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NEWS & LETTERS, February 2008 - March 2008EssayOn concretizing a 'Philosophic Moment'by Tom More A concretization of an alternative to capitalism, an ongoing project as spelled out in News and Letters Perspectives for 2007-2008 (N&L, August-September 2007), is different from a program of nationalizing property, or any blueprint. In dialectics, "concrete" is not a synonym of "immediate" or "tangible," as that word is often meant. Rather, the "concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse."(1) In her "Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy of June 1, 1987," Raya Dunayevskaya showed that the "determinant," a category of dialectics, was to be sought in "a new philosophic category" she named a "philosophic moment" (p. viii): "In Hegelian dialectics, the philosophic moment is a determinant," and "it remain[s] the element that govern[s] the concretization" (p. 7).(2) According to Marxist-Humanism, the philosophic moment that was the determinant for Marx was the ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844. There were principled philosophical reasons, therefore, why Marx excoriated Proudhon in THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY (1847), why he was so relentlessly critical of utopian socialism in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO on the eve of the Revolutions of 1848, and why he kept returning to this question from the GRUNDRISSE to his stinging repudiation of the Lassallean program of the Gotha Congress in 1875. Dunayevskaya's own philosophic moment in her May 1953 letters on Hegel's Absolutes, was the determinant that governed all of her subsequent theory and practice, from founding News and Letters Committees in 1955 and the publishing of MARXISM AND FREEDOM 50 years ago this year, to the last words to come from her in 1987. Death's knock prevented her completion of the book she was writing, provisionally titled "Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: The 'Party' and Forms of Organization Born out of Spontaneity." As she put it to her comrades in the 1987 Presentation, the year she never saw, "1988," was to be "THE YEAR OF THE BOOK" (p.18). A reader today of her June 1 Presentation cannot help but sense the urgency of her tone in anticipation. She wrote it as an internal document for an upcoming Plenum of News and Letters Committees. Perhaps it requires a little inside baseball to know that she also wrote it as a critique of her closest comrades, reminiscent in certain respects of Lenin’s "Letter to Congress" (December 1922-January 1923), famously known as his "testament" (including his recommendation to remove Stalin). For Dunayevskaya, the determinant was a matter of the inseparability of "meaning, i.e. philosophy" from "activity" (p. 18). Concerning "the year of the book," she wrote, "The real point is the meaning that this is not a question of the 'author,' but the whole organization," such that "the context of each person's activity and special point of concentration...will be inseparable from the meaning of that activity" (p. 18). As she emphasized, "I want to repeat, because philosophy has not permeated the paper [NEWS & LETTERS], THEREFORE, it didn't permeate the organization" (p. 19). The question Dunayevskaya was raising with such provocative urgency in her June 1 Presentation went far beyond the intramural affairs of News and Letters Committees, reaching up to a question of epoch-making world-historical importance, one that might strike us as even more urgent twenty years after "the year of the book," when the need to concretize a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalist society has grown even more desperate. Yet the pervasive mood of our time, despite the excitement aroused by the World Social Forum (which convened in Mexico City in January) and other extraordinary developments across Latin America, is still Thatcher's prophecy: "there is no alternative." If Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution is obvious even to casual observation, Lenin's own role in the twentieth-century failure of post-Marx Marxism after Marx requires a more discerning eye. If this should prove to be Dunayevskaya's eye in her June 1 Presentation, it is because she fore-grounded the category of a "philosophic moment" as the "determinant, and not just the ground" (p. 8) of the "concrete" itself, which Lenin, so close and yet so far away, had failed to grasp. That is, "for Lenin there was no philosophic moment insofar as ORGANIZATION was concerned" (p. 16). Dunayevskaya titled the conclusion of her June 1 Presentation, "Untrodden Paths in Organization" (pp. 17-20). It belonged to Marx alone to have discovered "a New Continent of Thought and Revolution" in his 1844 MANUSCRIPTS, his "new humanism" (see p. 4). On this basis, Dunayevskaya asks the question why it was that "the full organizational expression" of this philosophic moment as determinant "came only then [in Marx's last decade], especially the 1875 CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM[:] Why only then?" (pp. 3-4). Her answer can only be hinted at here, and only insofar as it bears on Lenin. She writes that "Marx himself laid the ground [in the CRITIQUE]," but that "the whole of post-Marx Marxism beginning with Engels has not built on that ground" (also including News and Letters Committees, as she implies by her metaphor of "Untrodden Paths"; p. 17). She writes that "Lenin did return to Marx's roots in Hegel [in his PHILOSOPHICAL NOTEBOOKS of 1914-15], and [in STATE AND REVOLUTION, he] did see that the CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM had never really been concretized as the smashing of the bourgeois state, without which you could not have a revolution.... But...he too didn't touch the question of the party. On the contrary, it didn't even go as far as his own varied critiques of WHAT IS TO BE DONE? once the Bolsheviks gained power" (p. 17). Concerning the subtitle of her unfinished book, she writes that "the party and the forms of organization born from spontaneity are opposites, but they are not ABSOLUTE opposites....The absolute opposite is philosophy" (p. 15). And that it was "a shock for [her] to have experienced this IN THIS YEAR 1987" (p. 14), that not only the Council Communists and not only Rosa Luxemburg, but "Lenin, too, never raised philosophy directly in relationship to organization" (p. 16). Marx's organizational document of 1875 established the ground, from within the determinant of his philosophic moment of 1844, yet any reader of Lenin's STATE AND REVOLUTION (1917), where he takes up Marx's 1875 CRITIQUE and projects it organizationally among "the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution," can discover how little he brought these tasks to the Party itself and how far he was from Marx's own "philosophic moment," then tragically unknown to him. "To this day 1844 was THE philosophic moment of Marx's discovery...that 'Marxism' certainly lacked, and instead singled out one of the developments--economics--so that we didn't know 'new humanism' until the Depression" (p. 4). And so perhaps still today, the dialectics of philosophy and organization remains the "untrodden path" of our perilous world. Notes 1 Marx, GRUNDRISSE, translated by Martin Nicolaus (NY: Random House, 1973), p.101. 2 THE PHILOSOPHIC MOMENT OF MARXIST-HUMANISM: TWO HISTORIC-PHILOSOPHIC WRITINGS BY RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA (Chicago, IL: News and Letters, 1989). |
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