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NEWS & LETTERS, April 2004Consciousness and revolution: A response to Ben Watsonby Dave Black Ben Watson’s critique of Dunayevkaya’s The Power of Negativity centers on the nature of "consciousness," in particular a statement by her in 1984 on "the actual participants in revolution": "Whether or not they were conscious of actually being the history-makers, they were exactly that." In the next sentence (which Watson doesn’t quote), Dunayevskaya referred, as example, to the milkmaids who initiated the Paris Commune in 1871 when they raised the alarm against the bourgeois government’s attempt to remove the city’s artillery defences. But to simply point out that "of course" the milkmaids weren’t conscious of the fact that their action would overthrow the government would not be enough to answer Watson’s charge that Dunayevskaya was "saying that the revolutionary masses can make history unconsciously. Her enthusiasm for social movements finally betrays her philosophy." His critique calls for a serious philosophic response. Watson, as a good anti-Stalinist, is of course aware of the denigration of "consciousness" as "subjectivity" during the epoch, post-1917, of counter-revolution-within-revolutions. Dunayevskaya, in 1964, wrote that "two kinds of subjectivity characterize our age of state-capitalism." One was represented by Mao Zedong ("no regard for objective conditions…as if a party of the elite that is armed can both harness the energies of men and ‘remold their minds'"). The other kind was the "second type of subjectivity" which rested on the Hegelian "transcendence of the opposition between Notion and Reality"; a subjectivity that had "'absorbed' objectivity, that is to say, through its struggle for freedom it gets to know and cope with the objectively real" (The Power of Negativity, p. 157). A year later (1965) however, she found this class divide (between petit-bourgeois and proletarian) to be incomplete and told her Japanese audience that this "second subjectivity" had to be broken into two kinds of revolutionary subjectivity: firstly, what the workers were going to do anyhow (whether the theoreticians listened or not); and secondly, "what theoreticians must do" who have listened (p. 144). Because historical development negates all of the forms that have gone before (such as the vanguard party), these two second types of subjectivity must also be the two sides of the ONE "second negativity" which creates the new society. It is precisely these insights which explain why, as Watson puts it, "she was proudest of her correspondence with worker-militants like Charles Denby and Harry McShane." Watson offers an eclecticism that wants to humanize the vanguard party project by "turning Hegelian concepts into accessible slogans" and promoting a "revolutionary interpretation" of "the unconscious." He expresses "frustration" at Dunayevskaya for not "relating to the French tradition of Charles Fourier, surrealism and the Situationists." "Tradition" however is itself at the mercy of the power of negativity. A "surrealist Hegel," which Watson thinks "would provide just the ally Dunayevskaya needs" for entering a "new era" of revolutionary thought, was precisely what the Situationists rejected. Guy Debord, whilst praising the surrealists’ assertion of the "sovereignty of desire and surprise," at the same time pronounced that their "idea of the infinite richness of the unconscious" was the "error at the root" of their project. Dunayevskaya’s critiques of council communism and Lukács’s theory of the "reification" of consciousness (chapters 1 and 12) in my view shed much light on Debord’s attempt to fuse the two.* (I cannot incidently see in Stewart Home’s cold-blooded porno-punk fiction anything that "might help to translate the extreme subjectivism of climactic Hegelian rhapsody into more materialist, Marx-friendly terms," let alone "[burst] the religious afflatus" of Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge.) Watson charges Dunayevskaya with an "uncritical embrace" of "new social movements" over and against the "crew of unhip grumblers" who sail the sinking ship of "post-Marx Marxism." Clearly though, judging by her writings throughout this book (covering from 1949-87), her "embrace" was never uncritical. For if mass movements were beyond criticism there would have been no need for her to write any of her books in the first place or for Watson to review them. When Watson says "Unfortunately, radical philosophy, unsupported by political party, academia or celebrity is a thin--if occasionally head-spinning--broth to live by," he does identify the challenge facing Marxist-Humanism. After all, in the history of post-Dunayevskaya Marxist-Humanism, there have been those who could not accept her determination not to allow philosophy and organization to exist side-by-side in separate "enclaves." But to "choose" between the "Practical" and "Theoretical" fails to realize that both tend to fall apart in separation. At the end of her life, in 1987, Dunayevskaya, in continuing to develop the "philosophic moment" of 1953 on Hegel’s Absolute Idea, categorized the dialectics of philosophy and organization as the "ground and roof" of her and her colleagues’ project. The 2003-2004 Perspectives of News and Letters Committees, addressing the error of treating philosophy as only theoretical and organization as only practical, asks: "Why shouldn’t we exercise [the theoretic power of philosophy] in class struggles, in Black struggles, in the anti-war movement, in youth and Women's Liberation struggles. In a word, why not project Marxist-Humanist philosophy organizationally as the power that is both the form for eliciting from the masses their thought and projecting Marxist Humanist perspectives to them?" Watson’s readable and provocative review of The Power of Negativity is most welcome, but the question remains: "why not." *See "Art, Reification and Class Consciousness in the Situationist International," by David Black, Hobgoblin 4, at: http://members.aol.com/THEHOBGOBL/Hobgoblin4.html |
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