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Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003,232 pages (paper).
Bertell Ollman has spent the past three decades reconstructing Marx's methodology and finding the most approachable ways to present it to audiences not necessarily trained in the specialist language of Marxist philosophy. It was Ollman, after all, who in 1978 released the anti-Monopoly board game "Class Struggle" to help, says the game box, "kids from 8-80" "prepare for life in capitalist America." Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method continues this project. This book is a compilation of selections taken from Ollman's previously published books and articles, re-arranged as a general primer on the dialectical method that he claims to be both indispensable for understanding Marx's analysis and necessary now for demystifying the hidden workings of 21st-century capitalism. As a treatise on method stripped of many of the technical discussions that have long occupied Marxist scholarship (such as value), this potted version of Ollman's theories shows just how provocative his work can be for anthropologists seeking to throw our own methodological heritage up for reconsideration.
Ollman has always wanted to distinguish sharply between the tools investigators use to interpret social reality and those they use to explain it. With respect to Marx's work, this translates to reading the Grundrisse and the 1844 Manuscripts differently from Capital since they were written for different purposes: the former to identify the objects of analysis, the latter...