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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya:
Marxist-Humanist Archives
News & Letters, July 2001
Counter-revolution from within revolution: the problem of
our times
Editor's Note
In response to ongoing discussions concerning what distinguishes
Marxist-Humanism from other tendencies of radical thought, we
here reprint sections of the Draft for Marxist-Humanist
Perspectives, 1984-85, originally entitled, "Where are the
1980s Going? The Imperative Need for a Totally New Direction in
Uprooting Capitalism-Imperialism." This was one of several
summations of Marxist-Humanism written by Raya Dunayevskaya in
the period following the publication of her third major
philosophic work, ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S
PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, in 1982. What appears here is section
4, entitled "Objectivity/Subjectivity-in Actuality and in
Philosophy," and a part of section 5, "Organizational
Conclusions," written April 26, 1984. The original text is
in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 8123.
In restating Marx's Humanism for our age, MARXISM AND FREEDOM,
1958, began with the age of revolutions-national, industrial,
social and political, as well as the intellectual revolution
which discerned and developed the dialectics of revolution as
the overcoming of stages of alienation. Beginning with the
machine age and the revolutions of 1776 and 1789, MARXISM AND
FREEDOM ended with the revolutions of our day-from the battles
against Automation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which
signaled the Black Revolution both in the U.S. and Africa, to
the East European revolts from under Russian totalitarianism.
Where, with our first breakthrough on the Absolute Idea, we had
witnessed in the 1950s a series of new revolutions in East
Europe from under totalitarian state-capitalism, the birth of a
whole new Third World in the 1960s required further
concretization of this philosophic breakthrough. This was
achieved with our second major theoretical work, PHILOSOPHY AND
REVOLUTION, in 1973.
There we concretized the dialectic of second negativity by going
beyond Lenin not only politically but philosophically.
POLITICALLY meant rejecting the vanguard party-to-lead, which
had so totally misled the masses as to bring about the greatest
tragedy of all-counter-revolution which came out of revolution
and transformed the workers' state into a state-capitalist
society. PHILOSOPHICALLY meant working out Absolute Idea as new
beginning, with a new sense of objectivity which revealed two
kinds of subjectivity. One kind was voluntaristic. The other was
masses in motion struggling for total freedom despite their
oppressive awareness of the new enemy, the new objective
reality-state-capitalism calling itself Communism.
We had actually first projected this in the second edition of
MARXISM AND FREEDOM in 1964, in the added chapter on "The
Challenge of Mao Zedong," which had ended with a subsection
entitled: "In Place of a Conclusion: Two Kinds of
Subjectivity." (The footnote to this section indicated that
this was to be "the burden of a new work in progress"-i.e.,
PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION.) The two opposing kinds of
subjectivity discussed here were: 1) "Mao's, which has no
regard for objective conditions, behaves as if state power is
for herding 650 million human beings into so-called 'People's
Communes,' as if a party of the elite that is armed can both
harness the energies of men and 'remold' their minds."
Under that delusion,* Mao declared himself ready to ride the
whirlwind of a nuclear holocaust. 2) The other type of
subjectivity-that of masses in motion-"is the subjectivity
which has 'absorbed' objectivity, that is to say, through its
struggle for freedom it gets to know and cope with the
objectively real."
PUT ANOTHER WAY, SINCE THE NEW ENEMY COMES, NOT FROM TRADITIONAL
CAPITALISM BUT FROM STATE-CAPITALISM MASQUERADING AS COMMUNISM
AND CONTINUING TO USE MARXIST LANGUAGE, THE STRUGGLE FOR TOTAL
FREEDOM BECOMES BOTH MORE ARDUOUS AND IN NEED OF A TOTALLY NEW
RELATIONSHIP OF PRACTICE TO THEORY.
Put another way, since the new enemy comes, not from traditional
capitalism but from state-capitalism masquerading as Communism
and continuing to use Marxist language, the struggle for total
freedom becomes both more arduous and in need of a totally new
relationship of practice to theory.
What that added chapter in MARXISM AND FREEDOM presented in
embryo is what was worked out in the first chapter of PHILOSOPHY
AND REVOLUTION: "Why Hegel? Why Now?" By then the
world had witnessed the new passions and new forces of the
generation of revolutionaries of the 1960s, East and West, as
well as the new revolutions in Africa both in fact and in
thought, as witness Frantz Fanon's Humanism. What was needed by
then was also a new sense of objectivity-that is to say, a
further development of the concept of transformation into
opposite when it emerges, not from reformism's betrayal as at
the outset of World War I, but from the transformation of the
first workers' state into a state-capitalist society.
That further development into the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism
could, in one way, also have been sensed from Antonio Gramsci's
projection in his PROBLEMS OF MARXISM [reprinted in SELECTIONS
FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS]: "The philosophy of PRAXIS is
consciousness full of contradictions in which the philosopher
himself, understood both individually and as an entire social
group, not merely grasps the contradictions, but posits himself
as an element of the contradictions and elevates this element to
a principle of knowledge and therefore of action."
The illumination that we gained from working out Hegel's three
final syllogisms [of his ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL
SCIENCES], especially para. 577, applies directly to our age.
There Hegel says: "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." Where Hegel
at that point consoled himself with "the eternal
idea," PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION in our age could show that
the "Self-Thinking Idea" was actually the
Self-Bringing Forth of Liberty. WE COULD DO THAT BECAUSE WE HAD
BECOME WITNESS TO THE BIRTH OF A NEW GENERATION OF
REVOLUTIONARIES AND HAD RECREATED MARX'S HUMANISM FOR OUR AGE.
IN THAT NEW SENSE OF OBJECTIVITY WAS IMBEDDED SUBJECTIVITY-A
SUBJECTIVITY THAT HAD "ABSORBED" OBJECTIVITY.
The 1970s, during which years PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION was
published, turned out to be when Karl Marx's last writings, his
ETHNOLOGICAL NOTEBOOKS, were finally transcribed. This made it
possible to view Marx's Marxism as a totality, as distinct from
all post-Marx Marxists, beginning with his closest collaborator,
Frederick Engels, whose first work after Marx's death, THE
ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE, had been
presented as a "bequest" from Marx. Once the
ETHNOLOGICAL NOTEBOOKS were available it became clear how very
far from Marx's multilinear dialectic was Engels' unilinear view
of humanity's development.
The new moments of Marx's last decade disclosed, at one and the
same time, Marx's rejection of others' interpretation of his
"Historical Accumulation of Capital" as a Universal
instead of a characteristic simply of Western Europe, a
characteristic which the undeveloped lands (which our age calls
the Third World) need not follow; and a philosophy of
"revolution in permanence" which was not only theory
but practice.
Marx's philosophy of revolution seemed to us to hold a trail to
the 1980s, both on the emergence of the Third World, and on the
development of women's liberation in our age from an Idea whose
time has come to a Movement. This sense of contemporaneity
gained a new dimension also from a study we had been making of
Rosa Luxemburg's concept of the spontaneity of the masses.
Although we found that Rosa Luxemburg was nearly tone-deaf on
philosophy, as a woman revolutionary she was both active in the
mass, working class, anti-war, women's movement of her day, and
fought the leadership of her German Social Democratic Party on
their do-nothingness against imperialism. What emerged during
that sharp struggle was the most virulent male chauvinism
against her. We decided not to wait until our new book [ROSA
LUXEMBURG. WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF
REVOLUTION] was completed, but published in NEWS & LETTERS,
in January-February 1979, the draft chapter we entitled:
"Relationship of Philosophy and Revolution to Women's
Liberation: Marx's and Engels' Studies Contrasted." By the
time ROSA LUXEMBURG. WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY
OF REVOLUTION was completed, this became the climax to the whole
work when it was developed as the final chapter which focused
fully on "The Unknown Ethnological Notebooks, the Unread
Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich, as well as the Undigested
1882 Preface to the Russian Edition of the COMMUNIST
MANIFESTO."
The 1980s view, which concluded that final chapter, held that
Marx's Marxism, from the very beginning of his break with
bourgeois society, disclosed that no concept of his was separate
from that of permanent revolution-from 1843 to 1883. Our
projection of Marx's Marxism as a totality disclosed that Marx's
philosophy of "revolution in permanence" was ground
also for organization, a concept we consider most pertinent for
our age, including its importance to the Women's Liberation
Movement's search for a decentralized form of organization....
To concretize the momentous perspective of "revolution in
permanence" for today is the arduous and imperatively
needed task, if we are not to be buried in a nuclear holocaust
unleashed by the superpowers to which all too many of the
so-called Left kowtow.
* Hegel, in working out unresolved contradictions, refers to his
PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, where he analyzes just such disoriented
minds: "The self-alienated type of mind, driven to the acme
of its opposition, where pure volition and the purely volitional
agent are still kept distinct, reduces that opposition to a
transparent form, and therein finds itself" (p. 610, J.B.
Baillie edition).
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