Hegel, Marx, and Critical Inquiry in Chicanx Studies
For Maritza
I have immersed myself in European philosophy and the continental tradition for the last five years. This has meant engaging a branch of philosophy concerned with the works and legacy of Immanuel Kant, a nineteenth-century German Enlightenment philosopher (sometimes dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy”). I have not read any of Kant’s three critiques (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgement) or his other works, such as his ideas on morals. Rather, I’ve been selective with my time, how I approach the continental tradition, and reading secondary literature to get a sense of the “canon.” All this is not to become an expert in continental philosophy but to understand the hegemony of this “canon” on knowledge production in the US academe, specifically the humanities and ethnic studies. Yet, as it goes, analytic philosophy, the opposite of the one I study, is the real hegemonic tradition in the US, characterized by pragmatism, empiricism, formalism, positivism, and logic (mathematics).
As a scholar and practitioner of Chicanx studies, I began with Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, and writer of novels, plays, and critical essays. Sartre for me was the entryway into European philosophy and Marxism. He gave me a philosophical language as much as he did a meditation on concepts such as spontaneity and organization. What had drawn me into his work was his Marxism rather than his existentialism, but I soon came to learn he was attempting to synthesize the two with his later work, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre was notorious for his production of writing while addicted to opioids. One thing I admired in his biography was his long partnership and polyamorous relationship with French existentialist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In saying all this, what drew me to his work was a claim that he was the last twentieth-century philosopher to have developed a full system of philosophy, in his 1943 book Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Curiously, he was a staunch anti-colonialist (having written the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon then going on to teach Critique of Dialectical Reason in the Algerian revolution), communist (early on as a Stalinist), and a troubling figure who at a time supported Israel and had critiqued the négritude movement in favor for the class struggle—his “great betrayal” in the 1948 essay “Black Orpheus.” Though Sartre is a troubling historical figure, his philosophy and radical politics paved the way for my ideas and set the tone for my study of European philosophy.
Sartre was the first European philosopher to expose me to G. W. F. Hegel, the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosopher writing in the time of the Napoleon revolution. Sartre’s relationship to Hegel is ambiguous for me, at this time, but Hegel appeared to be an immense figure of mythic proportions as I started to engage in his biography and the reception of his work. To read and critique the form and content of his philosophical system, that of his Science of Logic, was an adventure in itself, made evident by online forums, YouTube videos, and social media discussing Hegel. It wasn’t until I engaged more with Karl Marx, as a result of reading Sartre, that I found the critique of Hegel (to put him on his feet, as Marx gestured to) to be provocative: Marx’s influence was a break with Idealism and the makings of a radical turn to materialism as a way of transforming our relationship to history. The thought of humans, or as Hegel would put it, the realization of the absolute as Idea, was not the driving force of history, according to Marx. Instead, as Marx argues, the material forces and objects of our reality are what made history: how humans developed and created the world, and its realization through class struggle. Sartre was my first exposure to Hegel. Marx was the critic of Hegel to have sparked a fascination about who exactly this Hegel person was and why he mattered.
Now, why all this talk about Hegel and Marx? I am a doctoral candidate in Chicana and Chicano studies, researching and theorizing the affects, sounds, performance, and radical semiotics of La Xicanada, expanding the concept and practice of Xicanacimiento, centering the affective force of cultural production and its expression as labor. I am interested in questions about political expression, relationships to Indigenous struggle, and how the “Xicanx” identity has put to task its promise. I have also been interested in how Chicanx studies in general theorizes our world to agitate readers and students into action, not simply describing the world. To put it simply: How does Chicanx studies as a project for interpreting the world and radical struggle (for knowledge) position itself in relation to a science and philosophy? As I was mentored to think in my undergraduate studies, what is knowledge in Chicanx studies? What do we use it for? My turn to European philosophy, and that of Hegel and Marx, has less to do with a mastery of continental philosophy and Marxism, but more about what it means to struggle in the modern/colonial world.
In my time as a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I have had the opportunity to sit in and learn from multiple teachers in graduate-level seminars. I have been at times frustrated by graduate students and their perspectives, curious as to why the practices of many students were to simply get by. The seminar, as a temporary hub to discuss ideas and readings, became not a site for class struggle but an inconvenient detour to one’s dissertation project. My reading of European philosophy was an initial desire to study what everyone else managed to already know in their disciplines (i.e., sociology, anthropology, or history). There was, at the beginning of my aspirations, a desire to expand my foundational knowledge base—topics and epistemic positions I was not attuned to. Graduate students did not understand why I was adamant in reading theorists or philosophers such as Michael Foucault (on power) or Edmund Husserl (on consciousness). Chicanx studies graduate students especially were suspicious or indifferent: for what we did in our program were “projects” that studied Chicanx/Latinx populations with a social scientific, arguing for resilience or resistance. While we debated at times about “ethics” in our methodology or the reasons for using this or that method in our project, we hardly discussed what exactly was the knowledge we were set out to “produce.” My curiosity and desire to “catch-up” with my peers outside of Chicanx studies changed when I realized graduate school was not about study or an intellectual struggle. Many of us rallied around the calls to abolish the UC (and I still do) during the wildcat and union strikes for higher wages for our living situation across the UC system. I found that, though I was attempting to study what I believed to be “essential” to my graduate student experience, it did not matter as the commodity of my research would be just that: a commodity to be bought and sold on the academic marketplace, read by a few, engaged by fewer. This contradiction weighs heavily on me every day. Yet, I make the mistake each day to accept it, holding out to perhaps re-imagine and practice a concept Gustavo Esteva called the “de-professionalizing” intellectuals. To study Hegel and Marx was to neither become Hegelian nor Marxist—or worse, a professional philosopher. To study Hegel and Marx was to practice what Roberto D. Hernández would occasionally tell a group of students and organizers: to “do our homework.”
I am writing openly here about the tensions of actual study and seminar performances—a tension existing mostly in the university. I write openly about graduate students who on occasion I hear say, “Who cares about this theory?” or “What’s the point of theory?” Once I heard a graduate refer to the theory and practice divide, as though some only do practice and others only do theory, assuming a practice is not mediated by a theory, or that a theory does not have a practice corresponding to it. I am writing here knowing many of us in graduate school are hustling to pay rent, to buy groceries, to help our families as we study, and to try to get to academic conferences so that we might put our names out there in the abyss of the job market. Graduate school is work, and we pay with our bodies too. So, why read Hegel and Marx as students with better things to do and write our dissertations knowing only our committee will read our work? Well, I believe in study, despite all this. The university is a terrain for struggle, as Roberto D. Hernández would say—and that does not mean becoming of it, but rather being in it and against it. The university is the concrete site where we wage our struggle, and the classroom becomes an instrument for our struggle. I encounter Hegel and Marx in the undercommons, where we gather, where we plan, and where we conspire for a new world: and the next day, the undercommons might not exist. We read in spite of all this.
When I would bring up Hegel or Marx with maestra and visual artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez, I would revel in the conversation turning to Celia’s time with the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, also known as CASA, and Bert Corona. Bert Corona is a fascinating figure, having been a Chicano socialist labor organizer and a precursor to El Movimiento of the 1960s and 70s. His father was a member of El Partido Liberal Mexicano in the Southwest, the infamous anarchist organization and network founded by Ricardo Flores Magón. Celia would share stories of Bert Corona driving up and down California with him to organize with CASA. Once, she remarked how Bert (as she referred to him) had a stack of books of Hegel and Marx in his backseat. She would ask him, “Bert, why do you have those books with you at all times?” He would respond earnestly, “Because they are for struggle.” The anarcho-syndicalist tendencies of Bert Corona’s father would have an impact on his politics, making the turn to Marx and Hegel a not-so-surprising fact about him. Yet, as Celia would remark to me at the end of her stories about CASA and Bert Corona, “Marx cannot take us home.” This left a lasting impression on me.
I never resisted reading Marx because his critique of political economy stands the test of time. Marx’s Capital: Volume One is a must-read for anyone desiring to understand the economic mode of production we know as capitalism. One does not need to be a Marxist to read Marx, and I am not committed to that line of inquiry called Marxism—if only to sharpen my analysis, my critique, and my study of capital. As I read Marx, I became more and more fascinated with the “young” Marx of the Young Hegelians and his early philosophical critiques of Hegel, particularly Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. As V. I. Lenin once observed in his study of Hegel, paraphrasing him here, one must read Hegel’s Science of Logic to understand Marx. As Fredric Jameson would respond, in the “Introduction” to Louis Althusser’s Lenin and Philosophy, this was a “scandalous observation” by Lenin. This is to say, I resisted reading Hegel for a long time, as the Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic sits on my bookshelf, staring at me. A notoriously difficult writer and hard-to-understand philosophical system, Hegel haunts me, as he haunts the “Western” world. Yet, must we turn to Hegel as others have to engage Marx and his development of a dialectical method? How can one read Hegel in today’s world considering the Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler colonial apartheid? Marx cannot take us home, and neither can Hegel, yet can they open our eyes to the path? One might cite Althusser to suggest that reading the late Marx of Capital is sufficient to have known and understood Hegel. I am indifferent to such reversals, and Lenin in general. We must, as students of Chicanx studies, make up our own minds.
I know what you’re thinking: dead white men. More dead European philosophers and critics we must read. Funny enough, I feel similarly most days: why do we need to read more dead white men? I want to break up with Hegel and Marx and do away with their glamour. I desire to delve deeper into the black radical tradition. I desire to feel the resonances and heresy of Indigenous resurgence. I desire liberation, not negotiation. I desire to practice revolutionary love with compas, “comrades,” and friends—committing ourselves to the long struggle ahead of us, conjuring temporary and eternal sites for autonomous praxis and decolonial love. My heart is with our everyday struggle. Hegel won’t save us. Marx will give us language, inquiry, and a path to our investigation. It is not the vanguardism of Marxist-Leninist parties. It is the critique and the method he offers us. But I am here to convince us to study, and that means studying Hegel too—and beyond him.
The first way an anti-colonial thinker and organizer might encounter Hegel is in Frantz Fanon’s 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks. Born in Martinique, Fanon was a trained psychiatrist and revolutionary in the Algerian revolution, where he theorized and practiced decolonial action, culminating in his 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth. In his chapter, “The Black Man and Hegel,” Fanon launches a critique of Hegel’s position in European philosophy, not a universal philosophy. For anti-colonial readers, this position is received with enthusiasm, as Fanon’s critique of Hegel is the limit of Hegel’s concepts, such as recognition and self-consciousness. To read Fanon today is to engage in questions on not only blackness but decolonization. A Fanonian critique of the world is to think about how the world has shaped us and made us into its subjects (and for the Black person, into an object). Fanon’s term, sociogeny, names this phenomenon against psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s concepts of ontogeny (the singular organism) and phylogeny (the species of an organism). Against the philosophy of Hegel, Fanon’s critique of the “master/slave dialectic” proposes new ways to think about the limits of Hegel’s Eurocentrism. Yet the question remains: what is left of Hegel?
Another avenue a communist organizer and insurgent might encounter Hegel is C. L. R. James’ notoriously out-of-print book Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, first circulated in 1948. I have only seen this physical book as a library copy or on the shelf of a friend’s personal library. Notes on Dialectics remains a mystery to me on how it remains in obscurity. Born in Trinidad, James was a Marxist theoretician and historian. He is most known for his 1937 book World Revolution and his 1938 book The Black Jacobins. I also have come to love his early collaboration with Detroit-based Chinese-American organizer Grace Lee Boggs, also a reader of Hegel and Marx (with great passion). Boggs and James’ collaborations have something to tell us about their reading of not only Marx and his usefulness for Black struggle and revolution in the United States, but of their reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic, which I believe committed them to a form of Marxist humanism possible by way of Hegel. This has probably more to do with Boggs’ translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 than with Capital's content. Nevertheless, James and Boggs were committed to the transformation required to abolish the capitalist mode of production and thwart the exploitation of the people of the world.
One can find Notes on Dialectics on the Internet. Scanned and circulated PDFs roam on websites by those desiring to understand James’ reading of Hegel and Marx and by extension of the subtitle, Lenin. For me, James’ reading is important because we come to see how a Black Marxist and communist of the twentieth century understood the significance of Hegel for our movements against capitalism as well as understanding Marx’s Capital. For James, what was at stake in this interpretation was a re-invigorated sense of the dialectic and a new way of thinking.
Lastly, most students might encounter Hegel in the writings from the Frankfurt School (German critical theorists), but probably most might encounter him with the French interpretations of Phenomenology of Spirit popularized by Jean Hyppolite’s treatment and Alexandre Kojève’s lectures. Whether one reads Theodor W. Adorno and his criticism and extension of Hegel’s thought or Louis Althusser and his anti-Hegelian project as a rejection of metaphysics, the reader of Hegel will encounter not only how the European canon has engaged his work but the critiques that only serve to either obscure Hegel or make him legible. The student of Marxism will find that Hegel is a reactionary to the material world or is important to understand Marx’s method. However, we, in Chicanx studies or critical ethnic studies in general, read him we must confront the question if we are merely engaging Hegel to understand his philosophical system or if we are sustaining a critique to escape him. The stakes in reading Hegel today are much more than fine-tuning our Marxism or reading of Marx but confronting Westernized philosophy in general. Our heresy is not in a rejection of Hegel but a refusal. We must conspire together on what this refusal will mean.
Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.
Michel Foucault, “Discourse on Language,” Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, 1970-1971
As the quote above alludes to, one must pay a price to escape Hegel. Michel Foucault, the French historian of ideas, was referencing the work and teaching of Hyppolite’s lessons on Hegel, and its influence on many French intellectuals post-World War II. I read this passage as the kind of intimidating specter Hegel becomes for us, even when we might not know him. The same could be said about the Holy Roman Empire and Pope Constantine, the hold of Latin and Catholicism in the Americas. It could be said about the insidiousness of 1492 and the ongoing “long night” of invasion of five hundred years in 1521. It could also be said about the annexed territories of El Norte to the Anglo-American empire of the United States, persistent in Chicanx political imaginaries. To read Hegel in Chicanx studies is not only imperative, as it is studying the topics mentioned above, but it could well be an invitation for us all to build a refusal. This is my enticement. It has nothing to do with aligning with the modern/colonial world but developing and sharpening our refusal of it.
Marx is a common name in early Chicano studies literature, as the study of labor, organizing, and migration considered many of Marx’s concepts to think about the relationship of Mexican labor to US capitalism, including the Mexican American war of 1846-48 and the border. One can find Marx in Mario Barrera’s 1979 book Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality, Juan Gómez-Quiñones’ 1982 essay, “Critique on the National Question, Self-Determination and Nationalism,” published in Latin American Perspectives, or Tatcho Mindiola’s 1975 notes, “Marxism and the Chicano Movement: Preliminary Remarks,” addressed to the National Association for Chicano Studies. One might even turn to the 2002 dossier, “Cultures of the U.S. Left,” of the Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine to see Jorge Mariscal, Arnoldo García, and Elizabeth “Bettina” Martínez write on Chicanos and their involvement in “Leftist” (socialist) organizing.
The Chicanx relationship to Marx and socialism, which is to say the movements for communism, seem like a distant era and political vision. Latinx and Chicanx groups in southern California, where I write from, seem to be coming back to Marxism. La Raza Unida Party, a historical party since El Movimiento, has today involved itself with a return to the concept of nation-building from a Marxist perspective. Yet, in terms of public Chicanx discourse, it is unclear if there exists official forums, meetings, and organizations involving popular education of Marxism and debates around crucial topics like international solidarity with Palestine, the national question, or the method of historical materialism to properly offer an analysis of Chicanx/mexicano material conditions in the United States. Though I am personally less interested in the nation-form or the state as the vehicle toward emancipatory ends, I have noted a decline (and perhaps a silent resurgence) in the Marxist form of thinking and praxis among La Chicanada, especially young people. It is quiet, and maybe that is the point in a post-COINTELPRO era.
In Chicana feminist literature, I first found reference to Hegel in an observation of feminist discourse and Hegel in Norma Alarcón’s 1981 essay, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings from Radical Women of Color. She writes, “Feminist women agree with Hegel, despite his relentless use of man as universal, that the subject depends on external reality” (pg. 209, in the 2008 Third Edition). This general claim does a lot of work. Despite Hegel positing “man” as the “universal” of knowledge, feminists agree with his philosophy. This humanist and anthropological reading of Hegel is not new, as it was found in Marx and Fanon in their writings on Hegel. Yet, it prompted Alarcón to make a claim on reality and for women’s reality, especially US third world women. The references to Hegel by Alarcón have always excited me, for it requires us to think about why Chicana feminists were reading Hegel and to what end did this reading serve? Hegel is not an interlocutor in Alarcón’s essay but was a crucial reference to think about reality. Simone Weil, the French Catholic mystic and anarchist militant appeared as a more useful citation and interlocutor for Alarcón on the master-slave relation than did Hegel. This fact alone makes the Chicana feminist theoretical agitation of Westernized philosophy worthy of re-engagement.
I’ll end here on this thread, on Chela Sandoval’s 2000 monograph Methodology of the Oppressed and her references to Hegel. Sandoval in Methodology of the Oppressed sought to create not only a theoretical text engaging concepts such as postmodernism, ideology, difference, and consciousness, but to develop a manual for emancipatory social movement. Sandoval’s technologies comprising her methodology of emancipation require us to think and practice resistance from below. Her aim, with the notoriously difficult practice of the three differential forms (1. social movement, 2. the technology producing movement of consciousness through meaning, and 3. consciousness as a process) was to think through and beyond the pessimism of Fredric Jameson’s diagnosis of the postmodern world. The differential for Sandoval’s nexus of concepts and praxis was to offer us a new vocabulary to combat what she understood as the problem of late capitalism, following the Marxist criticism of Jameson. As she notes, “New terminologies help bring unprecedented modes of consciousness, agency, and collective action into being that (coactive with all other political formations) will provide us access to a liberatory global space as country people of the same psychic terrain” (pg. 6). This common “psychic terrain” is one that we must attune ourselves to, constantly in coalitional dialogue and debate with those also searching for liberatory methods. As one reads Sandoval’s text, one finds an overarching engagement and reading with Westernized philosophy, extending from Hegel to Marx to Fanon, ending with contemporaries such as Donna Haraway and US third world feminist writers such as Audre Lorde, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and Merle Woo. Her reading of our world and the analysis of our real conditions of human existence are instrumental for any organizer, rebel, and revolutionary seeking new ways of thinking, being, and feeling. Sandoval’s methodology of emancipation opens our world to build struggle in and against ideology, toward concrete and material sites of liberation.
For Sandoval, Hegel is a reference to make an argument she had already developed in discussing US third world feminist social movement, particularly how the below or the oppressed have developed a faculty in reading power for their survival. She references Hegel in stating, “As Hegel had already pointed out, the methodology that allows one to read forms of domination as ‘artifacts’ is a familiar behavior among powerless subjects, who early on learn to analyze every object under conditions of domination, especially when set in exchange with the master/colonizer (what is his style of dressing? her mode of speaking? Why does he gesture? when do they smile?) in order to determine how, where, and when to construct and insert an identity that will facilitate continued existence of self and/or community” (pg. 86). Hegel’s master/slave dialectic comes alive in Sandoval’s text, between subject and object, as she—like Alarcón—comes to agree with Hegel’s philosophy, in his epistemological description of the master/slave dialectic. She goes on later to observe, “These skills, which comprise the methodology of the oppressed, are the very technologies Hegel so surely recognized in his description of the insights available to the slave, but not to the master, when he wrote that it is in the consciousness of the slave that nature and God are unlinked from whatever images are proposed as law” (pg. 105). The slave here, as represented by Hegelian descriptions, possesses insight into the self-consciousness developing in relationship to the master, yet is instrumental and directly related to different images that are not “law.” This observation holds tension with its claim, as Sandoval offers us a new way, following Hegel, to understand how resistance unfolds against the master-colonizer-capitalist.
Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed stands as the twenty-first-century text offering many of us insight, tools, and readings of the world that have not been adequately critiqued or given any serious treatment. It is our responsibility to do so, in the same spirit as our encounters with Hegel and Marx, into the heart of what struggle means for us today.
I have come this far to invite us to an investigation, coupled with study and discourse. I have no answers, only questions. This writing was prompted by a desire. Many of us, who also see the imperative to read Hegel and Marx, as we do Alarcón, Sandoval, and Fanon, forge paths to do this intensive study. We create study groups. We share words and perspectives. We incite critique and invite new ways of thinking. Ideas are important in our practice. Our practice must be informed by our ideas. A synergy here is in motion, transforming and shapeshifting with time and energy. How do we not lose this sense of coupling theory and praxis?
You might not be convinced by my proposal. That is fine. In fact, you are probably right. Too many study groups. Too many words. Too many ideas. Little action. Little change. Little revolution. Yet, as October 7th has taught us: the intifada and the resistance are planned. It is happening in the underground, in secret, and in motion toward another world. The anti-apartheid movement led by Steve Biko started in his college dorm room. Fanon was teaching existentialist Marxism in the trenches of the Algerian revolution. Stuart Hall was teaching Marx to the British working-class outside of his professor duties. Chairman Fred Hampton was teaching Mao to Black insurgents in Chicago homes. George Jackson had ninety-nine books in his prison cell when he was assassinated. The Zapatistas used the Bible translated into Indigenous languages in Chiapas to inspire action. Prison study groups surge and distribute texts, practicing abolitionist theory in debates, and hope we are too. All this to say: there is no excuse.
Let us do our homework.
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Kristian E. Vasquez, UC Santa Barbara Ph.D. candidate