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NEWS & LETTERS, October-November 2006On Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2006-2007One of the most interesting parts of the Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives (N&L, August-September 2006) for me is Part III "The philosophic-organizational challenge: what happens after?" Let me start with Section A, "New stage of revolt or birth of a new epoch?" I think it is a good thing in the Draft to stress the notion of Dunayevskaya's of what is at issue for revolutionaries in our time: Can we continue Marx's unchaining of the dialectic organizationally, with the principles he outlined in his CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM. The emphasis has to be on "organization," because that aspect relates to the possible ability of Marxism-Humanism to intervene in the revolts and uprootings of today. WHICH SUBJECT? "The main difficulty," Dunayevskaya said in MARXISM AND FREEDOM, "in seeing the elements of the new society in the present is that workers repeat many of the ideas of the ruling class until the very day that an explosive break actually occurs." And so, I add, there are a lot of left theoreticians, who are "impatient" and are beginning to think without the impulse(s) of the living subject in capitalism and reach a vanguardist position, from which they want to prescribe what the living subject has to do, or they reach a position of a so-called automatic subject, in which there is no place for a living subject. The citation with which Section C begins is of great importance, because Dunayevskaya touches there the relation between the Universal and Particular, especially when she is saying, "to catch the 'moment' when the Universal particularizes itself and when it does not is the key to everything." One such a moment was the coal miners' general strike of 1949-50, which was a fundamental element in the birth of Marxism-Humanism. If capitalism is characterized by dead labor which is dominating living labor, and automation is the summit of that dead labor, how true are the words, "Automation has cut across the thinking of the people more sharply than anything else since the Industrial Revolution nearly 200 years ago" (Raya Dunayevskaya, MARXISM AND FREEDOM, p. 264). IMPULSE TO HUMANSIM The strike of the miners was a breakthrough in this thinking in the sense that they "began to question not only the fruits of their labor wages but the kind of labor." This is a crucial point, for the miners were looking for another kind of labor, the opposite of wage labor, an end to value production, which gave the impulse to Humanism in Marx's conception as directed against capitalism. I do agree with the notion of the Draft to help fill the void on the question of what happens after. What for me is an open question at the moment is the relation or connection between "what happens after" and "the day before." —Karel Ludenhoff |
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