Raya Dunayevskaya (1961)
From time to time a book appears that alters human experience by making explicit the possibilities of new relationships. When thought and deed have come to a standstill such a book makes it possible for them to move again — along untrodden ways.
It may be that a book of this order has recently been published in America, Marxism and Freedom by Raya Dunayevskaya (Bookman Associates—Six dollars or 34/-). It may soon be published in this country.
Its thesis? Much of the intractability of the present situation stems from the fact that little or no original political thinking has been done since the early 1920s. This means that although immense changes have taken place in science, technology and economics there is nothing to match them in political ideas and forms. (What have we but the New Deal and John Maynard Keynes?). Thus humanity today has all the parts with which to build a new world but no idea how to set about it.
Early socialist ideas were based, or thought to be based, on the concept of socialist internationalism. In the event of war the workers of the world were to stand together, overthrow their capitalist governments, join hands across frontiers and build socialism. The dream was shattered by the total collapse of the Second International in 1914.
When Lenin heard the news of the collapse he was frankly incredulous: "When it proved to be true, the theoretical ground on which he stood, and which he thought so impregnable, gave way under him.” He then did a very strange thing. Instead of throwing himself into the fray to recreate the International he retired from the political scene to re-examine his whole philosophy. “He began reading Hegel’s Science of Logic. It formed the great philosophical foundation of the great divide in Marxism.” After weeks of study be came up with this startling conclusion: “It is impossible completely to grasp Marx’s Capital, and especially the first chapter, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past half a century have understood Marx!"
It is difficult to begin to convey in a few words just what this means. Modern thinking has been vitiated by the assumed separate oppositeness of the subjective and objective. It was this that Hegel destroyed. Lenin in 1914 (for the first time) grasped the significance of Hegel’s discovery.
Dynamic qualities are in things and in persons — not merely operating upon them. Energy, atomic or human, does not require to be controlled, organised, ' mastered.’ It requires rather to be discovered, understood, made free. When it is free it is creativity itself and its own justification.
Thus human society can be self-activating and self-correcting and this makes any sort of government (the rule of men over men) ultimately absurd. This is the kernel of dialectics. Today homo sapiens is afraid of himself because of ignorance of the character of movement within himself. Straws are preferred to the stream. Lenin, seeing this for the first time and thus being free had no option but to make history. This he did, and the fact that others undid if for him was not his fault. He was much too alone, far too far ahead. We have still to catch up with him and Dunayevskaya has located the trail.
Peter Cadogan
Reprinted from Cambridge Forward — Four. 11th November, 1960.