VOLUME XI: 1981-1985 — DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION: AMERICAN ROOTS AND WORLD HUMANIST CONCEPTS

INTRODUCTORY NOTE FOR VOLUME XI

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The overall title of this volume, which covers the four years, 1981-1985, returns to the birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., when Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today, in 1957, defined the two aims of that work to be the American roots of Marxism and its world Humanist dimension. We had practiced Marxist-Humanism before 1957, but we had focused at first on the theory which saw state-capitalism as the new world stage of capitalism, a theory we felt had been proved by a three-year study from original Russian sources published in 1942. We had not then proclaimed Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. as an important, independent, historic Tendency. Even in 1957, although Marxism and Freedom was rooted deeply in the revolutionary dialectic, we had not singled out, along with the two aims we had specified, the third characteristic of Marxist-Humanism — the dialectics of revolution. That is what characterized every chapter of the book, as it was traced through the historic periods from the French Revolution and the Abolitionist Movement in America, through the 1917 Russian Revolution, to the revolutions in our own post-World War II age.

The transcription and publication of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks in the 1970s made “provable” our claim that the new moments of Marx’s last decade had seen him return to his first, 1844 declaration for a “new humanism,” greatly deepened now that he had discovered the economic laws of capitalist development. This view of Marx’s Marxism as a totality made it clear that from the start, in the early years when he had written his “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Marx had not only broken with capitalism but also critiqued both Feuerbachian mechanical materialism and what Marx called “vulgar communism.”

It was Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution that first created the category of post-Marx Marxists as having begun with Frederick Engels, and that challenged all post-Marx Marxists today to find in Marx’s Marxism “the trail to the 1980s for the transformation of reality.” This became the title of our Perspectives Thesis for 1982, the year that Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution was published. It was that concept that characterizes the whole of this Volume XI, which begins on the eve of the publication of that work, and ends on the eve of the publication of Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future.

The strong sense of internationalism that permeated the four years of this volume, 1981-1985, was demonstrated both in our theory and in our activity. The voices of revolutionaries in other countries speak for themselves in a bi-lingual bulletin on the unfinished Latin American Revolutions; a translation by Peruvian feminists of “Woman as Reason and as Revolutionary Force”; a pamphlet where the voices of Guatemalan revolutionaries are heard; special bulletins and translations by Iranian exiles. We recorded, as well, the rise of women dissidents in Russia as Women’s Liberationists; the developments of revolution and counterrevolution in Poland; our opposition to Israel’s totally genocidal invasion of Lebanon.

We celebrated the Marx Centenary Year, 1983, with an extensive National Lecture Tour. It was especially significant to us that Humanities Press, the publishers of Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, had chosen to publish, on the eve of that Centenary, new editions as well, of both Marxism and Freedom and Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao. This we called our “trilogy of revolution.” 1983 was likewise the year the Constitution of News and Letters Committees was amended to include a new paragraph on Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. It was, nevertheless, a tragic year for us, since that was the year we suffered the death in October of our Black production worker-editor, Charles Denby, whom we honored in our “In Memoriam” in the November issue of News & Letters.

We rose to the demands of News & Letters by assigning, in January 1984, two new columns to the page one space Denby’s “Worker’s Journal” had filled for 28 years. One was “Black World” by Lou Turner and the other “Workshop Talks” by John Marcotte and Felix Martin. Later that year, we published our pamphlet on A 1980s View: The Coal Miners’ General Strike of 1949-50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism by Andy Phillips and Raya Dunayevskaya. The impulse for this pamphlet had come during the Marx Centenary Tour, when Dunayevskaya returned to West Virginia, where, at one and the same time, she had been active in that historic 1949-50 strike and had been translating Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks, initiating a three-way correspondence around them with C.L.R. James and Grace Lee. (See Volume III for 35 letters from this correspondence.)

It was during the Marx Centenary Year itself that we had published a pamphlet on Marx and the Third World by Peter Hudis, as well as new editions of both Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions and American Civilization on Trial. The last letter of Charles Denby to Raya Dunayevskaya had centered on the importance of the expanded edition of the latter and the essay it was to include entitled “A 1980s View of the Two-Way Road Between the U.S. and Africa.”

At the end of 1983, Grenada proved that philosophy is no abstraction, and that to think all that is needed is activity, is to submit to the halfway dialectic that can become a road to the counter-revolution. The shock of Grenada was the way in which the counter-revolution right within what considered itself the revolutionary party of Grenada had paved the way for U.S. imperialism’s invasion.

The next year (1984), the Convention of News and Letters Committees voted to move the Center of Marxist-Humanism to Chicago. In making this decision, we considered that we were attending the Marx Centenary Year both chronologically and conceptually. Thus we saw the pamphlet, Eleanor Marx in Chicago, as one that had caught the “trail to the 1980s.” Indeed, so did our discussion bulletin around the first English translation of Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts, which we called: The Fetish of High Tech and Karl Marx’s Unknown Mathematical Manuscripts.

This volume ends with the year 1984-85 and the exciting developments in the new home of News and Letters Committees, which are reflected in three publications in particular:

• 1) “Responsibility for Marxist-Humanism in the Historic Mirror: A Revolutionary Critical Look” (#8334);
• 2) “Marxist-Humanism as a Body of Ideas” (#8348);
• and 3) “Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and World Humanist Concepts,” the presentation given at the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs on March 21, 1985.

The final inclusion in Volume XI consists of the page-proofs of the Introduction/Overview to Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future. This new book, which covers 35 years of writings on Women’s Liberation, is the first major theoretical work to present Marxist-Humanism as it itself developed dialectically. While it focuses on a single force of revolution, Women’s Liberation, it actually includes all forces of social revolution — revolutions which have been carried out by men and women throughout history. The dual rhythm of any social revolution lies in the task of both destroying the old exploitative society and creating totally new human relations.

Raya Dunayevskaya
March 1, 1985