Reviews of Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method

Perspectives on Political Science
James C. Foster, Oregon State University-Cascades

Bertell Ollman is a professor of politics at New York University. He gained his fifteen minutes of fame by creating the Marxist board game Class Struggle (See Class Struggle is the Name of the Game: Confessions of a Marxist Businessman). Ollman also is one of the more distinguished Marxist scholars of his generation. His Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society stands as a classic in the literature of Marxist scholarship because it renders accessible and develops further the philosophical aspects of Marx’s method.

Marx’s method, Ollman argues, is «internal relations.» It «tells a tale of two cities» focused on interconnections: «[The tale] is not capitalism, it is not communism, it is not history. Rather it is the internal relations between all of them» (1). Marx and Ollman collaboratively work out the social implications of the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End—»Only connect.» Illuminating connections between social formations that appear on the surface to be incommensurate opens Marx to charges that he is inconsistent and contradictory. As Vilfredo Pareto observed: «Marx’s words are like bats. One can see in them both birds and mice» (4). For Ollman, the answer to Pareto’s paradox is that Marx’s method was his message: «By allowing Marx to focus on the interconnections that constitute the key patterns in capitalism, the dialectic brings the capitalist system itself, as a pattern of patterns, into ‘sight’ and makes it something real that requires its own explanation» (4).

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