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NEWS & LETTERS, July 2004From the Writings of Raya DunayevskayaMarx's Humanism TodayEDITOR’S NOTE This essay by Raya Dunayevskaya was first published in 1965 in the anthology SOCIALIST HUMANISM, edited by Erich Fromm, which contained a number of studies on Marx’s Humanism by scholars and activists worldwide. We published parts of this essay in our May and June issues, and it concludes here. We publish this now as part of our ongoing discussions of Marx’s critique of capital in our "Draft for Perspectives 2004-2005--World Crises and the search for alternatives to capitalism". All footnotes here are by Dunayevskaya. The editors have provided references to quotes from Marx’s CAPITAL in the text. "MCIK" refers to Marx’s CAPITAL, Vol. I, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Co, 1906). "MCIF" refers to the edition of CAPITAL, Vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes (News York: Vintage Books, 1975). Other references to MARX AND ENGELS COLLECTED WORKS (MECW) have been provided as well. Other installments in the series: Part I Part II* * * Conclusion ...Because Marx's economic categories have so incontrovertible a class character, it is impossible to denude them of their class content. Although some of today's near-Marxists loudly proclaim the "neutralization" of these categories, they apply them TO CAPITALISM AND TO CAPITALISM ONLY. Because the Marxian law of value is the supreme manifestation of capitalism, not even Stalin--at least not for very nearly two decades after he already had total power, the State Plan, and the monolithic party--dared admit its operation in Russia since he claimed the land was "socialist." It was only in the midst of a world war that the Russian theoreticians openly broke with the Marxian concept; in practice, of course, the ruling bureaucracy had long since followed an exploitative course. In 1947 Andrei Zhdanov dramatically (or at least loudly) demanded that "the philosophical workers" replace the Hegelian dialectic with "a new dialectical law": criticism and self-criticism. By 1955 the critique of Marxian concepts concerned his humanism. V. A. Karpushin wrote in "Marx's Working Out of the Materialist Dialectics in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts in the Year 1844":
The Russian Communists were not, however, about to favor "revolutionary change" where revolutionary change meant THEIR downfall. Therefore, when the Hungarian Revolution tried the following year to transform reality by REALIZING philosophy, that is to say, by making freedom from Russian Communism a reality, the debate ended in machine-gun fire. Thus the violation of the LOGOS of Marxian theory was followed by the destruction of liberty itself. Soon after, the Russian theoreticians unloosed an unbridled, vitriolic attack on all opponents of ESTABLISHED Communism, whom they gratuitously labeled "revisionists." Unfortunately, too many Western scholars accepted the term and referred to the ruling Communists as the "dogmatists," despite such wild gyrations and "flexibility" as, on the eve of World War II, the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the united front between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek; and, more recently, the rift between Russia and China. At the same time, the single grain of truth in the duality of Lenin's philosophic legacy--between the vulgarly materialistic MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIO-CRITICISM and the creative dialectics of his PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS--has provided a field day for the innate anti-Leninism of "the West." Elsewhere(2) I have analyzed "Mao's Thought," which is supposed to have made "original contributions to Marxism," especially his ON PRACTICE, and ON CONTRADICTION, as they relate to his rise in power. Here I must limit myself to the fact that the humanist debate was in danger both of becoming a purely academic question, and of being separated from the "political" debates on "revisionism." Fortunately Marxism does not exist only in books, nor is it the possession only of state powers. It is in the daily lives of working people trying to reconstruct society on new beginnings. The liberation from Western imperialism, not only in Africa but in Latin America (Fidel Castro too first called his revolution "humanist"), unfurled a humanist banner. Thereupon the Russian Communist line changed. Where, at first, it was claimed that Leninism needed no sort of humanization, nor any of the reforms proposed by the proponents of "humanist socialism," the claim now became that the Soviets were the rightful inheritors of "militant humanism." Thus M. B. Mitin, who has the august title of the Chairman of the Board of the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, stated that Khrushchev's Report to the Twenty-first Congress of the Russian Communist Party was "the magnificent and noble conception of Marxist-Leninist socialist humanism."(3) And in 1963, at the thirteenth International Congress of Philosophy, held in Mexico, it was the Soviet delegation that entitled one of its reports "Humanism in the Contemporary World."(4) Thus, curiously, Western intellectuals can thank the Russian Communists for throwing the ball back to them; once again, we are on the track of discussing humanism. Let us not debase freedom of thought to the point where it is no more than the other side of the coin of thought control. One look at our institutionalized studies on "Marxist Leninism" as the "know your enemy" type of course will show that, in methodology, these are no different from what is being taught under established Communism, although they are supposed to teach "opposite principles." The point is this: unless freedom of thought means an underlying philosophy for the realization of the forward movement of humanity, thought, at least in the Hegelian sense, cannot be called "an Idea." Precisely because, to Hegel, "only that which is an object of freedom can be called an Idea," even his Absolutes breathed the earthy air of freedom. Our age can do no less. It is true that the Marxian dialectic is not only political or historical, but also cognitive. However, to claim that Marx's concept of the class struggle is a "myth" and his "glorification" of the proletariat only "the end product of his philosophy of alienation"(5) flies in the face of theory and of fact. In this respect, George Lichtheim's criticism that such an American analysis is "a sort of intellectual counterpart to the late Mr. Dulles's weekly sermon on the evils of communism"(6) has validity. Marx's humanism was neither a rejection of idealism nor an acceptance of materialism, but the truth of both, and therefore a new unity. Marx's "collectivism" has, as its very soul, the individualistic element. That is why the young Marx felt compelled to separate himself from the "quite vulgar and unthinking communism which completely negates the personality of man." Because alienated labor was the essence of ALL that was perverse in capitalism, private or state, "organized" or "anarchic," Marx concluded his 1844 attack on capitalism with the statement that "communism, as such, is not the goal of human development, the form of human society." Freedom meant more, a great deal more, than the abolition of private property. Marx considered the abolition of private property to be only "the first transcendence." Full freedom demanded a second transcendence. Four years after these humanist essays were written Marx published the historic COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. His basic philosophy was not changed by the new terminology. On the contrary. On the eve of the 1848 revolutions, the MANIFESTO proclaimed: "The freedom of the individual is the basis of the freedom of all." [MECW6, p. 506] At the end of his life the concept remained unchanged. His magnum opus, like his life's activity, never deviated from the concept that only "the development of human power, which is its own end" is the true "realm of freedom." [MCIK, pp. 954-5, MCIF, p. 959] Again, our age should understand better than any other the reasons for the young Marx's insistence that the abolition of private property is only the first transcendence. "Not until the transcendence of this mediation, which is nevertheless a necessary presupposition, does there arise positive Humanism, beginning from itself." "Positive Humanism" begins "from itself" when mental and manual labor are reunited in what Marx calls the "all-rounded" individual. Surely our nuclear age should be oppressively aware that the division between mental and manual labor, which has been the underlying principle of all class societies, has reached such monstrous proportions under capitalism that live antagonisms characterize not only production, but science itself. Marx anticipated the impasse of modern science when he wrote in 1844: "To have one basis for life and another for science is A PRIORI a lie." We have been living this lie for 120 years. The result is that the very survival of civilization as we have known it is at stake. The task that confronts our age, it appears to this writer, is, first, to recognize that there is a movement from practice--from the actual struggles of the day--to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement FROM THEORY can meet it. A new relationship of theory to practice, a new appreciation of "Subject," of live human beings struggling to reconstruct society, is essential. The challenge of our times is not to science or machines, but to men. The totality of the world crisis demands a new unity of theory and practice, a new relationship of workers and intellectuals. The search for a total philosophy has been disclosed dramatically by the new Third World of underdeveloped countries. But there are also evidences of this search in the struggles for freedom from totalitarian regimes, and in the West. To discern this mass search for a total philosophy it is necessary only to shed the stubbornnest of all philosophies--the concept of "the backwardness of the masses"--and LISTEN to THEIR thoughts, as they battle automation, fight for the end of discrimination, or demand freedom NOW. Far from being intellectual abdication, this is the beginning of a new stage of cognition. This new stage in the self-liberation of the intellectual from dogmatism can begin only when, as Hegel put it, the intellectual feels the "compulsion of thought to proceed to...concrete truths." The espousal of PARTIYNOST (party principle) as a philosophic principle is another manifestation of the dogma of "the backwardness of the masses," by which intellectuals in state-capitalist societies rationalize their contention that the masses must be ordered about, managed, "led." Like the ideologists in the West, they forget all too easily that revolutions do not arise in the fullness of time to establish a party machine, but to reconstruct society on a human foundation. Just as PARTIYNOST, or monolithism, in politics throttles revolution instead of releasing the creative energy of new millions, so PARTIYNOST in philosophy stifles thought instead of giving it a new dimension. This is not an academic question for either the East or the West. Marxism is either a theory of liberation or it is nothing. In thought, as in life, it lays the basis for achieving a new HUMAN dimension, without which no society is truly viable. As a Marxist humanist, this appears to me the whole truth of Marx's humanism, both as philosophy and as reality. * * * Notes 1. VOPROSY FILOSOFII (QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY), No. 3/1955. 2. See the new chapter, "The Challenge of Mao Zedong" in the paperback edition of MARXISM AND FREEDOM (New York: Twayne, 1964). For an analysis of a similar perversion of Lenin's partisanship in philosophy into Stalin's monolithic "party-ness in philosophy," see the well-documented and perceptive analysis SOVIET MARXISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE, 1917-1932 by David Joravsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 3. PRAVDA, Feb. 6, 1959. The English translation used here appears in THE CURRENT DIGEST OF SOVIET PRESS, June 3, 1959. 4. The report of this conference by M. B. Mitin appears in VOPROSY FILOSOFII, No. 11/1963. For a different report of the same conference see STUDIES IN SOVIET THOUGHT, No. 4/1963 (Fribourg, Switzerland). 5. PHILOSOPHY AND MYTH IN KARL MARX by Robert Tucker (Cambridge University Press, 1961). 6. George Lichtheim's "Western Marxist Literature 1953-1963" appears in SURVEY, No. 50, January 1964. |
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