Latin America and Dunayevskaya's thought

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from Rubén Dri's special introduction to the new Spanish edition of The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya. Rubén Dri is an Argentine philosopher/activist, consulting professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, author of several books on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. (Translation by Franklin Dmitryev and Erica Rae.)

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The 1960s and 1970s were characterized in Latin America by the resurgence of social and political movements fighting to end centuries of oppression and to begin building a new society free from imperialism and from oppression by the dominant classes in each country. The partial successes achieved were erased by ferocious military dictatorships, which terrorized the population to leave the field open for implementation of the neoliberal project promoted by the Washington Consensus.

In the 1980s and 1990s neoliberalism was deployed across the entire Latin American continent. Privatization, labor flexibility, unemployment, destruction of national industries, free movement of speculative capital, and preaching and performance of the crudest individualism that gave rise to the destruction of social relations.

The popular sectors had been dealt the deepest political defeat. The terror established by the military and the management of the economy by the big corporations, producing inflation that deepened the terror to the point of not knowing what there will be to eat tomorrow, left the popular movements and their activists with a deep sense of powerlessness.

But people also have common sense, good sense, as Gramsci noted, a good sense that we could translate as "the people's wisdom." There is a people's knowledge that knows when and how the powers of domination can be confronted. It is a creative wisdom. Suffering political defeat, activists took refuge in the social field.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS GREW stronger. New movements emerged. Their fundamental characteristic is not only to arise from the bases, from below, but always to stay in contact with that. It is the way of self-moving by constituting itself as subjects....

The social movements exhibit great vitality and creativity, but at the same time have met with limitations that at first sight seem insurmountable. As social movements, they have a very restricted, limited range, and end up being swallowed up by traditional political parties. This reveals the need to rethink politics in such a way that these movements can transcend themselves.

But this is impossible without theory. It is natural that, when we talk about theory, a determined skepticism rises in the activists of these movements, due to the mistakes and abuses that have been committed in the name of theory. It has always been difficult to understand the unsplittable totality of practice and theory....

A fundamental theoretical assumption for any revolutionary political project is that reality moves dialectically and, therefore, without dialectical understanding and action, it is impossible to succeed. Here various problems arise that make that difficult to achieve. First, the simplification that is already found in Engels and, with Stalinism, was reinforced through dogmatization. In this way, what should have been the key to understanding and transforming reality, was transformed into a screen that obscures it.

IN ARGENTINA on Dec. 19-20, 2000, a great revolt broke out against the politics of neoliberal destruction. Employed and unemployed workers, villagers, teachers, housewives, and students occupied the public space, making themselves lords of the city streets and squares....In Buenos Aires and the most important cities, there arose the phenomenon of the assembly, a social-political phenomenon that embodies a feeling of profound rejection of politics.

It is a new phenomenon containing great potentialities that could only be translated into new politics if it were interpreted dialectically. For the conception of the Left parties in general, there was nothing to interpret, but only to "apply." The phenomenon was not really "new," but simple repetition. The assemblies should receive instructions from the vanguard parties. Thus those parties contributed to the lack of translation of the assemblies' potentials into a political force.

Another problem is that, for the comprehension of the dialectic, what is absolutely necessary is the journey through Hegel; and here, on the one hand, intervenes the prejudice that his idealist dialectic was superseded by the materialism of Marx and, on the other hand, reading Hegel turns out to be not at all easy. Lenin's confession that it is impossible to understand Capital if one has not understood the Logic is disregarded. The book by Raya Dunayevskaya that we present is an invaluable aid to guide us in these problems....

Raya Dunayevskaya's central concern is the lack of understanding--and consequently of development--of philosophy, or of the dialectic in thought and in Marxist practice in general, and especially on the question of organization and the party. But where to find the theoretical basis to fill these gaps? It is a fundamental task, without which we are left with a crippled Marxism, with a blind practice, without theory, unable to overcome the "state-capitalism" into which had flowed the giant revolution led by Lenin.

This theoretical basis is found in certain texts that should be read as a whole....These texts are, from Marx, the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Capital, especially the first chapter, and Critique of the Gotha Program, and for Hegel, the chapter on the "Absolute Idea" of Logic, the "Absolute Spirit" (paragraphs 575, 576, 577) of the Encyclopaedia and the chapter on the "Absolute Knowledge" of the Phenomenology of Spirit. To these texts must be added Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks.

A first glance cannot but draw attention not only to the importance attached to Hegel, but to the texts that refer to Hegel's "Absolutes," that is, Absolute Idea, Absolute Spirit, Absolute Knowledge. After all, according to most interpretations these Absolutes constitute the closing of the system, the closure of history. In this respect the interpretation of the author is dazzling and extremely fruitful for rethinking and reorienting the liberation movements.

Noticeably, her reading of Marx's works does not share the lack of philosophical elaboration which has led to scientistic interpretations of Capital. According to our author, said philosophy can be found already elaborated in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts, which were followed by a series of key experiences such as the Communist League of 1848, the First International in 1864 and the Paris Commune of 1871. In none of these moments did the philosophy reach the level of the 1844 Manuscripts, which was only achieved in 1875 with the Critique of the Gotha Program, a document in which, however, Marx designated philosophy as "principle."

In 1844 Marx, according to Raya, discovered "negation of the negation" at the hand of Hegel, while at the same time criticizing his mysticism "as it considers that [negation of the negation] as various stages of consciousness, rather than as concrete ideas of men and women," and at the same time rejecting both capitalism and "vulgar communism" and naming his philosophy "a new humanism."

SEVERAL CONCEPTS ARE OF paramount importance here. First, the "negation of the negation" is the soul of the dialectic. Only by fully internalizing it can one understand that Marxism intrinsically implies "revolution in permanence" and that "Absolute Idea" is not a closure but an opening for new beginnings, the central issues in Raya's philosophical thought. Marx recovers this principle of Hegel, bringing it to the consciousness of concrete men and women, so that his materialism is in reality "humanism."...

This philosophical conception was the foundation of organization in Marx's practice, both in the Communist League, and in the Manifesto of 1848, in the First International in 1864 and in the Paris Commune of 1871, praised as "the form, the working existence, the communal non-state." "Why then," asks Raya, "is the actual concretization of a new unity so sharply critiqued as in the Critique of the Gotha Program?"

To find an answer, the author notes that Marx in a letter to Freiligrath, who had told him that he did not belong to any party, replied, "neither do I, to any existing party." Raya interprets that this statement of Marx had a "historical sense."[1] The experience of the Paris Commune was key. He had to go "lower and deeper."

The radical critique Marx made in that document on the Gotha Program brings Raya to question the absence of the philosophic moment in organization, or in the party. "We were so overwhelmed," she said, "with the movement from practice that we were hardly as enthusiastic or as concrete about the movement from theory, if not actually forgetting it." It was in 1953, upon Stalin's death, that Raya wrote two letters in which she posed the lines to follow to overcome the obstacle.[2]

It is therefore essential to rethink organization, which so far has lacked the "philosophic moment" that cannot be other than the dialectic in the full sense. In the words of the author: "The imperativeness of both the objective and subjective urgency now manifests that what has been an untrodden path all these years, by all post-Marx Marxists--including Lenin, who did dig into philosophy, but not the party, and Luxemburg, who did dig into spontaneity, but not philosophy--is organization, the Dialectics of Philosophy and Organization."

THE THEME OF ORGANIZATION is the theme of the party, but our author does not refer to the party of the masses, as that is a task that the masses will accomplish, nor to the elitist party, which she openly rejects. She refers specifically to the group of which she is part, which is conscious that nothing can be done without the masses--we would say "without the people"--but is conscious that, on the other hand, one cannot do without the theoretical moment. She graphically expresses that her search is for the "objectivity of subjectivity."

This search necessarily encounters Lenin, from whom it receives important aid, to the extent that he saw the necessity of philosophy and took it up, drawing on Hegel, but not with respect to organization, remaining anchored to the elitist party elaborated in What Is to Be Done? Lenin fills, in a certain way, the post-Marx philosophical void. He does not try to "apply" the dialectic, as did both Marcuse and Merleau-Ponty, and Engels himself, but rather he "is trying to figure out what is happening in his age."...

We must pause for a moment to consider the characterization of the Hegelian Absolutes. Theory and practice constitute the dialectical totality in a movement that goes as much from practice to theory as from theory to practice. A fundamental weakness of post-Marx Marxism was its concentration on practice, forgetting theory, that is to say, forgetting philosophy. The Absolute Idea, moreover, "contains the highest opposition within itself," so it is a major error to think of it as the end of history. On the contrary, it is nothing more and nothing less than "revolution in permanence."

THE ABSOLUTE IDEA, moreover, is "absolute liberation," the dialectic of freedom in which there is no transition. It should be understood as "the idea [that] freely releases itself in absolute self-security and self-repose." Raya clarifies the significance of this dialectic, considering it as the overcoming of Stalinism. The Leninist revolution was the stage of transitions. The totalitarian, or Stalinist, state "must be overcome by a totally new revolt in which everyone experiences 'absolute liberation.'"...

We cannot conclude this introduction without making the recommendation that Hegel makes to the reader of the Phenomenology and applying it to the texts of Raya Dunayevskaya: "Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary; and again we must halt at every stage."

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NOTES:

1. Marx wrote, "I meant the party in the eminent historical sense," as opposed to a "wholly ephemeral sense," in his 2/29/1860 letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath.--ed.

2. Elsewhere Raya says that philosophy is the missing link of Marxism.

¡Ya disponible! Edición mexicana:

El poder de la negatividad: Escritos sobre la dialéctica en Hegel y Marx.

Publicado por Juan Pablos Editor, S.A., México.

Introducción especial por Rubén Dri, filósofo/activista argentino, profesor consulto en la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, autor de varios libros sobre la Fenomenología del espíritu de Hegel.

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"La interpretación de Hegel y Marx, o sea del humanismo marxista que hace Raya Dunayevskaya es realmente fascinante y es más necesario que nunca para esta etapa de los movimientos populares latinoamericanos." --Rubén Dri

Now available in Spanish! Mexican edition of:

The Power of Negativity: Writings on the dialectic in Hegel and Marx.

Special introduction by Rubén Dri, an Argentine philosopher/activist, consulting professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, author of several books on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Introductory offer: $10 plus $4 postage.

Order from News & Letters, 228 S. Wabash #230, Chicago, IL 60604. Published by Juan Pablos Editor, S.A., Mexico.

"Raya Dunayevskaya's interpretation of Hegel and Marx, that is, of Marxist-Humanism, is truly fascinating and is more necessary than ever for this stage of Latin American people's movements." --Rubén Dri

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