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NEWS & LETTERS, November-December 2005Women as subjectivity: revolutionary force and reasonby Terry Moon On the 20th anniversary of the publication of Raya Dunayevskaya's WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION: REACHING FOR THE FUTURE (WLDR), we want to look at this 35-year collection of essays through the lens of what Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, called her original contribution to Marxism: "Absolute Idea as New Beginning." We do this as a revolutionary exploration of how her re-creation of the dialectic, concentrating on women's struggle for freedom, shows a path out of today's stifling retrogression. Dunayevskaya gave no brief definition of Absolute Idea as New Beginning, writing: "It isn't only that we did this great thing by saying Absolute isn't absolute in the ordinary sense of the word--it's the unity of theory and practice; Absolute isn't absolute in the bourgeois sense of the word--it's the question of the unity of the material and the ideal. But who ever said Absolute was a new beginning? None but us. And if we don't understand that original contribution--that we have to begin with the totality--then we won't know what a new beginning is." * EXPRESSING TOTALITY How can WLDR express totality when confined to the subject of Women's Liberation? It isn't a question of covering all forces of revolution throughout history. Rather, as Dunayevskaya put it: "[E]very one of the historic periods recorded [in WLDR] discloses the existence of both a new revolutionary force and a new consciousness--Reason itself--no matter how different the situation or the country in which the events unravel, and no matter how hidden from history, past or in-the-making, it has remained" (p. 3). We see this re-created, from the rise of today's Women's Liberation Movement; going back to the wives of striking miners in 1949-50, to women's part in revolts worldwide such as Iran 1979 and Poland's Solidarity movement. In each case Dunayevskaya made explicit the revolutionary force and reason residing in women's struggles for full humanness and freedom. Unseparated from that is how Marxist-Humanism met those movements, contributed to their development and was developed by them. In WLDR we see created the new relationship between theory and practice that she insisted was indispensable for revolution: "It was as if Hegel's Absolute Method as simultaneously subjective-objective mediation had taken on flesh. Both in life and in cognition, 'Subjectivity'--live men and women--tried shaping history via a totally new relationship of practice to theory" (p. 6). Let's look at how Dunayevskaya met the challenge given by sociologists and feminists who wanted her to speak on "The GRUNDRISSE [Marx's draft of CAPITAL] and Women's Liberation." She said that while "the GRUNDRISSE had nothing to do with the 'Woman Question'....the methodology is there" (p. 183). She delved into Marx's concretization of Hegel's statement that if he could put his philosophy in one sentence it would be that the truth is not just substance but Subject (p. 184). Marx concretized Subject as the proletariat. Later, when looking at revolutionary China in the 1850s, she said, "we see Subject as [the] Orient." Then she turns to "look at Subject in the history of women's liberation" (p. 185). Thus she grounds an expanded notion of Subject directly in Hegelian-Marxian philosophy and makes it explicit for our age. SUBJECTIVITY OF REVOLUTION Women as Subject is explored in terms of the indispensibility of the Black dimension. She showed that Black women as speakers and generals inspired white abolitionists and women's suffragists: "It was because of this Subject, this Black dimension, that the philosophic concept in the fight against slavery wasn't just that you would get rid of slavery, but that you would have entirely new human relations. The whole concept of absolute movement of becoming [Marx's expression from the GRUNDRISSE] was there" (p. 185). For our day she makes explicit what was new in the Women's Liberation Movement: women from the Left refusing to wait until after the revolution, who "want new relations right here, right now, right in my organization" (p. 186-87). Finally, Dunayevskaya takes issue with the structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose "read[ing] 'into' Marx" opens the door to thinking that labor isn't pivotal; whereas Dunayevskaya showed what is in Marx and that it is crucial to "see that women must have the philosophy of liberation in general, in particular, in essence, and in mind. It is critical not ever to separate theory from practice or philosophy from revolution, because unless you have that unity you will just end up once more feeling good because you have told off the men, but not having established anything new for woman as Reason" (p. 187). There is no easy definition of Absolute Idea as New Beginning, which is why WLDR is indispensable reading. As Dunayevskaya re-creates the dialectic by investigating women's struggle for freedom worldwide, she describes the events unseparated from what is actually emerging from the struggle and from a philosophy of total freedom that is a summation of the revolutionary thought that came before. In doing so, she gives a direction to today's movement and shows how women's liberation can be a path to the Universal of freedom when it refuses to separate itself from Marx's revolution in philosophy. ------ * April 18, 1976, Presentation to the East Coast NEB, "Our Original Contribution to the Dialectics of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning..." (Reprinted in November 1993 NEWS & LETTERS) * * * Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future by Raya Dunayevskaya Special 20th anniversary price $10 (regularly $13) includes postage. To order, click here. |
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