"That is what has been missing--the whole new concept of 'post-Marx Marxism as a pejorative'--it just laid there in Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution."

--Raya Dunayevskaya, "June 1, 1987"          

The late English Marxist Cyril Smith (1929-2008), who passed away May 8, asked a great question that opened up a lot of new perspectives. He had embarked on a re-examination of the "Marxist-Leninist" assumptions he had carried through his life as a Communist Party member and later as a Trotskyist. This can be seen in his late books, Marx at the Millennium (1996) and Karl Marx and the Future of the Human (2005).

In response to his reading of Raya Dunayevskaya's work, Smith took issue with her on one important point: "...we can't pick out those bits of Hegel's work which appear to fit in with our own revolutionary ideas. We must take him as a whole... I believe that Dunayevskaya's refusal to attend to Hegel's Philosophy of Right, illustrates this mistaken attitude. Marx actually made this book the starting point for his lifelong struggle with Hegel, when he wrote his 1843 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State'" (Critical comments on notes on the Smaller LOGIC, News & Letters, July 2000).

SMITH'S THOUGHTFUL CRITIQUE

Smith's was a critique rendered with great thoughtfulness and respect. If taken seriously, it should also serve to illuminate one of Dunayevskaya's signal works, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (RLWLKM, 1982). Here she developed her original category of "'Post-Marx Marxism' as a pejorative, beginning with Engels." In doing this Dunayevskaya presented an astonishingly original reading of the totality of Marx's work, in RLWLKM's third section.

She began with the 1840s, as Smith indicates must be done. Even before writing his critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx was challenging bourgeois society by his militant support of the right to freedom of the press, and the championing of human rights over property rights. This ultimately led Marx to write his critique of Hegel, of whom Marx felt himself at once the disciple and critic. It also led Marx to his recognition of the proletariat as the revolutionary class.

As Dunayevskaya put it, "What we may call 'the self-determination of the Idea,' Historical Materialism, which was born out of his concept of Alienated Labor, was the culmination of the critique Marx began in 1841 when he was telling his Young Hegelian colleagues that it was not enough to criticize Hegel for 'accommodating' to the Prussian state, that what was needed was to discover the principle in Hegelian philosophy that led to that accommodation. Only in that way could one transcend the inadequacy in so genuinely historic a way as to create a new ground for a philosophy of freedom. Freedom was the bones and sinew, the heart and soul, the direction for totally new beginnings" (RLWLKM, p. 126).

Hegel of course had made clear in his Philosophy of Mind that freedom played the same role in his own philosophy. In the final paragraphs of that work he stressed the unity of the self-determination of the Idea and the self-bringing forth of liberty. He understood this in terms of bourgeois society and bourgeois right. Marx saw that these two aspects, in bourgeois reality were separated and the unity needed to be re-created.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR REVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY

It seems that Marx was critiquing Hegel's Philosophy of Right in a way that remained entirely true to Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. It was a critique that began, in a sense, with Absolute Mind. It allows you to see that what Marx was doing later, in his 1844 Manuscripts was creating the ground of the historic responsibility for revolutionary philosophy. This entailed both a critique and a re-creation of Hegel's philosophy.

Dunayevskaya is able to project this aspect of Marx so concretely in RLWLKM because her own philosophic breakthrough on Hegel's Absolute Mind in 1953 allowed her to appropriate the totality of Marx's own work as well as the method of Marx's re-creation of Hegel. It seems to me that's the only way to proceed without the kind of either/or that Cyril Smith posed so acutely.

Dunayevskaya didn't spell it out, but the whole structure of RLWLKM is illuminated by her "philosophic moment" of 1953. She makes this crystal clear in a paragraph she added to the last page dated August 26, 1983: "That which Hegel judged to be the synthesis of the 'Self-Thinking Idea' and the Self-Bringing-Forth of Liberty,' Marxist-Humanism holds, is what Marx had called the new society. The many paths to get there are not easy to work out" (RLWLKM, p. XXXVIII).

That was indeed the heart and soul of RLWLKM, including the sections on Rosa Luxemburg and revolutionary democracy, the Women's Liberation Movement, and the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. These are aspects of concretizing that philosophic moment, on the uncharted terrain where Marx both critiqued and re-created Hegel. The heart and soul of freedom. This becomes clearer as time passes.

Dunayevskaya was writing with an epic sweep and at the same time a deep philosophic illumination that was meant to speak to the generations that had experienced the failures and contradictions of post-Marx Marxism. Cyril Smith, who had experienced the Communist Party of the zhdanovshchina and the vagaries of Gerry Healy's corrupt "Trotskyism" was a good example.

RLWLKM speaks just as well today, when freedom is still long-sought but little apparent. If Cyril Smith never felt that his great question was answered, as I believe, then that wouldn't be because the proper answer wasn't before our eyes.

--Tim Finnigan

Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution

by Raya Dunayevskaya

Part I. Rosa Luxemburg as Theoretician, as Activist, as Internationalist

Part II. The Women's Liberation Movement as Revolutionary Force and Reason

Part III. Karl Marx--From Critic of Hegel to Author of Capital and Theorist of "Revolution in Permanence"

Foreword by Adrienne Rich

Only $24.95 (including postage)

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