www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, March 2003
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives
The American roots of Marxism
EDITOR'S NOTE To re-establish the American roots of Marxism
constituted a goal of Raya Dunayevskaya's book, MARXISM AND FREEDOM, published
in 1958. That year Dunayevskaya developed this theme in a presentation to an
economic seminar at UCLA. We present excerpts here of her notes from that
lecture, titled "Communism, Marxism and Liberty--The American Humanist
Tradition." The notes have been edited for publication, and can be found in
THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION 12505–12514. * * * This talk aims to relate Marx’s thinking to the
historic aspects of American thought. I proceed on the assumption that this
serious, scholarly audience has come to hear a dissenter’s point of view on
the parallels and sharp divisions between the two. I understand this is
predominantly an economic seminar and would therefore feel more at home in the
economic and sociological aspects rather than in the purely philosophical ones.
This is not to say, in the present period of world crisis when not only the fate
of civilization but civilization itself is within the orbit of an
intercontinental ballistic missile, that any of us can fail to question the deep
human basis of all phenomena. As Marx explained his philosophy in the very first
piece of writing at the time of his break from bourgeois society, A CONTRIBUTION
TO THE CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW, “To be radical is to grasp the
matter by its root. The root of mankind is man himself." The only Marxist root I consider genuine is the
Abolitionist movement in America and that despite the fact that most of the
Abolitionists did not even know Marx. What is of far greater importance is the
spontaneous affinity of ideas, the independent working out of the problems of
the age as manifested in one’s own country, and the common source--the Negro
in America and his own activity in fighting for freedom. The least known part of Marxism is its American roots.
I’m not referring to any organization that called itself Marxist either in
Marx’s own time or ours. Of many of those Marx said, “If this is Marxism,
I’m not a Marxist.” He found he had to separate himself from the self-styled
Marxists in America who tried to evade the whole issue of the Civil War by
saying they were opposed to “all slavery, wage and chattel.” Marx was
actively and unashamedly on the side of the North. The mass demonstrations in
England which stopped the British government’s flirtations with the thought of
entering on the side of the South and the role of The Workingman’s
International Association, headed by Marx, is certainly an important
manifestation of the relationship between the Marxist concept of freedom and the
American. The most glorious page in American history was written
by the Abolitionists. Here is how one of their great leaders, Wendell Phillips,
expressed the struggle between the North and the South: By the South I mean a principle, and not a locality,
an element of civil life, in 14 rebellious States. I mean an element which, like
the days of Queen Mary and the Inquisition, cannot tolerate free speech, and
punishes it with the stake. I mean the aristocracy of the skin, which considers
the Declaration of Independence a sham and democracy a snare--which believes
that one-third of the race is born booted and spurred, and the other two-thirds
ready saddled for that third to ride. I mean a civilization which prohibits the
Bible by statute to every sixth man of its community, and puts a matron in a
felon’s cell for teaching a black sister to read. I mean the intellectual,
social aristocratic South--the thing that manifests itself by barbarism and the
bowie-knife, by bullying and lynch-law, by ignorance and idleness, by the claim
of one man to own his brother....That South is to be annihilated. (Loud
applause.) The totality of my common sense--or whatever you may call it--is
this, all summed up in one word: This country will never know peace nor union
until the South (using the word in the sense I have described) is annihilated,
and the North is spread over it…Our struggle is between barbarism and
civilization. Wendell Phillips further spelled this out most
concretely when he said that unless Blacks become the basis of Southern
Reconstruction we might as well not have fought and won; we will retrogress to
another form of barbarism. The question of land and the peasant as the prerequisite
for a successful revolution was brought home to us in the Civil War. Frederick
Engels, Marx’s great collaborator, had written before, in this analysis of the
Peasant Wars in Germany, that because the German Reformation in the 16th Century
had betrayed the peasant revolts by not giving the peasants land, the country
itself “disappeared for three centuries from the ranks of countries playing an
independent part in history.” We still suffer from the incomplete revolution
in the South where the Negro did not get his “40 acres and a mule.” (I hope
everyone has read W.E.B. DuBois’ BLACK RECONSTRUCTION, one of the greatest
contributions--and certainly the most original--to that period of America’s
development yet hardly known because it was written by a Negro and supposedly
for that reason was “prejudiced.” Many a so-called objective historian has
yet even to see the problem, much less to analyze it profoundly.) We must now proceed to the changes in Marx’s greatest
theoretical work, CAPITAL, made under the impact of the decade of the 1860’s
in general and the Civil War in the United States in particular... Joseph Schumpeter considers Marx’s materialistic
conception of history as nothing short of a work of genius, whereupon he
complains that Marx overestimated the value of philosophy in general and of
Hegelian methodology in particular. He proceeds to call Marx the most erudite of
all economists and cannot contain his praise for Marx’s “idea of theory,”
of being able to transform “historic narrative into historic reason”;
whereupon he proceeds to dissect him as “economist” only and disregard
entirely what made it possible to transform historic narrative into historic
reason, or how Marx’s “idea” of theory evolved. He does this not
maliciously or even consciously--it is impossible for an intellectual nowadays
even when he admires another intellectual with whom he completely disagrees, to
conceive of the fact that genius has any connection with common man’s
activity. Marx, on the other hand, always felt the pulse of what he called
“the spontaneous organization of the working class,” and never more so than
when he worked on “theory.” Marx had been working out his economic theories ever
since 1844. By 1859 he finally published what he considered to be the first
volume of CAPITAL, which he had called CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. But he no
sooner published it than he was dissatisfied with it. Under the impact of the
Civil War he returned to the manuscripts and began a thorough overhaul, in
structure and form particularly. The two most fundamental reorganizations
occurred in 1863 and in 1866 and the work was then finally published in the form
we have it today. It was in 1866 that he added the section on "the
Working Day," which will illuminate what Schumpeter calls “the idea” of
theory and what I call the Humanism of Marxism or Marxism as a theory of
liberation. It completed Marx’s transcendence of both classical political
economy and Hegelian philosophy, the two main sources of his theory, and the
creation of a new world view of history which was solidly based on the actual
activity of man. First, there was the relationship of the abolition of
slavery to the struggle for the eight hour day. As Marx was to write in CAPITAL: In the United States of North America, every
independent movement for the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured
a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where
in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once
arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation that
ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, from New England to California. The General Congress of Labor at
Baltimore (August 16, 1866) declared: ‘The first and great necessity of the
present, to free the labor of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the
passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working-day in all
States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength
until this glorious result is attained.’ The workers having by their own “correct instinct”
formulated a demand in almost the precise terms that Marx had worked so hard to
present to the First International, the theoretician’s mind took wing. New
categories were created, a step forward in philosophic cognition was made, and a
new way of thinking resulted. First came the shift from the history of theory to the
history of production relations. In CRITIQUE, he stated his theory on
commodities and money and then supplemented it with the other theories on that
subject. In CAPITAL, he removed all other theories to the end of the work,
Volume 4, and straightaway from the mentioning of the duality in the commodity
between use-value and exchange-value moved over to the duality in labor itself,
between abstract and concrete. After that he split the category of labor into
labor standing for the function, the activity itself, and labor power, the mere
ability to labor which the capitalist buys as a commodity according to the laws
of exchange. This does not get transformed into the function itself until it
belongs to the capitalist and the worker is made by him to produce a greater
value than it itself is, or get fired after the day’s work. Marx is the only
theoretical economist who entered the factory--and stayed there for the greater
part of Volume I of CAPITAL analyzing the relations at the point of production. In this part--“The Production of Absolute Surplus
Value”--the section on "the Working Day" appears. The academic
economists, who look upon these pages as “sob story stuff,” forget that
society would have collapsed had the workers not fought for the shortening of
the working day. Capitalism destroyed nine generations of spinners in only three
generations. The humanism of CAPITAL gives it that profundity, that force and
direction which made possible the prediction of monopolies and depressions. Marx didn’t predict them because he was a prophet but
because of two factors and two factors only: 1) he dialectically carried through
to the end the economic laws of development of capitalist society and 2) having
put the human being--the wage laborers--instead of the thing--wage labor--at the
center of his theoretical world, Marx discerned in the struggles and new
thinking the “new forces and new passions” for a new society. The winning of
the shortening of the working day which Marx called “a veritable civil war”
was finally the material basis for freedom. Two principles are involved in the structural change in
CAPITAL, one flowing from theory and one from practice. The philosophy of the
shortening of the working day, which arose out of the actual class struggles,
embraced all concepts inside and outside it. The thinking of the theoretician
was thus constantly filled with more and more content, filled by workers’
struggles and workers’ thoughts.... The socialization of labor meant, in human terms, a
great army of labor, united and disciplined by the very mechanism of labor and
forced, in order to straighten their bent backs, to throw off not only
capitalist oppression but put an end to class society, and reunite once and for
all, in the human being himself, mental and manual labor so that the pre-history
of society can end and humanity’s true history begin on the basis that the
free development of each is the condition for the free and full development of
all. We need not merely to go back to the traditions of the
Abolitionists but forward to a New Humanism comprehensive enough in theory,
scope, logic and life to win the global struggle for the minds of men. And our
country is rich enough in traditions of self-activity: from the Committees of
Correspondence in colonial times that appeared just a big nuisance to the
British authorities who awoke one day to find that these nuisances were, as
Charles A. Beard put it, “The Engines of Revolution”; through the
sit-downers of 1936 who transformed the industrial face of the nation; to the
present kind of wildcats against the existing labor bureaucracy which demand a
more fundamental answer to automation than either the economists, scientists, or
labor leadership has yet seen. I ask anyone to turn to books on automation which
seriously treat man as if he were indeed a buildable machine and then follow
John R. Commons’ advice and go seek out workers and talk to them and get their
attitudes and you will see what I mean when I say that the new impulses are only
to be gotten from the workers themselves and not from abstract theories of
“automation is progress.” The struggle for the minds of men--and our century is
exactly that--cannot be won with hollow words of democracy. But so rich are the
traditions of America, so uninhibited are the American workers by the
preconceived notions of leaders, including those from their own labor ranks,
that a new Humanism is evolving. They have no Labor Party to “lead” them or
mislead them--and they have no awe of intellectuals like the French
Existentialists. That does not mean they reject theory. On the contrary. There
is a movement from practice to theory that is literally begging for a movement
from theory to practice to meet it. When these finally do meet--and I have no doubt of the meeting--it cannot be anything short of a New Humanism. |
|
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 |
