DIALECTICS AND DIFFERENCE

Against the decolonial turn

Ours is a newly dialectical age, announces George Ciccariello-Maher at the outset of his
book Decolonizing Dialectics (2017). By this he means the much-touted teleological end of
history has collapsed like the myth it always was into fragmentation, disunities, and dynamic
oppositions. He immediately calls attention to the contentious character of the term, since
many who heralded this historical denouement a quarter century ago did so on the basis of
arguments invoking the dialectic.1 For too long, Ciccariello-Maher continues, dialectics has
not served to denote the moments of combative division that give its name but instead the
opposite: a harmonious closure.2 Against this conservative conception, he hopes to restore
its critical, revolutionary valence.
The books title might give rise to some confusion. Decolonizing Dialectics does not aim
to deploy dialectical methodology in ongoing projects of decolonization. Indeed, colonialism
in the narrow sense of direct territorial occupation and administration scarcely exists today,
having been replaced by more indirect colonialism by remote control.3 Rather, Ciccariello-
Maher aims to decolonize the methodology itself: i.e., remove the accidental features that
mark its geographic origins and add any essentials it may be lacking. Whereas the two classic
forms of dialectic, idealist and materialist alike, proceed by means of internal contradictions
and move toward determinate ends, decolonizing dialectics underscores how the Hegelian
and Marxian conceptions of history emerge from a particular location (Europe) and assume
dialectical resolutions specific to it (Sittlichkeit through civil society for Hegel, the abolition of
class by proletarian revolution for Marx).4
Ciccariello-Mahers latest release thus contributes to a growing body of literature within
the academy, the gist of which is to challenge established disciplines and schools of thought
by questioning their provenance and scope of applicability. Pioneered by figures like Walter
Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Ramn Grosfoguel, the approach cultivated in this
literature has been dubbed decolonial an admittedly torturous locution. Over the past
year or so, a number of works have appeared in a similar vein. Amy Allen, author of The End
of Progress (2016), asserts that critical theory stands in need of decolonization insofar as the
strategy for grounding normativity relies on the notion of historical progress.5 She implores
critical theorists to adopt a stance of epistemic humility as well as a genuine openness to
subaltern others.6 Gennaro Ascione argues in Unthinking Modernity (2016) that Marxists see
modern society as too self-enclosed, too sealed off from outside forces: [Marxs] notion of
incorporation [into global capitalism] conceals the colonial gaze and neutralizes the colonial
difference by obscuring non-Western, non-capitalist agency. Everything becomes reducible
to [capitals] own inner contradictions.7
1
Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. (The Free Press. New York, NY: 1992). Pgs. 60-67.
2
George Ciccariello-Maher. Decolonizing Dialectics. (Duke University Press. Durham, NC: 2017). Pg. 1.
3
International Communist Party. The Colonial Question: An Initial Balance Sheet. Il Programma Comunista.
( 14: 1957).
4
Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics. Pg. 11.
5
Amy Allen. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. (Columbia University
Press. New York, NY: 2016). Pg. 36.
6
Ibid., pgs. 76-77.
7
Gennaro Ascione. Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory: Unthinking Modernity. (Palgrave Macmillan.
New York, NY: 2016). Pg. 183.

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 Like Allen and Ascione, Ciccariello-Maher believes that existing modes of radical politics
are still too reliant on narratives of linear progress and not yet open enough to marginalized
perspectives. In contrast to a traditional dialectic that moves inexorably and deterministically
in keeping with its own internal oppositions, he explains, a decolonized dialectic recognizes
both the historic source of that motion outside Europe in the colonies as well as the brutal
reality that for colonial subjects, history often seems to move backward rather than forward,
if it moves at all.8 Unlike Allen and Ascione, however, Ciccariello-Maher is more interested
in dialectics understood as a practice9 than in theoretical matters such as normativity or
the empirical validity of social science. Furthermore, he regards recent high-profile efforts to
relate dialectical thought to non-European revolutionary movements as flawed: Susan Buck-
Morss Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) and Timothy Brennans Borrowed Light: Vico,
Hegel, and the Colonies (2014) each remain conspicuously Eurocentric.10 Ciccariello-Maher
insists that a decolonized (and decolonizing) dialectics construed as radical practice and
orientation toward struggle predates, exceeds, and exists independently of even Hegels
formulations, in the self-assertion of colonized and enslaved peoples.11
Yet in attempting to alter the dialectical method, Decolonizing Dialectics abandons several
of its crucial premises. Namely, the categories of totality, reciprocal mediation, and immanent
critique, the absence of which ought to cast doubt on Ciccariello-Mahers entire enterprise.
His argument is pieced together from readings of texts by Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and
Enrique Dussel, two of whom disavow the concept of dialectics as such and none of whose
views square neatly with their counterparts. This difficulty is acknowledged more than once
by Ciccariello-Maher, which suggests he is at least aware of the implausibility (if not outright
impossibility) of his thesis. Because built-in social antagonisms cannot function for him as the
source of a self-starting and automatic movement,12 the impetus must come from without.
Progress hinges here on an appeal to exteriority and a colonial difference that exceeds an
internally dialectical relation,13 which allows the antagonistic projection of militant identities
to jumpstart historical motion.14 Revolutionary subjectivity can only be revived by drawing
together multiple dialectics whose central identities class, race, nation, and people are
neither distinguished categorically from nor reduced to one another.15
Just how far this has drifted from the materialist dialectic will be shown by the following.
While Ciccariello-Maher nowhere claims to be a Marxist, it is nevertheless instructive to set
his retrofitted radicalism side-by-side with the universality of Marx. Today, the notion there
is any meaningful commonality based on human beings as a species is under a cloud, even if
its opponents rarely state their case in so many words, Loren Goldner explains. For them,
such ideas for instance, the idea that Western Europe from the Renaissance onward was
a revolutionary social formation unique in history, or that there is any meaning to the idea of
progress, or that there exist criteria by which one can judge the humanity or inhumanity of
different cultures are white, male, Eurocentric constructs designed to deny women,
peoples of color, and gays the difference of their identity.16
8
Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics. Pg. 11.
9
Ibid., pg. 14.
10
Ibid., pgs. 175-176.
11
Ibid., pg. 153.
12
Ibid., pg. 158.
13
Ibid., pg. 118.
14
Ibid., pg. 107.
15
Ibid., pg. 21.
16
Loren Goldner. The Universality of Marx. New Politics. (Volume 29, 2: 1989). Pg. 86.

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 Needless to say, the project of Decolonizing Dialectics is fundamentally at odds with that
of revolutionary Marxism. Ciccariello-Maher is cognizant of this fact, however, and admits as
much several times throughout the book. Ultimately this has to do with the aforementioned
colonial difference, which Maldonado-Torres calls a kind of subontological difference (in
an article cited by Ciccariello-Maher).17 Here there are obvious echoes of Heidegger, whose
exposition of ontological difference paved the way for the transontological difference of
Emmanuel Levinas ethics as well as Jacques Derridas deconstructive diffrance. The former
was extremely influential for Dussel,18 while Ciccariello-Maher shares clear affinities with the
latter. I trail slightly closer to deconstruction than the dialectic, he writes, in the degree to
which contingency, indeterminacy, and an open hostility to totality imbue [my] multiple and
local dialectics.19 But Heideggerian Differenz, colonial or otherwise, cannot coexist with the
Hegelian Dialektik, Marxist or otherwise.
Differenz is a term that is strictly antithetical to Dialektik, and certainly no less ubiquitous.
Some go so far as to claim that the pivotal shift in philosophy over the last century has been
the displacement of the latter by the former. Once again, Goldner has summarized this shift
rather well:
Like Foucault after him, Heidegger aimed his arrows directly at dialectical thought, at Reason
that tends to absorb the Other into itself, that understands all otherness as alienation. (Or
as in Marxs motto, nothing human is alien to me). Against this kind of rationality, Heidegger
tried to erect a wall of Differenz, difference that was not dialectically mediated or superseded
by any historical process, but just different: the same irreducible, anti-dialectical difference
Derrida would later call diffrance.20
Goldner is right to suspect that behind their all-too-facile attacks on master narratives and
bureaucracy, theoreticians of difference were after the real game: the unitary working-class
subject. This is certainly the case with Ciccariello Maher, who contends that to overcome
capitalism, we must call into question the immanent perfection of the (European) proletariat
as revolutionary subject, since even in Europe the working class is crosscut and intersected
by a host of oppressions and exclusions.21 Moreover, those who uphold the classic Marxist
doctrine that the proletariat is the only decisively revolutionary class in society22 are either
convicted of class-centrism, Eurocentrism, or both.23 Any insistence on the centrality of class
as the universal political identity motivating all human progress elevates a particular feature of
European history to the status of world-historic universal, declares Ciccariello-Maher, thus
imprisoning the racialized and colonized of the world within linear developmentalism, which
obliges them to catch up with Europe.24

17
Nelson Maldonado-Torres. On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.
Globalization and the Decolonial Option. (Routledge. New York, NY: 2010). Pg. 108.
18
Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics. Pgs. 108-113.
19
Ibid., pg. 14.
Mignolo insists that even deconstruction must be decolonized: The internal variability of diffrance cannot
transcend colonial difference, as deconstruction has to be subsumed and transformed by decolonization, from
a perspective of subalternity. Walter Mignolo. Local Histories, Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
and Border Thinking. (Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ: 2000). Pg. 45.
20
Loren Goldner. Ontological Difference and the War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrialization.
(Unpublished pamphlet, August 2001).
21
Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics. Pg. 115.
22
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Address to the Central Committee to the Communist League. Translator
unlisted. Collected Works, Volume 10: 1849-1851. (International Publishers. New York, NY: 1978). Pg. 277.
23
Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics. Pgs. 7, 9, 48, 103, 216.
24
Ibid., pg. 69.

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 Sorel is an important witness in Ciccariello-Mahers case against the role assigned to the
proletariat by Marxism. Instead of a progressive clarification of class oppositions through the
unbridled logic of capital and an unfolding historical dialectic leading to inevitable proletarian
victory, explains Ciccariello-Maher, Sorel saw only blockage and stasis, a frozen dialectic.25
Pivoting to a discussion of Fanons Wretched of the Earth (1961), Ciccariello-Maher writes that
Sorel had shown that even dialectics lacked traction in this peculiarly barren space [Europe].
The European proletariat could have smashed the narcissistic dialogue of European thought,
but refused to step forward, instead demanding inclusion in the totalized Hegelianism of the
spirit Yet European equilibrium was only possible at the expense of a substantial outside
beyond its borders.26 Workers are somehow pampered, as Ciccariello-Maher repeatedly
quotes Fanon to say.27 For Ciccariello-Maher, Sorel can even be understood as a forerunner
of those for whom the twentieth century would mark the real subsumption (Marxs term)
of the working class under the capitalist state, via mediating organs such as political parties or
trade unions.28 Proletarians had been more or less successfully integrated into capitalism, in
other words, their revolutionary potential nullified.
But this is a typical conflation on the part of Ciccariello-Maher. Sorels theories do not in
any meaningful sense prefigure those of Hardt and Negri or the Endnotes collective, whose
work Ciccariello-Maher lists. Real subsumption corresponds to the dominance of what Marx
called the production of relative surplus-value, whereas formal subsumption corresponds to
the dominance of the production of absolute surplus-value.29 However, Sorel was not just
skeptical of the category of surplus value, but the theory of value as such, and so there is no
ground for comparing him with a group like Thorie Communiste. Although both reach the
verdict that the working class can no longer be counted on as a revolutionary force in society,
the latter does so through an argument about the real subsumption of labor under capital,
while the former does not.30 Nor should this be thought immaterial in a treatise on dialectics,
since Hegel pointed out long ago that what matters for science is not the result alone, but
rather the result along with the process by which it came about.31 The truth of a conclusion
cannot be incidental to the method used to arrive at it; nothing is learned from that which is
only fortuitously correct.
Of course, the search for a revolutionary subject to replace the old industrial proletariat
is nothing new. Who will fill this role left empty by the proletariat? Ciccariello-Maher seems
to doubt the very logic of a universal social subject, much less one founded on class, and so
he turns to the third author dealt with in his study: the Argentine philosopher Dussel, whose
decolonial appeal to excluded exteriorities32 represents one of Decolonizing Dialectics main
points of departure. Dussels category of exteriority functions as a sort of catchall or generic
grab-bag of oppressed identities, covering all those groups that are systematically excluded
(economically, politically, according to gender, etc.) from the various systems comprising that

25
Ibid., pg. 28.
26
Ibid., pg. 100.
27
Ibid., pgs. 91, 96, 106.
28
Ibid., pg. 183.
29
If production of absolute surplus-value was the expression of the formal subsumption of labor under capital,
then production of relative surplus-value can be viewed as its real subsumption. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique
of Political Economy, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. (Penguin Books. New York, NY: 1971). Pg. 1025.
30
Thorie Communiste. Much Ado About Nothing. Endnotes. ( 1: 2008). Pgs. 154-207.
31
G.W.F. Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. (Oxford University Press. New York,
NY: 1977). Pg. 2.
32
Ibid., pg. 8.

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totality to the global cultural exteriority of colonized and formerly colonized spaces, where
collective practices either predate or coexist with those which make up the world-system.33
Looking to the fringes of global capitalism, to the periphery away from the core, Ciccariello-
Maher discovers multifaceted subjects, individuals to varying degrees outside the system34:
Exteriority is expressed by a multiplicity of subject-positions.35 All this talk of world-system
and the alternation of core and periphery immediately calls to mind economists like Andr
Gunder Frank, and indeed Ciccariello-Maher seeks to buttress his argument in dependency
theory la Monthly Review.36
To claim there is still space outside capitalist society considered as a totality implies that
its expansionary logic is incomplete. Perhaps no one would have been surprised if this were
so a hundred years ago, when capitalism had yet to make inroads into every territory across
the Earth. But in todays fully globalized world, the notion that anywhere remains untouched
by its growth seems unlikely. Nevertheless, Ciccariello-Maher feels that Decolonizing Dialectics
requires a fundamental break with the paradigm of totality.37 He is concerned to get away
from the predominant, totality-bound Hegelian-Marxist tradition.38 We cannot decolonize
dialectics solely by prying open the cracks of immanent critique, he states. Doing so entails
stepping beyond the geographical and methodological boundaries of traditional dialectics.39
Although he is admirably forthright in his renunciation of major tenets of dialectical thought,
one wonders if Ciccariello-Mahers attempt to update the algebra of revolution ever rises
to the heights achieved by Marxism a century ago. Recall the words of the great dialectician
Antonio Labriola:
The real criticism of society is society itself, which by the antithetic conditions upon which it
rests engenders from itself within itself the contradiction over which it finally triumphs
by passing into a new form. But the solution of existing antitheses is the proletariat, whether
proletarians themselves know this or not. Even as their misery has become the condition of
present society, so in their misery resides the justification of the new proletarian revolution.
It is in this passage from the criticism of subjective thought, which examines things from the
outside and imagines it can correct them all at once, to an understanding of the self-criticism
exercised by society over itself in the immanence of its own processus. It is in this alone that
the dialectic of history consists, which Marx and Engels, insofar as they remained materialists,
drew from the idealism of Hegel.40
For a dialectical account of society to even be warranted, a dynamic tension has to operate
throughout the social whole and govern its totality. Adorno went so far as to contend in his
introductory lectures on sociology that [t]he concept of society is, and must be, inherently
dialectical. Society signifies a mediated and mediating relationship between individuals, and
not as a mere agglomerate of individuals. It is thus dialectical in the strict sense, because the
mediation between these two opposed categories individuals on one side and society on
the other is implicit in both.41 One of the intermediate terms of this relationship is class,
33
Ibid., pgs. 111-112.
34
Ibid., pg. 119.
35
Ibid., pg. 111.
36
Ibid., pg. 107.
37
The phrase paradigm of totality occurs no fewer than thirty-five times in Ciccariello-Mahers dissertation.
38
Ibid., pg. 41.
39
Ibid., Pgs. 14-15.
40
Antonio Labriola. Essays on the Materialist Conception of History. Translated by Charles H. Kerr. (Charles H.
Kerr & Company. Chicago, IL: 1908). Pgs. 169-170.
41
Theodor W. Adorno. Introduction to Sociology. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. (Stanford University Press.
Stanford, CA: 2000). Pg. 38.

5
which structures their opposition.42 Without this broader divergence, Lukcs observed, the
objective economic antagonism as expressed in the class struggle evaporates, leaving just the
conflict between individual and society.43 Labriolas emphasis on the immanent character of
this conflict stands in stark contrast to the transcendental outcry of Ciccariello-Maher. Hegel
once defined dialectics, after all, as the immanent process of transcendence [dies immanente
Hinausgehen],44 a definition later borrowed by Lukcs.45 Dialectic for Hegel is nothing other
than the resolution of contradictions from its own resources [aus sich].46
Marxs ruthless criticism of modern society proceeds from historical possibilities opened
up by that society. The standpoint of the proletariat invoked by Lukcs, following Marx and
Engels,47 is not some Archimedean point outside the capitalist mode of production.48 Rather,
it is a point inside of this process from which the social totality can be glimpsed. Only from
the standpoint of the proletariat can immanent social contradictions be grasped as dialectical
and made conscious, wrote Lukcs in 1925, the class in a position to understand the total
development of capitalist society as a process.49 As Marx explained in the 1871 postface to
Capital, in its rational form, the dialectic includes in its positive understanding of what exists
a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every
historically developed form as in a fluid state, as in motion, it therefore grasps its transient
aspect; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence
critical and revolutionary.50 Lenin similarly emphasized fifty years later that capitalism would
only ever be overcome by a long and persistent struggle on the basis of capitalism itself.51
Communism will be inside out or not at all.

42
Adorno defines society as it presently exists as an antagonistic, divided, class society in which the interests
of groups are essentially, objectively in conflict. Ibid., pg. 66.
43
Georg Lukcs. What is Orthodox Marxism? History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.
Translated by Rodney Livingstone. (The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1971). Pg. 11.
44
G.W.F. Hegel. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1: The Science of Logic. Translated
by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel Dahlstrom. (Cambridge University Press. New York, NY: 2010). Pg. 129.
45
Georg Lukcs, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. History and Class Consciousness. Pg.
177.
46
Hegel, Encyclopedia, Part 1. Pg. 39.
47
Individuals are revolutionary insofar as they abandon their own standpoint in order to adopt that of the
proletariat [so verlassen sie ihren eigenen Standpunkt, um sich auf den des Proletariats zu stellen]. Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Translated by Samuel Moore and Friedrich Engels. Collected
Works, Volume 6: 1848. (International Publishers. New York, NY: 1976). Pg. 494.
48
See Lukcs, The Standpoint of the Proletariat, in History and Class Consciousness. Pgs. 149-209.
49
Georg Lukcs. Tailism and the Dialectic. Translated by Esther Leslie. (Verso Books. New York, NY: 2000).
Pg. 88.
50
Marx, Capital, Volume 1. Pg. 103.
51
Vladimir Lenin. Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Translated by Julius Katzer. Collected Works,
Volume 31. (Progress Publishers. Moscow, USSR: 1966). Pg. 56.