The Dialectical Structure of Marx's Concept of ‘Revolution in Permanence’

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Abstract
This article argues that while the limitations of Hegel's political reconciliation with existing reality has long been evident, the depth of Marx's challenge to capital cannot be fully comprehended, let alone restated for today, without a re-encounter with Marx's rootedness in and transcendence of Hegel's concept of absolute negativity. The need to go beyond critiques of private property and the market by projecting ground for the negation of capital creates a compulsion to return to Hegel at his most ‘abstract’ level—the Absolute. THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY of Marx's Communist Manifesto last year seemed to have brought with it a shock of recognition concerning the timeliness of Marx's critique of existing capitalism. For some, the Manifesto's discussion of the relentless drive of capital for self-expansion makes it ‘the most concise and thrilling account of a process that creates havoc in the contemporary world, the inexorable pressure of globalization.’ For others, the Manifesto's description of ‘a class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital,’ makes it the best ‘characterization of capitalism at the end of the 20th century currently available.’

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