e., that of the ethical attitude of the finite being) always open, never univocal. We are thus “situated at an anthropological level (not at the level of the infinite but of the human being), in face of the revelation (Schelling’s Offenbarung) of the ‘word of the Other’, and starting from that word in search of its meaning… analogy acquires central relevance…”¹²

The ethical drive is founded on a faith-filled decision to satisfy the urgent needs of the Other who announces those needs and who therefore lives a la intemperie¹³ both objectively for them and subjectively for us; hence, the act of faith, the logic (or logos) for us of an analogical faith.¹⁴ Of course, the exposure is also our exposure because the river current that drives analogical pluriversality is an ethics of empathy and of sharing. But the logos is ours; for it is our faith, not the faith of the needy. Hence, it is our similarity. The proximity of the other person is thus founded on a process of substitution. Our access to the other (a phenomenology of egotism based on a totalizing reason) is predicated on our openness towards the other (a trans-phenomenology of altruism based on faith).

Dussel says in his his 16 tesis de economía política that “the subject of indeterminate labor, not yet objectified in any product (and not yet subsumed in any concrete productive system) was called by Marx “living labor” (lebendige Arbeit). It is the starting point of the the whole productive and economic field.”¹⁵ Dussel makes an analogy between the will as the genesis of the ontology of the political field and living labor as the origin of the ontology of the productive field, and therefore between potentia (power-in-itself) in politics and living labor in-itself in the economic field. Diremption has not yet happened.

Historically, this general economic category is not simply or only pre-nonequivalential in a metaphysical sense, but also in a system-constitutive sense: Dussel’s examples are the peasant of sub Saharan Africa in confrontation with the slave hunter (an originary face-to-face), “the human subjectivity of living labor bought integrally and substantially as a thing… for example in the sugar mills of Brazil, Cuba and the American British colonies.”¹⁶

Here, however, in these examples Dussel makes a subtle change from exteriority being the alterity-source of a new totality, as I quoted above, to exteriority alterity-absorbed by a totality. He can do this because, with Levinas, subjectivity and the other that founds it ethically are anterior to social relations: They are an “interior transcendentality.” They become a source of social relations but not reducible to social relations because they are cut of a metaphysical cloth that weaves, and weaves itself into, sociality, but—as weaving, as “saying”—it is not sociality. Thus, he refers to modern slavery as “The estrangement of living labor in the slave system, the negation of the alterity of the human person as it is incorporated to the totality of the non-equivalential economic system par excellence…”¹⁷

A feature peculiar to Dussel’s thought is the positing of a metaphysical origin that functions as a vitalist apeiron in all the fields: In the economic as we see now, but also in the political and social fields: In the political field, there is potentia as the originating (originario) foundation of concrete potestas; in the economic field, there is precisely this reconstruction of Marx’s concept of living labor as an indeterminate exteriority.

However, Dussel falls short when the global becomes a “universal,” metaphysical category that has no contradiction within itself. It ends up naturalizing existing contradictions. For Dussel, contradiction comes to exteriority from the totality that seeks to encompass it, e.g., the peasant kidnapped by the slave-hunter; or, alternatively, it produces the totality, e.g., the living labor that is the source of all value, the heterosexual erotic relationship of his first ethics and of his latest text on political economy¹⁸; these two are examples, it seems to me, of a particular slant that disguises itself as a universal, a contradiction that sets itself up as an originary non-contradictory relation. Furthermore, it sets up in a problematic way a social relationship as natural. Heteronormativity is naturalized, other social relations are also normalized as if they were pre-social.

Dussel is correct to look for commonality in a set of particulars. Living labor seems to be such a general category. So, of course, is God. Dussel’s concept of living labor is more akin to the concept of a transcendent God than to the concept of an immanent relationship. As I will argue below, Marx’s concept of living labor refers precisely to such a relationship. Where Marx fails—namely, his limitation to an eurocentered conception of capitalism—, Dussel succeeds—namely, through a global conception of capitalism that includes slavery and conquest as integral to the capitalist totality. Nevertheless, Marx preserves much and develops further a conceptualization of living labor as immanent to intersubjectivity and sociality.

(b) Anterior to the logic of analogy is the idealized conception of community that we find in the Young Marx. In his “Excerpt (Notes) to James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy,” Marx contrasts the true community to its caricature in the alienated society envisioned as the ideal human being (the homo oeconomicus) by bourgeois economic theory. Indeed, the homo oeconomicus of classical political economy reduces true common life to the activities of trade and exchange:

Since human nature is the true common life [Gemeinwesen] of man, men through the activation of their nature create and produce a human common life, a social essence which is no abstractly universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essence or nature of every single individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth. Authentic common life arises not through reflection; rather it comes about from the need and egoism of individuals, that is, immediately from the activation of their very existence. it is not up to man whether this common life exists or not. However, so long as man does not recognize himself as man and does not organize the world humanly, this common life appears in the form of alienation, because the subject, man, is a being alienated from itself. Men as actual, living, particular individuals, not in an abstraction, constitute this common life. It is, therefore, what men are. To say that man alienates himself is the same as saying that the society of this alienated man is the caricature of his actual common life, of his true generic life [a better translation would be species life—Gattungsleben—MS]. His activity, therefore, appears as torment, his own creation as a force alien to him, his wealth as poverty, the essential bond connecting him with other men as something unessential so that the separation from other men appears as his true existence.¹⁹

Marx follows the analysis with words that show how much this text was a preparatory run for his Manuscripts of 1844, and also undermines any notion that the future concept of living labor is anything other than the negation of the “true community.” Hence, the bourgeois caricature of true common life turn’s man’s life into the “sacrifice of his life, the fulfillment of his essence as the derealization of his life, his production as the production of his nothingness, his power over the object as the power of the object over him, and he, the master of his creation appears as its servant of this creation.”²⁰

Of significance here is Marx’s critique of Hegel’s conception of labor as necessarily alienated labor. For Marx, that is the position that political economy (that is, bourgeois theory) has promoted concerning the nature of labor. Hegel reduces labor to alienated labor; thus, he accepts uncritically the political economy of the time, as Marx points out. Hence, the only type of intersubjective action that can be true would be outside the sphere of labor qua material activity: “Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man… he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man.”²¹

An important point to reflect on is the critique of Hegel’s conception of labor. If real, productive labor is only conceived in its alienated form (the conception of it in political economy) that is to be transcended in morality, according to Hegel,²² then we should examine the connection of alienated labor to the concept of living labor that appears in the Grundrisse more than a decade later. Living labor is noting to capital, that is, to political economy. Is its affirmation anything more than an ethical position? There again we see a conception of political economy similar to that of the Manuscripts of 1844: Although political economy says that capital is nothing but “accumulated labor,”²³(239), “stored-up labor,”²⁴ Marx argues that it “does not consider him [the worker—MS] when he is not working, as a human being ; but leaves such consideration to criminal law, to doctors, to religion, to the statistical tables, to politics and to the poor-house overseer.”²⁵

It seems to me, therefore, that the concept of living labor in the Grundrisse as well as the Manuscripts of 1844 is labor in its alienated form. The mistake of thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault was to reduce the concept of labor in Marx to its alienated form, whether as instrumental labor (Habermas) or classical epitome (Foucault). The mistake in Dussel has been to transform living labor into an ever-present transcendent exteriority. In sum, Dussel’s interpretation of living labor assumes the political economy that Marx criticizes.

Marx’s early critique of the life denied in life of the worker is an articulation of what Marx will later analyze as “living labor” in the Grundrisse. “True common life” is an anthropological concept that abstracts from its historical manifestations and systemic negations by stressing the Hegelian “true” infinity expressed in the “I that is We and the We that is I”—a being with others that precedes logically the notion of a subjectivity that irrupts in the infinite gap that opens up when questioned by the other; the latter is Hegel’s notion of “bad” or “false” infinity: The apparition to subjectivity of a pre-social, pre-ontological other; in fact, therefore, a bad infinity would also be the apparition of a pre-social, pre-ontological subjectivity, a source without sources, the sine qua non of a mystical anthropology.

For Marx, living labor is an affirmation of human life as negated and excluded by capital. Both are historical-ontological concepts. They are ontological because they refer us to the being of being human although one of them, living labor, refers us directly to a negative relation, to an existential condition, namely, a relation to capital that negates the being of being human. Furthermore, they are historical categories since they can only exist in an ensemble of dynamic social relations. The reader may want to examine the full citation that for reasons of space we cannot cite here in its totality.²⁶ One can gather from it that living labor arises from the “separation of property from labour” and such separation seems to be a “necessary law” of the exchange between capital and labor.

It follows, says Marx, that labor posited as non-capital is “absolute poverty… not as shortage, but as a complete exclusion of objective wealth.” That negative positing of labor is complemented by a “positive” positing: It is “the living source of value,” although itself it is not value. Hence, labor is both nothing objectively—not-capital, and everything subjectively—the source of the value of capital. It is the one because it is the other and it is the other because it is the one.

There is no labor that is anterior and exterior to the totality in the Levinasian sense of those terms. Living labor is rather a contradiction that arises within the totality. It is an effective contradiction because it is immanent to the totality.

One can speak of “anteriority” in the sense that living labor is the source of value of capital, and one can speak of “exteriority” in the sense that labor is objectively excluded from capital. Nevertheless, it is not an “Other” that is the source of the totality which it nevertheless transcends; rather it is simply an other that is the source of capital because the totality so constitutes labor and capital, as well as their exchange. It transcends capital. Only transformation, not metaphysics, transcends the totality.

For Marx, living labor has no value precisely because it is activity only within capitalist relations of production. Marx makes this clear in his discussion of it in the Grundrisse as he distinguishes living labor from slave labor:

As a slave, the worker has exchange value, a value; as a free worker he has no value; only the right to dispose over his labour, acquired by exchange with him, has value. He does not confront the capitalist as exchange value, but the capitalist confronts him as exchange value. His valuelessness and devaluation is the presupposition of capital and the precondition for free labor in general… [T]he worker is thereby formally posited as a person who is something for himself apart from his labour, and who alienates what expresses his life (Lebensäusserung) only as a means for his own life. So long as the worker as such has exchange value, industrial capital as such cannot exist, therefore developed capital in general cannot exist. Labour must confront capital as pure use value, which is offered as a commodity by its owner himself in exchange for capital, in exchange for its exchange value…²⁷

The above, the so-called first version of Capital, presents the reader with one of the real contexts of living labor, shortly before the famous description of labor as non-capital that I briefly discussed above.²⁸ Living labor is nothing for capital in so far as it is the labor of a “free” laborer, free to be in itself and for itself a commodity, someone who carries within itself as its uniqueness and ownership nothing but possibility in a capitalist world. In the face of capital, freedom is more than formal indeed: it is the substantial self-expression of wage-slavery. The worker is here “free” because they have been robbed of their social conditions for existence, “free” to embrace capitalism, or be killed or imprisoned.²⁹

Even so, the negation of capital is implicit in the possibility of the irreducibility of laborers to the inner demands of capital, for capital requires both and contradictorily, the complete submission of the worker and the formal independence of the worker. On the side of formal independence we encounter both the ideology that conceals wage-slavery and the “true common life” of all productive activity. One of the conditions for the actualization of the latter is revolution; the other condition lies in the objectivity of the internal contradictions of capital which, alone and by itself, is a brutal machinery of social and natural destruction; hence, it is self-contradictory. The existential question becomes: As it questions the being of being human, will it destroy not only itself but the very foundations of natural existence?

In Marx, dialectical diremption is the ontological origin of reality so that living labor is in contradiction to capital “genetically,” and it is so expressed in the Grundrisse where living labor is the category of the “free worker” as he or she relates to capital, not of the slave. Marx’s shortcoming was not to have seen more clearly the systemic connection between slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Dussel’s ascription of the category of living labor to slavery³⁰ is not an attempt to correct that mistake, however, but simply the conceptualization of the concept of living labor as a metaphysical point of origin prior to all diremption and all contradiction.

Dussel has shown that capitalism is at its foundation an even more global phenomenon than Marx thought. Dussel thus decolonizes fundamental concepts in Marx: capitalist exploitation, surplus value, commodity, and the real subsumption of labor under capital. Marx limited himself to an analysis of those concepts within the imperial countries themselves. As I have stated, Dussel’s thought becomes problematic when he privileges some social relations as natural: Heterosexuality is clearly one of them; the mystical anthropology that grounds his conceptualization of living labor as exterior to the history of totalities is another one albeit the Levinasian sense of “infinite” is replaced by an equally inexpressible Levinasian sense of subjectivity.

<2> Logics
In this section I offer a defense of Hegelian dialectics from the criticisms by an analectical thought that, paradoxically, attempts to subsume it.

Levinas dismisses all negativity as a function of the Same.

This reversion of the alterity of the world to self-identification must be taken seriously; the ‘moments’ of this identification—the body, the home, labor, possession, economy—are not to figure as empirical and contingent data, laid over the formal skeleton of the same; they are the articulations of this structure. The identification of the same is not the void of a tautology nor a dialectical opposition to the other, but the concreteness of egoism. This is important for the possibility of metaphysics. If the same would establish its identity by simple opposition to the other, it would already be part of a totality encompassing the same and the other.³¹

Clearly then, Hegelian dialectics would not be anything other than a rationalist effort to affirm Being. It is History and therefore immanence. The other (autrui) resists History because it is anterior to History, resists Totality because it is beyond and irreducible to the Totality.

But to say that the other can remain absolutely other, that he enters only into the relationship of conversation, is to say that history itself, an identification of the same, cannot claim to totalize the same and the other. The absolutely other, whose alterity is overcome in the philosophy of immanence on the allegedly common plane of history, maintains his transcendence in the midst of history. The same is essentially identification with the diverse, or history, or system. It is not I who resist the system, as Kierkegaard thought; it is the other.³²

Ultimately, infinity—whether expressed in “Greek” (Plato’s Good in the Republic) or “Latin” (Descartes’ intellectual intuition of the Infinite in the Third Meditation) is for Levinas the revelation that the finite self is in the truth only in relation to an Other that “always” overflows the Same in an infinite “gap” because the bond between subjectivity and other (autrui) never constitutes itself as a totality. “False” infinity is, by contrast, the philosophical tradition that is “incapable of overflowing the Same.”³³

Hegel’s thought would presumably belong to such a philosophical tradition. In principle, of course, Hegel quite explicitly defines true infinity as the ideal unity of finite and infinite within a totality. Furthermore, Hegel’s racism and eurocentrism lead him to formulate in many of his texts a conception of universality (understood as Absolute Substance and Subject) that barely disguises the particularity of European supremacy.³⁴ Imperialism contradicts the unity in difference of finitude and infinity and the task of decolonization requires the unmasking of ideological false unities but also the affirmation of the ideality of unity in difference.

Decolonization requires therefore besides a struggle for recognition against the colonizing other, a struggle for recognition against the colonized self. The revolutionary transformation through asymmetrical means of relationships of domination is the push from below towards “the I that is We and the We that is I.”

(b) Social structures influence the form of intersubjectivity (for example, is it exploitative and oppressive, or is there the unity of a mutual recognition of differences?), as well as the rise of new totalities: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”³⁵ Thus, the affirmation of the Other carries with it the negation of the circumstances that produce and reproduce the suffering of the Other.

For Hegel, Life is both motion and disquiet: The latter is the sensuous conditioned that was esteemed by Marx, the former is the unconditioned supersensible criticized as a hypostasized abstraction by the philosophies of existence. What is the common feature of both motion and the disquiet? The simple essence that produces itself through self negation.³⁶