Volume 14 – Sections 1 and 2

Section I: The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism
Section II: Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today

Volume 14 – Section 3, first part

Section III: Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and From Marx to Mao
Subsection A, Chapter Files for Part I and Chapters 1 through 4

Volume 14 – Section 3, second part

Section III: Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and From Marx to Mao
Subsection A, Chapter Files for Chapters 5 through 9

Volume 14 – Section 3, third part

Section III: Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and From Marx to Mao
Subsection B: Draft Chapters of Philosophy and Revolution
Subsections C, D, E: Correspondence, Presentations and Notes on the Writing of Philosophy and Revolution, January 1958 – December 1966

Volume 14 – Section 3, fourth part

Section III: Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and From Marx to Mao
Subsections F, G: Correspondence, Presentations and Notes on the Writing of Philosophy and Revolution, January 1967 – April 1973

Volume 14 – Section 4, first part

Section IV: Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution
Subsection A: Draft titles and tables of contents
Subsection B, Chapter Files for Chapters 1 through 8

Volume 14 – Section 4, second part

Section IV: Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution
Subsection B, Chapter Files for Chapters 9 through 12, additional notes and summaries

Volume 14 – Section 4, third part

Section IV: Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution
Subsection C: Draft Chapters
Subsections D, E, F: Correspondence, Presentations and Notes on the Writing of Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution

VOLUME XIV: THE WRITING OF RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA’S “TRILOGY OF REVOLUTION,” 1953-83: THE “LONG, HARD TREK AND PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT” OF THE MARXIST-HUMANIST IDEA

Open the original Volume XIV listing document: 11628

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

In the last year of Raya Dunayevskaya’s life, as she worked 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, her studies turned again and again to a reexamination of the whole Marxist-Humanist body of ideas. By March, 1987, after more than three decades of experience with the concretization of Marxist-Humanism as organization, as journalism, as archives, she asked: “What Is Marxist-Humanism? How to Project It at Momentous Historic Moments?” Her probing spanned the years from her first book, Marxism and Freedom (1957), through Philosophy and Revolution (1973) to the final work in what she called her “trilogy of revolution,” Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982).

During her 1986-87 studies, Dunayevskaya became dissatisfied with what she considered the “incompleteness” of the archives of Marxist-Humanism, the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, despite the fact that Vol. XII, completed in 1986, had extended the reach of the Collection back to 1924 and so expanded the number of documents that it now totaled more than 10,000 pages. She sought to “disclose the process of development of the philosophic dimension” even more fully, and requested 1) that an inventory be taken of the “chapter files” created during the writing of Philosophy and Revolution and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution; and 2) that an attempt be made to locate draft chapters and letters from the writing of Marxism and Freedom. No work was undertaken on either of these requests before Dunayevskaya’s death.

After the donation of Vol. XIII, Supplement to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, in February, 1988, work was begun on the present volume, which seeks to document, as fully as possible, the process of development of Dunayevskaya’s “trilogy of revolution,” from her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes to the paragraphs she added in 1982-83 to Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution after the book was already set in type.

This volume includes “chapter files” of documents created by Dunayevskaya during the writing of Philosophy and Revolution and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. The files for the former book had been organized in their present form by Dunayevskaya before that book was published; the files for the latter were organized by Dunayevskaya’s secretary and colleague, Olga Domanski, after publication. Draft Chapters, Tables of Contents and Outlines for all three books were taken from files in Dunayevskaya’s home and in the office of the Marxist-Humanist organization, News and Letters Committees. Also included here are correspondence, presentations and notes, selected from Dunayevskaya’s files, the files of News and Letters Committees, and from donations made by those with whom Dunayevskaya corresponded.

In the arrangement and description of the documents included in Vol. XIV, we were able to draw on the concept and practice of archives Dunayevskaya developed throughout her life. By 1986 she held that:

“The significance of Archives for any Marxist-Humanist has, as ground, what we learned from Marx’s Archives, especially from the writings in his last decade, and especially the Ethnological Notebooks which were first transcribed in 1972… These Notebooks so integrally related the ‘new moments’ of Marx’s last decade that it made it possible to grasp Marx’s Marxism as a totality. In a word, the new moments of his last decade, and the very first writings of his break from capitalism and his founding of a whole new continent of thought and of revolution in 1843-44, were one continuous development of what Marx called a ‘new Humanism.’”

Whether Dunayevskaya considered the works of Hegel, of Marx, or of Marxist-Humanism, her concept of archives focused special attention on those writings which marked the “birthtime” of an Idea, and on those which represented its final determination, its summation. Taken together, these works not only offered a view of the work of a founder “as a totality,” but made it possible for another age to grasp this totality “as new beginning.”

In one of her last writings, her June 1, 1987 presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, Dunayevskaya deepened this view, singling out her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes as “the philosophic moment” which had determined her development of the Idea of Marxist-Humanism from the 1950s through the 1980s. There she wrote:

“In Hegelian dialectics, the philosophic moment is a determinant; even if the person who was driven to articulate the Idea of that ‘moment’ was very nearly unconscious as to its depth and its ramifications, it remained the element that governed the concretization that follows the laborious birth that poured forth in a torrent nevertheless.”

Each of the works in her “trilogy of revolution,” she concluded, developed as a concretization of, and return to, those 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes. Dunayevskaya called that process “Marxist-Humanism emerging out of Marxist-Humanism.”

Dunayevskaya’s 1986-87 re-examination of her “trilogy of revolution,” and of the Marxist-Humanist body of ideas as a whole, discloses two movements: 1) the “long, hard trek and process” in the self-determination of the Idea of Marxist-Humanism, from its birth in the 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, through its test in revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events and in battles with other ideas over three decades and more, to Dunayevskaya’s final, 1986-87 view; 2) the labor of summation of the totality of the body of ideas from the vantage point of the last years of Dunayevskaya’s life. This summation, reaching back over that whole process of development, is the founder’s philosophic self-comprehension of the freedom Idea, or what Hegel called Erinnerung — a summation that is at one and the same time a recollection and an inwardization of the Idea, and thus a “new beginning.”

We have therefore begun Vol. XIV with the text of The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism: two historic philosophic writings by Raya Dunayevskaya, published in 1989. It includes both her June 1, 1987, Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, and her Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, written May 12 and 20, 1953. This appears as Section I. Section II presents documents from the writing of Marxism and Freedom (1957): draft outlines, draft chapters, correspondence, presentations and notes. Section III includes documents from the writing of Philosophy and Revolution (1973): chapter files, draft chapters, correspondence, presentations and notes. Section IV contains documents from the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982): titles and tables of contents, draft chapters, chapter files, correspondence and notes. All four sections are arranged within a single Volume XIV to underline their unity as a body of ideas.

Volume XIV is not, however, a self-contained entity, despite the fact that it reaches through three books and over 30 years. A study of the writing of Marxism and Freedom would have to include preliminary work on the book, which began as “Marxism and State-Capitalism,” documents included in Vols. I-III of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, as well as Vol. IV, which covers the years 1955-58, when the book was written in its present form. Also pertinent are documents contained in Vol. XII, including additional writings from the 1940s, and correspondence with Herbert Marcuse in the 1950s. This holds true for the writing of Philosophy and Revolution and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution as well. Especially important are the draft chapters and letters from the writing of both of these works, found in Vols. VII and X; international trips to Europe, Africa and Asia by Dunayevskaya, as well as further correspondence with Marcuse, Erich Fromm and many others, both Marxist intellectuals and Marxist-Humanist colleagues, in Vol. XII; and a re-examination of the whole “trilogy of revolution” in relationship to Dunayevskaya’s 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, in Vol. XIII. In truth, however, no subject Dunayevskaya took up, from the 1940s through the 1980s, was separate from her work on the books. The fullest study requires the whole of these archives.

The present volume is also incomplete in a very different sense. Missing from the documents on the writing of Marxism and Freedom are several of the draft chapters from 1956, most notably the draft of the original concluding Chapter 16, “Automation and the New Humanism.” The most important gap in the documents on the writing of Philosophy and Revolution is the fact that we have yet to find any of the first three draft chapters of that work penned in 1967 — chapters on Hegel, Marx and Lenin. The 1967 Hegel chapter was Dunayevskaya’s first articulation of her category, “Hegel’s Absolutes as New Beginnings.”

When we donated Vol. XIII in February, 1988, only eight months after Dunayevskaya’s death, we noted that we were including in that volume many documents not edited by her for publication. We said that in doing so, “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?’” With this Vol. XIV we have continued Dunayevskaya’s perspective of making documents on the “process of development” of the Marxist-Humanist Idea available to all. We appeal to all those who may hold Dunayevskaya’s unpublished documents to share them with the Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund, just as we appeal to all those who study the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection to share their thoughts and
questions in a dialogue with us.

Michael Flug, archivist for the
Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund
October 15, 1989