www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, July 2002
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: MARXIST-HUMANIST ARCHIVES
Nuclear war and state-capitalism
Editor's Note The current standoff between India and Pakistan can
escalate at any moment into nuclear war, the threat of which did not end with
the Cold War. Raya Dunayevskaya had discussed the superpower preparations for
nuclear war in the capitalist epoch in July 1961, in "Ideas and
Organization," the draft of that year's perspectives report for News and
Letters Committees. We selected excerpts from that report as a contribution to
the discussion about the present nuclear threat and other crises and revolts, in
the feature that begins on page 1 of this issue, "Permanent war or
revolution in permanence?" We welcome your thoughts on both analyses.
Readers can find the original in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 3153. *** [July 1961] The very intensification of war preparations and the
urgency of the times compel a return not only to principles of anti-war struggle
but to the fundamentals of the new in world production…. We must concretize
this new stage of automated production that seems to have made a
"discontinuous" leap. Leaps into space with Sputniks, vanguards, Luniks,
orbital and sub-orbital manned flights as well as ICBMs abound; and there are
plunges into the depths of the oceans with the Polaris. But yet to be seen is
any serious industrialization of the underdeveloped economies or any "newer
life" in the technologically advanced lands. On the other hand, just as
both the Hungarian Revolution and the African Revolution opened a new stage of
WORLD-CONSCIOUSNESS, so the lateness of the hour must mean the PRACTICING of
Marxist-Humanist philosophy in organizational work. Nationally and
internationally, the relationship between ideas and organization has ended the
near-standstill in the continuity of Marxist thought, compelling regroupment…. I. 'DISCONTINUITY' IN PRODUCTION AND CONDITIONS OF
LABOR As distinct from the Industrial Revolution at the end of
the 18th century which produced our machine age, the Scientific Revolution in
the mid-20th century got its spurt from the war and is wholly dominated by it.
The "new weapons system" is not just a new form of
"blitzkrieg." Rather it threatens the extinction of civilization
altogether. Between 1949 and 1954, when Russia first broke America's A-bomb
monopoly, and then achieved "parity" with her in H-bombs, it has
become clear that while such "parity" becomes a minor deterrent to
nuclear war today, it is a major stimulus to war tomorrow. The "tomorrow" has moved ever nearer since
October 1957 when Russia shot out front with the launching of the Sputnik.
Thereby, however, hangs a tale, the TRUTH of capitalistic production—its
exploitation, its "production for production's sake," its
contradictory growth while degrading the worker to an appendage of a machine,
and its never-ending development of the means of production at the expense of
the means of consumption. For while the Sputnik shows indeed an impressive
mastery of the techniques of Automation, automated production in Russia has no
different CLASS content than it has in the United States. In both the conditions
of labor have worsened; speed-ups in production have heightened tensions and
increased industrial accidents. The shortage of labor that continues to characterize
Russian production expresses in no uncertain terms the workers' opposition to
automated production. Productivity of labor, which remains THE decisive factor
in the determination of a new social order, spells out Russia's industrial
backwardness more definitively than its spectacular space achievements spell out
its military "first-edness." To single out ICBMs, or even machine
tools in order to claim the opposite is indeed what has been called
"misplaced concreteness"—AND total blindness to the class content of
WORLD production in the age of state-capitalism at the quintessential turning
point in history called the Second Industrial Revolution.… The radical who wants to begin arguing on
capitalistically laid ground as the "rate" of industrial development
in this or that country should be prepared to laud "the miracle" of
West German production on the ruins of World War II. War destruction achieves
overnight what the relentless process of technological revolutions and
depreciation of existing capital take years to do. And the country that is
modern enough to respond in terms of the latest developments in the production
process—as Russia, Germany, and Japan were, but China was not—experiences
"miracles." German production, Russian science, and Japanese goods are
flooding the Western markets now. On the other hand, in China, where there was no heavy
industrial structure, the vastness of the land and the 600 million humans could
not produce a modern steel industry, despite the State Plan. Both poles of world
capital pour millions, if not to industrialize seriously the underdeveloped
economies, then certainly to win the minds of men. But those lands are poorer
than ever. After capitalist world domination, two-thirds of the world is still
starving! Above all, the atomic age cannot promise either advanced or backward
economy any "miracles" of production; a nuclear holocaust can destroy
the greatest of all productive forces—humanity itself… As the African Revolutions showed, no forces on earth
can stop humanity's development forward. Where the people in the technologically
backward countries dared and won independence against all odds and with the
greatest speed, there you have a creative upsurge of millions of people who CAN
easily master the "techniques" of industrialization PROVIDED these are
available, and they will be available to them, NOT under capitalism, but when
workers control production and thereby give a totally new impulse to its
development. The development from competition through monopoly to
state control is only a manifestation of the INNER development of capitalist
production from cooperation to manufacture through machinofacture or "the
automaton." That is why Marx's analysis of capitalist development remains
valid for our day. Marx discerned that the dialectic of the concentration and
centralization of capital would lead, at one and the same time, to
"centralization of capital in the hands of one single capitalist or one
single capitalist corporation" and the unemployed army, unless "new
forces and new passions" would undermine the system and build a new one. Lenin summed up the entire difference between the Second
and the Third Internationals, between those who talked socialism and those who
were building it, by the sole distinction of THE CONDITIONS OF LABOR. Since old
radicals no longer base themselves wholly on the proletariat, they do not stop
to ask questions either as to the conditions of labor of the proletariat, or as
to the "accumulated wealth" of Russian production. Consequently, they
see neither that of all the industrially developed countries Russia is still
backward, both in industry and in agriculture. It is the only industrially
developed country that still has over 40% of its population working in
agriculture. Khrushchev admits that in PER CAPITA production, the United States
has a 3:1 superiority. The super jets fly above muddy roads, and housing is so
scarce that the best a paternalistic Khrushchev could do to reward the first
Cosmonaut was to give him a four-room apartment. In a word, Russia may be superior in the thrust of its
rockets and jet bombers and the other paraphernalia of war, but that is
distinctly CAPITALISTIC. Production, continuous or "discontinuous," is
following no new path in Russia, much less in China, that differs fundamentally
from its development under private capitalism. The challenge, the greatness, the maturity of our age is
due to the fact, AND ONLY TO THE FACT, that the masses are so highly developed,
so audacious in their challenge of the mighty, so talented in the ability to use
the latest technological inventions in the remotest bushes that they need not
follow the capitalist path to industrialization, provided power remains in their
own hands.... II. THE CONTINUITY OF THOUGHT: PRACTICING
MARXIST-HUMANIST PHILOSOPHY …If the hallmark of our state-capitalist age is that
everybody wants to lead, nobody to listen, it is no less true that many who had
broken with the concept of "the party to lead" share with the "vanguardists"
the disdain for the Hegelian roots of Marxism. It is not only that the
inter-relationship of philosophy and politics which gave birth to Marxism as
theory and the PRACTICE of theory had so long been stored away as a mere
"heirloom." It is, above all, that they are blind to "the masses
AS REASON." It becomes necessary therefore once again to repeat our
ABC's: Over 100 years ago Marx saw that the very degradation of
the laborer to an appendage of the machine would produce in him a "striving
for univeralism." The Marxian theory of liberation, which was born out of
the actual struggles of the proletariat of his time, was so deeply rooted in
Hegelian philosophy—is, in fact, ORGANICALLY inseparable from it—because it
was that which supplied the "missing link" between history as
"accident" and history as a totality of the past and present actions
of men which determines their future. Marx's concept of revolution was likewise
"total"—the old torn up by its roots in depth and in breadth and new
dimensions created. The "negation of negation" was not merely the
abolition of capitalism but the abolition of all that stems from it: the
division between mental and manual labor, between science and philosophy,
between work and life. Marx developed his theory of the unity of thought and
action, philosophy and revolution, because he held a vision of a new world, or
"positive Humanism," which involved the unfolding of the world's
greatest historic live drama of human liberation, a self-creation by millions of
human beings who would reshape history "not out of whole cloth," but
as they found it in fact, in the class struggles, a world they had not created,
though they had [produced] all its material goods. To him history was not for
contemplation: it was for the knowledgeable building of the future. It was not a "hereafter"; it was to begin this
very day in the struggles which would unite theory and practice, release the
untapped creative energies of ever new millions, thus ending the
"pre-history" or CLASS history of man, and beginning his true, HUMAN
history. The grandeur of this vision was lost by the
"Marxists" after Marx of the days of the Socialist International
(1889–1914) which had torn Marx from his Hegelian moorings, stripped him of
his humanism, and transformed him into an economic determinist. The one grain of truth which accounted for this
vitiation of Marxism was the fact that Marx could not have discovered
"historical materialism" had he not stood Hegel "right side
up." The one grain of truth became the Big Lie long before the Russian
Communist Party—after the death of Lenin—grabbed hold of it in order to arm
vulgar materialism with state power, thereby establishing the counter-revolution
WITHIN the revolutionary movement itself. The only new element in this
post-Marxist "Marxism" was the manner in which the counter-revolution,
having lost its old, private capitalistic foundations, HELD ON LIKE A VAMPIRE TO
THE NEW FORMS--FROM THE SOVIET POWER TO THE STATE PLAN, INCLUDING THE VERY
LANGUAGE OF MARXIST-LENINISM. Theoretically a valuable contribution was made by us
when we made public what Lenin had kept private—his PHILOSOPHIC
NOTEBOOKS—written at the time he broke with established Marxism and returned
instead to the origins in Hegelian philosophy, especially Hegel's SCIENCE OF
LOGIC. As we showed in MARXISM AND FREEDOM, all of Lenin's
works and actions from then on were permeated with the new sense of
contemporaneity of "the dialectic"—the self-movement, the
self-activity, the self-organization, the self-development of those who would
reconstruct society on new beginnings through a unity of thought and action. This never meant to us that there was nothing left for
our generation to do but to repeat Lenin. Our own return to the dialectic,
though based on Marx and Lenin, had entirely new foundations: 1) the American
workers, who, in their battle with Automation, raised the questions of alienated
labor and the question of a new relationship between thinking and doing; 2) the
East European revolts, beginning in East Germany in 1953, going through the
ferment in Poland, and coming to a climax in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Since the publication of MARXISM AND FREEDOM we added the third new foundation
opened by the African Revolutions.... Our generation has witnessed a total transformation into opposite of the Soviet state (into a state-capitalist society). But at the opposite pole, we witness at the same time the complete maturity of the masses even in the most underdeveloped countries—Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa above all. When the African Freedom Fighters made themselves heard, they did so not only as fighters against oppression, but as builders of a totally new philosophic foundation—the universalism of technology becoming the basis for a new humanism which will embrace the whole world... |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
