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NEWS & LETTERS, NOVEMBER 2003

Philosophic Dialogue

Dialectics as a way of life

Editor’s note: These excerpts of a review of THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX, by Raya Dunayevskaya (ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, Lexington Books, 2002), was recently published in THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY (Vol. 32, No. 2, 2003) in The Philippines.

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In examining the Hegelian underpinnings of Marx’s writings, Raya Dunayevskaya developed the philosophical perspective of Marxist-Humanism traced in her book THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY. It is based upon the idea of assessing mental and physical work at equal value and focuses upon the self-actualization of every person without distinctions of gender, class, and race.

Marxist-Humanism is a philosophy of revolution and the negation of the negative is central to her dialectics. In “Toward philosophic new beginnings in Marxist-Humanism,” which appeared in the 1989 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IDEOLOGY (Vol. 13), Hudis remarks:

Dunayevskaya first donated much of her published and unpublished writings to Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs in 1969, with the addition of several volumes of new material in 1981. She named the collection THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION--MARXIST-HUMANISM: A HALF CENTURY OF ITS WORLD DEVELOPMENT.... Dunayevskaya’s unique concept of “living Archives” was rooted in her view of the importance of sharing not only the results, but also the PROCESS of her philosophic development of Marxist-Humanism. Thus, she insisted that these Archives be donated, organized and expanded by the living founder of the body of ideas, and that the COLLECTION be made available to all those interested, both scholars and archivists alike.

While the above passage was written by one of the editors 13 years before the publication of Dunayevskaya’s book, it forewarns the reader of the importance of the process, in addition to the product.

The organization of the book follows the same form by presenting in the first chapter Dunayevskaya’s last major discussion of dialectics before her death....The remainder of the book chronicles the process through her correspondence and other writings.

It is through the correspondence that the reader gains a more personal glimpse of the inquiring nature of the author. She encourages others to share their thoughts and engage in dialectics with her about the meaning, usage, and implication of Marx’s work.

Dunayevskaya plumbs the work of Hegel and Marx for an understanding of their use of dialectics; however, she is not writing to clarify dialectics for the uninitiated. As stated above, she seeks to share the process of her philosophic development and her own understanding of dialectics. The editors choose selections, that help the reader trace the development of her understanding and application of dialectics.

The strength of the book lies in the craft of editing. The editors are meticulous in footnoting the changes between the original and subsequent copies of her work. They add the historical and personal perspectives of the author to create a context for understanding the writings and her process of development. The reader will receive the grounding to read her work with greater understanding because of the editors’ synthesis and explanations.

It is easiest to understand Dunayevskaya’s work from a critical theorist framework. She moves towards change by concretizing dialectics in the realities of the day. Her development can be understood only through her study of dialectics. It is her application of dialectics to the realities of life that allows her such growth.

PHILOSOPHIC MOMENTS

The first chapter...walks the reader through Marx’s philosophic moment in 1844 when he praises Hegel for discovering the "negation of negation” and criticizes him for shrouding it in mysticism or the esoteric. It is her application that distinguishes her writing, and the reader is able to share her concretization of the philosophical perspective of Marxist-Humanism:

In Hegelian dialectics, the philosophic moment is a determinant: even if the person who is driven to articulate the Idea of that “moment” was very nearly unconscious as to its depth and its ramifications, it remained the element that governed the concretization that follows the laborious birth that poured forth in a torrent nevertheless. (p. 5)

The editors identify Dunayevskaya’s philosophic moment in the second chapter of the book, writing:

In the 1980s, when Dunayevskaya was reviewing the 50-year development of the philosophy that she had termed Marxist-Humanism in 1957, she discovered that her 1953 letters [on Hegel’s Absolutes] represented nothing less than its philosophical moment. Each stage of her development of this body of ideas constituted a further fleshing out and concretization of the new points of departure contained in the 1953 letters. But all of their ramifications were not evident from the start, even to herself. It took repeated returns to them on her part, in response to objective world events and developments in Marxist-Humanism, for the full meaning of these letters to show itself.

This is part of the beauty and intellectual challenge of reading the book. There are no concrete definitions but there are rich discussions and works in progress as she returns to the same issues in a different context and reshapes her ideas. New readers will shape their ideas as a post-structuralist by defining what something is not rather than what it is or by what it has been as they are being concretized by the author. There is confusion in tracking the changes and it is best to focus on the ideological changes of the author herself.

Dunayevskaya’s mantra--that “most of the post-Marx-Marxists did not go far enough”--is explained in the first chapter by quoting from the final chapter of her ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION:

It isn’t because we are any "smarter" that we can see so much more than other post-Marx Marxists. Rather, it is because of the maturity of our age. It is true that other post-Marx Marxists have rested on a truncated Marxism; it is equally true that no other generation could have seen the problematic of our age, much less solve our problems. Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. It is not a question of only meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and the deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx’s concept of the philosophy of "revolution in permanence." (p. 8)

DIALECTICS OF PHILOSOPHY

Dunayevskaya uses the dialectics of philosophy to analyze the dialectics of organization. When she and C.L.R. James were leading the Johnson-Forest Tendency, James found that Hegel’s PHILOSOPHY OF MIND held nothing more for their organization. Dunayevskaya pushed on with her studies to find what she called “the new society” where there would be an end to the division between mental and manual labor. This was a philosophic moment for Marxist-Humanism.

The dialectic means development through contradiction, not only as the first negation--when you say no and overthrow what is--but on through second negativity, the establishment of something new. While the first negativity is only general negativity, the second is a concrete absolute negativity. It is important to distinguish them. The positivity of a double negative does not bring you to the starting point nor is it intended to.

For a simplistic example, one can think of students observing a teacher. A student sitting close to the window at the back of the room will have a different perspective of the teacher than one sitting near the door on the opposite side of the room. In simple terms this represents the general negativity. The absolute negativity (negation of the negative) would place its opposite directly behind the teacher within a different proximity. Instead of being far away, the absolute negative students would be in closer proximity to the teacher. This is closer to its absolute than the original student on the opposite side of the room. This does not address dialectics as the tendency of a notion to pass over into its own negation as the result of conflict with its inherent contradictory aspects, as Hegel identified it.

This example does not help me to understand the original concept which the Greeks were trying to find, i.e., a common understanding when there was a difference of opinion that resulted in a totally different position than either initially had. Dialectics is more than ideas that bump in the night. Dialectics is the development of ideas through contradictions reaching a common view of what is correct for both sides. It has moved from polemics to understanding and working together for a common good. It is the language of revolution...

The book repeatedly returns to Marx’s use of Hegelian dialectics, the importance of absolute negativity, and that Lenin was the first post-Marxist to appreciate Marx’s use of Hegel’s dialectics. While Dunayevskaya returns to these frequently she does so to share new insights she has gained. The chapters of the book are in chronological order with the exception of the first chapter. Each chapter is a vignette of what Dunayevskaya was thinking and her current development of thought. Her insights get sharper and more focused as she turns to current affairs; however, there is no intention to leave dialectics.

If we listen to what the Idea is, and we know that there is no difference between Idea and freedom, then it will be equally the nature of the fact and the nature of cognition itself. That is one of the forms of getting to the transformation of reality--what Marx called the realization of freedom. That’s why Marx stuck so much to the dialectic. We’re not going to throw philosophy out, we have to realize it; that is, instead of an idea of freedom, it has to become the reality. (p. 207) 

--John Jenckes, De La Salle University

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