The central place of potential in dialectical thinking has been noted by a variety of thinkers. C.L.R. James refers to the internal relation between actuality and potentiality as "the entire secret" of Hegel's dialectics (meaning Marx's as well).

Ollman, Bertell. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 159.

More than a few selections in these four volumes are particularly notable for their enduring value to Melville scholarship and in some cases to a deeper comprehension of such persistent underlying problems in American culture as racial tensions, economic exploitation, religious and political hypocrisy, and the tendency of authority to subvert democratic values for the sake of its own security or profit. C.L.R. James's powerful chapter on Moby-Dick, "The Captain and the Crew," for example, has never found equal merit in the eyes of all readers, but his provocative exposition on Ahab, madness, and the destructive mechanization of contemporary civilization at the expense of millions of anonymous workers still commands a vigorous response as it did when it first appeared half a century ago in Mariners, Rengeades and Castaways (1953).

Marovitz, Sanford E. Review: A. Robert Lee, ed. Herman Melville: Critical Assessments [4 vols., 2001]; Melville Society Extracts, no. 125, July 2003, p. 13.

. . . Michael Denning's Cultural Front insists that the New Deal was committed to preserving the legacy of individualism so central to nineteenth-century liberalism. For cultural critic C. L. R. James, on the other hand, the sudden emergence of social security as the dominant cultual paradigm during the New Deal effectively collapsed the difference between the state and the more overtly collectivizing strategies of the left. Writing between 1938 and 1953 in what would become American Civilization, he claimed that "the outstanding social fact of the United States is that the population has gone a long way on the road to recognizing that freedom has been lost." The "welfare state," he consequently argues, "actually proposes now no longer freedom but security." But in fact, both Denning and James are correct, for social security involves a reconciliation of liberalism to very real losses of freedom made manifest during the Great Depression.

Szalay, Michael. New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 205-206.

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