www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April-May 2006From the Writings of Raya DunayevskayaWhy Philosophy? Why Now?EDITOR'S NOTE February 2006 marks the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of the crimes of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party. His speech was part of an effort to out-flank his rivals in the USSR’s leadership and to co-opt within manageable channels mass opposition to his regime. By the fall of 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution broke out against the USSR, his plans were in ruins. The Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 called for a new society freed of both Russian “Communism” and Western capitalism and helped place Marx’s Humanism onto the historic stage. The 50th anniversary of these events raises the question of what has the anti-Stalinist Left achieved in the course of the past half century. To help generate discussion on this issue, we reprint here a 1965 essay by Dunayevskaya which evaluated the momentous world historic changes that had taken place since the end of World War II. It originally appeared in the December 1965 issue of NEWS & LETTERS under the title, “Why Philosophy? Why Now?” It can be found in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 6760-61. * * * Twenty years after the end of World War II, a full generation has grown up, and yet look at our “new,” non-fascist world. Twenty years after the British Empire began its dissolution with India winning its independence; sixteen years after Tito broke from Stalin and Mao won power in China; over a decade since the end of the Korean War and true de-Stalinization was begun by the East German workers, who first put an end to the myth of invincibility of Russian totalitarianism (a new stage of freedom which was climaxed, in that orbit by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution); eight years since a whole new world was opened by the African Revolutions that so enveloped whole continents that even in the mightiest imperialist empire, the U.S., Cuba tore away free; not to mention the Negro Revolutions right within this country--all these world-shaking events, and yet, and yet, capitalism is still so firmly in the saddle that it can exude a new form of reaction. In Europe there is De Gaullism; in the U.S. [John] Birchism; [in Asia] the Sino-Soviet conflict signifies not a break FROM state-capitalism but WIHTIN it for the domination over the new Third World of newly independent countries aspiring to establish themselves on new foundations. During the same period the Cuban Revolution [of 1959] was so diverted from its humanist channels that Cuba is now hardly more than a satellite of Russia. Must we then in the U.S. nevertheless fall victim to the gravitational pull of pseudo-revolutionism--Maoism, Trotskyism, Fidelismo, “pure” Communist Party-ism? This, indeed, is the only alternative WHEN one looks for escape, instead of true liberation, which can only be achieved where there is a unity of the movement of liberation and the philosophy of liberation. PHILOSOPHY BECOMES THE IMPERATIVE Just as it was no accident that in liberated France after World War II Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s humanism became the urgent questions of the day, so in our day the answer to What Now? rests in the rediscovery of Marxist-Humanism. It is not necessary, in order to expose the void, to return to the death of Lenin and the disarray in the Marxist movement. The need for a philosophy is felt by others than Marxists. While it was true that the question was one of life and death for the Hungarian Freedom Fighters [in 1956] who spoke in Marxist terms, it was raised as poignantly by the African revolutionaries who spoke, instead, of “Negritude,” independent African socialism. Humanism has now become the imperative for the Negro Revolution, for the young intellectual, white and Negro, who sees that “the power structure” will not let it be, and yet considers it sufficient to meet each situation as it arises without having any “preconceived notions.” In order to grasp the need for an underlying Marxist-Humanist philosophy, however, what is necessary is to see philosophy not only “in general,” but most concretely and profoundly as THE link in the forward movement of humanity. Even for seeing the fork in the road ahead it is necessary, first of all, to clear away the intellectual debris, THE "UNDOGMATIC," NO LESS THAN THE "DOGMATIC." A piecemeal policy is incapable of disclosing the historic link, the continuity in the struggle for freedom, much less anticipate the future course of revolution as it overcomes the counter-revolution that has always appeared at critical moments just when victory seemed in sight. Lessons of history cannot be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders while one continues to live only for the moment. Unfinished revolutions have ever been the source for the new breath the old class society draws upon to keep on existing. Sometimes it even appears as “new “--as the democratic Weimar Republic [in Germany in the 1920s] did when compared to the Kaiser regime that preceded it. Yet July 1917 (Kornilov’s attempted counter-revolution in Russia) was not just a date on the calendar, nor only a Russian phenomenon that intervened between February (overthrow of the Tsar) and October 1917 (the workers’ state). February would never have “gone on” to October without the Bolsheviks. As in Germany in 1919, the Russian Revolution would have been beheaded by the counter-revolution just beneath the surface that rose to the surface on all sides to challenge the workers’ power that had been achieved. History is full of examples of “dead” societies that live on, only to exude a new reaction. Between the defeated 1923 German Revolution and triumphant Nazism a whole decade passed, but the seeds of counter-revolution were present in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht [in 1919], and in the first Nazi beer hall putsch, which failed in the early 1920s but was also not transformed into any new October. Theory is needed not only to discern the counter-revolution but [also] to overcome it. History may repeat itself, BUT A MISSED REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT PERISHES INTO THE OLD DECADENT SOCIETY. MARXISM AND OUR OWN PERIOD When Hegel complained that philosophy had not responded to the challenge of the French Revolution, he didn’t mean that it would have done so if thought “corresponded” to reality. He meant THOUGHT TOO WOULD HAVE TO TRANSFORM REALITY. It is this, JUST THIS, principle of dialectic, which Marx drove beyond the limits of philosophy when he wrote: “Philosophers have interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” Far from this meaning only material change, it meant change also in consciousness, in thought, in the minds of the “educators” as well as those “to be educated.” From the moment when Marx first stated that in 1845, to the last breath of life he drew in 1883, it would be hard to find a division between his theory and his practice, a letup in either the development of THEORY or in participation of revolutionary class struggles--national and international. His theory lives after him because it not only reflected the period in which he lived, but our own period. By introducing the wage laborer into economies, Marx transformed it from a science of things dealing with profits and wages to one of production relations, concerned with laborers and capitalists at the point of production. By introducing Man into Hegelian dialectics, which had concerned itself with development of consciousness and self-consciousness, Marx put an end to the dehumanization of philosophy. By making the masses the subject of history, he did away with the utopianism of socialism, the bringing in of an “ism” by utopian planners from the outside, instead of seeing the masses themselves reshaping history from the material foundations TO its ideas. Only the whole is the truth. For the Humanism of Marxism, MAN AS CREATIVITY, became the point of departure--and the point of return, which transformed reality and [provides] insight into the future. As Marx reshaped CAPITAL under the impact of the American Civil War and the struggle for the shortening of the working day, theory itself was transformed from an intellectual debate to a reflection not only of the class struggles but of the pull of the future. RELATION OF THOUGHT AND FREEDOM The relationship of thought to freedom hit Lenin with such extraordinary force when the Second International proved impotent in the face of the challenge of World War I [in 1914] that this greatest of all realists wrote excitedly, idealistically, approvingly this paraphrase of the mystic Hegel: “Cognition not only reflects the world, but creates it.” And indeed this became not just an ideal, but the actual preparation for the Russian Revolution. Without such an underlying philosophy, Lenin could not have written STATE AND REVOLUTION and made this both the preparation for revolution and the foundation for what happens afterwards to assure the needed breakdown of the division between mental and manual labor, if ever a truly new society was to be created. The historic continuity was LOST with Trotskyism. Having failed to become a polarizing force for any new Marxist regroupment, however, there was no necessity in the 1950s to destroy all its pretensions to historic continuity. With the Sino-Soviet conflict out in the open in the 1960s, however, Maoism is exercising a gravitational pull on the Left, and Trotskyism, which is tail-ending it, is just the non-Stalinist whitewash needed to make Mao’s “uninterrupted revolution” and Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” the way to “‘revolutionary seizure of power”--AS IF OUR WHOLE STATE CAPITALIST AGE WASN'T PROOF THAT WILLINGNESS TO TAKE POWER AND CLASS COLLABORATIONISM ARE NO LONGER OPPOSITIES. Moreover, for the purposes of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., the revolutionary SOUND is heard above the underlying class collaborationism and therefore can act as a polarizing force for the intellectual Left which thinks it can live very well without a total philosophy. THE THEORETIC DESTRUCTION OF TROTSKYISM HAS BECOME A NECESSITY BECAUSE IN OUR LIFE AND TIMES THERE IS A DANGER THAT THE WHOLE FORWARD MOVEMENT OF HUMANITY WILL ONCE AGAIN BE STOPPED IN MIDPOINT. The further digging into philosophic roots, the reformulation of this philosophy of freedom for our epoch in ever-new forms must be done by us. Neither Marx nor Lenin could have, in the concrete, seen the problems of our age. This is our task. Therein lies the uniqueness of Marxist-Humanism. Just as it is no accident that six weeks BEFORE the East German workers tore down the myth of Communist totalitarian invincibility [in 1953], we concretized “the Absolute Idea” for our age by showing that the movement is not only from theory to practice, but FROM PRACTICE to theory. THIS decided the structure of MARXISM AND FREEDOM, so the concretization of “the second negativity,” that is to say, not only the overthrow of the old but the creation and continuity of the new, will determine the structure of a new book [PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION]. No one else has even posed the working out of a new relationship of theory to practice demanded by our age. The re-establishment of the Humanist and Abolitionist roots of Marxism, which were the goals of MARXISM AND FREEDOM --and which were concretized on the American scene by AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRAIL and on the world scene by the chapter on Mao in the new edition of MARXISM AND FREEDOM--must be extended so that both organizationally and philosophically, the spontaneous movements on a WORLD scale can rediscover the missing link: the HISTORIC CONTINUITY with the freedom struggles and once and for all have freedom BE, individually, socially, totally. |
|
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 |
