On 50th anniversary of Marxism and Freedom

It is crucial to look anew at Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxism and Freedom 50 years after its first publication. The context in 1958 was the world of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Hungarian Revolution, the kind of great movements that we have learned from Marxism and Freedom to think of as movements from practice that are also forms of theory.

Such earth-shaking movements may not be as obvious today. Covering a whole historic era, Marxism and Freedom lets us view the time with eyes that see beneath and beyond just today.

The philosophic category developed in the book is precisely that, "the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory." Five more decades of revolutionary and organizational experience make it possible to begin to see how much is contained in this category. It really is nothing less than a philosophy of history. For the creation of the philosophic category is inseparable from the concept of a body of ideas, what Hegel called "a copious body of objective truth," and from the responsibility for those ideas.

Perhaps this can be thought of in terms of what Hegel wrote in the Science of Logic, that "the greater extension is equally a higher intensity." After all that's happened since in the world, the movements, and our own organization, Marxism and Freedom seems more relevant than ever to me.

Here is a passage that jumps out today: "He who glorifies theory and genius but fails to recognize the limits of a theoretical work, fails likewise to recognize the indispensability of the theoretician. All of history is the history of the struggle for freedom. If, as a theoretician, one's ears are attuned to the new impulses from the workers, new 'categories' will be created, a new way of thinking, a step forward in philosophic cognition" (p. 89).

Now it is easier to see, I think, that this passage is not only a precis of what Marxism and Freedom is about but also what the book itself is. In very clear, vivid chapters, Dunayevskaya demonstrates how Hegel, Marx and Lenin related philosophy to freedom struggles. The clarity and the profundity of presentation is her own contribution to the movement, a demystification of history as well as a new philosophic vantage point to be grasped.

It also seems to me that in creating the category, "the movement from practice," the question of the dialectics of organization and philosophy was already present in 1958. The more one grasps how inseparable the category is from the body of ideas, the philosophy, the more obvious I believe it will become that the "indispensability of the theoretician" can be seen as the responsibility for Marxist-Humanism.

In Marxism and Freedom Dunayevskaya, like Marx before, turned historical narrative into historic reason. This isn't just an interesting story, but a history and a body of ideas to be claimed, as a necessary new dimension "to enable each to become as tall as the proletariat straightened up to its full height in the creation of a new society" (p. 66). What an honor and privilege to claim it.

--Tim Finnigan

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