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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2002
Marxist-Humanism: the biography of an idea
This essay is adapted from
WOMEN BUILDING CHICAGO. We publish it in celebration of Women's History Month,
2002. (WOMEN BUILDING CHICAGO 1790–1991: A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY. Rima Lunin
Schultz and Adele Hast, editors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.) by Terry Moon Raya Dunayevskaya was a
revolutionary thinker and activist who developed an original philosophy,
Marxist-Humanism. Throughout her life she searched for paths to liberation,
paths she saw in the struggles of women, African Americans, youth, and labor. Adrienne Rich called her a
"major thinker in the history of Marxism and of women's liberation—one of
the longest continuously active woman revolutionaries of the twentieth
century....A core theme of [Dunayevskaya's] writing...[was] the inseparability
of experience and revolutionary thinking, the falseness of the opposition
between 'philosophy' and 'actuality"' (Foreword to ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S
LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION). Dunayevskaya proposed that the
radical movement return to the works of Karl Marx and study his roots in the
philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel; and she rejected the thinking, in both the U.S. and
Soviet Union, that identified "Marxism, a theory of liberation, with its
opposite, Communism, the theory and practice of enslavement" (MARXISM AND
FREEDOM). As Douglas Kellner put it in
the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN LEFT, she "attempted to realize the unity
of theory and practice, which she took to be the core of revolutionary
Marxism." FROM UKRAINE TO BLACK CHICAGO Raya Osipovna Dunayevetskaya
was born on May Day of 1910 in Ukraine, then part of tsarist Russia, in the town
of Yariishev near the Romanian border. The experience that set her on the path
of revolutionary philosophy and activism was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and
the ensuing civil war, which she witnessed as a young girl. During these years she saw the
destruction of her village and the rapes and beheading of townspeople by
counter-revolutionary troops retreating from the Bolsheviks. That the Bolsheviks
were welcomed as liberators shaped her outlook and actions when the family
settled in Chicago in 1922, after fleeing the famine in Russia the year before. Although Dunayevskaya was too
young at the time to be a Communist Party (CP) member, she soon joined the
communist youth organization in Chicago. Angered by anti-Semitism, injustice,
and poverty, she felt such revulsion at reciting the pledge of allegiance at
school that at age 13 she contributed her own version to the CP youth journal:
"One aim throughout our life/Freedom to the working class!" A year
later, she led a student strike at Cregier Elementary School against
anti-Semitism and corporal punishment. Because Dunayevskaya viewed her
childhood in Russia and Chicago as the crucible for a radical life, it becomes
parts of the biography of the idea of freedom. As she put it in 1978, "It
isn't personal whatsoever! If you live when an idea is born, it doesn't make any
difference where you are: that becomes the next stage of the development of
humanity." Her activities in this period
were unusual: as a teenage white woman she had determined to immerse herself in
revolutionary work with African Americans. She carved out a place for herself,
working with the NEGRO CHAMPION, the newspaper of the American Negro Labor
Congress, edited by Lovett Fort-Whiteman. The NEGRO CHAMPION office was located
in the heart of Chicago's Black Metropolis. She wrote book reviews that were
published widely in African American newspapers and journals. When she graduated
from Medill High School in 1928, her date with an African American classmate
created a protest that threatened to cancel the scheduled prom. Dunayevskaya began to question
the CP's policies and actions after the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the party
in 1927. When she suggested that her local comrades hear Trotsky's response to
his expulsion, she was thrown down a flight of stairs and kicked out of the
Young Workers League. She then began a revolutionary sojourn that took her from
New York City to Los Angeles. Moving to Boston in 1929, she met Antoinette
Bucholz Konikow, a birth control advocate who spoke out for legal abortion and
had formed a group of independent Trotskyists—almost all women—who had been
thrown out of the CP. Back in New York, she became
secretary to James P. Cannon, who was one of the founders of the Socialist
Workers Party in 1938. Dunayevskaya did not stay with Cannon very long but
traveled to workers' strikes at various sites. She hitchhiked across the country
in 1934, a year during which labor strikes were characterized by intense class
conflict. When she arrived in San
Francisco, the general strike of July 16-19, 1934, had begun. More than 100,000
workers in San Francisco and Alameda Counties stopped work in support of
longshoremen and seamen who had gone on strike along the entire West Coast.
Dunayevskaya was shot at by police during a street battle that was part of the
widespread police and vigilante violence. The next year she was in Los Angeles,
where she taught Karl Marx's CAPITAL and was an organizer for the Spartacus
Youth League. By 1936, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked with
Ralph Bunche on the Washington Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers. In 1937, hearing that Leon
Trotsky needed a Russian language secretary, Dunayevskaya left for Mexico
without obtaining permission from the U.S. branch of the Trotskyist party.
Trotsky was in exile in Mexico, trying to escape assassination by Stalin, who
was methodically jailing and executing his past revolutionary comrades.
Dunayevskaya worked with Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico, during the years when
Stalin waged the infamous Moscow trials. She helped Trotsky respond to the
trials' fantastic slanders against him. In 1939 she broke with Trotsky
over his insistence that Russia was still a "workers' state" even
after Stalin's August 1939 pact with Hitler. The 29-year old Dunayevskaya found
herself disagreeing with Trotsky, the man she considered the greatest living
revolutionary. She lost her power of speech for two days. THE MOVEMENT FROM
THEORY Then began what she later
asserted was "my real development." The realization of Trotsky's
error, a mistake that limited the total revolutionary change that Dunayevskaya
envisioned, forced her to immerse herself in economics, revolutionary theory,
and philosophy, a development that transformed what Marxism would come to mean
for her. Driven to understand the true
nature of the Soviet Union, she began a rigorous study, utilizing Russian
economic statistics, Marx's CAPITAL, and his then little-known
ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS (1844). In 1941, she wrote "The Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics Is a Capitalist Society." She soon met C.L.R. James, who
had also written a position paper on state-capitalism. Dunayevskaya and James
formed the State-Capitalist Tendency within the Workers Party; Dunayevskaya was
active in the Harlem, New York, branch of the party. By 1944 Dunayevskaya's critique
of Russian theoreticians, "A New Revision of Marxian Economics,"
published in the AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, reached beyond the publications of
the Left and was reported on the front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES. She
criticized Russian theoreticians who had declared that the law of value, which
Marx said was a defining feature of capitalism, operated under socialism. (Will
Lissner discussed her article in "Soviet Economics Stirs Debate Here,"
Oct. 1, 1944). Moving to Pittsburgh in the
late 1940s, she became active in the coal miners' general strike of 1949-50 in
West Virginia. At the same time she was translating Lenin's "Abstract of
Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC" and working on a book on state-capitalism. Her activity and studies in the
Hegelian-Marxian dialectic culminated in a series of "Letters on Hegel's
Absolutes," written in the spring of 1953—the period following Stalin's
death. Dunayevskaya referred to these letters—in which she discerned "a
dual movement in [Hegel's] Absolute Idea, from practice and from
theory"—as a determinant for her subsequent development of
Marxist-Humanism. From then on, Dunayevskaya never separated activism from the
deepest delving into philosophy. In the midst of cold war
politics in the 1950s, C.L.R. James was expelled from the U. S. for passport
violations; he moved back to England after breaking up the State-Capitalist
Tendency, whose Correspondence Committees had been listed as subversive by the
U.S. Attorney General in 1954. Immediately after the dissolution, in 1955,
Dunayevskaya, together with most of the worker members of the Correspondence
Committees, formed News and Letters Committees as a "unique combination of
workers and intellectuals." In 1958, Dunayevskaya published
her first book, MARXISM AND FREEDOM, FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY, with an introduction
by Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. It aimed "to re-establish Marxism
in its original form, which Marx called 'a thoroughgoing Naturalism, or
Humanism"' and included her translations of Lenin's PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS
(1914) and two of Marx's 1844 ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS, the first time
those essays were published in English. Dunayevskaya worked with an
array of U.S. and international movements throughout the 1960s, traveling to
Europe, Africa, Hong Kong, and Japan. In 1969, she made the first donation of
her writings to the Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs,
believing one could learn as much from the process of development of theory as
from the result. Her manuscript collection included voluminous correspondence
with such Left theoreticians as Herbert Marcuse; Erich Fromm; Iring Fetscher and
Maximilien Rubel; the Scottish worker Harry McShane; the African leaders Leopold
Senghor and Nnamdi Azikiwe; and a host of women writers, including Natalia
Trotsky; Sheila Rowbotham; the Portuguese revolutionaries Maria Barreno and
Isabel do Carmo; and Americans Meridel LeSueur and Adrienne Rich. The crises of the 1960s
revolutionary movements moved Dunayevskaya to work on a book that would clarify
revolution theoretically: PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION: FROM HEGEL TO SARTRE AND
FROM MARX TO MAO (1973). In her opinion, the failure to make a revolution in
1968 revealed the limitation of social movements whose practice is not grounded
in philosophy. "Now the one thing we learned from the turbulent 1960s was
this: without a philosophy of revolution, near revolutions abort! It is a fact
that because those near-revolutions had ended so disastrously, in particular
France 1968, that the New Left finally ended their delusion that 'theory can be
picked up en route' and a deeper look into Marx's philosophy of revolution was
begun by some." MARXISM AND WOMEN’S
LIBERATION The women's liberation movement
was not exempt from these difficulties, but rather than castigating it as a
diversion from revolution, as most of the Left initially did, Dunayevskaya
sought to make explicit its revolutionary character. She wrote in her third book,
ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION (1982),
that the uniqueness of the women's liberation movement is that "not only
did it come out of the left but it was DIRECTED AGAINST IT, and not from the
Right, but from within the Left itself."
Dunayevskaya argued that the transformation of the relationship between
women and men was fundamental to a Marxist concept of a new society. Charles Denby,
the Black worker-editor of NEWS & LETTERS, died in 1983. The next
year the headquarters of News and Letters Committees moved to Chicago.
Dunayevskaya there continued to write a monthly column for News & Letters
and articles and reviews for other publications. She published her fourth book,
WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION: REACHING FOR THE FUTURE
(1985), a collection of essays written over a 35- year period, which sought to
articulate "Marxist-Humanist views over the entire post-World War II world
in a way that will...confront unfinished revolutions." Her last years were dominated
by studies for a book with the working title, "Dialectics of Organization
and Philosophy: The 'Party' and Forms of Organization Born out of
Spontaneity." Dunayevskaya died on June 9,
1987. She was buried in Forest Home
Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois, with her grave facing the monument
commemorating the revolutionaries who were falsely convicted in August 1886 of
throwing a bomb in Chicago's Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. Raya Dunayevskaya lived freely when women were not free and was fierce in her determination to transform a world she viewed as brutally inhuman into one where everyone could experience self-development and freedom. Since her death, all her books have been republished by university presses and translated in numerous countries. A collection of her philosophic writings, THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, has just been published by Lexington Books. |
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