Marxism, the Dialectic of Freedom and Emancipation

Abstract

It is now over ten years since Roy Bhaskar wrote Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, a crucial turning point in the relationship between critical realism, Marxism and the project of human emancipation. This chapter will briefly outline how Bhaskar’s previous work had sought to aid Marxism in clarifying issues of social ontology and explanatory critique before focusing on issues in the book Dialectic itself which have made the relationship more problematic. As Colin Wight has shown in his chapter, the latest books by Bhaskar (pace ‘spiritual turn’) offer very little by way of an emancipatory politics, buying into much of the currently fashionable new age lifestyle spiritualism to the detriment of a political project. Although some of these issues will be covered in the final section, the main purpose of this chapter is to look at how such a damaging turn could have come about by examining the weakness present in Dialectic. By way of a positive contribution, I shall begin with what is valuable in Bhaskar’s earlier work and conclude by indicating how this, along with some of the arguments in Dialectic, might be developed in a more positive direction.