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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2004From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya'Marx's Humanism Today'Editors note The following essay by Raya Dunayevskaya was first published in 1965 in SOCIALIST HUMANISM, edited by Erich Fromm (New York: Doubleday), which contained a number of studies on Marx’s humanism by scholars and activists worldwide. We will continue publishing this crucial study of Marx’s new continent of thought in the next two issues of NEWS & LETTERS as part of our ongoing discussions of Marx’s critique of capital in our classes on "Alternatives to Capitalism" (See announcement). Footnotes by the author are indicated by "RD"; all others are by the editors. The editors have provided references to all quotes from Marx’s CAPITAL in the text. "MCIK" refers to Marx’s CAPITAL, Vol. I, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Co, 1906). "MCIF" refers to the more recent edition of CAPITAL, Vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). Other installments in the series: Part II Conclusion* * * Part I It was during the decade of the First International (1864-74)--a decade that saw both the Civil War in America and the Paris Commune--that Marx restructured(1) the many drafts of CAPITAL and published the first two editions of Volume I. CAPITAL sets forth a new concept of theory, a new dialectical relationship between theory and practice, and a shift of emphasis from the idea of history as the history of theory to the idea of history as the history of production. It signifies Marx’s "return" to his own philosophic humanism after more than a decade of concentration on economics and empiric studies of the class struggles of his day. Not surprisingly, this return is on a more concrete level, which, rather than diminishing Marx’s original humanist concepts, deepens them. This is obvious in the section "The Working Day," which Marx first decided to write in 1866 under the impact of the mass movement for the shortening of the working day following the conclusion of the Civil War in the United States. It is obvious in "The Fetishism of Commodities," which Marx informs us he changed "in a significant manner"(2) after the Paris Commune. It is obvious in the original categories he created for his economic analysis and the creative practice of the Hegelian dialectic. Humanism gives Marx’s magnum opus its force and direction. Yet most Western scholars of Marxism are content either to leave the relationship between the now famous ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844(3) and CAPITAL implicit, or to make the continuity explicit only insofar as the ethical foundations of Marxism are concerned.(4) This leaves the door wide open for those who wish to transform Marx’s humanism, both as philosophy and as historic fact, into an abstract which would cover up concrete economic exploitation, actual lack of political freedom, and the need to abolish the conditions preventing "realization" of Marx’s philosophy, i.e., the reunification of mental and manual abilities in the individual himself, the "all-rounded" individual who is the body and soul of Marx’s humanism. The 1844 MANUSCRIPTS didn’t just "pave the way" for "scientific socialism." Humanism wasn’t just a stage Marx "passed through" on his voyage of discovery to "scientific economics" or "real revolutionary politics." Humanist philosophy is the very foundation of the integral unity of Marxian theory, which cannot be fragmented into "economics," "politics," "sociology," much less identified with the Stalinist monolithic creation, held onto so firmly by Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. Of all the editions of CAPITAL, from its first publication in 1867 until the last before Marx died in 1883, the French edition (1872-75) alone contained the changes that had, as Marx put it in the Afterword, "scientific value independent of the original." The revolutionary action of the Parisian masses in "storming the heavens"(5) and taking destiny into their own hands clarified for Marx the two most fundamental theoretical problems: the accumulation of capital, and the fetishism of commodities. Just as his analysis of the struggles to shorten the working day became pivotal to the structure of CAPITAL, so these additions became crucial for its spirit, i.e., for the future inherent in the present. The changes were of two kinds. One was tantamount to a prediction of what we today call state capitalism--the ultimate development of the law of concentration and centralization of capital "in the hands of one single capitalist, or those of one single corporation" [MCIK, p. 688, MCIF, p. 779]. The second was the illumination of the fetishism of commodities inherent in the value-form as emanating from "the form itself" [MCIK p. 82, MCIF, p. 164]. Marx concluded that only FREELY associated labor can abrogate the law of value; ONLY "freely associated men" [MCIK p. 92, MCIF, p. 173] can strip the fetishism from commodities. At this moment in history, when established state powers claim "to practice" or to base themselves on Marxism, it is essential to re-establish what Marx himself meant by practice. It was freedom. The notion of freedom, always Marx’s point of departure and of return, is concretized through a most painstaking and original analysis of the "inexorable laws" of capitalist development. This discloses HOW the proletariat, as "substance" (or mere object of an exploitative society) becomes "subject," i.e., revolts against the conditions of alienated labor, THEREBY achieving "the negation of the negation," or self-emancipation. In a word, CAPITAL is the culmination of the 25 years of labor that began when Marx, in 1843, first broke with bourgeois society and melded what he considered its highest achievements in thought--English political economy, French revolutionary doctrine, Hegelian philosophy--into a theory of liberation, a new philosophy of human activity which he called "a thoroughgoing Naturalism or Humanism." The Hungarian Revolution of 1956(6) transformed Marx’s humanism from an academic debate to a question of life and death. Interest in it intensified the following year when the "100 Flowers" blossomed briefly in China before the totalitarian state caused them to wither abruptly.(7) From 1958 to 1961 the African revolutions gave proof of a new, third world whose underlying philosophy, again, was humanism.(8) The Cold War and McCarthyism helped keep the United States isolated from the West European rediscovery of Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays in the mid-1940s and early 1950s. Now, however, Americans have an opportunity to make up in comprehensiveness of discussion what was lost in the belated start.(9) The Freedom Now movement of the Negroes, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the 1962 missile crisis over Cuba, which made real the nuclear threat, have helped rekindle the debate. In his own way, the scholar too must grapple with the inner identity of the Marxian economic, political, sociological, scientific, and philosophic categories. It was the late, non-Marxist, anti-Hegelian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who pinpointed Marx’s genius as "the IDEA of theory," the transformation of "historic narrative into historic raisonné."(10) (Continued next month) --------------------- 1. In his Preface to Volume II of Marx’s CAPITAL (Kerr edition), Friedrich Engels lists the original manuscripts in such a way that the pagination tells the story of the restructuring. For my analysis of this, see pages 87-91 of MARXISM AND FREEDOM (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958, 1964).--RD 2. See Marx’s Afterword to the French edition of CAPITAL, in CAPITAL, Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). 3. Marx’s 1844 MANUSCRIPTS are now available in several English translations, including one issued in Moscow, but the one more readily available here is by T. B. Bottomore, and is included in MARX'S CONCEPT OF MAN by Erich Fromm. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1961) Outside of the essay on "Alienated Labor," I am, however, using my own translation and therefore not paginating the references.--RD 4. See THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXISM by Eugene Kamenka. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962).--RD 5. THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE, by Karl Marx, is widely available in many languages both as a separate pamphlet and in Marx’s SELECTED WORKS and COLLECTED WORKS. --RD 6. For Dunayevskaya’s writings on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, see "Spontaneity of Action and Organization of Thought: In Memoriam to the Hungarian Revolution," Political Letter of Sept. 17, 1961, in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 2954–2956. See also chapter 18 of MARXISM AND FREEDOM, "Two Kinds of Subjectivity." 7. The indispensable book for the English reader is THE HUNDRED FLOWERS CAMPAIGN AND THE CHINESE INTELLECTUALS by Roderick MacFarquhar (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960). The voices of revolt in China should then be compared with those in Eastern Europe. By now the books, not to mention pamphlets and articles, on the Hungarian Revolution are legion. A few which I consider important for tracing the role that Marx’s humanism played are the following: IMRE NAGY ON COMMUNISM (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957); François Fejtö, BEHIND THE RAPE OF HUNGARY (New York: David McKay Company, 1957); THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION, A WHITE BOOK edited by Melvin J. Lasky (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957); BITTER HARVEST, edited by Edmund O. Stillman with Introduction by François Bondy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959). For eyewitness reports, and especially those relating to the Workers’ Councils, the issues of THE REVIEW (periodical published by the Imre Nagy Institute, Brussels) is quintessential. Some reports also appeared in the magazine EAST EUROPE, which did a competent job on Poland, especially in the publication of the debate on Marx’s humanism between the leading philosophers in Poland, Adam Schaff and Leszek Kolakowski. Both of these philosophers are also translated in the collection entitled REVISIONISM, edited by Leopold Labedz (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962).--RD 8. AFRICAN SOCIALISM by Léopold Sédar Senghor (New York: American Society of African Culture, 1959); Sekou Toure’s "Africa’s Path in History" was excerpted for the English reader in AFRICA SOUTH, April-June 1960, Capetown; now available only abroad. See also my NATIONALISM, COMMUNISM, MARXIST-HUMANISM AND THE AFRO-ASIAN REVOLUTIONS (American, 1958, and English, 1961, [1984,] editions available at NEWS & LETTERS, Detroit, Michigan [Chicago, Illinois].--RD 9. I do not mean to say that I accept the West European intellectual’s attitude on either the question of the degree of belatedness, or the low level of discussion in the United States. Four or five years before Europe’s first rediscovery of Marx’s early essays, when Europe was under the heel of fascism, Herbert Marcuse dealt with them in his REASON AND REVOLUTION. It is true that this was based on the German text of the essays, that no English translation was available, and that the discussion of Professor Marcuse’s seminal work was limited to small groups. It is also true that I had great difficulty in convincing either commercial publishers or university presses that they ought to publish Marx’s humanist essays or Lenin’s PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS. I succeeded in getting both these writings published only by including them as appendices to my MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958). Even then they did not become available to a mass audience. It was not until 1961, when Erich Fromm included a translation of the 1844 MANUSCRIPTS in MARX'S CONCEPT OF MAN, that Marx’s humanism reached a mass audience in the United States, and received widespread attention in American journals. Nevertheless, I see no substantive reason for the intellectual arrogance of the European Marxologists since, in Europe as in the United States, it was only after the Hungarian Revolution that the discussion of humanism reached the level of either concreteness or urgency. When I refer to the belatedness of the discussion, I have in mind the long period between the time the 1844 MANUSCRIPTS were first published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Russia, in 1927, under the editorship of Ryazanov, and the time they received general attention. --RD 10. A HISTORY OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS by Joseph Schumpeter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). --RD |
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