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NEWS & LETTERS, June -July 2007Humanism of Marx endures: Iranians review Marxism and FreedomRaya Dunayevskaya’s 1958 book MARXISM AND FREEDOM recently appeared in a Persian-language edition in Iran. Despite the authoritarian clerical regime that has dominated the country since the revolution of 1979, a lively world of newspapers and small journals maintains a precarious existence and manages to carry on discussions of philosphy, politics and culture. We reproduce here two reviews of MARXISM AND FREEDOM that appeared in such journals. * * * We live at a time in which Communism has collapsed, capitalism has declared itself victorious and occupies the entire intellectual horizon. Former leftist activists are ashamed and have turned into tailenders of bourgeois alternatives, or proudly proclaim themselves to be on the frontline of the bourgeoisie. The end of history is being declared through the bombing of the innocent people of Iraq. Iranian intellectuals are dying for Hashemi Rafsanjani to be elected [president.] Is there an alternative to capitalism? Is another world possible? Raya Dunayevskaya, Russian-American thinker and labor activist was born in the Ukraine in 1910 and emigrated to the U.S. at age 12. [At that time] the U.S. Left consisted of large numbers of supporters of Soviet socialism, the Social Democratic front and the Trotskyists. Social Democrats combined a critique of Soviet totalitarianism with praise for bourgeois democracy and concluded with the indispensability of capitalism. Trotskyists followed Trotsky in calling the Soviet government a degenerated workers state. Dunayevskaya could not be anyone’s follower. She herself was a tendency nourished by the lineage of the revolutionary tradition of Hegel’s dialectic which had been transmitted to Marx and Lenin. In this way Dunayevskaya broke with Trotsky by presenting the theory of "state capitalism" to describe the Soviet government. From her point of view, neither superpower (the U.S. and the Soviet Union) could present a program for human liberation. The difference between them was simply over the form of expropriation of exploited labor. While Western bourgeois capitalism presented the freedom to sell the individual’s soul on the market, the Soviet Union presented the alternative of obeying the strict discipline of the [one] party state. In Dunayevskaya’s view, the state in the Soviet system was both a motor for accumulation and a means for controlling labor. The post-Trotskyist Johnson-Forest Tendency accepted her economic analysis, but when she returned to Marx’s humanism during the course of the 1950 Miners’ general strike, the foundation for her complete break from the Trotskyist tradition was created. The Johnson-Forest Tendency rejected Humanism as a religious or Existentialist category. Dunayevskaya was the first to translate Marx’s 1844 ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS into English. Unlike many Marxists who limit Marx’s humanism to the writings of his youthful period, she considers humanism to be the determinant element of the whole of Marx’s philosophy and the divide between Marxism and state capitalism in the Soviet Union and China. MARXISM AND FREEDOM is the product of this view. Basing herself on Marx, Dunayevskaya’s [work] presents a fundamental critique of Stalinist and Maoist systems and continues to issue a call for a better and completely different world at a time when any hope for an alternative to the capitalist system has been lost... Part III, "Marxism: the Unity of Theory and Practice," which explains the relationship of the process of writing CAPITAL to the U.S. Civil War and the radical democracy of the Paris Commune is Dunayevskaya’s original masterpiece. She counter poses the humanist essence of the GRUNDRISSE and CAPITAL to the dominant mechanical and impure views of Marxists and proves that the foundation of Marx’s critique of political economy is humanist and dialectical. --Keyvan, from the journal AFTABKARAN * * * Considering the existing intolerable and tormenting censorship and cultural mass murder, if one can name a few good books that one has read during the past year, one need not be too concerned about how long ago these books were published. But MARXISM AND FREEDOM by Raya Dunayevskaya does not fall into this category. This book was published this year and I am not certain that many people have read it. It has some very interesting introductions of which I consider those by Joel Kovel and Herbert Marcuse to be very useful. Each one, especially Kovel’s, praises Dunayevskaya’s work while at the same time singling out her weaknesses. In my view, Dunayevskaya considers herself completely belonging to the Hegelian Marxist branch and goes as far as putting Hegel’s Absolute Idea in the place of the Marxian expression, praxis, and calls the unity of theory and practice, not praxis but the Absolute Idea. In an article written near the end of her life, and in the course of praising Lenin for analyzing and dissecting the entirety of Hegel’s LOGIC, she fundamentally critiques Lenin for not being able to extend the results of his research on Hegel to the question of the party and organization, and hence defending the incorrect theory of the vanguard party which he had developed in WHAT IS TO BE DONE, prior to his research [on Hegel]. Of course, Dunayevskaya never had the chance to make true to her promise and develop her own theory of the party on the basis of Hegel’s philosophy. But in my view what distinguishes the entirety of her work is her Marxist humanism which has been greatly influenced by the discovery of Marx’s 1844 ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS of which she was the first English translator. This is what gives MARXISM AND FREEDOM its special and superior status. She was of the mind that "Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing. Whereas Marx was concerned with the freedom of humanity, and with the inevitable waste of human life which is the absolute general law of capitalist development, Russian communism rests on the mainspring of capitalism--paying the worker the minimum and extracting from him the maximum. They dub this ‘the Plan.’ Marx called it the law of value and surplus value." On the other hand, Marx believes that capitalism creates preconditions for a life free of toil, poverty, injustice and stress while at the same time, it intensifies toil, poverty, injustice and stress. Like many others, Dunayevskaya considered Marxism and proletarian revolution to be the fundamental means of resolving this mortal contradiction and creating a society based not on "exchange value" and profit but "use value" and human needs. It often seems that in contrast to Marx’s ideas, Dunayevskaya is too philosophical and so-called "super Hegelian," and does not pay attention to the fact that the mature Marx put aside philosophical language and turned to specific and exploratory studies. However, we need to do justice to her and agree with Marcuse that this work "shows not only that Marxian economics and politics are completely philosophical and philosophy is from the beginning economics and politics." In my view, without this inseparable and dialectical combination of politics, economics and philosophy, MARXISM AND FREEDOM would have lost its current attraction. On the whole, the translation is lucid and readable. --Akbar Masum Beigi, from the journal NAQD-E NO |
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