Bertell ollman biography

— Tony Smith

Dialectical Investigations
By Bertell Ollman
New York: Routledge, 1993, 191 pages, $14.95 paper.

BERTELL OLLMAN, CREATOR of the wonderful board game Class Struggle, is one of the leading defenders of the importance of dialectical method in Marxism.

In the first half of his book Ollman attempts to establish that “dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world.” (10) In the second half a series of papers are collected illustrating dialectics in action.

For Ollman the world is made up of systems, each of whose parts is internally related to the others.

These systems are in process; their nature is fixed by the past from which they came and the future towards which they are going.

Marx provides a paradigm case of a thinker who grasped these realities. He understood, for example, that capital is not an isolated thing, but a set