File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0110, message 15


Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:27:38 +1000
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: More ont he master-slave dialectic was Re: BHA: <fwd> Fukuyama: The


At 09:23  11/10/01 +0100, you wrote:
>to claim victory now already is imho both unscientific rhetoric
>and a dangerous illusion; indeed, it all sounds very nietzschean,
>but a Nietzsche at the worst ;-)
>
>jan

My post on Bhaskar's remarks about Fukuyama's Nietzscheanism sank alas 
without a trace. But the central concern is still there.  Is Fukuyama 
reading the master-slave dialectic in an Hegelian or a Nietzschean way? 
Moreover did Hegel himself refuse to accept the full implications of the 
master-slave dialectic and opt for a vision which had not the slave as the 
agent of history but rather as a partner with the master in a unity based 
on mutual forgiveness and reconciliation?

What follows is a piece I wrote earlier and elsewhere on the master-slave 
dialectic:

The master-slave dialectic:  Three approaches

The master-slave trope is itself a complex figure that has been variously 
interpreted. Within the Marxist tradition perhaps the most influential 
interpretation has been that of Alexandre Kojeve. For Kojeve the master was 
the capitalist and the slave the worker. Moreover he read Hegel as saying 
that the slave eventually won the struggle with the master because she 
found herself through the creative process of work (Kojeve, 1969: 45-52).
There is an alternative reading of the master-slave dialectic that is 
associated with Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche. Deleuze rejects 
'personalist' readings of the dialectic that would assign direct social 
roles to the master and the slave (cited in Hardt, 1993: 32-45). He insists 
that the master-slave trope refers not to the working class and the 
capitalists but to the abstract process of the development of logic. For 
Deleuze the master is the hero of the piece because her being is bound up 
with direct negation of reality through the unmediated exercise of her 
power.  The master consumes and thus immediately negates while the slave 
delays this process by work (ibid). Deleuze's support for the master is 
presumably influenced by Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power, the 
exercise of which was a good (Hollingdale, 1986: 231). There is also a 
strong element in Deleuze's thought of what Bhaskar terms 'ontological 
monovalence', that is, a purely positive account of being.  The slave's 
power is not being exercised therefore it cannot be real (Hardt, 1993: 35). 
 From a critical realist perspective the slave's power can be a 
transfactual tendency and nevertheless real.
A third reading of the master-slave dialectic is offered by Roy Bhaskar one 
that is generally closer to Kojeve's than Deleuze's. However we should be 
cautious here. Bhaskar makes a distinction between what he terms the 
dialectics of reconciliation and those of emancipation. This distinction is 
linked to the Hegelian concept of Unhappy Consciousness. Within this the 
slave can either indulge in the
         . . . (i) introjective internalization of the master's viewpoint 
or aspirations or ideology and/or (ii) the projective duplication of what 
the slave, lacking the imaginary world of religion (Kantian 'rational 
faith') finds in fantasy, film or soap in a surrogate compensatory 
existence (Bhaskar, 1994: 154).
So the slave's path to emancipation is not as simple as Kojeve seems to 
suggest. After all 'Arbeit mach frei' does indeed have many resonances 
other than simply 'work will make us free'. For Kojeve the slave's work on 
the world laid the basis of a consciousness that would liberate her from 
the master.  For Bhaskar, however, there is a tendency within the slave to 
seek reconciliation and accommodation with the master rather than to 
embrace emancipation. There are two elements of this process.  Firstly that 
of mutual forgiveness between the master and the slave mediated through 
ethical life or sittlichkeit. Secondly, mutual recognition mediated through 
a constitutional state (Bhaskar, 1993: 334). Extrapolating from this to the 
actual labor-capital relationship it is arguable that there is within the 
labour movement a tendency to seek accommodation with capital and to work 
for "common" goals rather than the abolition of the labour -capital 
distinction.
This is, of course, a controversial matter and literally much blood has 
been spilt over the issues involved. But for the purposes of my argument I 
would suggest that there is within the labour movement a tendency that 
seeks reconciliation through reform and that which seeks the negation of 
the capital-labour relationship through revolutionary change. There is also 
a crucial differentiation within labour between those who manage the system 
- union officials, labor politicians, and those who are managed, that is 
rank and file trade unionists.
In terms of the master-slave dialectic we have the capitalist as master, 
the trade union official as the slave who is the master of other slaves - 
the worker. Bhaskar argues that corresponding to these different social 
positions we have different ideologies. For the master there is the 
ideology of emotivism. This in its simple form is ethical subjectivism, 
which says "x is good, because I like x".  In the real world this most 
often takes the form of "these redundancies are necessary, because they are 
in the national interest".
For the slave who is the master of other slaves there is the ideology of 
decisionism. Here the bureaucrat sees her task as implementing the 
decisions of the powerful or the master. This is the terrain of 'There Is 
No Alternative'. Objections or even the questioning of the premises on 
which the decisions are made tend to be regarded as irrational, unhelpful 
or even malicious.
The third layer, the slave has personalism as her ideology.  This is the 
viewpoint  that takes
. . .  hold of the concrete singular, denudes him or her of their 
concreteness, tells them they ought implies that they can and must, quite 
irrespective of their abilities needs and wants.  It then blames them, and, 
if the misdemeanour is great enough, punishes them (Bhaskar, 1993: 366).

References
Bhaskar,  R., Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso, 1993
_________, Plato Etc, London: Verso, 1994
Hardt, M., Giles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Hollingdale, R. J., A Nietzsche Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Kojeve, A., Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the 
Phenomenology of Spirit, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.



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