Australian Left Review
Article Title
Book Reviews: The Dialectics of Liberation
Abstract
THESE TWO SENTIMENTS expressed by people widely separated in social space and time nevertheless (one might say therefore) express poignantly the complexity of the present world situation, in which even those who have a common ground (that they see the need for change) differ in their situations and therefore inevitably in the solutions offered. Each expresses the need for an overthrowing of repressive relations between people, but the circumstances are so different that the methods of fighting repression will inevitably be poles apart. One could take the attitude that one is right and one wrong, or that each may be right for a particular set of circumstances.2 Whichever attitude, or whichever viewpoint one supports, one is still faced with the fact that the viewpoints themselves, and those who support them, are all elements in the world social process. The complex interactions between all these elements, or what we might call a process of processes, can, from the revolutionary point of view, be called the dialectic of man’s social system. Hopefully, although not necessarily, it is a dialectic of liberation for man.