A CRUCIAL WORK OF HUMANIST MARXISM
October 11, 2024
https://imhojournal.org/
Summary: Explores Raya Dunayevskaya’s reading of Hegel and Marx in her book Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today and its relevance to today’s challenges — Editors
When Raya Dunayevskaya calls Hegel the “greatest bourgeois philosopher”[1] she intimates a dialectical transformation – first that Hegel (along with Marx) was meeting the challenge of the French revolution in the aftershocks of a high watermark for bourgeois thought, and second that with Hegel bourgeois philosophy perished. The provocatively titled Marxism and Freedom is in a sense a text about what this simple construction means. What does it mean for Hegel and Marx to be paired as philosophers of history, revolution, and the Absolute at the ends of bourgeois philosophy, and moreover what are the consequences of dismissing Hegel as an equal element of this pairing? The stakes could not be higher in what Dunayevskaya calls “an age of absolutes”,[2] when “counter-revolution is in the very innards of the revolution.”[3] The primary investment for Marxism and Freedom is a type of precision as to where Hegel and Marx meet, and where Hegel actually cannot meet Marx as above and against prevailing official Marxisms of the time. Dunayevskaya answers that double-sided question by first rooting out the actual reasons for the political and philosophical breakdown of Hegel’s proposed politics of a “new society”[4] and second inaugurating a scandalous heresy by insisting that Marx does not truly ever abandon a type of humanist idealism. In other words, attendant to the former point, that if there is a break between Hegel and Marx it is in the ability to see “the masses as “Subject” creating the new society.”[5] This is as above and against a countervailing reading of a break purely in theory rather than in visions of practice. To understand the latter, the shocking development of Marx as an eminent idealist materialist, we must first return to the opening movements of Dunayevskaya’s argument.
It is helpful to remember here, from the first words of Marxism and Freedom, that Dunayevskaya is writing a polemical work. The whole program of Dunayevskaya’s politics is contained within the opening lines of the first page. Our age, she says, is born from 3 revolutions (the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution), “every question of the modern crisis was posed then.”[6] Strikingly “The proof that our age has not resolved the contradictions it faced at birth is as big as life. The One-Party Totalitarian State is the supreme embodiment of these contradictions. The central problem remains: can man be free?”[7] From the outset, it is clear that Dunayevskaya is targeting the Marxist orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. The philosophical establishment of the nominally communist world needs, in Dunayevskaya’s words, “a total change”,[8] if the present crisis is to be properly understood and confronted. It is here where we get two subtle developments from Dunayevskaya that will orient the entire trajectory of her argument. First, it was under the impact of the era of revolution that Hegel “reorganized all hitherto existing philosophy”, and to that point, it was the revolutionary action of the masses that made such a seismic change in thought possible: “There is nothing in thought – not even in the thought of a genius – that has not previously been in the activity of the common man.”[9]
With the polemic set and the narrative arc traced, Dunayevskaya establishes the terms of the discussion, setting the constellation of revolutions from 1789 and 1793 as moments of titanic epistemological importance. Though they never develop a formal theory, it is the revolutionary masses that teach “the new bourgeoisie its first lesson in democracy.”[10] Dunayevskaya’s history in miniature of the French Revolution in these pages is about the people’s revolution, doomed by its underdeveloped historical stage (at the time by Dunayevskaya’s reckoning the working class numbers roughly 600,000 people).[11] Years later, we are told, Marx will draw “the principles of revolutionary socialism”[12] from the mass movement that was the French Revolution in order to meet its great challenge to all Western philosophy before it. Here, however, Dunayevskaya fundamentally shifts the tenor of her read by asserting that before Marx, “Hegel had already met the challenge of the French revolution to reorganize completely the premises of philosophy.”[13]
The most dramatic moment in Dunayevskaya’s reading of Hegel happens here when Hegel discovers alienated labor in 1801 and backs away from it. This excision, or retreat from “describing the conditions of workers in capitalist production”[14] is, however, not a mere curiosity on the way towards a Hegel who does not concern himself with exploitation. Rather, Dunayevskaya will tell us that this early peek into what will become a core element of Marx’s work leaves such an imprint on Hegel that “labor remained integral to his philosophy.”[15] This point is most strikingly represented by Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” dialectic. It is in “Lordship and Bondage” where Hegel and Marx can be understood as in fundamental dialogue – to Dunayevskaya, Hegel, and Marx find in their most inalienable origin a primal identity in their parallel efforts to discover the conditions for an ultimate historical move from bondage to freedom. For Hegel “Freedom is the animating spirit”, it is “not only his point of departure, but his point of return.”[16]
In The Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel was able in thought to present “the stages of development of mankind as stages in the struggle for freedom.”[17] In common with Marx, freedom must be fought for. Take paragraph 187 in “Lordship and Bondage”, where “the relation between two self-consciousnesses” (here the eponymous Lord and Bondsman) “is determined in such a way that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death combat.”[18] In this initial struggle between two Beings, the one that emerges victorious takes the position of Lord. The Lord here emerges, in proposition 190 as a “consciousness that is for itself”,[19] while the Bondsman can only work. Thus, at first, it appears as if the Bondsman is dependent upon the Lord. The Lord holds “Independent being” over the Bondsman, who is proved “to be dependent, to have his independence in thinghood.”[20] However, by Proposition 195, the situation has quite reversed. The object of freedom is worked on by the Bondsman, while the Lord’s desire for the object has become “a disappearance, for it lacks the objective side or subsistence.”[21] The Bondsman, on the other hand, must work and so desire is “held in check… work cultivates. The negative relation to the object becomes its form or something permanent.”[22] In other words it is precisely in labor where the bondsman acquires a mind of its own, while the Lord slowly loses that power until the Lord finds its freedom fully enmeshed with the servitude of the Bondsman, while the Bondsman suffers no such dependency. Thus, as Dunayevskaya says, it is not “from as through slavery that man acquired freedom.”[23]
Marx, then, “Did not depart from Hegel’s dialectic method or from his Absolutes.”[24] While Hegel could not recognize the genius of the proletariat, he and he alone among his peers responded to the French revolution by drawing philosophy into History. Truth and freedom can be found in the limitless possibility of man to develop in history. Dunayevskaya holds that intellectuals searching for the expression of Hegel’s Absolute in theory before practice have it wrong. In her view, it is the proletariat that demonstrates the workings of the Absolute in practice before theory. Intellectuals are hampered by “their isolation from the working people in whose lives the elements of the new society are present.”[25] The question remains, however, if all of the conditions for a truly revolutionary praxis are already present in Hegel’s work, why was Hegel unable to totally overcome the contradictions of his era? Why did Hegel become a professor, and remain a revolutionary coward?
Dunayevskaya gives us two reasons that both emerge from issues of class and class consciousness. Politically Hegel thinks the state is insufficient without a regulatory ‘caste’ system. Philosophically, Dunayevskaya relates Marx’s reading that asserts essentially that “In the Hegelian system, humanity appears only through the back door, so to speak, since the core of self-development is not man but only his ‘consciousness.’” Essentially, Hegel “had destroyed all dogmatisms except the dogmatism of ‘the backwardness of the masses. On this class barrier Hegel foundered.”[26] Here, at the end of bourgeois philosophy, Hegel’s Absolute stands as a revolutionary epistemology “imbedded, though in abstract form [with] the full development of the social individual.”[27] It is at this point in Dunayevskaya’s intervention where she turns to her polemical target and attacks “the barbarism of Stalin”[28] directly.
Indeed, the root of the insipidity and insufficiency of Soviet thought after the revolution of 1917 can be traced to a failure to account for a “total, an absolute answer.”[29] The Russian system of official Marxism cannot cope with the haunting Hegelian absolute, and their development of ‘criticism’ and ‘self-criticism’ will not untie the knots of this debt. There can be no Marxian negativity without the constructive act of Absolute Negativity – without Hegel there can be no negation of the negation. Dunayevskaya approaches her greatest scandal through the truth of Hegel’s absolute: that it is “the vision of the future.”[30] Hegel’s seemingly purely idealist “unity of heaven and earth” is “not up in heaven, but here on earth.”[31] Dunayevskaya prepares the ground by saying that this gives the “material ring to Hegel’s idealist philosophy”, the actual “philosophy of history established by the French revolution.”[32]
The climax of Hegel’s system tells us, indispensably and shockingly, that “there is a movement from practice to theory as well as from theory to practice.”[33] In essence, Hegel practices a materialist idealism that falters because its subject is the transformation in the history of the philosopher (the Stoics emerge at the end of the Lord and Bondsman dialectic, for example) rather than the action of the masses. In parallel, and controversially beyond all measure, Dunayevskaya asserts that Marx “did not reject Idealism” but rather maintained throughout his work the position of a dialectical mediator between materialism and idealism. Marx, then, is an idealistic materialist. Hegel cannot realize the truth because, to his last breath, he traces “the logical movement not of the worker, but of the intellectual.”[34] The final question here, then, is what brings to summation the innovation that Marx makes as and through Hegel? To which Dunayevskaya gives a clear answer: “The development of the dialectical method on new beginnings is to be found in Marxism. To develop the dialectical method further, it was necessary to turn to the real world and its labor process. This is what Marx did.”[35]
During the French Revolution the bourgeoisie discovered democracy in the action of the proletariat, in the critical intervention of the masses. The major theoretical development of the bourgeois revolution in France was, in other words, first discovered by the practice of the people. This is Dunayevskaya’s fundamental political insight, in our present age of crisis more critical than ever. If there is a path forward to a world beyond one dominated by the capitalist mode of production, we must remember what it means to advance the politics of a “new society.” Contemporary Marxist thought is marked indelibly by a tendency towards theoretical despair. This tendency privileges Marx’s analysis of capitalist society alone, and while this does indeed produce valuable insights it is a fundamentally limited frame of analysis. What we forget is that Marx was a revolutionary and was always engaging with capitalism from the standpoint of communism. What this means is that contemporary theory ignores the other half of Marx’s intellectual legacy – that the proletariat is always engaged in a struggle with the attempts of capitalist production to dominate it, that the masses are always an active countervailing force against their bondage to capital. It is therefore critical to remind ourselves that an intersectional Marxism is the first step to understanding the challenge of the proletariat because the so-called ‘theoretical’ object of intersectionality is the very lifeblood of the contemporary action of the masses. What more evidence do we need than the recent wildfire of mass protests in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their resistance to the ongoing United States-backed Israeli-perpetuated genocide? As the capitalist mode of production strip-mines the earth and spins ever further out of control, as climate crisis and displacement accelerate across the globe, and the rhetoric of the ascendent right wing further targets queer people, migrants, and people of color, it is past time that our theory learns from practice!
[1] Page 46
[2] Page 41.
[3] Ibid
[4] Page 38
[5] Ibid
[6] Page 27
[7] Ibid, emphasis on second sentence mine.
[8] ibid
[9] Page 28.
[10] Page 29.
[11] Out of a population of roughly 25 million, per page 32.
[12] Page 32 and 33.
[13] ibid
[14] Page 34
[15] Ibid
[16] Page 35
[17] Page 36
[18] Page 78
[19] Page 79
[20] ibid
[21] Page 81
[22] Ibid
[23] Dunayevskaya, Page 35
[24] Page 37
[25] Page 38
[26] Page 38
[27] Page 39
[28] Ibid
[29] ibid
[30] Page 41
[31] ibid
[32] ibid
[33] Page 42
[34] Page 42.
[35] ibid
https://imhojournal.org/
Summary: Explores Raya Dunayevskaya’s reading of Hegel and Marx in her book Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today and its relevance to today’s challenges — Editors
When Raya Dunayevskaya calls Hegel the “greatest bourgeois philosopher”[1] she intimates a dialectical transformation – first that Hegel (along with Marx) was meeting the challenge of the French revolution in the aftershocks of a high watermark for bourgeois thought, and second that with Hegel bourgeois philosophy perished. The provocatively titled Marxism and Freedom is in a sense a text about what this simple construction means. What does it mean for Hegel and Marx to be paired as philosophers of history, revolution, and the Absolute at the ends of bourgeois philosophy, and moreover what are the consequences of dismissing Hegel as an equal element of this pairing? The stakes could not be higher in what Dunayevskaya calls “an age of absolutes”,[2] when “counter-revolution is in the very innards of the revolution.”[3] The primary investment for Marxism and Freedom is a type of precision as to where Hegel and Marx meet, and where Hegel actually cannot meet Marx as above and against prevailing official Marxisms of the time. Dunayevskaya answers that double-sided question by first rooting out the actual reasons for the political and philosophical breakdown of Hegel’s proposed politics of a “new society”[4] and second inaugurating a scandalous heresy by insisting that Marx does not truly ever abandon a type of humanist idealism. In other words, attendant to the former point, that if there is a break between Hegel and Marx it is in the ability to see “the masses as “Subject” creating the new society.”[5] This is as above and against a countervailing reading of a break purely in theory rather than in visions of practice. To understand the latter, the shocking development of Marx as an eminent idealist materialist, we must first return to the opening movements of Dunayevskaya’s argument.
It is helpful to remember here, from the first words of Marxism and Freedom, that Dunayevskaya is writing a polemical work. The whole program of Dunayevskaya’s politics is contained within the opening lines of the first page. Our age, she says, is born from 3 revolutions (the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution), “every question of the modern crisis was posed then.”[6] Strikingly “The proof that our age has not resolved the contradictions it faced at birth is as big as life. The One-Party Totalitarian State is the supreme embodiment of these contradictions. The central problem remains: can man be free?”[7] From the outset, it is clear that Dunayevskaya is targeting the Marxist orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. The philosophical establishment of the nominally communist world needs, in Dunayevskaya’s words, “a total change”,[8] if the present crisis is to be properly understood and confronted. It is here where we get two subtle developments from Dunayevskaya that will orient the entire trajectory of her argument. First, it was under the impact of the era of revolution that Hegel “reorganized all hitherto existing philosophy”, and to that point, it was the revolutionary action of the masses that made such a seismic change in thought possible: “There is nothing in thought – not even in the thought of a genius – that has not previously been in the activity of the common man.”[9]
With the polemic set and the narrative arc traced, Dunayevskaya establishes the terms of the discussion, setting the constellation of revolutions from 1789 and 1793 as moments of titanic epistemological importance. Though they never develop a formal theory, it is the revolutionary masses that teach “the new bourgeoisie its first lesson in democracy.”[10] Dunayevskaya’s history in miniature of the French Revolution in these pages is about the people’s revolution, doomed by its underdeveloped historical stage (at the time by Dunayevskaya’s reckoning the working class numbers roughly 600,000 people).[11] Years later, we are told, Marx will draw “the principles of revolutionary socialism”[12] from the mass movement that was the French Revolution in order to meet its great challenge to all Western philosophy before it. Here, however, Dunayevskaya fundamentally shifts the tenor of her read by asserting that before Marx, “Hegel had already met the challenge of the French revolution to reorganize completely the premises of philosophy.”[13]
The most dramatic moment in Dunayevskaya’s reading of Hegel happens here when Hegel discovers alienated labor in 1801 and backs away from it. This excision, or retreat from “describing the conditions of workers in capitalist production”[14] is, however, not a mere curiosity on the way towards a Hegel who does not concern himself with exploitation. Rather, Dunayevskaya will tell us that this early peek into what will become a core element of Marx’s work leaves such an imprint on Hegel that “labor remained integral to his philosophy.”[15] This point is most strikingly represented by Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” dialectic. It is in “Lordship and Bondage” where Hegel and Marx can be understood as in fundamental dialogue – to Dunayevskaya, Hegel, and Marx find in their most inalienable origin a primal identity in their parallel efforts to discover the conditions for an ultimate historical move from bondage to freedom. For Hegel “Freedom is the animating spirit”, it is “not only his point of departure, but his point of return.”[16]
In The Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel was able in thought to present “the stages of development of mankind as stages in the struggle for freedom.”[17] In common with Marx, freedom must be fought for. Take paragraph 187 in “Lordship and Bondage”, where “the relation between two self-consciousnesses” (here the eponymous Lord and Bondsman) “is determined in such a way that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death combat.”[18] In this initial struggle between two Beings, the one that emerges victorious takes the position of Lord. The Lord here emerges, in proposition 190 as a “consciousness that is for itself”,[19] while the Bondsman can only work. Thus, at first, it appears as if the Bondsman is dependent upon the Lord. The Lord holds “Independent being” over the Bondsman, who is proved “to be dependent, to have his independence in thinghood.”[20] However, by Proposition 195, the situation has quite reversed. The object of freedom is worked on by the Bondsman, while the Lord’s desire for the object has become “a disappearance, for it lacks the objective side or subsistence.”[21] The Bondsman, on the other hand, must work and so desire is “held in check… work cultivates. The negative relation to the object becomes its form or something permanent.”[22] In other words it is precisely in labor where the bondsman acquires a mind of its own, while the Lord slowly loses that power until the Lord finds its freedom fully enmeshed with the servitude of the Bondsman, while the Bondsman suffers no such dependency. Thus, as Dunayevskaya says, it is not “from as through slavery that man acquired freedom.”[23]
Marx, then, “Did not depart from Hegel’s dialectic method or from his Absolutes.”[24] While Hegel could not recognize the genius of the proletariat, he and he alone among his peers responded to the French revolution by drawing philosophy into History. Truth and freedom can be found in the limitless possibility of man to develop in history. Dunayevskaya holds that intellectuals searching for the expression of Hegel’s Absolute in theory before practice have it wrong. In her view, it is the proletariat that demonstrates the workings of the Absolute in practice before theory. Intellectuals are hampered by “their isolation from the working people in whose lives the elements of the new society are present.”[25] The question remains, however, if all of the conditions for a truly revolutionary praxis are already present in Hegel’s work, why was Hegel unable to totally overcome the contradictions of his era? Why did Hegel become a professor, and remain a revolutionary coward?
Dunayevskaya gives us two reasons that both emerge from issues of class and class consciousness. Politically Hegel thinks the state is insufficient without a regulatory ‘caste’ system. Philosophically, Dunayevskaya relates Marx’s reading that asserts essentially that “In the Hegelian system, humanity appears only through the back door, so to speak, since the core of self-development is not man but only his ‘consciousness.’” Essentially, Hegel “had destroyed all dogmatisms except the dogmatism of ‘the backwardness of the masses. On this class barrier Hegel foundered.”[26] Here, at the end of bourgeois philosophy, Hegel’s Absolute stands as a revolutionary epistemology “imbedded, though in abstract form [with] the full development of the social individual.”[27] It is at this point in Dunayevskaya’s intervention where she turns to her polemical target and attacks “the barbarism of Stalin”[28] directly.
Indeed, the root of the insipidity and insufficiency of Soviet thought after the revolution of 1917 can be traced to a failure to account for a “total, an absolute answer.”[29] The Russian system of official Marxism cannot cope with the haunting Hegelian absolute, and their development of ‘criticism’ and ‘self-criticism’ will not untie the knots of this debt. There can be no Marxian negativity without the constructive act of Absolute Negativity – without Hegel there can be no negation of the negation. Dunayevskaya approaches her greatest scandal through the truth of Hegel’s absolute: that it is “the vision of the future.”[30] Hegel’s seemingly purely idealist “unity of heaven and earth” is “not up in heaven, but here on earth.”[31] Dunayevskaya prepares the ground by saying that this gives the “material ring to Hegel’s idealist philosophy”, the actual “philosophy of history established by the French revolution.”[32]
The climax of Hegel’s system tells us, indispensably and shockingly, that “there is a movement from practice to theory as well as from theory to practice.”[33] In essence, Hegel practices a materialist idealism that falters because its subject is the transformation in the history of the philosopher (the Stoics emerge at the end of the Lord and Bondsman dialectic, for example) rather than the action of the masses. In parallel, and controversially beyond all measure, Dunayevskaya asserts that Marx “did not reject Idealism” but rather maintained throughout his work the position of a dialectical mediator between materialism and idealism. Marx, then, is an idealistic materialist. Hegel cannot realize the truth because, to his last breath, he traces “the logical movement not of the worker, but of the intellectual.”[34] The final question here, then, is what brings to summation the innovation that Marx makes as and through Hegel? To which Dunayevskaya gives a clear answer: “The development of the dialectical method on new beginnings is to be found in Marxism. To develop the dialectical method further, it was necessary to turn to the real world and its labor process. This is what Marx did.”[35]
During the French Revolution the bourgeoisie discovered democracy in the action of the proletariat, in the critical intervention of the masses. The major theoretical development of the bourgeois revolution in France was, in other words, first discovered by the practice of the people. This is Dunayevskaya’s fundamental political insight, in our present age of crisis more critical than ever. If there is a path forward to a world beyond one dominated by the capitalist mode of production, we must remember what it means to advance the politics of a “new society.” Contemporary Marxist thought is marked indelibly by a tendency towards theoretical despair. This tendency privileges Marx’s analysis of capitalist society alone, and while this does indeed produce valuable insights it is a fundamentally limited frame of analysis. What we forget is that Marx was a revolutionary and was always engaging with capitalism from the standpoint of communism. What this means is that contemporary theory ignores the other half of Marx’s intellectual legacy – that the proletariat is always engaged in a struggle with the attempts of capitalist production to dominate it, that the masses are always an active countervailing force against their bondage to capital. It is therefore critical to remind ourselves that an intersectional Marxism is the first step to understanding the challenge of the proletariat because the so-called ‘theoretical’ object of intersectionality is the very lifeblood of the contemporary action of the masses. What more evidence do we need than the recent wildfire of mass protests in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their resistance to the ongoing United States-backed Israeli-perpetuated genocide? As the capitalist mode of production strip-mines the earth and spins ever further out of control, as climate crisis and displacement accelerate across the globe, and the rhetoric of the ascendent right wing further targets queer people, migrants, and people of color, it is past time that our theory learns from practice!
[1] Page 46
[2] Page 41.
[3] Ibid
[4] Page 38
[5] Ibid
[6] Page 27
[7] Ibid, emphasis on second sentence mine.
[8] ibid
[9] Page 28.
[10] Page 29.
[11] Out of a population of roughly 25 million, per page 32.
[12] Page 32 and 33.
[13] ibid
[14] Page 34
[15] Ibid
[16] Page 35
[17] Page 36
[18] Page 78
[19] Page 79
[20] ibid
[21] Page 81
[22] Ibid
[23] Dunayevskaya, Page 35
[24] Page 37
[25] Page 38
[26] Page 38
[27] Page 39
[28] Ibid
[29] ibid
[30] Page 41
[31] ibid
[32] ibid
[33] Page 42
[34] Page 42.
[35] ibid
The International Marxist-Humanist Organization (IMHO), the publisher of this journal, aims to develop and project a viable vision of an alternative to capitalism - a new, human society - that can give direction to today’s freedom struggles.''
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