SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION

MARXIST-HUMANISM: A HALF-CENTURY OF ITS WORLD DEVELOPMENT

VOLUME XIII: RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA’S LAST WRITINGS, 1986-1987–TOWARD THE DIALECTICS OF ORGANIZATION AND PHILOSOPHY

Open the original Volume XIII listing document: 10640

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The sudden death of Rays Dunayevskaya on June 9, 1987, halted in midcourse her intense probing on the question she called “the dialectics of organization and philosophy,” the subject which was her preoccupation in the last years of her life. Her 1982 book, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, had concluded: “It is not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and of deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx’s concept of the philosophy of ‘revolution in permanence.’” Before that work was even off the press, Dunayevskaya offered a new paragraph that added:

This is the further challenge to the form of organization which we have worked out as the committee-form rather than the “party-to-lead.” But, though committee-form and “party-to-lead” are opposites, they are not absolute opposites. At the point when the theoretic-form reaches philosophy, the challenge demands that we synthesize not only the new relations of theory to practice, and all the forces of revolution, but philosophy’s “suffering, patience and labor of the negative,” i.e. experiencing absolute negativity.

For the last five years of her life Dunayevskaya labored to concretize that “absolute opposite” in the dialectics of organization and philosophy. No subject she took up, whether analyses of current world events or participation in dialogues with activists in freedom struggles, was separated from this work.

By 1986 Dunayevskaya began work on a projected new book, which she had tentatively titled Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: ‘the party’ and forms of organization born out of spontaneity. That book was left unfinished at her death; she did not leave any chapters in manuscript form. Her work in 1986-87 did, however, approach the subject in correspondence with scholars and activists, in journalism on world events, in presentations to Marxist-Humanist colleagues, and in a whole new kind of dialogue she created in that last year, which she variously called “Talking to Myself”, “Random Thoughts”, or just “Notes”.

In these last writings Dunayevskaya explored new perceptions of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence, precisely at the point of Lenin’s greatest philosophic breakthrough — on Hegel’s Idea of Cognition and on the threshold of the Absolute Idea. She projected a new view of Hegel’s Phenomenology, both in relation to Marx’s 1844 Essays and as pivotal to confronting the problems of the dialectics of organization today. She dug into a study of forms of organization — from the International Workingmen’s Association to the Soviets and from the Bolsheviks to the Hungarian Revolution. Her final work, the presentation Dunayevskaya wrote for the June 1, 1987, meeting of the Resident Editorial Board of News & Letters, singled out the philosophic point from which the Self-determination of the Idea unfolds, whether in Hegel’s 1807 work on the Phenomenology, Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays, or in Dunayevskaya’s own 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes. The driving force in all of these studies was Dunayevskaya’s re-examination of her own archives, especially these 1953 Letters. She called that process of re-examination “Marxist-Humanism emerging out of Marxist-Humanism.”

Archives were central to Dunayevskaya’s work throughout her life, beginning with her 1940s translations of Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays and Lenin’s Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Her own unique concept and practice of the archives of Marxist-Humanism was developed in part from her critique of the attitudes of “post-Marx Marxists, beginning with Engels” to Marx’s archives.

With her first donation of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection to Wayne State University in 1969, Dunayevskaya sought to share and record the development of the Marxist-Humanist body of ideas, its method, its test in world events, its battles with other revolutionary ideas, while she lived. She approved the documents to be included, organized the categories of their presentation, and wrote the introductory texts. The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, Vols. I-XII, thus represents not only a vast assemblage of Marxist-Humanism’s documents, but her concept of the organization of Marxist-Humanist thought, its categories.

In February 1986 Dunayevskaya expanded her archives with the donation of Volume XII: “Retrospective/Perspective — the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, 1924-1986.” Here she traced what she called the “biography of an idea,” from her earliest work in the 1920s, through her posing of questions “against all established Marxists” during the Spanish Civil War, to her most current writing, a new Introduction/Overview to the 1986 edition of Frantz Fanon, Soweto, and American Black Thought. As she donated these documents she summed up her concept of archives:

The whole question of the relationship of any ongoing event with the past, with the very concept of Archives, depends on the two opposite words — continuity and discontinuity. Whereas only great divides in epochs, in cognition, in personality, are crucial, and may relate to turning points in history, no discontinuity can really achieve that type of new epochal “moment” unless it has established continuity with the historic course of human development.

The present work, Volume XIII, is the first not organized by Dunayevskaya herself. For this reason, we have designated this volume and all subsequent volumes which we will donate as “Supplement to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection.” In donating this Volume XIII only eight months after Dunayevskaya’s death, and by including in it documents not edited by her for publication, we seek to sharply contrast Marxist-Humanism’s attitude to the archives of a founder, with those post-Marx Marxists of whom Raya asked: “Why a century to publish the whole of Marx?”

At the same time we seek to underline the importance of the last writings of an epochal thinker, writings which as a final determination in the journey of the Idea of freedom, reach both back to the philosophic moment of the Idea’s birth and forward into the future.

The outpouring of sorrow at Dunayevskaya’s death and the deep appreciation of her life from friends around the globe point to the objectivity of her last writings and her whole body of ideas. It demands that we continue the work of making Raya’s documents available for study by all. For this purpose, the Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund has been established. We hope to be able to add new volumes to the “Supplement to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection” in the near future.

Michael Flug, archivist for The Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund*
February 22, 1988

* The Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund was established in July, 1987. Its trustees are Olga Sufritz and Robert French. The Fund can be reached at rdmf@rayadunayevskaya.org

News & Letters, the newspaper of the Marxist-Humanist organization, News and Letters Committees, is available 1955 to the present online at www.newsandletters.org/category/newspaper/.