Organizational Responsibility for Marxist-Humanism

All of philosophy consists in making explicit what is only implicit in the objective movement of history. An objective view of historical development of necessity reveals the subjective, the human force which will be the one to realize the forward movement of humanity.[1] --Raya Dunayevskaya

When asked by Marcuse, who was writing the introduction to her book Marxism and Freedom, to summarize that work, Raya Dunayevskaya did so in a way that revealed how the book was making explicit what had been implicit in Marx (see "Philosophic Foundation of Marxism," Dec. 2008-Jan. 2009 N&L). First and foremost was the importance of establishing that Marx was no mere economist, but a philosopher, and that Marxism had a philosophic foundation grounded in the Hegelian dialectic. She showed that Marx's philosophic foundation was not limited to his early period when he wrote his Humanist Essays, but that it was developed from the young Marx, through the Marx who wrote the Communist Manifesto, to the mature author of that "'most economic' work which is preferred by the academic economists--Volume III of Capital." Part of that Humanism is shown as well in how explicitly Dunayevskaya makes clear that all of "Marx's economic categories [are] social categories," and "are thoroughly permeated with the humanism that came out of the working-class struggles for the shortening of the working day."

HUMANISM, HISTORY AND THEORY

This humanism of Marx is inseparable from what Dunayevskaya called "the relationship of theory to history," which meant never dividing the two and including today's struggles--particularly working-class struggles--in what is meant by "history." She makes that element of Marxism explicit by showing that the "proof of this relationship of theory to history," is how objective events of Marx's time--including the Paris Commune and the Civil War in the U.S.--compelled him to make changes in Capital.

Thus, Marxism and Freedom made explicit the role of the intellectual. Marx's methodology, which shaped his completely new form of theoretical engagement with movements of his day, becomes concrete. Dunayevskaya wants her book to show today's intellectuals how they can re-create Marxism for our age by grasping his methodology. So important is this task to her that it takes up two points in her three-point summation at the end of her letter to Marcuse; and the three points are so tightly tied together they read to me as one. The "re-establishment of the philosophic foundation of Marxism in Hegel" is certainly unseparated from "the summation of all three volumes of Marx's Capital in a manner that the reader knows Marxism both as theory and as methodology"; and this is to become "so real" to the intellectual "that he could indeed discern the movement from practice to theory and as eagerly long for the unity of the two [the movement from practice and the movement from theory] as does the worker."

CREATING CATEGORIES

While Dunayevskaya's letter to Marcuse on Marxism and Freedom makes explicit in Marx's development his philosophic foundation in Hegel and its ramifications including a totally new kind of revolutionary intellectual, Tim Finnigan, in his article in the same issue, "On the 50th anniversary of Marxism and Freedom," revisits what is implicit in Dunayevskaya's own contribution. When he begins by singling out the book's new philosophic category, "the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory," it is to explore the power of making such a historic-philosophical category. He does this by bringing in a quote from Hegel's Science of Logic: "the greater extension is equally a higher intensity." Creating a category brings something into the world that has not been recognized before. It creates, therefore, a new reality. It is the new reality that makes a "greater extension" and "higher intensity" possible, because we are seeing and experiencing things in a very new way with a new illumination.

Finnigan cites Dunayevskaya on the process of making categories: "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). This is what Marxism and Freedom accomplished, and it is a summation of the book. But he goes further in his short article in seeing that "the question of the dialectics of organization and philosophy was already present in 1958" in the book, in the category created about the movement from practice being itself a form of theory. He illustrates this in a deceptively short manner: simply by saying that "the 'indispensability of the theoretician' can be seen as the responsibility for Marxist-Humanism."

Why does the indispensability of the theoretician imply an organizational conclusion? While there are probably many answers, it seems to me that taking responsibility for an idea--when it is the Idea of Freedom, when it is about revolution and transforming our world, and if it is to be unseparated from the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory--it is not enough to write about it in a book. Rather it must be tested and practiced in an organization. Taking responsibility for the Idea of Freedom has to shape organization if we are to have a revolution that realizes all human potential.

--Terry Moon

NOTES:

1. Raya Dunayevskaya, 1963 Perspectives Thesis, "The Need to Transform Reality"; The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, # 3279; excerpts republished in the January/February 2001 News & Letters.

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