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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives
April 2001
Dialectics: The Algebra of Revolution
Editor's Note
The following consists of excerpts of comments made by Raya Dunayevskaya
during the 1978 Convention of News and Letters Committees, in response to a
question from the floor about the meaning of dialectical philosophy. It has
never before appeared in print. We publish it now as part of our ongoing
effort to raise and work out the question "Why Dialectics? Why Now?" (See
the announcement
for an upcoming series of discussions on this.) The
original can be found in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 5791.
I come from Russia 1917, and the ghettos of Chicago, where I first saw a
Black person. The reason that I'm starting that way is that I was
illiterate. You're born in a border town. There's a revolution, there's a
counter-revolution, there's anti-Semitism. You know nothing, but experience
a lot, especially if you happen to be born a revolutionary. You don't know
that you're a revolutionary, but you're opposed to everything.
If the capitalists were only exploiting us they wouldn't last a minute.
It's because they have all the mass media, as well as the exploitation, all
the education, everything with which to brainwash us and make us think that
their ideas are our ideas--"If I only think about myself and my family, I
will get somewhere" is that type of idea--that they are able to perpetuate
this exploitative system.
Now how does it happen that an illiterate person, who certainly didn't know
Lenin and Trotsky, who as a child had never seen a Black person, had begun
to develop all the revolutionary ideas to be called Marxist-Humanism in the
1950s? It isn't personal whatsoever. If you live when an idea is born and a
great revolution in the world is born, it doesn't make any difference where
you are. THAT BECOMES THE NEXT STAGE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITY. You
know it in your bones in something as simple as when you say, "No!" to your
Mama who wants to put you in pink and the boy child in blue....
Take Rosa Parks. Do you think she thought she was starting a revolution?
No, she was tired as all get-out! She had just worked a full day. She was
tired and just wasn't going to get up again to move to the back of the bus
to give her seat to a white man who hadn't labored as hard as she. And the
Black youths who were sitting there seeing this middle-aged woman being
dragged off to the police station, said, let's not let Rosa Parks be all
alone there.
What did Rosa Parks do by that one action? She started the entire Black
revolution in the South! She's the one that made Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. the "leader." King would never have been leader if a movement for
freedom hadn't started from below, spontaneously.
What is important is that you are so natural an opponent of this system
that you will bring on the revolution. Your one action of opposition to the
system makes you part of that revolutionary movement, and you did it, not
because you were "unconscious"--that's what they think you were--but because
you were born a revolutionary and don't like the damn system under which we
live!
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER?
The reason it is important not only to be a revolutionary and not like the
capitalist system and want to start a revolution--is that we have had too
many ABORTED revolutions, too many UNFINISHED ones! We have to contend with
the fact: What is it, why is it so?....
Take any one of the revolutions that have happened. What was great about
Russia 1917? They had a successful revolution. They had a Lenin! Was
Trotsky the same as Lenin? It sounds like he was. He was not only on the
right side of the barricades. He led that great proletarian revolution, he
built up the Red Army, and he was next to Lenin in political stature. But
did he undergo the same reorganization of himself [as did Lenin]? When
World War I happened and there was the Second International's betrayal, did
Trotsky think that, though he didn't betray, nevertheless he too had to
reorganize his thinking because the historic responsibility for such a
betrayal of existing Marxism needed more of an answer than just: "I didn't
betray"?
Yes, Lenin and Trotsky found themselves on the same side of the barricades,
and that's what the Trotskyists always paraded out--and I as a Trotskyist
for years helped Trotsky parade out that fact. But how did it follow from
that that there was no difference between Trotsky and Lenin? IT'S NOT TRUE!
Trotsky was on the same side of the barricades as Lenin, but Lenin had
undergone a transformation on philosophy as well. Lenin was leaving us a
heritage, the steps by which to recapture the philosophic, historic link of
continuity with the Marxian-Hegelian dialectic.
Put differently, Lenin said: We Russians are backward. We have done the
revolution in a country that is not supposed to have had it. Without the
revolution in Germany, we'll certainly die! But the other revolutions will
know not only from something we did and were successful but also from where
we pointed to in a world context, in a new relationship.
He was saying: We have found out that we whites are so conceited, because
we have run this world for so long, that if [the revolution] didn't happen
in Germany, with the tradition of Hegel and Marx, and of being
technologically advanced--if it didn't happen there, what are we going to
do? Fold up and die? No! We have to point to NEW BEGINNINGS.
And the new beginnings in 1920, at the Second Congress [of the Communist
International] was that [Lenin said] despite our conceit, the majority of
the people in the world are Black and Red and Yellow. If the
counter-revolution can be stopped, and on a world scale, not from Berlin
but from Peking or wherever, then we should be willing to sacrifice [the
Russian Revolution] for that world revolution.
[Lenin also told] the editors of the new theoretical journal UNDER THE
BANNER OF MARXISM to publish Hegel, naturally from a materialist point of
view, but the dialectic is the pivot. He said call yourselves "Materialist
Friends of the Hegelian Dialectic."
So he left us beginnings, both global and philosophic. What did Trotsky do?
Trotsky said, I was on the right side of the barricades, but we lost the
revolution, and therefore because I'm a revolutionary the difference
between us is reformism. But that wasn't the only difference. A NEW
philosophic ground he did not have, a NEW Subject of revolution he did not
have. He kept repeating: the peasantry is reactionary, as I showed in my
theory of Permanent Revolution. They did play a revolutionary role in the
Russian Revolution, but that is their last time.
The only thing he added when he lost to Stalin was not new beginnings, but:
if only I can build up a new cadre, that will do it.
NEW FORCES, NEW PASSIONS
Look what happened. We got World War II and we're waiting for a revolution
equivalent to the Russian [Revolution of 1917]. We get at most the Chinese,
in other words a great national revolution [in 1949]. So you have to
reconsider what is happening. You had always thought the revolution would
come out of the war. Had you noticed any new forces that now have emerged?
Had you built out of those new forces? And those revolutionary peasants in
China? Is that only a mirage? Is that only Stalinism in Chinese dress?
Consider Africa. Do you think the Zulus knew they were leading a
revolution? They knew they didn't like British imperialism trying to take
their country over. We learned of that because: l) we had a world
revolutionary perspective; 2) we knew that the 1905 [Russian Revolution]
couldn't have been only in Russia; something was "in the air" globally; and
3) in the post-World War II period we said there must certainly also be
something happening in Africa. If that idea of revolution came to France,
or to Japan, where else is it?....
Take the question of male chauvinism. Suddenly just a "personal," "family"
affair makes you rebel. It isn't that you made a category called "a
movement from practice to theory; a movement from theory to practice." It
isn't in any book you read. The book may have made a generalizationabout
it, but it was in life, in your life, and because it was also in other
lives, and they too rebelled, it became a movement, and a "book," and an
organization.
One other incident hasn't to do with women, but with Black. I was in Paris
in 1947, trying to convince Trotskyists they should believe that Russia
isn't merely a "degenerated workers' state," it's a state-capitalist
society.....When I go to Lyon, France, where I addressed the Socialist
youth, somebody is sitting in that audience whom I didn't know. But now I
read all the histories and biographies of Frantz Fanon, and not only was he
there, in Lyon at the same time, interested in Trotskyism, but though he
was also finding an affinity with Existentialism, the Black nature leads
him away from it all to an independent path he will later call "new
Humanism." These happenings aren't "accidents." When there are great
stirrings in life, in revolutions-to-be, something gets "in the air" and
crosses national boundaries.
The point is: it doesn't make any difference whether there was an in-person
relationship. If you know the exact relationship between OBJECTIVE AND
SUBJECTIVE, between PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, and don't consider any of
that as abstract, you then realize it is abstract only if you haven't made
the connection of objective and subjective, and seen how the actual
subjective genuine human new beginnings which then unite with the movement
from theory can make up into this Absolute Idea AS NEW BEGINNING....
A theory is good for the answer of what you're going to do this year or
next year, but you need an entire philosophy for a vision of your age's
"breaking the barrier," that is to say not only overthrowing the old, but
creating the new.
The greatest thing in relation to Marx's philosophy of revolution is
this--even before he worked out all of historical materialism, he is saying:
If we are going to be serious about A NEW TYPE OF PERSON, A NEW TYPE OF
SOCIETY, we really have to begin with the beginning, the Man/Woman
relationship. Isn't that tremendous! In other words, he wants to uproot not
only the exploitation, or the racism, or the sexism even--he means it has to
be so totally different that you have to begin, so to speak, with your
moment of birth, or the moment after you're born.
Ever since Marx, every Marxist tendency is trying to make it narrower and
narrower. We cannot get into it further here. I'm simply indicating what
the goal is of the book--Rosa Luxemburg, Today's Women's Liberation
Movement, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution.
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