From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives
October 1998

Marx's new moments and those in our age

Editor's Note: Raya Dunayevskaya presented the sixth and final lecture in a series of workshop/classes on "Current World Events and the Dialectic Method" in April 1986. It came in the wake of Ronald Reagan's attack on Libya in March 1986, and in it she deepened her view of Marxist-Humanism's historic right to exist because of its half-century of world development in a "Changed World." We reprint excerpts from this lecture in light of Bill Clinton's recent imperialist cruise missile bombardments on Sudan and Afghanistan followed by his declaration of war (see editorial, page 1) and as ground for restating today's need for an absolute opposite, that is, new revolutionary beginnings and the re-creation of Marxist-Humanism. Bracketed phrases were added by the editors. The lecture can be found in The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, 11532.

What is as disastrous as Reagan's criminal actions in his attack on Libya is the Reagan ideology that pollutes the air. Here is the President of the U.S., unashamedly saying, "I am also a contra," and following this up with a blitz on Libya which he dares to call "self-defense" against "terrorism," as if he wasn't committing a state-terrorist act. With this bombing of Libya, Reagan Retrogressionism has reached such an abyss that the whole of today's talk is entitled: Which new beginnings will determine the end-the new developing revolutions or the Reagan counter-revolution and its putrefaction of thought? There are two opposing worlds in each country-the rulers and the masses. The Reagan degenerate chauvinistic super-patriotism pollutes our air. Long ago, Samuel Johnson had the right description of such patriotism when he said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Just look at the concrete disgusting rationale with which Reagan followed the attack in the Gulf of Sidra with an actual attack on Kadafi's living quarters, killing his 15-month-old infant and severely wounding two others of his children, three and four years old. Eighteen bombers flew from England to drop the bombs. If anyone can be lower as a terrorist than Kadafi, then Rambo-on-the-loose, Ronald Reagan, is the one. It is this type of pull from the gutter imperialist politics of nuclearly armed capitalism that makes it important to struggle against all rulers. And it is the enemy at home that Marxist-Humanism must struggle against, not only by being active in all mass movements and by solidarizing with international movements, but by the specificity of a totally opposite philosophy of revolution. The philosophy of classless new human relations is also a force to be projected in our daily lives journalistically as well as philosophically.

Here are the three Marx principles that form the ground of 1986 analyses, whether they relate to Workshop/Classes; or to News & Letters; or to Volume XII of the Marxist-Humanist Archives [The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection] that was being finished in the same three months; and, of course, to the events themselves as they will affect our 1986-87 Perspectives [giving direction to News and Letters Committees]: 1.) Marx's concept of history in the making. That is to say, recording an event both as the masses in motion are shaping and reshaping history and as the Marxist philosophy of revolution practices the Idea as a force, even as action itself is force. First, then, is history in the making. 2.) Inseparable from it is Dialectics. It is not something restricted to any one historic period. The Dialectic Method examines every event in the context of both historic continuity and discontinuity, as well as the perspective for tomorrow. To put it another way, while there is no substitute for action, action like theory is in itself one-sided. The unity of action and thought is what motivated Marx from the very start when Marx designated his philosophy "a new Humanism" and unfurled a banner not only for the overthrow of capitalism but for the creation of totally new human relations. Whether an event happened in Marx's lifetime, specifically, his founding of a new continent of thought and revolution in 1844; or whether the event happened in Lenin's time, 1914, and he issued the call for the transformation of an imperialist war into a civil war-what all Marxists singled out from Hegel was the "materialistic" statement that wherever there is life, there is movement, there is the Dialectic. Marx's transformation of the Hegelian Dialectic from a revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution led him, when the 1848 Revolutions were defeated, to call for "revolution in permanence." The second principle, then, is Dialectics. 3.) The third principle is the relationship of objective to subjective, neither as mere generalization nor something that stops at the first negation-that is, the overthrow of private capitalism-imperialism, the uprooting of capitalism, private or state. Rather, it analyzes the concrete events inseparable from a vision of the future. This isn't something Marx said only in 1844 or 1848. It is something Marx experienced; he lived it. The "new moments" in the very last decade of his life, with his dialectical attitude to the so-called new science of anthropology-i.e., his new appreciation of pre-capitalist society, what we now call the Third World-are proof of this. We all know what the Communist Manifesto projected as the world outlook of the newly named Communist League: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" Why, then, don't we remember as well that the Communist Manifesto was practicing Marx's 1844 proclamation of "revolutionary, critical-practical activity," not only against the ruling state-party, but by separating himself from "the varying existing opposition parties"? In a word, why don't we remember the battle of ideas in all periods? * * * It is high time to detail Marxist-Humanism's development because what becomes imperative in this crisis-ridden capitalistic-imperialistic world-and that of course includes both nuclear Behemoths-is Marx's multilinear concept of human development, be it of the industrialized world or what he called the pre-capitalist world, and we know as the Third World, as well as the whole concept of organization for that final battle, that would be inseparable from Marx's philosophy of revolution. This of course is what we point to when we say that Marx's new moments make it clear that the 1880s is the trail to the 1980s. But this requires concretization by this new generation. First we broke with all post-Marx Marxists and worked this out explicitly in Chapter 12 of Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution. The turning point in the global struggle for freedom was the recognition that the Absolute Method is the philosophic ground for the present world struggle for freedom. In a word, we must face what we consider the burning question of today-ORGANIZATION AS INSEPARABLE FROM THE IDEA, i.e., MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, VS. THE VISAGE OF HITLER AND THE ONGOING REALITY OF REAGANISM. The visage of Hitler in South Africa extended itself to producing the Lesotho coup which didn't stop Reaganfrom rolling out the red carpet for the most notorious mercenary, Savimbi, financed by apartheid South Africa which is getting very substantial help from Reagan to intensify their counter-revolutionary work in Angola and in Mozambique. This turned out to be just a "curtain raiser" for the imperialistic, savage onslaught against Libya-which Reagan dared to call ''self-defense'' against terrorism. In truth, he is the greatest terrorist. He must be stopped. Nor can the activities in opposing him be separated from the battle of ideas against this new form of counter-revolution.

The relationship between the battle of ideas and our actions against the reactionary age we are living in may not seem to be connected with what sounds like such a mystical abstraction as Absolute Method. The truth is that 1953, when the world witnessed the very first ever revolt against totalitarian Communism, was the very period when I broke through on the Absolute Idea. I said that signified that there was a movement from practice as well as from theory, and this involved the whole struggle for total freedom in the specific post-World War II period. That is exactly why, in a similar period of Prussian reaction more than a century ago, Marx called his ideas "a new Humanism." All this we spelled out in our first major theoretic work, Marxism and Freedom, which worked out the continuity with Marx's Marxism and the discontinuity which was an actual concretization for our age's battle for freedom. Indeed, the very first chapter ended with a section called "Hegel's Absolutes and Our Age of Absolutes." In a word, Absolute Method, far from being any metaphysical abstraction, is actually the process of concrete dialectical development in each age.

The ceaseless movement of human development, through ever-reappearing contradictions, signifies that an end is really the ground for new beginnings. And new beginnings determine the end.

When the turbulent 1960s ended with an aborted revolution, it became clear that Youth activity alone, with its disregard for theory as if it could be "picked up en route," would only end in more and more aborted revolutions. We concretized this in Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao.

To this day, neither post-Marx Marxists nor activist pragmatists have wrestled with the Dialectics of Organization: Philosophy, the "Party" and Opposite Forms of Organization Born Out of Spontaneity. That is the topic of my next book. Unfortunately it will take another two years to complete. All I can do here is touch with where I begin-with Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program, written in that last decade of his life when he experienced all those "new moments."

No Marxists understood fully this critique as it relates to organization, not even Lenin, who achieved the greatest leap on concretizing Marx's analysis of the need to destroy the bourgeois state in his State and Revolution which unfurled the banner for the actual November 1917 Russian Revolution. But insofar as the Party was concerned, he omitted entirely that question of Organization, leaving himself confined within his 1903 concept of the vanguard Party, notwithstanding the changes he introduced in 1905 and 1917, and hailing the spontaneous new forms of organization, like the soviets in 1917.

Rosa Luxemburg, who had made a category of spontaneity, likewise remained "orthodox" on the question of the Party and criticized Lenin only on the point of centralization and decentralization. Who, then, took organizational responsibility for Marx's philosophy, not just of revolution "in general," but specifically the question of what happens after the overthrow of capitalism? What Marx was pointing to concretely was that both those who called themselves Marxists (Eisenachists) and those who were Lassalleans considered that what was of the essence was unity, putting off or "taking for granted" the philosophic ground.

In actuality, what "taking for granted'' achieved was to make a principle of the specifically German General Workers Association that was nationalistic, as against the First International Marx headed. Put differently, what Marx was aiming at in the Critique was to tell Marxists they must not forget the Universal of freedom as what happens after overthrow, in their preoccupation with immediate activity, activity, activity. It is true that those last three words were from the 1960s, not from 1875. But the essence of what Marx was aiming for was expressed in that simple word that everyone "took for granted" they understood-labor. There Marx "repeated" at the very time he completed the French edition of Capital what he had been saying on labor since 1844: that labor must not remain alienated, that it must become a total human activity, never separating theory from practice.*

The world in which we live now confronts us with all its counter-revolutionary actions, with the Reagan Retrogressionism on all fronts, including the U.S. itself and its "ideology," which we must never forget that Marx designated as false consciousness. The putrefaction of thought that the Reagan Administration is exuding is polluting the air for all.

That makes it all the more imperative to grasp what has happened in this post-World War II period since the movement from practice was so creative as to be a form of theory itself. Let us not forget that a form of theory is not yet philosophy. Rather, it is a challenge to the theoreticians to end the one-sidedness of theory, as practice is challenged to end its one-sidedness so that theory and practice can create a new unity, the new relationship of practice to theory in order finally to reach the realization of philosophy. This is what Marx was working out in his last decade, after the defeat of the revolutions in his period, and the fact that the 1875 attempts at organization put a priority on the unity rather than the principles which they supposedly "took for granted." What is an imperative for our age is never to "take for granted'' the Marx principles, Marx's Universals, the philosophy of revolution, as the age grapples with its immediates.

New forms of theory that have arisen from the spontaneous mass revolts, with its challenge to the theoreticians, are exactly where Marxist-Humanism started when working out a new newspaper where the production worker [Charles Denby] became the editor.

News and Letters Committees at the same time assigned the completion of the first major theoretical work, Marxism and Freedom, and that it be done by submitting the draft for discussion with workers and Youth. (See especially Chapter 16, "Automation and the New Humanism" as well as the Introduction.) In a word, the combination of worker and intellectual was not limited to the journalistic form, but was for all our major theoretical works in process.

The point is that objectively the new passions and new forces of revolution-whether they be rank-and-file labor, Black, Youth, women's liberation, peasant-are present both as force and as Reason, all aiming to see that the new revolutions are not aborted but create the ground for new human relations.

This is exactly what we are aiming at with what we call organizational responsibility for Marxist-Humanism. The doors are open, wide open. April 22, 1986 (Lenin's birthday)

* A conversation with Herbert Marcuse in the late 1970s in a way revealed the whole relevance of that for our age, when he asked me what did I think of that specific paragraph in the Critique of the Gotha Program.

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