Philosophic Dialogue
October 2000

Concept of revolutionary organization

by Gerard Emmett

I want to say something in response to Cyril Smith's "Philosophic Dialogue" in the July 2000 issue of NEWS & LETTERS. If this is an example of the kind of rethinking that might be going on today, then it is real cause for optimism. I hope therefore that this will be accepted in a spirit of dialogue.

Smith's article interests me as an example of the drive to separate philosophy and organization that seems to really inhere in all of post-Marx Marxism. In this particular case-and there are many other ways of making this separation-Smith bases himself on Marx's 1844 "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic."

As Smith says, "Here Marx shows that Hegel stays within the confines of philosophy, and thus remains at home within what he called 'estrangement.' He also attacks Hegel because he 'posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness.'"

Smith continues, "[Dunayevskaya] quotes quite correctly Hegel's statement that 'the truths of philosophy are valueless apart from their interdependence and organic union.' But that implies that we can't pick out those bits of Hegel's work which appear to fit in with our own revolutionary ideas. We must take him as a whole. Remember that Hegel clearly situates his massive body of thought within the historical context of his own time and place, in the aftermath of the French revolution, in backward Germany. 'Applying' it to the 21st century, it seems to me, is to do it injury and to blunt Marx's critique.

"I believe that Dunayevskaya's refusal to attend to Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT illustrates this mistaken attitude. Marx actually made this book the starting point for his life long struggle with Hegel, when he wrote his 1843 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State.'"

DUNAYEVSKAYA AND HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT

Cyril Smith isn't the only one who has seen the PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT as an issue for Dunayevskaya's Marxist-Humanism. There is also her correspondence from 1986 with non-Marxist Hegel scholar Louis Dupre on the Idea of Cognition, part of her work on the dialectics of philosophy and organization. In a "Random Thoughts" of Jan. 5, 1987 (THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 10846) she quotes from Dupre's response to her own letter:

"...he agrees with me...that 'the eternal idea is ceaseless motion, the movement itself,' whereupon he begins disagreeing: 'But I no longer follow you when you call the eternal idea "revolution in permanence." Your social interpretation is, in my opinion, not supported by Hegel's text. The entire concept of social revolution belongs to the practical order which itself is never absolute. I suspect that the real answer to your question lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT...'

"At that point he rejects my interpretation with par. 577 as being any sort of 'entrance into the new society. I would rather read it as an entrance into philosophy.'"

So both Smith and Dupre see a stumbling block for Marxist-Humanism in the PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT; for Smith, philosophy can't be made to comprehend revolutionary, "practical-critical" activity; and for Dupre, the "practical" can't be made to carry the weight of the philosophic "absolute." It is really this deep background in Dunayevskaya's unfinished work on the dialectics of philosophy and organization that ultimately makes Cyril Smith's "Philosophic Dialogue" so challenging.

In response, I would just like to look at a few key points in the copious body of ideas that is represented by the works of Hegel, Marx and Dunayevskaya.

COPIOUS BODY OF IDEAS

To begin with Hegel, and to return to his own "philosophic moment" in the PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND: he follows the forms of Spirit that have presented themselves in thought and history up to the final stage of the PHENOMENOLOGY, "Absolute Knowing." What comes to the forefront here for Hegel is "organization":

"The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, finds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conservation, looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears" (A. V. Miller, trans., p. 493).

In the activity of Absolute Spirit in the final paragraph (577) of PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, you do indeed seem to see this organization there: "...it is the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition. The eternal idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind" (William Wallace, trans. p. 314-15).

We often ask why it is that the "logical" pattern of the final three syllogisms in this work isn't followed out. You have par. 575, Logic-Nature-Mind, the form of Hegel's ENCYCLOPEDIA; and par. 576, Nature-Mind-Logic, "where Mind reflects on itself in the Idea" and "philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it." With par. 577, you don't go (in a sense) "backward" to Logic, but rather you are faced with Nature, Mind, and the Idea in a new unity of philosophy and the organization of its existence. Coming at the end of the ENCYCLOPEDIA, as well as at a late date in Hegel's own mortal life, can this be seen as an expression of the way in which he hoped that his philosophy would exist in the world?

In any event, if we do now trace a path backward in the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND we see how this philosophic unity is a judgment already contained in and upon other sections of the work, a principle that measures them-for example, at the end of the section "Mind Subjective" (par. 482), where Hegel states "If to be aware of the Idea-to be aware, that is, that men are aware of freedom as their essence, aim, and object-is matter of speculation, still this very Idea itself is the actuality of men-not something which they have, as men, but which they are." (Think of par. 577's "process of the objectively and implicitly existing Idea.")

Hegel further states that in the form of religion, this state of affairs "...must appear" and "become an influence to oppress liberty of spirit and to deprave political life." This is a powerful and principled critique of reality, not at all what one associates with the false image of Hegel as an apologist for Prussian absolutism or nationalism. But it may also be true here, as Cyril Smith points out, that there can be found seeds of the kind of accommodation to reality that many of Hegel's followers have objected to in the PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT. This was not an objection that began with Marx, but was present from the time this work was first published.

In regard to Marx's critique-by far the most profound-it might help to look at Hegel's analysis of the commodity form in the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. This is in the section "Mind Objective," under the heading of "Law" and "Contract." In par. 494 Hegel takes up the commodity and gets as far with it as the concept of use-value and exchange-value:

"...there is put into the thing or performance a distinction between its immediate specific QUALITY and its substantial being or VALUE, meaning by value the quantitative terms into which that qualitative feature has been translated. One piece of property is thus made comparable with another, and may be made equivalent to a thing which is (in quality) wholly heterogeneous. It is thus treated in general as an abstract, universal thing or commodity."

The commodity form here continues to exist in the framework of law as Hegel develops it. This helps you to see why chapter 1 of CAPITAL is where Marx both re-creates Hegel's dialectic of freedom most fully and yet concretely goes much farther than Hegel ever could have.

ORGANIZATION AND MARX'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL

Chapter 10 of Dunayevskaya's ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION is profound on the relation between Marx and Hegel, and the "Great Divide" with Marx's re-creation of Hegel's dialectic in chapter 1 of Capital. But (as Smith has suggested) I want to go back now and look at Marx's critique of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT. The first and longer version of Marx's critique-of which the more compact, well-known and brilliant essay of 1843 is a kind of summation-doesn't in any way throw over Hegel's concept of the Idea of freedom as the measure of reality, in this case as the measure of the German reality to which Marx sees Hegel accommodating himself.

Far from rejecting Hegel's dialectic in his brilliant 1843 essay, Marx uses Hegel's concept of the "inverted world" from the "Culture" section of the PHENOMENOLOGY to rip to shreds the whole of the backward German reality. As well, Marx extends that critique of backward Germany to that which is unconsciously retrograde in the whole of modern reality, including the supposedly more economically and politically advanced nations of France and Britain. Further, Marx here puts to the "practical party," who would "abolish philosophy without realizing it," the necessity for a philosophic confrontation with reality.

The criticism Marx makes of social relations, "the human world, the state, society," gets deepened and extended-including as the unmasking of commodity fetishism, bringing that overriding form of social unconsciousness into the light of reason-over a lifetime of Marx's theory and practice. But the most immediate fruit of Marx's critique of Hegel appears in 1844 in Marx's ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS, specifically his "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic."

Place the "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic," which points to the "positive moments of Hegel's dialectic" and then immediately looks at the communist movement in that light, beside "Private Property and Communism," where Marx re-creates the concept of "self-consciousness" that he has been critiquing in Hegel: "Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution."

The very next sentence of "Private Property and Communism" in fact seems to echo the final paragraph of Hegel's Phenomenology on "Absolute Knowing," with "the whole historical development...the real genesis of communism (the birth of its empirical existence) and its thinking consciousness, is its comprehended and conscious process of becoming...." (T. B. Bottomore, trans.).

Again, what I think you are seeing with this appropriation of "self-consciousness" is the birth of the "party," or the birth of Marx's concept of organization as the responsibility for the idea of revolution in permanence. Here, I want to look at some of the most important organizational documents that came from the pen of Marx. In these are what might be called "appearances" of Marx's philosophy of revolution in permanence. For instance, in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO the vision and principle of the new, human society is expressed as, "The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

In Capital itself there is the vision of "freely-associated labor" stripping away the fetishism of the commodity form. And in the 1875 CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM we have Marx's fullest projection of the role of freely creative labor in a new human society. As Dunayevskaya summarizes the meaning of this document, in which Marx measures the reality of the existing "Marxist" movement by his own body of thought, "What must tower above all struggles against exploitation, nationally and internationally, is the perspective of a totally classless society; the vision of its ground would be 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.'" And she adds, "The revolution that would overthrow capitalism would have to be a great deal more total in its uprooting of the old than just fighting against what is. Thus Marx says that to reach the communist stage, there would have to be an end to the 'enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor...'" (ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, p. 156-157).

It would be impossible to imagine this profound level of "economy," of the living human being's interaction with his/her environment, without as well the highest level of "philosophic consciousness," or profound grasp of its meaning. In short, what you are brought back to here is the unity of organization and what Marx called "principle"-and what remains for us today the ground for taking up the dialectics of philosophy and organization. What I am reminded of here also, to return from the future to Hegel once more, is par. 577 of the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND: "...in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind," as compared to Marx's "labor from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life..." from the CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM.

If I can jump ahead now to 1953, just to ask one question. Based upon the work of Marx and Hegel, did Dunayevskaya have the right to translate Hegel's final paragraph in the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND as "We have entered the new society" in her letter of May 20, 1953? It seems to me that what Dunayevskaya accomplished there was to strip away the last fetishism from the concept of revolutionary organization in a way that could potentially allow the revolutionary movement to come into a deeper unity with itself-what Marx was doing in re-creating the self-consciousness that he criticized in Hegel. In other words, then and later she was re-creating for organization the whole philosophic development by which Marx created his own body of ideas-the role of philosophy and revolution in the coming-to-be of a new form of spirit, a new way of being free in the world, a new society but, first of all, the power to project such a thing.