NEWS & LETTERS, December 2008 - January 2009
Black/Red View
Marxism and Freedom: a page in history
by John Alan
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxism and Freedom, we print excerpts from John Alan's Dialectics of Black Freedom Struggles that takes up Marxism and Freedom and the debate on the Black dimension.
Even before Marxist-Humanism arose as a full philosophy of liberation beginning in the 1950s, Raya Dunayevskaya reconnected with Marx's position on the integrality of the African-American liberation movement to human emancipation. In the 1940s she carried on a battle in the American Trotskyist movement as she insisted on the independent nature of the Black struggle.
An important opposition tendency had arisen within the American Trotskyist movement at the outbreak of World War II, known as the State-Capitalist Tendency. Its analysis was that Stalin's Russia, far from still being a workers' state, had been transformed into its opposite, a state-capitalist society. The tendency was called the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT) after the names of its co-leaders, C.L.R. James (Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest).
James and Dunayevskaya viewed state-capitalism as a new global stage of capitalism. Their economic analysis of this was never separated from the new forms of revolt arising against it. Specifically, they became known for their unique analysis of the independent nature of the Black struggles for freedom when, in the midst of World War II, Black uprisings erupted in Detroit and Harlem as well as a miners' strike which included large numbers of Black miners. James and Dunayevskaya wrote a series of pioneering studies on the "Negro Question" in America and its relation to socialist revolution....
[In] the debate the JFT assigned to her at the Workers Party Convention in 1946 against Ernest Rice McKinney (aka Coolidge), the leading Black trade unionist and spokesman for the party, McKinney argued against an independent African-American movement on the grounds that race consciousness was not revolutionary, and could lead only to the "cult of Negro nationalism." This was in contrast to Leon Trotsky, who had criticized the American Trotskyists for their failure to understand the Black masses... By developing Trotsky's view and revisiting Lenin's thesis on the national question, Dunayevskaya argued not only that the independent Black struggle was in itself revolutionary but that Black self-activity could be the "bacillus" and catalyst of the American labor movement as a whole.
In effect, the battle between McKinney and Dunayevskaya over the Black dimension showed a serious disagreement over the fundamentals of Marxism. Whereas McKinney had argued that Americans like himself knew the Black situation better than either Lenin or Trotsky, Dunayevskaya insisted that "the Negro question is a problem that has a political history. Marxism has to deal with it in a Marxist manner."...
Dunayevskaya's writings of the 1940s anticipated the civil rights revolution that made the 1960s a transforming decade for the whole of the U.S. society. For her "the Negro Question" was a crucial dimension of the American revolution. However, she looked not to leaders or bourgeois spokesmen, but to the African-American masses, even their "race consciousness" as it gave direction to their struggle for freedom.
This became especially clear when the Montgomery Bus Boycott erupted in 1955. Dunayevskaya put the Montgomery Bus Boycott onto the world stage by linking it to the East German workers' revolt in 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In Marxism and Freedom (1958) she argued that the boycott "is truly historic and contains our future." The greatest thing about it, she argued, echoing Marx's description of the Paris Commune, was "its own working existence."
In Marxism and Freedom Dunayevskaya also did groundbreaking work to show that the Black struggle, far from being external to Marx's philosophy, was intrinsic to it, pointing especially to how Marx's attentiveness to Black struggles inside the U.S. led him to reorganize his greatest theoretic work, Capital. Her view was a leap in American Marxism. As we've seen, post-Marx Marxists tended to view the U.S. struggle as less militant than the European--primarily because they relegated the Black dimension to a subordinate position and often saw it as a diversion from the class struggle altogether. Marx, Dunayevskaya argued, saw it in the opposite way.
No ready-made theory, whether from the Communist Party, Trotskyist parties or existentialists was adequate for the new spontaneous movements as they arose in the 1950s and 1960s. Completely new theoretical departures had to be made to express the ideas of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. as well as the anti-colonial revolutions in Africa and meet them with a philosophy of liberation.
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