Toward a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 45) 9789004224681, 9789004232815, 9004224688

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Toward a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor

David Fasenfest

Wayne State University Editorial Board

Chris Chase-Dunn, University of California-Riverside G. William Domhoff, University of California-Santa Cruz Colette Fagan, Manchester University Martha Gimenez, University of Colorado, Boulder Heidi Gottfried, Wayne State University Karin Gottschall, University of Bremen Bob Jessop, Lancaster University Rhonda Levine, Colgate University Jacqueline O’Reilly, University of Brighton Mary Romero, Arizona State University Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo

VOLUME 45

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/scss

Toward a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization By

Eugene Gogol

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012

Cover illustration: Created by Paul Tanzawa, a Japanese-American artist. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker Gogol, Eugene.  Toward a dialectic of philosophy and organization / by Eugene Gogol.   p. cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences, ISSN 1573-4234 ; v. 45)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-22468-1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Dialectic. 2. Communism and philosophy. 3. Philosophy, Marxist. 4. Revolutions--Philosophy. 5. Organizational sociology--Philosophy. I. Title.  HX533.W35 2012  335.4’11--dc23 2012025019

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.nl/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4234 ISBN 978 90 04 22468 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 90 04 23281 5 (e-book) Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For Raya, as always

Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. 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.” —Raya Dunayevskaya Time is in fact the active existence of the human being. It is not only the measure of human life. It is the space for its development. —Karl Marx

CONTENTS Introduction: Philosophy, Organization, and the Work of Raya Dunayevskaya�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1      I. The Contradictory Reality of the Present Moment and Its Relation to a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization��������������2    II. The Project of Dunayevskaya: Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy...............................................................................................3  III. The Form for the Present Study����������������������������������������������������������������8 Prologue: The Dialectic in Philosophy Itself��������������������������������������������������� 11      I. What Is Hegel’s Journey of Absolute Spirit?��������������������������������������� 12    II. Why a Negation of the Negation?���������������������������������������������������������� 16  III. Can We See Hegel’s Absolutes, Not as a Closed Totality, but As New Beginning?���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 19 PART ONE

ON SPONTANEOUS FORMS OF ORGANIZATION VS. VANGUARD PARTIES 1. Marx’s Concept of Organization: From the Silesian Weavers’ Uprising to the First Years of the International Workingmen’s Association���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 43      I. A Preliminary Note—Revolutionary Organization and the Organization of Thought��������������������������������������������������������� 43    II. 1843–52: Critique of Ideas/Tendencies, and the Movement of the Workers��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 44  III. From the Early 1850s to the Early 1860s: A Brief Note on Marx’s Organization of Thought and the “Party”������������������������������ 59  IV. A New Organizational Form: Marx and the International Workingmen’s Association����������������������������������������������������������������������� 60 2. The Commune of Paris, 1871: Mass Spontaneity in Action and Thought Fused with the Responsibility of the Revolutionary Intellectual: The Two-War Road Between Marx and the Commune�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 65      I. A Non-State State: The Paris Commune as a Form of Workers’ Rule����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 65

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    II. The Civil War in France— Drafts and Address, and the French Edition of Capital����������������������������������������������������������������������� 75   III. The Commune Deepens Marx’s Concept of Organization—The First International After 1871���������������������������� 79 Appendix: Marx, Excerpts from First and Second Drafts  of The Civil War in France��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 83 3. The Second International, The German Social Democracy, and Engels after Marx—Organization without Marx’s Organization of Thought��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 89      I. A Preliminary Note on Lassalle�������������������������������������������������������������� 89     II. Fetishism of Organization: The Second International and the Germany Social Democracy��������������������������������������������������� 91   III. Engels’ Relation to German Social Democracy and to Marx’s Marxism: What Tactics? What Theory? What Philosophy?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 95 Appendix: “The Interlude that Never Ended Organizationally”���������������� 99 4. The 1905 Russian Revolution: Mass Proletarian Self-Activity and Its Relation to the Organizational Thought of Marxist Revolutionaries������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������103       I. 1905 in Life and in Books: New Forms of Struggle; New Forms of Organization�����������������������������������������������������������������104     II. Trotsky, Lenin, Luxemburg: Attitudes Toward and Theoretical Ramifications of 1905, Particularly with Regard to Revolutionary Organization������������������������������������111 5. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and Beyond: Workers’ Forms of Organisation: Lenin and the Bolsheviks ��������������������������������139       I. February-October, 1917: Forms of Organization From Below; Developments and Struggles Within Bolshevism������������139     II. Russia post-October: Workers, Bolsheviks and the State—New Beginnings and Grave Contradictions in the Revolution�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������158 6. Out of the Russia Revolution: Legacy and Critique— Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Trotsky�����������������������������������������������������������������173       I. Luxemburg and Two Revolutions—Russia, 1917–18; Germany, 1918–19������������������������������������������������������������������������������������173

contentsxi     II. Pannekoek’s Council Communism����������������������������������������������������180   III. In Exile: A Brief Note on Trotsky’s Concept of Revolutionary Organization and View of Proletarian Subjectivity��������������������������������������������������������������������184 7. Organizational Forms from the Spanish Revolution, 1936–37������������187       I. The Revolution Begins and Develops������������������������������������������������188     II. The Communist Party Works to Dismantle the Revolution��������192 8. The Hungarian Workers’ Councils in the Revolution: A Movement from Practice that is a Form of Theory����������������������������197  Prelude: East Germany, 1953�������������������������������������������������������������������������197       I. Hungary: The First Days������������������������������������������������������������������������198     II. The Turning Point�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������202   III. The Counter-Revolution and the Proletarian Response��������������204   IV. Postscript: Brief Notes on East Europe, post-Hungary 1956—Resistance-in-Permanence; Contradictions Within���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������206 PART TWO

HEGEL AND MARX 9. Can “Absolute Knowing” in Hegel’s Phenomenology Speak to a Dialectic of Organization and Philosophy?�������������������������211       I. A Note on Hegel’s Method in Absolute Knowledge����������������������211     II. Marx’s “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic”�������������������������������������213   III. Spirit’s Journey in Absolute Knowledge: Externalization (Entäusserung) and Recollection/Inwardization (Erinnerung)���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������219   IV. The Dialectic in Philosophy Itself: Does It Bring Forth a Dialectic of Organization?—A Reading of Absolute Knowing from Dunayevskaya���������������������������������������������������������������222 10. Critique of the Gotha Program: Marx’s Critique of a So-Called Socialist Program; his Projection of Communism; What is its Meaning for Today?���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������227 Appendix: Marx on Necessity, Freedom, Time and Labor�������������������������242

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HEGEL AND LENIN 11. Lenin and Hegel: The Profound Philosophic Breakthrough that Failed to Encompass Revolutionary Organization�����������������������249       I. Introduction���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������249     II. A Preliminary Note on Lenin’s Philosophic Exploration of Hegel������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������251   III. A Brief Survey of Dunayevskaya’s Explorations, Pre-1986, of Lenin’s Hegelian Vantage Point.�����������������������������������������������������255    IV. Dunayevskaya’s ‘Changed Perception of Lenin’s Philosophic Ambivalence’: Fusing a mid-1980s Vantage Point with a 1953 Philosophic Breakthrough�����������������������������������259      V. Dunayevskaya’s New Reading of Lenin: Fusing 1986–87 Preceptions with Her 1953 Philosophic Moment............................272    VI. Organizational Ramifications�������������������������������������������������������������276 12. Hegel’s Critique of the Third Attitude to Objectivity—Its Relation to Organization�����������������������������������������������������������������������������279       I. Introduction: The Three Attitudes to Objectivity��������������������������279     II. Dunayevskaya’s 1961 Reading of the Third Attitude to Objectivity��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������284   III. Dunayevskaya’s 1986 Reading of the Third Attitude to Objectivity��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������286 PART FOUR

DIALECTICS OF PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II WORLD: THE WORK OF RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA 13. Moments in the Development of Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������293       I. A Preliminary Note on War and Revolution as Turning Points for Radical Thought: The Moment of the Theory of State-Capitalism as Needed Ground for Marxist-Humanism����293     II. Dunayevskaya’s Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, May 12 and 20 1953: “The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism”��������299

contentsxiii     III. The Organization of Thought which Determines Organizational Life: Developing Marxist-Humanism and News and Letters Committees�����������������������������������������������������������310     IV. Dunayevskaya’s Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, June 1, 1987—A New Philosophic Category and a Challenge for News and Letters Praxis���������������������������������320 Appendices: 1. Dunayevskaya Letter on Meeting a Cameroonian Revolutionary (Excerpt).......................................................................................327  2. Dunayevskaya in 1949–50 Miners’ General Strike..............................327  3. Preamble to the Original Constitution of News and Letters Committees, 1956���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������329 PART FIVE

CONCLUSION 14. What Philosophic-Organizational Vantage Point Is Needed?�����������335        I. Recent Challenges to Hegel’s Dialectics of Negativity�����������������335      II. What Is the Dialectic of Marx’s Capital?������������������������������������������362    III. Once Again Hegel’s Dialectic of Negativity—Its Concretization/Praxis as Organizational Expression; Its Meaning for Today���������������������������������������������������������������������������373 Bibliography�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������385 Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������389

INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY, ORGANIZATION, AND THE WORK OF RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA* The problematic of revolutionary organization’s relation to emancipatory philosophy stands before us as a crucial, yet primarily unexplored dimension of Marxist thought and practice. There have been multiple studies on socialist, Marxist and other radical organizations. Writings on organizational forms with respect to a multiplicity of social movements abound. Works on “the Party” are surely not lacking. However, these treatments have rarely discussed the philosophic foundation of organizational practice. Instead, their framework has been organizational practices, often in terms of tactics and strategy, at times linked to political theory. The present study has a focus which lies elsewhere. We wish to explore the relationship between an organization of thought, in its fullness dialectical philosophy, and its expression in actual revolutionary organization. We want to ask whether in the dialectic of philosophy itself there can be found a dialectic of organization. Thus, exploring the dialectic in philosophy itself will be a central theme. Only with such an exploration can we discern how the dialectics of negativity expresses itself in organization not as will or externality, but as concrescence. At the same time we want to explore what has occurred historically when revolutionary organizational practice has not derived from an emancipatory philosophic foundation, but remained in a separate compartment. Can this help us understand the problems of incomplete and transformed-into-opposite revolutions and revolutionary movements? Can the present inability to move beyond capital be explained, at least in part, by the failure to work out a dialectics of organization and philosophy? What effforts have been made to fuse organization of thought to actual organization, or put diffferently, what manifestation in living organization has come from concretization of the dialectic in philosophy? We are not seeking an “application” of dialectics to organization; rather, we are looking towards its re-creation in organizational practice.

* I thank Roger Hollander for his proofreading and editorial suggestions for the book.

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We wish to engage in a “battle of ideas,” that is, to critique a number of contemporary radical thinkers who have commented on aspects of Hegel’s thought in presenting their own view of social transformation. I. The Contradictory Reality of the Present Moment and Its Relation to Dialectics of Philosophy and Organization With the collapse of so-called Soviet Communism, the blinders worn by many within revolutionary movements for much of the twentieth century—an uncritical attitude toward the vanguard party-to-lead—have been at least partially removed, allowing many to see more clearly the tragic historic ramifijications of such parties as progenitors of transformed-into-opposite revolutions. However, this has not resolved the question of revolutionary organization and its relation to the mass movement. The recognition of the grave contradictions within the vanguard party form, while absolutely essential, does not by itself lead to organizational new beginnings. Even when such recognition is united with an appreciation for and participation in spontaneous forms of mass organization from below, the level of discussion and practice remains on form of organization—de-centralized, multitude, committees, etc. Such concentration on appearance, even when it moves to Essence— the content of the organization, as for example with mass organizations arising at specifijic historic moments and places having within dimensions from workers and women, to racial and ethnic minorities, and youth— does not yet fully reach to Notion, that is, to an emancipatory philosophicorganizational vision in corporeal form, in fusion with social rebellion in its spontaneous organizational forms. Our present, deeply contradictory moment, is characterized on the one hand by a strong distrust of the old Left political parties and organizations on the part of many mass social movements. These movements demand an independent, free existence from sufffocating ideological impositions of external “Party” solutions as they struggle to emancipate themselves  from the death-grip of capital. They search for an emancipatory view of the future, and look for organizational pathways to assist in achieving it. On the other hand, the present moment is as well characterized by the goal of achieving state power by progressive forces, which once again raises questions of state-ism, of control from above, and the danger of shackling social movements to state-power politics. This is not to condemn out-of-hand the important, complex processes occurring, for

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instance, in Venezuela and Bolivia. Rather, it is to indicate the need to seriously analyze and sharply debate what is occurring. Is the taking of statepower a priori non-viable for authentic social transformation, or does it provide the needed ground for uprooting the power of capital economically and politically? Here we need to ask whether this debate can be answered on the ground of taking power verses not taking power, or whether a more radical standpoint needs to be explored. I would suggest a more comprehensive vantage point is necessary. We need to be, at one and the same time, more concrete and more universal than what much of the present discussion and debate has provided: more concrete, in the sense of specifijically analyzing the actual social-economic processes occurring using the conceptual tools that Marx has provided, his tracing the logic of capital and the dialectic of its abolition; more universal, in the sense of recognizing the need to work out an emancipatory vision of the future as part of the analysis and debate. To be both concrete and universal for our day, in the spirit of Hegel’s concept of a concrete-universal, and in Marx’s re-creation of this concept in his four decades of philosophy and revolution as praxis, we need to take up the dialectic in philosophy as it manifests itself in a dialectic of organization. The challenge of creating this concrete-universal, I would argue, is objectively and subjectively the crucial project that stands before us. II. The Project of Dunayevskaya: Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy Over half a century ago, Raya Dunayevskaya, then a member of a small Marxist grouping, sought to explore the relation between revolutionary organization and dialectical philosophy by examining the Absolute Idea chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic: “I am concerned only with the dialectic … of the type of grouping like ours, be it large or small, and its relation to the mass.” (May 12, 1953 Letter on Absolute Idea, Dunayevskaya, 2002: 16). This was the vantage point for a breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes that she experienced with her May 12 and 20 Letters on Hegel’s Absolute Idea and Absolute Mind (Spirit). Whatever it was that was driving me in 1953 to write those letters of May 12 and May 20, it suddenly became the whole of Hegel’s work. … What had begun as ‘the dialectic of the Party’ as well as the contradictions in the Absolute Idea itself, resulted in my seeing what I called ‘the new society,’ i.e. the end of the division between mental and manual. (June 1, 1987 “Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” Dunayevskaya, 1988: 11, 12)

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That 1953 “philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism” would catalyze Dunayevskaya’s journey of philosophic probing and organizational practice over a span of more than three decades. The philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, with American roots and world historic connections, was thus born and developed from 1953 to the end of her life in 1987. Its organizational expression was News and Letters Committees, founded in 1955. A direct theoretical probing of the relationship between dialectical philosophy and revolutionary organizational practice was not taken up by her in and of itself immediately following the 1953 Letters. To be sure, many aspects of the relationship were touched upon in her philosophic-political-organizational labors during the three decades following her Letters on Hegel’s Absolute. It was only in the mid-1980s, however, that she decided to undertake a new theoretical/philosophic work focused directly on the subject, one which came to be tentatively titled “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: ‘The Party’ and Forms of Organization Born Out of Spontaneity.” It was a project that was rooted in a return to her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, while at the same time drawing upon the decades of “Marxism-Humanism emerging out of Marxism-Humanism,” as seen in her major philosophic writings and her organizational practice in News and Letters Committees. In October 1986, she articulated the relation between a dialectic in philosophy and a dialectic in organization that she was exploring for her new book as follows: What I’m driving at, is that unless we work out the dialectic in philosophy itself, the dialectic of organization, whether it is from the vanguard party or that born from spontaneity, would be just diffferent forms of organization, instead of an organization that is so inseparable from its philosophic ground that form and content are one. (Dunayevskaya, 1981: # 10789)

At the time of her death, June 1987, Dunayevskaya had not yet drafted a manuscript. However, she left a vast collection of notes, presentations and letters on the subject had been undertaken. These form Vol. XII of her archives, The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection. (Dunayevskaya, 1981) Among those documents, she had dictated “One Possible Outline for Dialectics of Organization and Spontaneity,” on May 11, 1987, (Dunayevskaya, 1981: #10922), one month before her sudden, unexpected death. Because the Outline—which brought together many of the dimensions that Dunayevskaya was working out for her book-to-be—forms an important point of departure for the present study, it is reproduced below:

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“One possible outline for Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” Dictated by Dunayevskaya May 11, 19871 1 The following explanatory notes on Dunayevskaya’s outline for the book are not meant to be a defijinitive explanation of her outline. They are only intended as an aid to help

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The outline is one synthesis she made of her labors over the last two years of her life. It hopefully can help us to understand the many elements that she was seeking to develop as a totality. I have used the Outline, her studies in volume XII, as well as other writings writings, as primary sources readers with her abbreviations. Many of the terms and concepts will be taken up in more detail in the chapters that follow.          1. “whole? of PPM on org.” = “whole question of post-Marx-Marxism on organization” post-Marx Marxism refers to the category Dunayevskaya developed in (Dunayevskaya, 1982).       2. “Engels and 2nd International–Erfurt” refers to Second Workingman’s International founded in 1889, and to the Erfurt Program of 1891. Engels participated in its fijinal editing. See Chapter Three of the present study for more detail.       3. “especially Trade Union Debate” refers to the debate within the Bolshevik party in 1920–21. For Dunayevskaya’s commentary on this debate see (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 196–201)       4. “(Kronstadt?) NO?” Refers to Kronstadt uprising of 1919 which was put down by the new Soviet government. “NO?” perhaps refers of Dunayevskaya’s questioning whether it should be taken up under Soviets as spontaneous forms of organization.       5. “(& Rosa Luxemburg)” most likely refers to Luxemburg’s writing in the period immediately following the Russian revolution, “The Russian Revolution”. (Luxemburg, 2004)       6. “Council Communism – Pannekoek” refers to the Dutch Marxist Antonie Pannekoek and his work on council communism. See particularly Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils. (Pannekoek, 1975)           7. “Spanish Revolution and Hungarian Revolution,” refers to the Revolution in Spain of 1936–1937 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.      8. “this NB”—Nota Bene, note well      9. “Lenin’s Philosophic Notes—not as in 1953 or 1973, but 1987.” Dunayevskaya wrote on Lenin’s Abstract on Hegel’s Science of Logic in her May 1953 letters on Hegel’s Absolutes (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 15), in her 1973 Philosophy and Revolution, and in 1987 letters to non-Marxist Hegel scholars “as in letters.” (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 325) Her letters of 1987 developed new points of critique. 10. “Hegel’s own diffference” refers to his presentation in the Science of Logic as compared to his presentation in the Encyclopedia (Smaller) Logic.    11. “Attitudes to Objectivity,” in Hegel this refers to the sections on Attitudes to Objective Hegel added to the 1830 edition of his Encyclopedia Logic. Lenin in his Philosophic Notebooks made no reference to the Attitudes to Objectivity section of the Encyclopedia Logic. Dunayevskaya related the Attitudes to Objectivity, particularly the Third Attitude of Objectivity, Intuitionism, to her own period, including her analysis of Mao Zedong.  12. “Miners’ General Strike”, refers to the Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50 in which Dunayevskaya and others in her Tendency (Johnson-Forest Tendency, at that time in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) participated. See (Philips, Andy and Raya Dunayevskaya, 1984)  13. “Cameroonian,” refers to Dunayevskaya meeting with a Cameroonian revolutionary in England in 1947 who told her of a general strike against French imperialist occupation carried on in Camaroon’s capital in the period immediately following World War II, a precursor to what was later know as Third World Revolutions. An excerpt from the letter has been published as appendix to Chapter Thirteen of the present study.)

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for my own research and writing. In addition, I have used points in her outline as topics for investigation outside of her own writings. *** In addition to her May 12 and May 20 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, and her “One Possible Outline for Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” we want to call attention to another writing of Dunayevskaya, her “Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” (Dunayevskaya, 1988), written for delivery to her colleague-members of the Resident Editorial Board of News & Letters, June 1, 1987. In this organizational document—which she had called “Pre-pre Post-Plenum, i.e. – Executive Session Type of Talk in three parts: I. The Philosophic Point. II. Dialectics of Organization. III. Untrodden Paths in Organization”— Dunayevskaya began a new dialogue with her colleagues on the future

  14. “vs. CLR James” C.L.R. James (Johnson) was co-leader with Dunayevskaya (Forest) of the Johnson-Forest Tendency that existed fijirst within Trotskyism (1941–1951) and then as an independent Tendency (1951–1954). The “vs.” may refer to the specifijicity of their difffering attitudes of the miner’s activities in 1949–1951, but likely refers as well to the difffering attitudes on the relation of organization and philosophy, which was fijirst manifest in Dunayevskaya’s moving beyond James’ concept of the “dialectic of the party” in her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, which she later designated as the “Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism,” and saw as the origin of her last labors on “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” (See her June 1, 1987 Presentation and her May 1953 Letters. (Dunayevskaya, 2002) For my own commentary see (Gogol, 2004), as well as Chapter Thirteen of the present study.    15. “? ground and roof” Dunayevskaya referred to her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes as containing the ground and the roof for her work on “Dialectics of organization and philosophy.”   16. “1953 Letters on Absolute Idea—concentration on organization and as 3 fijinal syllogisms” This refers to her letter of May 12, 1953 which commented on the Absolute Idea Chapter of the Science of Logic (Hegel, 1929) and to her letter of May 20, 1953, which commented on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (Spirit) (Hegel,1971), particularly its fijinal chapter on Absolute Mind with its “3 fijinal syllogisms,” referring to paragraphs 575, 576, and 577.    17. “Dual movement is not alone, but Self-Thinking Idea = Mhism”. For my commentary on this expression see Chapter Thirteen of the present study.   18. “Mhism” = Marxist-Humanism   19. “Mhism’s concept of organization (Constitution)” Constitution refers to the Constitution of News and Letters Committees founded by Dunayevskaya and colleagues in 1955, (original Constitution, 1956). 20. “(of trilogy of revolution??)” a reference to her three major works in book form: Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution.    21. “This is on ourselves…” refers to the three plus decades (1955–1987) of MarxistHumanism within the philosophical-organization form of News and Letters Committees

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work of News and Letters Committees. She was determined to maintain as a unity her philosophic-organizational writing of the new book and the organizational-philosophic work of News and Letters Committees. In so doing, she critiqued a gap between the philosophic expression and organizational practice of Marxist-Humanism, in which “philosophy had not permeated the paper [News & Letters] and therefore it didn’t permeate the organization.” Dunayevskaya sought a pathway for “the whole organization” to be actively involved in working out “the dialectics of philosophy and the book as one.” This was to be the central praxis of News and Letters Committees.

III. The Form for the Present Study My previous study, Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism (Gogol, 2004) ended with a reproduction of her May 1987 outline for “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” The present study uses the outline as its point of departure and frame of reference, and I am thus deeply indebted to Dunayevskaya’s work of the last two years of her life. However, it would be wrong to view this book as any attempt to “complete” her work. We cannot know where she would have fully gone with her study. Each of her previous major works underwent major transformations in the process of writing. For “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” Dunayevskaya entered onto unexplored terrain. In so doing she laid out pathways, creating space for others to take their own journeys. I wish to use her extensive notes, presentations, letters, etc., as essential ground and foundation, in the same way she considered Hegel, Marx, Lenin as founders for her works, while at the same time, in the end, it was her own Marxist-Humanist new beginning. I make no claim that this is such a new beginning. Rather, I hope to present a small illumination on the objective need for such new beginnings to be worked out collectively in the global freedom movements of our day. The title of the present study, Towards a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization reverses the words of her title. This is not done to separate my work from Dunayevskaya’s. In her own notes, she herself had on more than one occasion reversed the words of the title. Rather, the words are reversed because in the process of writing this work, I came to see how crucial was the concept of the Dialectic in Philosophy before any Dialectic

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of Organization could emerge in Dunayevskaya’s thought. This seemed to me to necessitate the change in the title. The Prologue is a discussion of the centrality of the Dialectic in Philosophy Itself and sets the ground for the study. It seeks to explore crucial themes in the Hegelian dialectic—his concept of Spirit, the signifijicance of negation of the negation, the Absolutes As New Beginnings—that I believe speak to a Dialectic of Organization for our day.2 Part I, “On Spontaneous Forms of Organization vs. Vanguard Parties,” begins with Marx’s concept of organization, from the 1840s to the fijirst years of the Workingman’s International. Forms of organization arising from below are examined in chapters on the 1871 Paris Commune, the Russian Soviets of 1905, the factory committees and Soviets of 1917 Russia, the Spanish Revolution of the mid-1930s, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. As well, the ideas of Lassalle, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Pannekock are taken up in relation to Party organizational forms and mass organizations. Part II, “Hegel and Marx,” begins with a chapter on Hegel’s Absolute Knowing in relation to a dialectic of philosophy and organization. Within, is an examination of Marx’s critique and indebtedness to the Hegelian dialectic, of Lukacs’ view of the ending of the Phenomenology, and of Dunayevskaya’s reading of Absolute Knowing. A second chapter examines Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program in relation to revolutionary organization then and now. Part III, “Lenin and Hegel,” explores the limitations of Lenin’s crucial philosophic reorganization with respect to organization in the period of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. A second chapter probes Dunayevskaya’s organizational reading of Hegel’s Third Attitude to Objectivity. Part IV, “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy in Post-World War II World,” details Dunayevskaya’s praxis of organization and philosophy in the founding and fijirst three decades of the News and Letters Committees, a Marxist-Humanist group. In the concluding Part V,3 I ask as part of a battle of ideas: “What Philosophic-Organizational Vantage Point Is Needed?” Here I explore the 2 Here, as well as in other parts of the present study, I have at times used excerpts and modifijied excerpts from my previous works. (Gogol, 2002) and (Gogol, 2004) 3 More than two decades have passed since Dunayevskaya dictated the outline that I have used as a guide. Much has changed in the present world. While I have made extensive use of her notes in my writing, I had intended to include an additional Part V, “Latin

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vantage points of Holloway and Adorno, Hardt and Negri, as well as Mészáros, Postone, and Lebowitz. This concluding chapter returns to Hegel’s Dialectic of Negativity, to Marx, and to Dunayevskaya, in posing the challenge of forging anew dialectics of philosophy and revolutionary organization at the end of the fijirst decade of the 21st century.

America: Emancipatory Social Movements, Organizational Forms (Organizations), State Power and Philosophic Vantage Points,” where I would have sought to explore the question of the dialectic of philosophy and organization in relation to movements, organizational forms and statism, as they have arisen in Latin America. However, in the course of writing the present study I found the material expanding at such an accelerated rate that I have decided not to include it here, but to present that material in an additional volume, tentatively entitled Utopia and the Dialectic in Latin American Liberation. I hope to complete this study in the near future.

PROLOGUE: THE DIALECTIC IN PHILOSOPHY ITSELF What I’m driving at, is that unless we work out the dialectic in philosophy itself, the dialectic of organization, whether it is from the vanguard party or that born from spontaneity, would be just diffferent forms of organization, instead of an organization that is so inseparable from its philosophic ground that form and content are one. —Raya Dunayevskaya, Oct. 6, 1986 (Dunayevskaya, 1981: #10789)

In each age, revolutionary thinker-activists have been challenged to work out the dialectic in philosophy for their historic moment. For Marx in the middle of the 19th century, it meant a recognition of “the greatness of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and of its fijinal result—the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle,” while at the same time sharply critiquing Hegel for “the lie in his principle,” residing in his dehumanization of the Idea. (“Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Marx, 1975a) Marx would construct a “new continent of thought and revolution,” centered on the creative subjectivity of the proletariat, and further encompassing the “new passions and new forces arising in the bosom of society.” He re-forged the dialectic in his critique of capitalism, posing an emancipatory view of society wherein human power would be its own end. His revolutionary transcendence of the Hegelian dialectic at the same time meant continual returns to that dialectic of negativity. For Lenin at the outbreak of the First World War and on the edge of a revolution in Russia, probing the dialectic in philosophy meant a thoughtdive into the Science of Logic, from which he discerned the principle of transformation-into-opposite as key for understanding the objective situation of his time, found threads of connection between the Hegelian dialectic and Marx’s Capital, and deepened the nature of his revolutionary political practice. His 1914–15 study of Hegel (Lenin, 1976) would be called his “philosophical preparation for revolution.” Yet, as ground-breaking as Lenin’s philosophic reorganization was, it did not encompass organization, and thus did not mean re-thinking the nature of his Bolshevik Party. For Dunayevskaya in the aftermath of Russia’s transformation from a workers’ state into a state-capitalist monstrosity and the failure of Trotsky and Trotskyism to forge a revolutionary alternative to that transformed reality, the exploration of the dialectic in philosophy meant a probing

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of Hegel’s Absolutes in Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic and Philosophy of Spirit (Mind) to fijind a new beginning—“Absolute Negativity As New Beginning.” Her probing of the dialectic was fused with the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity from below in the post-World War II world—proletarian struggles East and West, the rise of the African, Asian and Latin America revolts and revolutions, the dimensions of Black, youth and women’s movements in the United States. Hers was a journey that continued for more than three decades. In the mid-1980s it took the form of probing anew the dialectic in philosophy to trace out a dialectic of organization, an exploration cut short by her death. In seeking to examine the Dialectic in Philosophy in relation to a Dialectic of Organization for the present moment, we will here briefly take up three questions: (1) What is at the heart of Spirit’s journey in the Hegelian dialectic? (2) What is the dialectic of negativity as a dialectic of double negation, a movement of absolute negativity? (3) Can the dialectic of negativity in various forms of the Absolute—Absolute Knowing in Phenomenology, Absolute Idea in the Logic, Absolute Mind (Spirit) in Philosophy of Spirit—be read in a manner whereby each of the Absolutes becomes an entrance to a new sphere, an open totality, a new beginning— “Absolute Negativity As New Beginning”? I. What Is Hegel’s Journey of Absolute Spirit? “Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us,” wrote Hegel. The dialectic of negativity is not a flight into abstraction. It is saturated with experience, with the here and now. But it refuses to accept experience as a given, fijixed state of afffairs. Such experience has movement, has contradiction within. The dialectic of negativity seizes upon contradiction as its lifeblood. It is not only a critique of the status quo, but of any philosophic system which accepts that given state of afffairs as reality. It is a critique that strives to break down the division between reality and thought. The driving force of this negativity is the Idea of freedom, and thus the overcoming of barriers, or contradictions, that prevent the full expression/ realization of the Idea. The journey of Phenomenology of Spirit expresses the birth of a new world through the negation, the transcendence, of the old: [O]ur epoch is a birth-time and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old

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ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation. (Hegel, 1964: 75)

In examining experience, dialectical thought fijinds a world that is enslaved, in which humanity, and indeed nature, exist as “other than they are.” This existence as unfreedom is not the truth of humanity. True existence is “the continuous negation of that which threatens to deny freedom.” This central theme of Spirit for Hegel is the journey that negates unfreedom and thereby comes to express, that is be, liberation. The dialectic of negativity is the means by which humanity seeks to overcome its state of bondage. Such a dialectic is not a tool, is not imposed upon humanity, but comes out of humanity’s historical experience. All of history is a “progress in the consciousness of freedom.” Hegel wrote of this as Absolute Negativity, negation of the negation in permanence. As we will see, such a negation of negation is not a nullity. Rather it is a dual rhythm, the destruction of the old, and the creation of the new. Freedom is here not relegated to the realm of pure thought. Dialectical thought is an act of liberation, which of necessity strives to unite theory and practice. Philosophy by itself cannot free the world. But without the preparation of new departures in thought there can be no transformation in life. Phenomenology was Hegel’s fijirst major point of departure. It is where mind attains self-consciousness of freedom, develops to the fullness of Spirit, and sets about the task of achieving absolute liberation. The barriers met, the contradictions overcome in a long arduous journey—“the labor, patience and sufffering of the negative”—have Mind/Spirit pass through a multiplicity of states: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, and fijinally Absolute Knowing. Even here the journey does not end, for there is the transition to the Science of Logic with its fijinal chapter, Absolute Idea, and then to Philosophy of Mind, culminating in Absolute Mind. This journey is at times interpreted as not directly that of corporeal women and men, but of the Notion, through various stages. This reading of Hegel’s “Voyage of Discovery” is not “wrong.” However, in isolation it misses the richness of historical humanity’s presence, even if at times that presence is obscured with a mystical veil. For the movement of Spirit that negates contradictions, is not external to humanity. Life, both of nature and human nature as expressed historically, is thoroughly within Spirit. In its fullest expression the Notion is Spirit, and “the grandest concept of Spirit is the Absolute.” The movement of the Notion as Spirit is the movement of freedom toward its fullest, most comprehensive expression.

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Hegel’s concept of Spirit has at times been characterized as a totalizing, closed journey that fijinally extinguishes history and leaves no room for an Other, including other human beings who are “diffferent.” However, one can read the Hegelian dialectic in a manner that yields a richer view of the relation of Spirit and Other, a reading that gives us a complex, “total” journey, but one that is not static and closed, but self-developing and open. One recent commentary on Phenomenology points to the interconnection of Hegel’s use of spirit and the human subject, as well as recognizing that the formation of subject, subjectivity, spirit, results from interacting with the world, whose otherness is not actual foreign, but is a self’s “own becoming”: Hegel’s main task in the Phenomenology is to capture how spirit becomes embodied in the modern world in and through human history and the activity of its real agents, human individuals. … [A] subject’s active involvement (interaction) with the world and its activity of self-development became the focus of philosophical analysis of subjectivity. … Hegel’s new conception of the self and its self-presentation involves more than its ‘reaching out’ into the real world and actual experience… The real novelty of Hegel’s approach to the subject and subjectivity is his view that the self results from interacting with the world. In the Phenomenology he makes this point in these terms: ‘only this self—restoring identity or this refection to otherness within itself—not an original or an immediate unity as such—is true. It [subjectivity] is its own becoming…’ (Bykova, 2009)

In the dialectic, the development of freedom arises from Spirit’s confrontation with Otherness. What does the concept of Otherness mean for Hegel? What is the nature of Spirit’s confrontation/relation with Other in Hegelian thought? In truth the two questions are inseparable in Hegel. Otherness only arises in relation to Spirit, Spirit only in relation to Otherness. First, the Other encompasses the relation of human being to human being. Certainly that dimension is present and crucial in much of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In its broadest sense this dimension includes human social constructions. Second, Otherness in Hegel extends to that which is not directly intrasubjective. In his introduction to the Encyclopedia Logic, the philosophy of nature is “the science of the Idea in its otherness.” Everything from inorganic nature to life in its animal form is part of the Idea in its Otherness. But even here, how far are we from humanity, since the concept of Nature, let alone a philosophy of nature, is a human construction? There is a rich complexity present in Hegel on the relation of Other and Spirit. In his hands, Otherness confronts Spirit as much as Spirit confronts

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Otherness. It tugs upon and shapes Spirit, pulls Spirit into new spheres. It can have the shape of a battle of ideas of other philosophies, “attitudes to objectivity,” as much as it is a journey of individual human being’s struggle for recognition. It can have the form of an “external other” of a slave’s struggle with a master, or the “internal other” of what the slave confronts within himself/herself after gaining “a mind of one’s own,” beginning with stoicism and skepticism, and continuing to Absolute Knowing. Otherness involves experience. In fact, one might argue that in Hegel, Otherness in its broadest conception is experience, and that the journey of Spirit is a passage through the Otherness of experience in such a manner that the Otherness of the Other is continually being transcended by Spirit. Not the Other, but the sense of a foreignness of Other, is abolished. This transcendence involves conflict, negation, but does not annul the Other, or absorb its totality within Spirit. Rather, it can have a dimension of intermingling of Spirit and Other, which fijinds both transformed, but neither collapsed, the one into the other. Through negativity, Spirit confronts what at fijirst appears to be external to it—an Other. What is the nature of this confrontation? In Hegel’s view it is a transcendence, which is simultaneously a process of negation and creation. It can best be described by Hegel’s use of aufheben, a term with intertwining meanings: (1) to raise, to hold, lift up; (2) to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel, suspend; (3) to keep, save, preserve. Hegel is often using the expression in all three senses at once. Nowhere is this truer than in how Hegel explores the relation between Spirit and Otherness. The relation between Other and Spirit cannot be seen as given or fijixed, but as continually evolving and manifesting Hegel’s difffering concepts of the Other. Thus in the Phenomenology one fijinds, “ ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and “We’ that is ‘I’ ” wherein consciousness “steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present.” While, in Philosophy of Mind one fijinds “Absolute mind knows that it posits being itself, that it is itself the creator of its Other, of Nature and fijinite mind, so that this Other loses all semblance of independence in face of mind, ceases altogether to be a limitation for mind and appears only as a means whereby mind attains an absolute being-for-self.” These sharply contrasting constructions do not necessarily mean that Hegel’s view of the relation of Otherness and Spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit is as diffferent from that in Philosophy of Mind as it fijirst appears. Such diffferences seem more to lie in the fact that an evolving Spirit is confronting diffferent dimensions of Otherness. An interpretation which sees Hegel only as a philosopher of identity wherein diffference is

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abolished, fails to grasp the complexity of the dialectic of Spirit and Otherness. If Spirit and Other are not only interrelated, but inseparable, then when we reach the realm of the Absolutes—whether of Knowledge, Idea, or Spirit—we will be confronted anew with the dialectic of their relation.

II. Why a Negation of the Negation? Hegel’s philosophy is known as the dialectic of negativity, of negation of the negation. Why does such a dialectic refuse to be limited to a fijirst negation, and instead drive toward second negativity, indeed toward absolute negativity? Hegel centered his philosophy on the concept of contradiction, of overcoming, that is, negating contradictions or barriers to freedom. This transcendence of alienation would be the pathway for self-development. However, if the sole focus of the negation was only against something/ someone, the transcendence would always be incomplete. One would continue to be shackled or defijined by what one was trying to overcome. To be “not something” means that you continue to be determined by what you are seeking to negate. The initial negation, this fijirst negation, will not set you fully free from this dependence on what has been a barrier to freedom, even as you move to negate or overcome it. Hegel wrote of this difffijiculty early in Phenomenology of Mind, in the movement from consciousness to self-consciousness, discussing the relationship between master and slave. The slave negated his dependence on the master through his labor, “in fashioning the thing.” Thus, “the bondsman becomes aware, through this re-discovery of himself by himself, of having and being a ‘mind of his own.’ ” (Hegel, 1964: 239) At the same time, Hegel warned that this could be “a type of freedom which does not get beyond the attitude of bondage.” (240) It could become “a piece of cleverness which has mastery within a certain range, but not over the universal power not over the entire objective reality.” (240) To have only an initial, and thus incomplete negation, would mean to be caught in such an “attitude of bondage.” Hegel proceeded to how “a mind of one’s own” would fijirst begin to be practiced in the section “Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.” Here the attitudes manifested were not fully free, even though the bondsman had discovered a mind of his own. Something more was needed if the bondsman’s development was to truly be a self-development on its own ground.

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This limitation of an initial or fijirst negation is further seen in Phenomenology in the section “Spirit in Self-Estrangement: The Discipline of Culture and Civilization.” Here Spirit, the drive toward freedom, becomes self-estranged when it attempts to generate its own world in opposition to the actual world, to the objective reality before it that oppresses and limits it: “Spirit in this case, therefore, constructs not merely one world, but a twofold world, divided and self-opposed.”(510) The selfopposition tells us that while Spirit has begun to create a world diffferent from the world it was born into (a world of unfreedom), it fijinds an internal opposition in its creation. Self-alienated spirit itself breaks up into two spheres, two kingdoms. In one, “self-consciousness is actually both self and its object, and in another we have the kingdom of pure consciousness, which … exists for Faith, is matter of Belief.” (511) Spirit in constructing its own world in opposition to the given reality becomes “pure Insight,” with its own deep self-opposition: “This insight, being the self grasping itself, completes the state of culture. It takes up nothing but the self, and everything as the self, i.e., it comprehends everything, extinguishes all objectiveness.” (512) Hegel here had in mind Enlightenment’s opposition to a world of faith and superstition. Enlightenment’s manner of fijighting faith and superstition is revolutionary in “bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of Here and Now.” (512) However, rather than directly confronting and overcoming the alien reality of faith and superstition, Enlightenment chooses to create its own separate world, and thus ends up halting Spirit’s self-development. Rather than being a pathway for Spirit’s further development in opposition to an alien reality, such pure insight is narrowly defijined as a negative, an opposition to faith, that is in fact, defijined by what it opposes, ending as a mirror-image of faith: The sphere of spirit at this stage breaks up into two regions. The one is the actual world, that of self-estrangement, the other is that which spirit constructs for itself in the ether of pure consciousness, raising itself above the fijirst. This second world, being constructed in opposition and contrast to that estrangement, is just on that account not free from it. (513)

Spirit in Self-Estrangement seeks to construct a separate world in opposition and contrast to the actual world, but in constructing it “in the ether of pure consciousness,” Spirit has not fully posed a challenge to the existing world in its totality, has not confronted the totality of objectivity. It does not become a Spirit that freely self-develops. It remains within the

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orbit of that existing world. It generates “a world of its own creation” but it cannot gain “freedom from it and in it.” What Hegel found not fully present—whether in how the bondsman began to practice with a mind of one’s own, or in how Enlightenment confronted Faith and superstition—was another kind of negation, one which went beyond a simple negation or opposition, or for that matter, a series of negations, “no’s”, all of which remained determined by or defijined by what was being critiqued. Hegel posed not alone a negation or a series of negations, but a negation of the negation, that is, a second negation that was an opposition to the fijirst negation. This opposition to the fijirst negation did not simply return one to the original starting point, to the old. Rather than depending on the original object of critique, this second negation no longer refers only to the fijirst negation. It is a negation of itself free from any dependence of the original starting point, which becomes external to this second negation. Because the second negation is free from the original external object, what emerges in the second negation is the development of something independent and new. This is the positive that emerges from the negative, the creativity of second negation. Marx, in singling out “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle” from Hegel, grasped the richness of second negativity and re-created it in his positing the inseparability of a through-going critique of capitalism and the posing of human power which would be its own end: …because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation, from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only the act of creation, the history of the origin of man. (“Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Marx, 1975a)

These were not alone theoretical or philosophical questions for Marx. They came to be expressed in the real world. The original opposition to capitalism by communism, its essence captured in the abolition of private property, was seen by Marx as the necessary, but only initial (fijirst) negation. Continued no further, it would only mean the universalization of private property, a generalized or collective private property. A further transcendence was needed. A negation of the original negation. It is from this second negation that the new, truly independent would emerge, in Marx’s words, a through-going naturalism or humanism—a positive Humanism beginning from itself. Marx posed this in writing on the need

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for a transcendence of positive communism as the form of human society developed: Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society. (“Private Property and Communism,” Marx, 1975a)

This view emerged in his 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. It would be the foundation for Marx’s emancipatory thought and practice throughout his life. We can see this re-creation of the dialectic in a work like his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, a critique of a supposedly revolutionary socialist program, where Marx refused to separate the destruction of the old—that is, what would be necessary for uprooting capitalist production’s labor theory of value in the lower phase of communism— from the posing of a new humanism, the higher phase of communism wherein: after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want, after the productive forces have also increased with the allaround development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirely and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (Marx, 1989a)

One simply cannot think about Marx’s Marxism without at the same time coming to grips with negation of the negation, Hegel’s dialectic of absolute negativity. III. Can We See Hegel’s Absolutes, Not as a Closed Totality, but As New Beginning? In turning to the Absolutes we need to see them not as a separate entity of the dialectic, but as much a dialectical starting point as a culmination. Every beginning, noted Hegel, must be made in the Absolute. Yet, it is absolute only in its completion. Each of Hegel’s major writings culminates in a diffferent form of the absolute: Absolute Knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Absolute Idea in the Science of Logic, and Absolute Spirit in the Philosophy of Spirit (Mind). We will take up their

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independence and distinctiveness. At the same time it is their interrelatedness, a resonance between them, an interpenetration that we need to explore as well. A. Absolute Knowledge (Knowing) Hegel begins the chapter on Absolute Knowledge with the need to move beyond revealed religion where Spirit “has not yet surmounted its attitude of consciousness as such.” The Absolute posed is not a separate walledofff pinnacle, but is already present in the various “shapes or modes” consciousness has assumed in the Phenomenology. Indeed, Absolute Knowledge is the very odyssey Spirit has undertaken to reach its full flowering. Yet, with Absolute Knowledge we have not reached a resting point; we are not standing motionless on a mountaintop. Rather there is a twofold movement within: (1) an externalization of self-consciousness that establishes thinghood, “positing itself as object, or the object as itself.” This negation is not merely a negative, but contains a second negation, a positive signifijicance, and thus a second movement; (2) self-consciousness supersedes this externalization and “is thus at home with itself in its otherness as such.” Hegel expresses this twofold movement as follows: The object as a whole is the mediated result (the syllogism) or the passing of universality into individuality through specifijication, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through specifijication, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through canceled individuality or specifijic determination. (Hegel, 1964: 790)

This movement has characterized Phenomenology from Consciousness, Self-Consciousness and Reason to Spirit, Religion, and now Absolute Knowledge: “These three specifijic aspects, then, determine the ways in which consciousness must know the object as itself.” (790) Hegel has here, at the end of the Phenomenology, brought forth the categories that will form the heart of his yet to be written Science of Logic. Universal, Particular, and Individual have become the vantage point from which Hegel recollects his “voyage of discovery” and foresees the philosophic journey to come. He writes of the movement from universal to individual through the particular being a two-way movement. One can begin either with the universal and strive toward the individual or the reverse. The movement in either direction is through negation, a double negation through which a new sphere is created/shaped. It is a dual rhythm of destruction and creation.

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Here, are we not viewing the manner by which Otherness is aufheben in the fullness of Hegel’s usage as uplifting, abolishing, transcending? As we have moved from consciousness to self-consciousness to reason, the individual has continually confronted the universal as an Other, as distinct from itself. Through the process of confronting that Other, of reaching out, externalizing itself, the individual discovers/becomes itself, in fullness. The barrier of the Other is overcome by this twofold movement, an externalization of the individual to the universal and at the same time an internalization, a recollection of all previous forms. The individual internalizes the various forms of the universal as its own, seeking to become at home with itself in its Otherness. In internalizing the universal, the individual moves to overcome the barriers and contradictions faced. In meeting and transcending the barriers, both the universal and individual become Other than they are. This process is a double negation, so that the two movements of externalization and internalizing are not separate, but a twofold movement. The whole that has been immanent from the beginning of the Phenomenology comes to fruition as a concrete universal: “Spirit has attained the notion, it unfolds its existence.” Hegel wrote of this being a “mediated result’ as opposed to any immediacy. The whole journey of the Phenomenology, the “experiences of consciousness,” has been such a mediation, one involving a “labor, patience and sufffering of the negative.” Only in the chapter on Absolute Knowledge can we see the journey as a totality, see this continual Othering and at the same moment, this overcoming the foreignness of the Other. Most crucially, it is when Spirit itself, rather than we as observers, sees/experiences this unfolding as the fullness of its own existence, including a recognition of the Other, that the moment/movement of Absolute Knowledge arrives. After presenting us with the categories of individual, particular, and universal, Hegel takes us on a journey back through the Phenomenology: To understand this method of grasping the object, where apprehension is a shape or mode of consciousness, we have here only to recall the previous shapes of consciousness which came before us earlier in the argument. (791)

The journey is to show us Spirit coming to knowledge of itself: “Spirit certain of itself in its objective existence takes as the element of its existence nothing else than this knowledge of self.” (793) The knowledge of self is not limited to immediateness, nor a determinate existence, but must encompass as well a third moment, universality, an essence or inner reality. Only when all these moments unite do we arrive at the Notion that has become “systematic Science.”

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Again and again Hegel tries to show us that Absolute Knowledge is not a “tool” for grasping stages of consciousness. Rather it is itself the totality of the movement, the immanence of the whole present as the very movement through the shapes and modes of consciousness. It is conscious that that is indeed what it is: The nature, moments and process of this knowledge have then shown themselves to be such that this knowledge is pure self-existence of selfconsciousness. (798)  Spirit which at once gives its complete and true content the form of self, and thereby realizes its notion, and in doing so remains within its own notion—this is Absolute Knowledge. (737)

We are in the realm where “the content is the spirit which traverses the whole range of its own being, and does this for itself qua spirit, by the fact that it poses the shape of the notion in its objectivity.” (738) This is no mere abstraction. Traversing the whole range of its own being is none other than the experiences of consciousness that have been undertaken in the Phenomenology from sense-certainty to Absolute Knowledge. Hegel returns us to the fact that such a concept of Spirit can only come forth after undergoing this totality of experience: Science does not arrive in time and reality till spirit has arrive at this stage of being conscious regarding itself. Qua spirit that knows what it is, it does not exist before, and is not to be found at all till after the completion of the task of mastering and constraining its imperfect embodiment.(798–99)

Again and again Hegel goes over the task of Spirit, the labor that Spirit must undertake to bring itself to fullness: Self-consciousness enriches itself till it has torn from consciousness the entire substance, and absorbed into itself the entire structure of the substance with all its constituent elements. Since this negative attitude towards objectivity is positive as well, establishes and fijixes the content, it goes on till it has produced these elements out of itself and thereby reinstated them once more as objects of consciousness. In the notion, knowing itself as notion, the moments thus make their appearance prior to the whole in its complete fulfijillment; the movement of these moments is the process by which the whole comes into being. (799–800)

We now enter the pages of Absolute Knowledge where Hegel has been accused of annulling time, extinguishing history: Hence spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time so long as it does not grasp its pure notion, i.e., so long as it does not annul time. …

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Time therefore appears as spirit’s destiny and necessity, where spirit is not yet complete within itself. (800)

This has been interpreted as the most extreme idealism, with Hegel having spirit control, and fijinally annul time. But is this what Hegel is arguing? All of the Phenomenology until Absolute Knowledge has shown time as history shaping spirit, bringing spirit again and again to a realization of its incompleteness. It is through history (time) that spirit comes to a fuller, richer meaning, a grasping of itself as spirit. Only at the end of this process is time “annulled.” Is the annulling not of actual time, but of philosophic time? Philosophy, once it has reached Absolute Knowledge, Science, does not have to repeat all the phenomenological stages of spirit’s existence. Now philosophy as science, conscious of itself as spirit, cognizant of the pathways it took to become Absolute Knowledge, is no longer dependent on time in the form of the collection of experiences we call history for its further shaping. In fact as Absolute Knowledge, as Absolute Negativity, it can comprehend and perhaps now shape the experiences of the future. It is not only the Idea that strives to meet reality, but reality that strives to meet the Idea. Spirit as Absolute Knowledge has taken in the various shapes and modes of consciousness and made them its own, so that both those modes of consciousness and the ongoing reality become shaped in a new way, in a new realm. The new way of shaping comes from the illumination cast, the actual force of the Idea, when it has become Spirit in the form of Absolute Knowledge. J.N. Findlay interprets this section of Hegel as follows: He [Hegel] is holding that it is only by achieving self-consciousness through a temporal process that self-conscious Spirit can be at all. Time, so far from being unreal, is the very form of that creative unrest which represents Spirit as it becomes conscious of itself. Hegel certainly says that, in the fijinal insight of philosophy, Time will be expunged or annulled, but this ‘annulment’ stands for no metaphysical or theological timelessness, but for an annulment in and for philosophy. It means that, for the philosopher, concepts are universal and principles true, and that the precise moment at which anyone appropriates them is completely unimportant. ( Findlay, 1958: 146)

An interpretation that argues for the annulment of time upon reaching Absolute Knowledge does not seem justifijied. The process of arriving at Absolute Knowledge has been one where experience through time, history, is crucial. Hegel’s Phenomenology is saturated with experience even if experience is often in a veiled, mystifijied form:

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prologue For this reason it must be said that nothing is known that does not fall within experience, or (as it is also expressed) that is not felt to be true. (Hegel, 1964, 800)  Consequently, until and unless spirit inherently completes itself, completes itself as a world-spirit, it cannot reach its completion as self-conscious spirit. (831)

We can certainly disagree with Hegel over what he felt made up this “world spirit,” a world spirit, which, when he chose to put it in human terms for peoples and whole continents, was often done in a prejudiced, narrow manner. But can we not incorporate into our own thinking, Hegel’s profound dialectical conception of the experiences of the world giving shape to Spirit, and Spirit in turn shaping the world once it has become Absolute Knowledge – “The process of carrying forward this form of knowledge of itself is the task which spirit accomplishes as actual History” (831)–and labor on a re-expression, indeed re-creation, which embraces all the peoples of the world? Throughout the Phenomenology we watch as Spirit seeks to overcome foreignness fijirst by one method then by another–stoicism, skepticism, unhappy consciousness, and so on. Here in the chapter on Absolute Knowledge, Hegel is arguing that no such alien (external) method will do. Only by fijinding within Spirit itself the means to do it can it be done: Not till it has surrendered the hope of canceling that foreignness by an external, i.e., alien method does it turn to itself, to its own peculiar world in the actual present. It turns thither because to supersede that alien method means return into self-consciousness. It thus discovers this world in the living present to be its own property. (832)

Again and again, Hegel presents incomplete methods, only to come back to his own Absolute Method: Spirit … externalizes itself of self and sinks itself within its own substance and qua subject, each has gone out of that substance into itself, making its substance an object and a content, and also supersedes this distinction of objectivity and content. … The power of spirit lies rather in remaining one with itself when giving up itself. (804)

When we reach Absolute Knowledge we are not standing stock still. Rather, Hegel’s method is in Absolute Movement. Spirit far from being Absolute in a “fulfijilled” sense, is rather a “process of releasing itself from the form of its self.” This for Hegel is “the highest freedom and security of its knowledge of itself.” Even this release, “the relinquishment (externalization) of self is still incomplete.” Hegel now takes up this externalization

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of spirit in two forms: Space, Spirit passing into Nature, and Spirit “externalized and emptied into time” or coming to be as History. Nature for Hegel is Spirit’s living immediate process of development. Hegel writes that Nature is “this eternal process of abandoning its own independent subsistence, and the movement which reinstates Subject.” (809) Hegel chooses not to develop the relationship of Nature and Spirit further at this point. Rather he moves to the other aspect in which Spirit comes into being, History. Spirit seems to have given itself up to its Otherness, whether that Otherness be as Nature or as History. However the externalization into Time undergoes a second negation: “the negative is negative of itself.” (807) As such, “Spirit leaves its external existence behind and gives its embodiment over to Recollection (Erinnerung).” (807) This is the precise point where a number of commentators have interpreted Hegel as annulling time and thus history. While Hegel writes, “Spirit is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness,” (807) and seems to shut out all reality, in fact a very diffferent kind of death and new birth is taking place. As we will see shortly, in this fijinal paragraph of Phenomenology, it is Absolute Spirit itself which will undergo Golgotha. We have reached “the new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit.” (807) Here we would argue that experience (history) is not lost, but through a recollection (erinnerung), that is, an internalization, it is conserved. History moves from being contingency to being intellectually comprehended. Let us follow Hegel through the rest of this fijinal paragraph. It is true that we are at a new embodiment of Spirit and Hegel says Spirit has to “begin all over again in its immediacy … as if, for it, all that preceded were lost.” (807) But he immediately writes: “Re-collection has conserved that experience, and is the inner being, and, in fact, the higher form of the substance.” (807–08) We read this to mean that history is not annulled, but preserved in a diffferent form. What is this new stage of existence of Spirit? Hegel gives us a revelation of the depth and extension of Spirit in its new embodiment. We fijind, at one and the same time, spirit’s existence in its extension and in its depth. The externalization and the internalization are not two separate moments, but a simultaneous process, in which a deeper extension–reaching out to history and nature – is at the same time a deeper internalization, diving into itself: “This externalization in its very nature relinquishes (externalizes) itself, and so exists at once in its spatial ‘extension’ as well as in its ‘depth’ or the self.” (808) Spirit in the form of Absolute Knowledge has on one level abolished the opposition between knowledge and being, and

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thus on one level Spirit has come to be “at home with itself in its otherness”: The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, fijinds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conservation, looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears. (808)

Here we have Spirit’s extension to history and its deepening to reach “intellectual (philosophically) comprehended organization” or Science. We appear to have reached the goal. But then comes the shock: “Both together, or History (intellectually) comprehended, form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.” (808) We now have, not history annulled, but the death of Absolute Spirit! A “new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit” has become necessary. And with it, new forms of the Other. Resolution must be sought elsewhere. A new beginning is undertaken in the Science of Logic. We turn to its fijinal chapter, Absolute Idea. At the same time, so rich are Hegel’s labors in Absolute Knowledge that we will be compelled to continue in Phenomenology as well. B. Absolute Idea On the fijinal page of the Phenomenology Hegel presented us with the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit. However, in the Preface of Phenomenology, penned after the Absolute Knowledge chapter, he writes: But the life of mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures death and in death maintains its being. It only wins its truth when it fijinds itself utterly torn asunder. It is this mighty power, not by being a positive which turns away from the negative, as when we say of anything it is nothing or it is false, and, being then done with it, pass offf to something else: on the contrary, mind is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and dwelling with it. (93)

In Absolute Knowledge, Spirit becomes universal self-consciousness, the thought of itself or Science. It is led there through the unfolding of the experiences of consciousness, Spirit saturated with experience, reaching the Absolute: its consciousness of itself as Spirit. The very manner of its journey allows Absolute Spirit, in undergoing Golgotha, to maintain its being and be born in a new form at the same time it is being torn asunder.

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This new form is speculative logic, in Jean Hyppolite’s words a “spiritualized logic.” (Hyppolite, 1969) Though the determinate concepts in the Science of Logic are diffferent from the fijigures of consciousness of the Phenomenology, there is a profound congruence between the culmination of the former and the manner of movement within the latter. I want to call attention to two moments within the Absolute Knowledge chapter, which become important dimensions of the discussion of Absolute Idea in the Logic. The fijirst, which we have taken up in the previous section, is Hegel’s discussion of the categories Universal, Particular (specifijication), and Individual: “These three specifijic aspects, then, determine the ways in which consciousness must know the object as itself.” (808) With these categories as the method for grasping the object, Hegel recalls the previous shapes of consciousness which formed Phenomenology’s journey. At the same time, these are the categories that form the heart of the Science of Logic. They constitute the major foundations for the Doctrine of the Notion, the fijinal part of the Logic, the concluding chapter of which is the Absolute Idea. “Spiritualized Logic” is a logic that is more than itself. Throughout the Science of Logic it demands movement. It is itself and its Other. The same movement of overcoming Otherness as fijigures of consciousness in the Phenomenology is seen in the “spirit of contradicting” determinate concepts found in the Science of Logic. Dialectics, as a dialectics of negativity, a double negation from Universal, through Specifijicity to Individual and the reverse, is at work in the Phenomenology and in the Science of Logic. Hegel writes of this concordance of Logic and Phenomenology in his Preface to the fijirst edition of the Logic: This movement of Mind, which in its simplicity gives itself its determinateness and hence self-equality, and which thus is the immanent development of the Notion–this movement is the Absolute Method of knowledge, and at the same time the immanent soul of the Content of knowledge. – It is, I maintain, along this path of self-construction alone that Philosophy can become objective and demonstrate science. – It is after this fashion that I have tried to present consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. (Hegel, 1929 Volume I: 36–37)

The second moment: The concluding pages of Absolute Knowledge have Spirit passing into Nature, and emptied into Time, Spirit as the unfolding of History. Hegel thus projects his philosophic labors in the Science of Logic and in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. In turn, the concluding pages of the Logic have the Absolute Idea releasing itself as

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Nature, then “out of externality” passes “to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit.” What we will examine now is that, as in Absolute Knowledge, Absolute Idea is no pinnacle, no end of philosophy, though it may conclude Hegel’s System. Absolute Negativity, the Absolute Movement of Becoming, is not only with us in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic but continues even when we are within their fijinal chapters, the Absolutes of Knowledge and Idea. In both cases, new beginnings are to be found. We have examined that in the Phenomenology and will proceed to do so in the Logic. In the movement through the very diffferent contents of Phenomenology and Logic, and in the manner in which their Absolutes culminate in new beginnings in other realms, there is an interweaving of Hegel’s “voyage of discovery” and his “system.” The Absolute Idea chapter of the Science of Logic begins with a unity and a contradiction: The Absolute Idea has now turned out to be the identity of the Theoretical and the Practical idea. … The Absolute Idea, as the reasonable Notion which in its reality coincides only with itself, is the return to Life by reason of this immediacy of its objective identity; but on the other hand, it has equally transcended this form of its immediacy and contains the highest opposition within itself. (Volume 2, 466)

Though we have reached the Absolute Idea, we have not overthrown contradiction, we still face Otherness and negation. The ceaseless dialectic movement has not stopped. The unfolding and attempt at resolution of this Otherness, “the highest opposition within itself,” is the focal point of the Absolute Idea chapter. Here everything will concentrate on method, the Absolute Method, which is at once unfolding and resolution. In expressing this “Absolute Cognition,” immediacy and mediation, analytic and synthetic, negation and negation of the negation, otherness as “its own other” and as “an other of an other,” are all taken up as Hegel brings the Idea toward “an absolute liberation, having no further immediate determination,” where there is “no transition in this freedom,” and “the Idea freely releases itself.” (484, 486) And yet even here at the very end of the Science of Logic, there is no rest. Rather, the spheres of “Nature,” and most crucially, Mind or Spirit–“Notion … aris[e] to perfect its selfliberation in the Philosophy of Spirit (Mind)” (484, 486) – are posited. A new beginning is posed. Let us follow this movement in greater detail. In reaching Absolute Idea, “determinateness has not the shape of a content, but is simply as form … the Universal Idea.” The unfolding of the Idea

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is its only goal: “The self-determination therefore in which alone the Idea is, is to hear itself speak.” (467) The manner by which the Idea does so is the method: “What remains therefore to be considered here is not a content as such, but the universal element of its form, that is, the method.” The method is “no more than the movement of the Notion itself.” It is a “self-determining and self-realizing movement.” The method therefore is both “soul and substance, and nothing is either conceived or known in its truth except in so far as it is completely subject to the method.” (468) Absolute method is in contrast to inquiring cognition, which sees method as a “tool.” “True cognition” is not “a quality of certain determinations.” Instead: Notion “is determined in and for itself.” The method “is posited in its identity with the subjective Notion.” The beginning of such “Notion-forming thought” “is simple and universal,” an “immediate.” But, “the realization of the whole Notion is demanded,” which is not the beginning, but is “the goal and task of the entire further development of cognition.” The “pure and simple” beginning is vitiated because of the drive of self-development: “The immediate element of the beginning must be inherently defective and must be endowed with the impulse of self-development.” (471) For Hegel, “there is nothing as simple and abstract as is commonly imagined.” Every beginning has inherent within it the absolute, “must be made from the absolute.” And yet, “it is absolute only in its completion.” (472) Thus, “the concrete totality which is the beginning contains as such the beginning of progress and of development.” (472) The Absolute Method is the manner by which it comes to the fullness of itself: the absolute method fijinds and recognizes in itself the determination of universal … [It] does not hold the position of external reflection; it draws the determinate element directly from its object itself, since it is the object’s immanent principle and soul. (472)

The method, Absolute Cognition, is said to be equally analytic and synthetic. But precisely here Hegel, who strenuously resists the fijixity of defijinitions, succinctly poses for us the concept of the dialectic moment: “This equally synthetic and analytic moment … by which the original universal determines itself out of itself to be its own other, may rightly be called the dialectic moment.” (472) For the next several pages, Hegel will present anew this driving force of the Method, dialectics. He will reach a most provocative and human concept of negation of the negation:

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prologue It is the innermost and most objective moment of Life and Spirit by virtue of which a subject is personal and free. (478)  (The innermost, most objective moment of life and spirit, through which a subject, a person, a free being, exists.) (Hegel, 1969: 835–36)

Let’s trace these pages. On the fijirst page of the Absolute Idea chapter the Notion is seen to have personality and contradiction, atomic subjectivity and universal, and is found to contain its Other: The Notion is not only Seele but also is free and subjective Notion, which is for itself and therefore has personality; – the practical and objective Notion, determined in and for itself, which, as person, is impenetrable and atomic subjectivity; while at the same time it is not exclusive individuality, but is, for itself, universality and cognition, and in its other has its own objectivity for object. (Hegel, 1929, Volume 2: 456)

Here the Notion as Absolute Idea, has in view its Other as “its own objectivity.” Put this beside Hegel’s expression of the dialectic moment: “the original universal determines itself out of itself to be its own Other, may rightly be called the dialectic moment.” (473) Are we viewing the same Other, or has Hegel posed for us a diffferent Other? Do we have within the dialectic moment, two moments, wherein a fijirst negation poses the Other in itself, and a second negation, a negation of the negation, poses the Other of an Other? Can one separate these moments, or are they a unifijied double rhythm, which one separates or stops only by putting in peril, indeed breaking apart, the dialectic moment? “Any fijirst term considered in and for itself shows itself to be its own Other.” (475–76) The fijirst term which was immediate, turns out to be mediated and related to an Other. No term can be accepted as an immediate, it is subjected to mediation and related to an Other. The universal becomes particularized, undergoing fijirst negation: “the immediate has become submerged in the Other,” (476) but this other is not an “empty Negative,” but as the Other of the fijirst term, it is “determined as mediated” and “contains the determination of the fijirst.” The fijirst term is not abolished but “preserved in the Other.” The Other is not overcome, but transformed by its taking in of the fijirst term. The dialectic moment of Spirit and its Other is neither a swallowing up of Identity nor an abolishing of the Other. Instead: “To hold fast the positive in its negative, and the content of the presupposition in the result, is the most important part of rational cognition.” (476) The second term, the mediated term at fijirst is itself an immediate. But it is “at the same time the mediating determination.” (476–77) It is a negative, but of the positive and includes the latter:

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It is not therefore the Other of a term to which it is indiffferent, for thus it would be neither an Other, nor a reference or relation; it is the Other in itself, the Other of an Other. It thus includes its own Other, and so is contradiction, or the posited dialectic of itself. (477)

Hegel will here hit out against formal thought [that] makes identity its law, and allows the contradictory content … to drop into the sphere of sensuous representation, into space and time, where the contradictory terms are held apart in spatial and temporal juxtaposition and thus come before consciousness without being in contact. (477)

Hegel refuses to let contradiction disappear. Those who see Hegel as a philosopher of identity, of an Absolute spirit that swallows up all Otherness, have not dove deeply enough into the Hegelian concept of “the thinking of contradiction [that] is the essential moment of the Notion.” (477) Otherness is not merely something for Spirit to overcome. Otherness is the lifeblood of Absolute Spirit. Now that we have reached the second negation, the negation of the negation, Hegel will not let us rest: The negativity which has just been considered is the turning-point of the movement of the Notion. It is the simple point of negative self-relation, the innermost source of all activity, of living and spiritual self-movement, the dialectic soul which all truth has in it and through which it alone is truth; for the transcendence of the opposition between the Notion and Reality, and that unity which is the truth, rest upon this subjectivity alone. (477)

Here, at second negativity, is where Hegel’s concept of subjectivity embraces humanity. If there is not a corporeal presence, there is, “the moment of Life and Spirit, by virtue of which a subject is personal and free”: The second negative, the negative of the negative which we have reached, is this transcendence of the contradiction, but is no more the activity of an external reflection than the contradiction is: it is the inner most and most objective moment of Life and virtue of which a subject is personal and free. (477–78)

We have traveled from the beginning of “The Absolute Idea” with the Notion “which, as person is impenetrable and atomic subjectivity” but “in its Other has its own objectivity for object,” to the subjectivity of second negativity, this transcendence of the contradiction, to reach “the innermost and most objective moment of Life and spirit, by virtue of which a subject is personal and free.” The method that has brought us here is the movement of the Notion, the dialectic moment. It transcends the barriers

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between immediacy and mediation to reveal each within the other, between fijirst and second negation to show their inseparability as a dual moment of transformation, between Spirit and Otherness, to reveal their integrality to Absolute Method. We have been witness to an unfolding of the Absolute Idea driven by Absolute Negativity, an Absolute Idea that is Absolute Negativity. There is no quiescence, absolute negativity abounds. Double negation arrives at a third term which is “self-mediating movement and activity. The beginning was the universal, the result is the individual, the concrete, and the subject.” (479) The fijirst two moments, the universal and particular, are “abstract and false moments, which for this very reason are dialectical and make themselves into the subject by virtue of this their negativity.” (480) Only with the movement from the universal in itself through the negative for itself do you arrive at the form of the Notion that is in and for itself, “in which it mediates itself with itself through its negativity, and is thus posited for itself as the universal and the identity of its moments.” (480) [The Notion] has recovered the form of immediacy. It is thus an entity of the same kind as the beginning had determined itself to be. As simple selfrelation it is a universal, and the negativity that constituted its dialectic and mediation has, in this universality, also collapsed into a simple determinateness that in turn can be a beginning.(480)

The result is “the new foundation, but the method remains the same as the previous foundation.” We now move from merely form to “the content of cognition” and thus “method itself is extended into a system.” (480) We have returned to the beginning. Now, however, “determinateness is the next truth of the indeterminate beginning.” The beginning “shall be taken not as immediate but as meditative and derivative.” (481) Being, essence, universality appeared as “absolutely fijirst beginnings.” Indeed, “the indeterminateness which these logical beginnings have for sole content precisely constitutes their determinateness.” This determinateness consists of negativity, which “imparts a particularity to their indeterminateness.” (481) On the one side determinateness comes from self-mediation, which “makes the immediate beginning a mediated entity.” On the other, in running its course, the method restores the beginning, now as a determinate beginning, but equally a “transcended determinateness,” which restores “the fijirst indeterminateness with which the method began.” (482) The method has arrived at “a system of totality,” the determination of which is to be considered. This system of totality is not closed, its determinateness “is itself a new beginning.” (482) Otherness is certainly key to

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the development of a new beginning. But Hegel is not privileging Otherness: The universal is the foundation; the progress therefore must not be taken as a flow from Other to Other. In the absolute method the Notion preserves itself in its otherness and the universal in its particularization in the Judgment and in reality. (482)

In not flowing from Other to Other Hegel has not put Other on a pinnacle as the determinate. The method raises to each next stage of determination the whole mass of its antecedent content and by its dialectical progress not only loses nothing and leaves nothing behind but carries with it all that it has acquired enriching and concentrating itself upon itself. (482–83)

This expansion it should be noted is only the fijirst premise, the fijirst negation. “But the relation also has the second (the negative or dialectic) side.” Here each determination is an intro-Reflection. Each new stage of exteriorization (that is of further determination) is also an interiorization and greater extension is also higher intensity. The richest consequently is also the most concrete and subjective term, and that which carries itself back into the simplest depth is also the most powerful and comprehensive. (483)

Exteriorization (reaching out to Otherness) and interiorization (the internalization of Notion) should not be seen as opposites but as part of the same moment. Otherness is at the heart of Hegel’s concept of the Notion, not as what Notion needs to absorb or overcome, but as the very shaper and creator of Notion. Notion is transformed by Other as Other is transformed by Notion. Notion and its Other are inseparable because the Method, absolute negativity, contains them both. Can we not relate this to exteriorization and internalization that one sees in the last part of the Absolute Knowledge chapter of Phenomenology? The goal which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit fijinds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conservation looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency is History; looked at from the side of their intellectual comprehended organization it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears. Both together or History (intellectually) comprehended form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit the reality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless, solitary, and alone. (Hegel, 1964: 808)

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Hegel expresses exteriorization and interiorization as a progress of further determination, which is also a rearward approach as the method “thus forms a circle.” This form of a circle has been interpreted as being the “proof” of the “closedness” of Hegel’s system, much as it has been argued that the Absolute Knowledge chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit is a closed entity. Hegel adds that this circle is “a circle of circles” in which each member both returns to the beginning and is at the same time, “the beginning of a new member.” Isn’t this circle of circles perhaps best seen as a spiral because of the temporal development, history, and thus open to, indeed dependent upon Otherness, even when it has reached Absolute Idea? Though Logic has comprehended its own Notion and returned to its beginning, there is at the same moment a diffferent kind of new beginning, a diffferent sphere: In so far as the pure Idea of Cognition is enclosed in subjectivity, and therefore is an impulse to transcend the latter; and, as last result, the pure truth becomes the beginning of another sphere and science. (Hegel, 1929, Volume 2: 485)

As a circle of circles the Science of Logic has comprehended its own notion. In the idea of Absolute Cognition the Notion becomes its own content. But the impulse to transcend means transcend itself. “The pure truth” becomes the beginning of another sphere and science. This new sphere is fijirst, Nature: the idea posits itself as the absolute unity of pure Notion and its Reality, and thus gathers itself into the immediacy of Being; and in doing so, as totality in this form, it is Nature. (435)

There is an absolute liberation, there is no transition in this freedom: “The transition here therefore must rather be taken to mean that the Idea freely releases itself in absolute self-security and self-repose.” (484) Here we are at the Philosophy of Nature: “the science of the Idea in its otherness” (Hegel, 1873: paragraph 18) At the same time there is a second sphere: “The Philosophy of Mind (Spirit): the science of the idea come back to itself out of that otherness.” (paragraph 18) The next resolution of the pure idea “arises to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit, and to discover the highest Notion of itself in that logical science as the pure Notion which forms a Notion of itself.” (Hegel, 1929, Volume 2: 486) Just as at the conclusion of Absolute Knowledge, Hegel has the Golgotha of Absolute Knowledge and thus the need to continue in the sphere of Logic, so here Logic does not remain alone enclosed in a circle of circles.

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A new sphere, Philosophy of Spirit, emerges for the shaping of Spirit and its Other. Its culmination is Absolute Spirit, a further new beginning. C. Absolute Spirit Philosophy of Spirit (Mind) emerges out of Philosophy of Nature and is described as “the science of the Idea come back to itself out of that otherness.” Because Nature is presupposition for Spirit in this context, the relationship of Other and Spirit at the beginning of Philosophy of Spirit has the form of a Spirit overcoming, devouring, its Other. But is this true at the level of Absolute Spirit? There are three points we want to have before us in following this relationship. First, nature is not “an out-and-out Other.” Rather, the Idea has been released to “go forth freely as Nature” at the end of the Logic. (Hegel, 1873: paragraph 244) It takes the form of a “transition from necessity to freedom … a progression through many stages, whose exposition constitutes the Philosophy of Nature.” (Hegel, 1971: paragraph 381) Second, the substance of Spirit is freedom, liberty. (paragraph 382) It is freedom in more than one sense: It is “the absence of dependence on an Other,” but “not won outside of the Other, but won in it.” It is a Spirit that discovers its essence as liberty in world-history, and thus “the spiritual activity is directly to an object that is active in itself.” (paragraph 379) It is a liberty to be made concrete: “When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality.” (paragraph 482) Third, in the culmination of Philosophy of Spirit, Absolute Spirit (Mind), the relation between Spirit and Other is re-created once again. The concept of Other is no longer what emerged out of the Philosophy of Nature, but an Other, which joins Spirit within the Self-Thinking Idea. At the beginning of Philosophy of Spirit, Spirit is an “absolutely restless being … negating … every fijixed category.” (paragraph 378 Zusatz.) Its distinctive determinateness is, “the reduction of the idea’s otherness to a moment, the process of returning – and the accomplished return – into itself of the idea from its Other.” (paragraph 381 Zusatz.) The Other as Nature is here simply, a representation of the Idea … in nature, the Idea appears in the element of asunderness, is external not only to mind but also to itself, precisely because it is external to that actual, self-existent inwardness which constitutes, the essential nature of mind. (paragraph 381 Zusatz.)

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The relationship of Spirit and Other becomes, “the triumph over externality … Every activity of mind is nothing but a distinct mode of reducing what is external to the inwardness which mind itself is.” (paragraph 381 Zusatz.) Thus, all the initiative rests with Spirit. But even with a passive, inanimate Other, the Other is not simply annihilated. Rather, it is the sense of otherness of Other that is overcome: Mind posits Nature as a reflectedness-into-self, as its world, strips Nature of its form of otherness and converts the Other confronting it into something it has itself posited; but, at the same time, this Other still remains independent of mind, something immediately given, not posited but only presupposed by mind, as something, therefore, the positing of which is antecedent to reflective thought. (paragraph 384)

However, “a diffferent relationship obtains with the mind or spirit that makes world-history.” (paragraph 381 Zusatz.) Here the Other is not “a merely passive object,” but “an object which has spontaneously worked itself up into the result to be brought about by that activity, so that in the activity and in the object, one and the same content is present.” We now have a very diffferent relation of Spirit and Other, a dimension of reciprocity, because the Other is not a passive object, but an Other which can be as self-animating as is Spirit. In fact, even in relation to Nature, Hegel does not give all initiative to Spirit: “philosophy has, as it were, only to watch how nature itself overcomes its externality.” Thus, “Nature is driven onwards beyond itself to mind.” (paragraph 381 Zusatz.) When mind posits Nature as a reflectedness-into-self, as its world, strips Nature of its form of otherness and converts the Other confronting it into something it has itself posited … this Other still remains independent of mind, something immediately given, not posited but only presupposed by mind, as something, therefore, the positing of which is antecedent to reflective thought. (paragraph 384 Zusatz.)

All of this is the relation of Spirit and Other when Spirit is fijinite Spirit, which encompasses the fijirst two parts of Philosophy of Spirit: Subjective Spirit and Objective Mind. For fijinite Spirit, Nature is a limitation that is only overcome by absolute knowledge, Absolute Mind, which is infijinite. It appears as if Absolute Mind will swallow the Other, but we need to probe more fully into Absolute Mind’s relation to Otherness to see if that view is justifijied. The journey of Spirit from subjective spirit through objective spirit to absolute spirit is a journey of liberation, an overcoming of barriers that are not alone external, but which Spirit imposes upon itself, a becoming conscious of freedom as the very being of Spirit, one that is fully manifested, acted out, brought to reality, as Absolute Spirit. In the journey to

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Absolute Spirit, individuality is “purifijied of all that interferes with its universalism, i.e. with freedom itself.” (paragraph 481) The drive to freedom has a “permanent character.” (paragraph 482) The steps in Spirit’s liberation are identifijied in three stages: “fijinding a world presupposed before us, generating a world of our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it.” (paragraph 386) We can dispute Hegel when he excludes whole parts of the world – Africa, Asia, Latin America – from having a concept of this Idea. We can disagree with him as to whether such an Idea came into the world only through Christianity. But we would put our own creation of a concept of liberation at peril, if we were to throw out, disregard, the Idea as the Self-Bringing-Forth of Liberty, a Self-Thinking Idea of Freedom. Finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world of our own creation, returns Spirit through the Phenomenology to the threshold of Absolute Knowledge, much as it brings Idea to the threshold of the Absolute in the Science of Logic, and Spirit to the commencement of Absolute Spirit in Philosophy of Spirit. Gaining freedom from the world and in that world is the leap of second negativity, which posits Spirit in the crucible of the Absolute. It is here where the relation of Spirit and Other is forged anew. In fijinding a world before us, Spirit sees the Other as alien to it, oppressing it, limiting it. In generating a world of our own creation, a leap out of the confijines of the given has been made, but even this does not bring us to Absolute Negativity, does not resolve the question of the Other. That Other can be the oppression of the old world, which is not overcome. Instead, Spirit builds a parallel world, which lies in opposition to the fijirst world, but fails to come in contact with it. That Other can have the intersubjective form of a multiplicity of Others creating their own worlds in opposition to a world presupposed and shackled that lies before them. Are these newly generating worlds conflicting among themselves? Self-determinations that are conflicting? Or can these Others instead contribute to a deepening, a profound enriching of Spirit? The Other has not been done away with; its Otherness not overcome. Rather, a second negation, absolute negativity, not as destruction, but as the working out of a freedom from and in the new worlds generated, remains the task. If diffferent worlds have been generated by other self-determinations, then the only manner to “gain freedom from it and in it,” is a collective one, a collective self-bringing forth of liberation. Here, the Other is not overcome or annihilated in a simple negation. Rather, the intersubjectivity

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of Spirit and Other is one in which both Spirit and its Other are transformed and newly emerge. This is the realm of Absolute Spirit. In Absolute Spirit, the notion of philosophy is “the self-thinking Idea.” (paragraph 574) We stand at the threshold of the fijinal paragraphs, 575, 576, 577, of Philosophy of Spirit, which take the form of three syllogisms. Paragraph 575 is Logic, Nature, Spirit. The form is that of the journey of the Idea through the Encyclopedia of Philosophic Sciences. I stress journey, because Hegel is far from presenting a fijixed syllogistic form. Movement, both within this fijirst syllogism, and in the transformations, which will take place with paragraphs 576 and 577, is at the core. The movement through these fijinal syllogisms is not a priority of one moment over another, not a privileging of Spirit over Other, of identity over diffference, but rather, their uniqueness and inseparability. Here, either the Universal, or the Particular or the Individual can be the starting point for the movement. Paragraph 575 is more than a listing of the parts of the Encyclopedia. Nature is the mediation, a mediation that neither keeps Spirit and Logic apart in “extremes of fijinite abstraction,” nor poses an immediate unity. Instead, the transition between the two is presented as “the course of necessity.” Nature, that is otherness, has not been absorbed, but is mediation: the Idea in the form of otherness. Since the Idea is therefore the negative of itself, or external to itself, nature is not external relative to this Idea (and to the subjective existence of the same – spirit), but is embodied as nature in the determination of externality. (Hegel, 1970: paragraph 247)

Spirit is Spirit only through this mediation. Liberty as self-developing, a “self-amalgamation,” is seen only at “one extreme” of the syllogism. In paragraph 576, Spirit becomes “the mediating agent,” presupposing Nature and turning to Logic. Does this mean that the Phenomenology of Spirit is returned to? Here, “Spirit reflects on itself in the Idea: philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it.” Liberty saturates the syllogism. Freedom, at the end of the Philosophy of Spirit as at the beginning, is rooted within Spirit. We have moved from necessity to freedom. It is true that back in paragraph 187 Zusatze, Hegel had posed in syllogistic form the three branches of philosophy: the Logical Idea, Nature, and Mind, moving from Nature to Mind to Logic as mediation. But in the fijinal syllogisms the discussion is richer, and, in the fijinal paragraph of Absolute Mind, 577, a crucial change occurs. Instead of the Logical Idea becoming the mean, as it does in paragraph 187 Zusatze, Hegel places “the Idea of

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philosophy, which has self-knowing reason, the absolutely universal, for its middle term.” It is not the Logic, but the self-thinking Idea that becomes the unifying moment, bringing together the two appearances of the Idea from paragraphs 575 and 576. It is a remarkable transformation. Instead of posing the System, the Logical Idea, as culmination, Hegel turns to the Self-Thinking Idea, and thus speaks, not of Logic, but of the self-thinking Idea of Spirit as the unifying moment: “it is the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition.” This Self-Thinking Idea is not an Absolute that absorbs, negates, all but itself. It is a mediation, a movement which is equally “the nature of the fact” and “the action of cognition.” Thus the Other is present, only the sense of foreignness of it for Spirit is gone. The Self-Thinking Idea is a twofold moment, containing Spirit and Other as a totality, as it is a twofold movement, an aufheben, which annuls and preserves, a dual rhythm of negation and creation. Dialectical negation is mediation. The Other shapes and creates Spirit as much as Spirit molds and transforms the Other. Hegel has here reached the fullness of the I that is a We and the We that is an I. As one contemporary commentator notes: The We is no fusion or undiffferentiated unity of persons. The We does not necessarily result in such unity, because mutual releasement and forgiveness are conditions of the mutual recognition through which the We emerges as a result. The We stands not for domination or oppression, but for liberation and freedom (Williams, 1992: 301)

The fijinal sentence of Philosophy of Mind reads, “The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Spirit.” One provocative interpretation has the “eternal Idea” not as eternality, but ceaseless motion and thus, “revolution in permanence,” a movement entering upon “the new society.” (“New Thoughts on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” Dunayevskaya, 1989: xxxvii-xliv) Such an interpretation flowing out of Dunayevskaya’s philosophic category of “Absolute Negativity As New Beginning” stands in marked contrast to readings of the Absolutes both by Hegel scholars and by a number of Marxist thinkers, who have concluded that the Absolutes culminate in an end to negativity, an end to history, an absolute idealism or closed totality.

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These three moments of the Hegelian dialectic that we have discussed— the meaning of Spirit, including its relation to Other; the signifijicance of negation of the negation in the dialectic; the philosophic category of Absolute Negativity as New Beginning;—allow us to turn to the central theme of this study: How does a Dialectic of Organization flow out of a Dialectic of Philosophy?

PART ONE

ON SPONTANEOUS FORMS OF ORGANIZATION VS. VANGUARD PARTIES

CHAPTER ONE

MARX’S CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION: FROM THE SILESIAN WEAVERS’ UPRISING TO THE FIRST YEARS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMAN’S ASSOCIATION I. A Preliminary Note—Revolutionary Organization and the Organization of Thought Though Marx had no explicit “theory of organization,” from the 1840s to the end of the 1870s he participated in and wrote about numerous revolutionary organizations. In the 1840s there were the organizational forms created by the nascent workers’ movement reaching to rebellion and revolution, as well as tendencies such as the League of the Just that, with the writing of the Communist Manifesto, became transformed into the Communist League. Even after the defeat of the Revolutions of 1848–49, and Marx’s exile to England together with his withdrawal from the querulous exile movement of the refugees of 1848, he still referred to “our Party” when he was writing of himself and Engels as representative of a body of thought in the decade of the 1850s. When new objective-subjective moments began to develop in the mid 1860s—working class struggles in Europe including Polish and Irish movements for self-determination, the growth of a trade union movement in England, and the Civil War in the U.S. involving Northern white labor’s relation to the Black southern slave labor in rebellion—Marx was instrumental in the formation, development and work of a new organizational form, the International Workingmen’s Association (First International). He saw no separation between his theoretical labors in completing Capital and his organizational labors in the International. The intertwining of Marx’s organization of thought and his organizational life form a crucial thread in the present study. When the spontaneous self-organization of the Paris Commune erupted in 1871, Marx followed those “heaven-stormers,” chronicling their revolutionary praxis, proclaiming its greatest moment to be “its own working existence,” and made important additions to the French edition of Capital under the impact of the Commune’s creativity. As the repressive, bitter period that followed the Commune’s bloody destruction, manifested both

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pusillanimous behavior on the part of some British trade union leaders who wished to separated themselves from the revolutionary Communards, and an intensifijication of factionalism in the International, particularly on the part of the followers of Bakunin, Marx was prepared to let the First International’s center be relocated in America where it would later die. This did not end Marx’s involvement in organizational questions. When he found that his would-be followers in Germany were so awed by Lassalle’s shadow that they were prepared for organizational unity based on a program that moved far away from the principles Marx had striven to work out over three decades, he issued his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) against an organizational program of revolutionary socialists. Marx at each historic moment strove to present a concept of organization born out of the proletarian and other mass struggles of his day, and out of the organization of thought that we know as Marx’s Marxism. We will probe Marx’s concept of organization from the 1840s to the 1870s of the Paris Commune in Chapters One and Two, and explore his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program in Chapter Ten. II. 1843–52: Critique of Ideas/Tendencies, and the Movement of the Workers In their struggle against the existing state of afffairs the proletarians can claim the progressive spirits, the great philosophers, as their leaders. —Heinrick Heine, 1844 The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. … The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat. The proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality. —Karl Marx, “Introduction, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” (Marx, 1975a: 182, 187).

A. From Critique of the Young Hegelians to Organizing Activities in Paris For Marx critique was a crucial concept. Beginning with his initial break from bourgeois society, as early as his editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung, 1842–43, Marx had written articles critiquing the laws of the Prussian state, particularly those on press censorship. By 1843–44, that critique included the highest expression of bourgeois society, Hegelian philosophy, as he

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wrote “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic.” In the spring and summer of 1843 Marx’s critique encompassed not only Hegel, but his former colleagues, the Young Hegelians. When Bruno Bauer wrote a narrow theological, political presentation of the Jewish question, Marx responded that it was not political bourgeois emancipation that was called for, but total human emancipation. It was his fijirst salvo, if not against an actual organization, against a tendency, the thought of the Young Hegelians. During this same period, Marx developed his critical concept in a series of letters to Arnold Ruge, published in their journal Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbuchar: [I]t is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists. Ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. … nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. … We can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarifijication (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. (Marx, 1975a: 142, 145)

It was in these letters to Ruge that Marx began also his critique of those who proclaimed themselves the opposite of bourgeois society—“actual existing communism”: Communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, Dezamy, Weitling, etc. This communism … is still infected by its antithesis—the private system … is itself only a special one-sided realization of the socialist principle.

In contrast, Marx presented his freedom vision: The self-confijidence of the human being, freedom, has fijirst to be aroused again in the hearts of these people. Only this feeling … can transform society into a community of human beings. … The world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. (Marx, 1975a: 142, 143, 137)

In the pages of this same journal, Marx concretized the “community of human beings” and the “dream” in putting forth the relation of the proletariat and philosophy: As philosophy fijinds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat fijinds its spiritual weapons in philosophy. And once the lighting of thought

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chapter one has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into human beings will take place. (“Introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx, 1975a: 187)1

What Marx wrote on the theoretical plane was brought into sharp focus with his move to Paris in October 1843. There, the living proletarian forces become the life blood of the philosophy of revolution-in-themaking. Paris of the 1840s was aflame with communist and socialist ideas, with workers groups and secret societies. The communism put forth was for the most part abstract. Its advocates hoped for the good will of the possessing class whom they wished to convince of the need for social reform or revolution. Voices such as those of Leroux and Proudhon argued for social transformation, but proclaimed it would neither be accomplished through the workers own organizations, the unions, nor by a revolution. Others argued for political reforms through universal franchise, calling for the “organization of labor,” and the “right to work.” But these forces, including the Democratic Socialist Party of Louis Blanc, were neither socialist nor communist, advocating only joint ownership of the means of production. Marx, for his part, searched out radical German workers in Paris, (“Marx has plunged into German communism here”—Arnold Ruge), and began developing his ideas of “the antithesis between capitalist and worker,” where labor “appears only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness.” He envisioned a diffferent mode of labor: “My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life.” (“Comments on James Mill,” Marx, 1975a) At the same time, Marx was digging deeply into 1 See as well pages 186, 187: “Where, then, is the positive possibility of … emancipation? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal sufffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it; which can no longer invoke a historical but only a human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the premises of the German state; a sphere, fijinally which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat … By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raise to the rank of a principle of society what society has made the principle of the proletariat, what, without its own co-operation is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society.”

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work of political economy, excerpting, summarizing, and critiquing works of James Mill, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and others. From within the living workers’ movement, Marx found the motive force which would transform labor from a “loss of self” to a “free manifestation of life.” It was not only the Parisian workers. His turned to a Silesian weavers’ uprising of June 4–6, 1844. In contrast to other commentators who saw Silesia as only a futile revolt of the despairing poor, Marx in “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article by a Prussian,” wrote: The Silesian uprising begins precisely with what the French and English workers’ uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat. The action itself bears the stamp of this superior character. Not only machines, these rivals of the workers, are destroyed, but also ledgers, the titles to property. And while all other movements were aimed primarily only against the owner of the industrial enterprise, the visible enemy, this movement is at the same time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy.

And what of the role of the revolutionary intellectual? Confronted with the fijirst outbreak of the Silesian workers’ uprising the sole task of one who thinks and lives the truth consisted not in playing the role of schoolmaster in relation to this event, but instead in studying its specifijic character. This, of course requires some scientifijic insight and some love of mankind.

Marx drew the lessons that he had learned: We have already seen that a social revolution is found to have the point of view of the whole because—even if it were to occur in only one factory district—it represents man’s protest against a dehumanized life … socialism cannot be realized without revolution. It needs this political act insofar as it needs destruction and dissolution. But where its organizing activity begins, where its proper object, its soul, comes to the fore—there socialism throws offf the political cloak. (Marx, 1975a: 201, 202, 205, 206.)

In Paris, this organizing activity for Marx was among French and German workers, especially the League of the Just, German proletarian activists who had groups in London, Switzerland and Paris. It was to their meetings that Marx went, listening and speaking throughout 1844. A police report of the period noted: Every Sunday the German Communists assemble … sometimes 30, sometimes 100 or 200 … Speeches are made advocating regicide, abolish property, down with the rich, etc.; there is no longer any talk of religion… such people as Marx … continuing to lead young people to disaster.

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Marx would write to Feuerbach: You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which burst forth from these workmen.. … The German artisans in Paris, i.e., the Communists amongst them, several hundreds, have been having lectures twice a week throughout the summer. (Marx, 1975a: 355, 357)

In the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 he wrote of the association of communist workers: When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their fijirst end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a need–the need for society–and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. (Marx, 1975a: 313)

Toward the end of his stay in Paris Marx wrote the Holy Family, with Engels contributing several small chapters. In the main, the work was directed at the “Critical Criticism” of the Young Hegelians who had launched a campaign against communism and socialism. The introduction begins, “Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism which substitutes ‘self-consciousness’ or the ‘spirit’ for the real individual man.” Marx contrasted the proletarian associations to the abstractions of Critical Criticism: According to Critical Criticism, the whole evil lies only in the workers’ ‘thinking.’ It is true that the English and French workers have formed associations in which they exchange opinions not only on their immediate needs as workers, but on their needs as human beings. In their associations, moreover, they show a very through and comprehensive consciousness of the ‘enormous’ and ‘immeasurable’ power which arise from their cooperation. But these mass-minded communist workers, employed, for instance, in the Manchester or Lyons workshops, do not believe that by ‘pure thinking’ they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the diffference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labor and the like are no ideal fijigments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical objective way for man to

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become man not only in thinking, in consciousness but in mass being, in life. (Marx, 1975b: 52, 53)2

By the time Marx left Paris for enforced exile in Brussels (February 1845), he had put forth a new world view of historical materialism rooted in the existence of classes, and linked to specifijic struggles in the development of production. His critique of bourgeois society and of other tendencies of thought, whose opposition to bourgeois society he saw as only partial, would become concretized in a full-blown manifesto of communism written as an organizational document, as the League of the Just became transformed into the Communist League. B. Toward the Communist Manifesto: A Unity of Organization of Thought and Organization of the Working Class Movement Marx’s three years in Brussels, 1845–48, were the years of The Poverty of Philosophy and The Germany Ideology, as well as a lecture to the Brussels German Workers Society that led to Wage Labor and Capital, and fijinally to the Communist Manifesto. It was the period of Marx’s and Engels’ work with proletarian organization that resulted in the transformation of the League of the Just into the Communist League, revolutionary organization on the basis of class. What we saw in Marx’s writings of 1843–44—that the critique of tendencies such as the young Hegelians and of Hegel himself, was in part tied to the newly emerging activities and consciousness of the proletariat— became more explicit as Marx undertook his response to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty and its influence on the French working class, and in

2 See as well pages 36–37: “Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—the practical expression of necessity—is driven to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labor. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.”

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the historical materialist ground created in the fijirst chapter of the German Ideology against both the Young Hegelians and True Socialists. In Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, written in French, almost the entire fijinal section, “Strikes and Combinations of Workers,” was devoted to the workers’ own form of organization beginning with combinations, that is, trade unions. He showed how the workers create these forms of organization in spite of the pressure of the manufacturers who say to the workers do not ask for higher wages as we have no command over prices; in spite of the economists who tell the workers do not combine as you will hinder the “regular process of industry” and thus bring on still lower wages; and in spite of the “socialists who condemn the workers’ self-organization,” and instead ask them to follow utopian schemes. He wrote of the necessity of doing research on workers’ organizations and concluded: The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power property so-called, since political power is precisely the offfijicial expression of antagonism in civil society. (Marx, 1976: 212)3

Throughout 1845–47, Marx and Engels worked on the German Ideology, their massive critique of the Young Hegelians and the True Socialists. The ground for that critique was found in the fijirst chapter where they put forth the materialist concept of history that Marx had begun working out in 1843–44. What needs to be stressed is that in criticizing the abstract idealism of the Young Hegelians and the True Socialists, Marx and Engels did not pose a vulgar materialism, but a materialism founded upon a revolutionary subject: the proletariat. Marx presented his view of the

3 See entire section “Strikes and Combinations of Workers,” pages 206–212. In particular pages 206, 211: “In England they have not stopped at partial combinations which have no other objective than a passing strike, and which disappear with it. Permanent combinations have been formed, trade unions, which serve as bulwarks for the workers in their struggles with the employers … The organization of these strikes, combinations, and trade unions went on simultaneously with the political struggles of the workers, who now constitute a large political party, under the name of Chartists … when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organization as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain. An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself.”

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relationship between the self-activity of the proletariat and the stage of material life that was capitalism: In all appropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse cannot be controlled by individuals, unless it is controlled by all. This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be efffected. It can only be efffected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organization is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society. Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the castingofff of all natural limitations. The transformation of labor into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the previously limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. (Marx, 1975c: 88)4

*** Regular correspondence and internationalism were two aspects that Marx felt must be involved in any group of revolutionaries who wished to be together with the working class’s own activities and organizations. Throughout the 1840s Engels maintained contact with radical journals in England, contributing to The Northern Star, an English weekly of the Chartists. At the same time, because there was no radical journal in Brussels to print their circulars, Marx and Engels sought to establish a permanent correspondence committee in diffferent towns where there were communist groups. The Communist Correspondence Committee was formed early in 1846. In August 1846 it was decided that Engels should return to Paris to try and win support for the establishment of workingmen’s organizations. He met regularly with tanners, joiners and tailors to discuss historical problems and explain current economic questions. During this period there

4 See as well his Thesis on Feuerbach written in the same period: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated.” (Marx, 1975c: 7)

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was also continuing correspondence with leaders of the League of the Just in London. The League had created an educational society with 500 members of diffferent nationalities, who had been reading the writings of Marx and Engels. In January 1847, Joseph Moll of the League came to Brussels and invited Marx and Engels to join. They agreed, persuading the League of the Just to transform itself into the Communist League. Their fijirst congress, with Engels in attendance, was held in June. In August, the International Communist Correspondence Committee reorganized itself into a branch of the Communist League, with Marx as president and as a member of the League’s regional directorate. The same month Marx and Engels helped to form the German Workingman’s Society in Brussels, which met weekly and to whom Marx would later deliver the lecture which prefijigured his Wage Labor and Capital. In November, Marx and Engels traveled to London for the 10-day Second Congress of the Communist League. They also spoke to the London German Workers’ Society, and to an international meeting held on the 17th anniversary of the Polish Uprising of 1830. They began working on the Communist Manifesto immediately after the Congress. In January 1848 Marx worked on it alone, and it was published in February. The Manifesto was the apex of Marx’s development on organization, 1843–48. His concept was one in which there was a fusion of organization of thought—as critique of the bourgeoisie, as critique of other tendencies, and as the posing of a new world proletarian vision—with the organization of the nascent working class movement. We will not rehearse here the well-known outline of the Manifesto. Rather, we will only briefly take note of its dimension as an organizational document. Its preamble states: It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies and meet this tale of the Spectra of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself. To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages. (Marx, 1976: 481)

Its section on “Proletarian and Communists” asked, “In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?” and responded: “They do not set up any sectarian (separate) principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.” However, the Communists were distinguished from other working class parties by having an internationalist viewpoint, and by the need to represent the

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movement as a whole. They could push forward all other parties and at the same time had “the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” (497) The document criticized other tendencies in terms of ideas and organization under the sections on “Socialist and Communist Literature.” This was further developed in the Manifesto’s fijinal section, “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties,” where the Communists might at times form an alliance with other parties, supporting “every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” None of this would mean concealing “their views and aims,” which could “be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. … The proletarians have Nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” (519). The Manifesto’s anticipation of revolution would become realized within weeks. Marx’s participation, as the test of organization of thought and of class in the praxis of revolution, was at hand. C. The 1848 Revolutions and Their Defeat: From New Organizational Forms to Revolution in Permanence Expelled from Brussels in early March, Marx arrived in Paris March 5th. (“Good and loyal Marx,” wrote Ferdinand Flocan, member of the Provisional Government, “the soil of the French Republic is a fijield of refuge and asylum for all friends of liberty. Tyranny exiled you, now free France opens its doors to you and to all those who are fijighting for the holy cause, the fraternal causes of all the peoples.”) Marx brought with him the central offfijice of the Communist League, which had already transferred its authority to Brussels from London with the outbreak of the February Revolution. Marx immediately set out to re-establish the central offfijice of the League and was elected to its presidency on March 10th. As the same time, he and others founded the German Workmen’s Club to educate and prepare exiled Germans to return to the homeland. The 300–400 Germans who came around were given the Manifesto and “Demands of the Communist Party of Germany,” written by Marx and Engels in late March and printed as a leaflet. The Demands were reprinted on a number of occasions in Germany during the revolution. In early April Marx returned to Cologne to found a revolutionary daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and participated with the

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working class of Cologne.5 One-year later, May 1849, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed and Marx forced to flee Cologne for France. Shortly thereafter he had to leave France for England. In exile Marx plunged into three tasks: (1) The establishment of a new journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisho-okonomische Revue; (2) The building of a German political refugee committee to aid the German refugees who were streaming across the Continent and to England after the defeat of the German Revolution; (3) The revitalization and reorganization of the Communist League. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-okonomische Revue published six issues in 1850. Foremost among its contributions were Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848–50, and Engels’ Peasant Wars in Germany. Just as the Manifesto had anticipated the 1848 Revolutions, and Marx’s Neue Rheinisch Zeitung had been a measure of a revolutionary intellectual’s participation, so The Class Struggle in France proceeded to sum up that experience. Marx wrote, “The annals of the revolution from 1848 to 1849 carries the heading: Defeat of the Revolution!” But he added, “The revolution made progress by the creation of a powerful, united, counterrevolution” that forced the ripening of “a really revolutionary party.” That “really revolutionary party” was the proletariat. Marx traced the lot of the Paris proletariat from February 1848 through the June insurrection to June 1849. In looking at the clash of proletariat and bourgeois he was fijinding the forms of struggle, forms of organization that the proletariat creates. First came their February demand for Organization of Labor and the creation of a Ministry of Labor, “a socialist synagogue,” but with “no budget, no executive authority at their disposal.” Nothing is more understandable, then, than that the Paris proletariat sought to assert its own interests side by side with the interests of the bourgeoisie, instead of enforcing them as the revolutionary interest of society itself, that it let the red flag be dipped before the tricolor. The French workers could not take a step forward, could not touch a hair of the bourgeois order, until the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, against this order, against the rule of capital, and had forced them to attach themselves to the proletarians as their protagonists. The workers could buy this victory only through the tremendous defeat in June. (Marx, 1978: 57)

5 For a discussion of Marx’s revolutionary journalism and his participation with workers’ groups during the Revolutions of 1848–49, see (Gogol, 1980).

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The bourgeoisie forced the June insurrection upon the proletariat. It was a defeat of the workers in terms of arms, but the birth of a new consciousness in terms of proletarian outlook: In place of its demands, exuberant in form, but petty and even bourgeois still in content, the concession of what it wanted to wring from the February republic, there appeared the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class! (Marx, 1976: 69)

It was the fijirst time that Marx used the expression, “Dictatorship of the Working Class,” which he found in the experience of 1848, and which others have vulgarized to mean the dictatorship of the party. In no sense was that its meaning for Marx. Rather, it meant a total uprooting and not a limitation to a political revolution or a revolution of one party speaking “for” the workers. It meant the masses thinking and acting, often in opposition to any parties speaking for them. It encompassed workers creating their own forms of expression: “June 13 [1849] has struck offf the offfijicial heads of various semi-revolutionary parties; the masses that remained won a head of their own.” In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx completed his writing on France in revolution and counter-revolution. In was here that he contrasted the method of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, especially on a concept of self-criticism: Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success, their dramatic efffects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparking brilliants, ecstasy in the everyday spirit, but they are short-lived, soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression seizes society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their fijirst attempts, seem to thrown down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, and recoil again and again from the indefijinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (Marx, 1979: 106–107)6

*** 6 After June 1848, “the proletariat receded into the background of the revolutionary stage.” Marx does not hesitate to point out the limitations of the proletarian movement at

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Though the Communist League had been disbanded in June 1848 as the situation in German called for a more open type of functioning, by February 1849, when faced with greater repression, Marx and ten others met in Cologne with Joseph Moll from the German refugee community in London to discuss reorganization of the League. However it was not until late August 1849, when Marx went into exile in London, that concrete  work was done. A German Refugee Committee was set up, which shortly thereafter was transformed into the Social-Democratic Refugee Committee. It provided material assistance for the refugees of 1848. Marx wrote an appeal for support, speaking of “thousands upon thousands of people have been wandering without shelter in foreign lands” ever since “ ‘pee and order’ have been re-established in Germany”; The work with refugees at the same time helped to reconstitute ties among members of the Communist League. Marx joined the Central Committee of the Reconstituted Communist League which was near stagnation. What he called a “war plan against Democracy,” the Address to the Central Authority of the Communist League, was delivered in March 1850. In this address Marx set down what the League had accomplished in 1848–50, “in double fashion”: First, in that its members energetically took part in the movement in all places, that in the press, on the barricades and on the battlefijields, they stood in the front ranks of the only resolutely revolutionary class, the proletariat. The League further proved itself in that its conception of the movement as laid down in the circulars of the congresses and of the Central Authority of 1847 as well as in the Communist Manifesto turned out to be the only correct one. (Marx, 1978: 277)

such a period: “In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily sufffers shipwreck.” (Marx, 1979: 110–111) But by no means is it a permanent defeat: “But the revolution is through. It still journeys through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 it has completed one half of its preparatory work; it is now completing the other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it perfects the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates, it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it.” (Marx, 1979: 185) Thus while “all previous revolutions concentrate state power,” that will not be the proletariat’s aim. Instead, “all its forces of destruction” are concentrated against it. Here Marx prefijigured what would become explicit with the Paris Commune—the smashing of bourgeois state power, and its supersession with the workers own form, the Commune

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Here we have Marx’s organizational practice in the heat of the uprising— taking part in the movement in all places and having a concept of that movement. At the same time, Marx called for reorganization of the League that had become “slackened,” where connections with the Central Authority had “become loose and gradually dormant,” “the workers’ party lost its only fijirm foothold” and “the general movement came completely under the domination and leadership of the petty bourgeois democrats.” Marx’s response was that, “the independence of the workers must be restored.” On what basis? By making “the Revolution permanent”: It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their positions of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians … not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one. (Marx, 1978: 281)

Where in Class Struggles in France Marx had introduced the idea of “the permanence of the revolution,”7 he now, in his address to the Communist League, developed permanent revolution and the organization of a revolutionary group as projection in anticipation of the next revolutionary period. In such a revolutionary period Marx fijirst called upon the League to oppose unity with petty bourgeois democrats: The League, must exert themselves to establish an independent secret and public organization of the workers’ party alongside the offfijicial democrats … They (the workers) must work to prevent the direct revolutionary excitement from being suppressed again immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible … Alongside the new offfijicial governments they must immediately establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, whether in the form of municipal committees  and municipal councils or in the form of workers’ clubs or workers’ committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but from the outset see themselves

7 “The proletariat increasingly organizes itself around revolutionary Socialism, around Communism, for which the bourgeoisie itself has invented the name Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.” (Marx. 1978: 127)

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chapter one supervised and threatened by authorities backed by the whole mass of the workers. Second, “the workers must be armed and organized”: Workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard with commanders elected by themselves under the command not of the state authority but of the revolutionary municipal councils set up by the workers. And fijinally: It is above all necessary for the workers to be independently organized and centralized in clubs … Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence. (Marx, 1978: 282, 283, 284, 287)

The Address was circulated underground back into Germany in an attempt to revitalize the Communist League. Indeed, it was the arrest of a League member in possession of the Address to the Communist League and the Communist Manifesto that began the process toward the Communist Cologne Trial as an attempt to defame the communist movement. Marx responded to this attempted frame-up with “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne.” The communists, in prison on the basis of forged documents and false evidence, were accused of trying to destroy the existing society. Marx exposed the falsifijications and responded to the charge of attempting to destroy the existing society by putting forth the much deeper revolution the League had in mind: The ultimate aim of this propaganda is said to be the destruction of existing society; but the Prussian state has already perished once and could perish ten times more and indeed for good and all without the existing social order being even the slightest bit harmed … if the fijinal goal of the League is the overthrowing of the social order, the method by which this is to be achieved is necessarily that of political revolution and this entails the overthrow of the Prussian state, just as an earthquake entails the overthrow of a chicken house. The accused, however, proceed in fact from the outrageous assumption that the present Prussian government would collapse without their having to life a fijinger. They accordingly did not found a league to overturn the present government of Prussia, and were not guilty of any “reasonable conspiracy.” (Marx, 1979: 404)

Despite Marx’s effforts to restore the League, the counter-revolutionary forces were so strong that they had a strong pull within the revolutionary movement. Adventurism of some exile members of the League came to the fore. Marx tried to combat these currents by transferring the Central

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Authority from London to Cologne.8 However, the split became more permanent, the squabbling among émigrés (what Marx called the “war of the frogs and mice”) greater. In November 1853 Marx moved to disband the League. He was not again to participate in actual organization until he saw a new historic moment arise in the mid-1860s. He instead continued his intellectual labors, an organization of thought that he viewed as representing the “party.” III. From the Early 1850s to the Early 1860s: A Brief Note on Marx’s Organization of Thought and the “Party” I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’ I mean a ‘League’ that expired eight year ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense. —Marx, Letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath. February 29, 1860. (Marx, 1978: 87)

The period of reaction which characterized much of Europe following the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions, combined with the fact that segments of a radical movement failed to comprehend the moment, turned to adventurism, compelled Marx to withdraw from active participation in so-called revolutionary organization. However, far from being any “dead period for Socialist thought,” (Cole: 1960: 1) the decade was one of great intellectual creativity on the part of Marx. His intense research produced the notebooks and drafts of what would become Capital. At the same time as he studied the development of capitalism, with England as principle laboratory, Marx did not fail to comment on ongoing world events of his time, as can be seen in his vast canvas of revolutionary journalism. 8 See minutes of the meeting of the Central Authority, Sept. 15, 1850: Marx—“In the last decade on ‘the position of the German proletariat in the next revolution’ views were expressed by members of the minority on the Central Authority which directly clash with those in the last circular but one [Address of the Central Authority to the League, March 1850], the [Communist] Manifesto. A German national standpoint was substituted for the universal outlook of the Manifesto, and the national feelings of the German artisans were pandered to. The materialist standpoint of the Manifesto has given way to idealism. The revolution is seen not as the product of realities of the situation but as the result of an efffort of will. Whereas we say to the workers: You have 15, 30, 50 years of civil war to go through in order to alter the situation and to train yourselves for the exercise of power, it is said: We must take power at once, or else we may as well take to our beds … Our party can come to power only when the conditions allow it to put its own views into practice.” (Marx, 1978: 626, 627.)

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It was this development of a body of revolutionary thought that Marx would refer to as “the party in the broad historical sense.” At times it would as well have corporeal presence, as in the First Working Men’s International or the Paris Commune—Marx referred to the Commune as the “most glorious act of our party.” However, when an organization no longer represented this body of thought, Marx did not hesitance to separate from it, as seen in his separation from the Communist League in the 1850s,9 and, as we will see, exiling the First International to America when it was “no longer realizable” in its original form. He referred to the “party” even when there was no actual organization to adhere to, only Engels and himself. Marx had no permanent adherence to a specifijic organizational form. He recognized no fetishism for organization. What was permanent, was Marx’s continual working out an organization of thought, a body of revolutionary ideas. IV. A New Organizational Form: Marx and the International Workingmen’s Association I prefer a hundred times my agitation here through the International Association. —Marx to Kugelmann, Feb. 23, 1865

The multiple strands leading to the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) were independent of Marx. The growth of a trade union movement in Britain, the new activity of French workers and the desire for interchange between the two movements, the Civil War in the United States and the activity of an important segment of the English working class in opposition to any attempt on the part of the government to intervene on the side of the Southern cotton growers who supplied the British textile industry, were crucial developments in the fijirst half of the 1860s that lead to the formation of the IWA. At the same time, the eight years (1864–1872) of the Workingmen’s Association existence on the Europe continent were decisively shaped by Marx’s intellectual/organizational participation. Among his principle contributions: working with British trade union leaders and workers as

9 We need to remember as well, that in the early 1850s Marx defended the communists who were being framed in the Cologne Communist Trial in Cologne, while in the late 1850s he wrote his defense, Herr Volt, against the slanders of his and others’ participation in the Communist League.

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well as with delegates and correspondents from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and the United States; marshaling the effforts of émigrés from a number of countries living in London; writing the Association’s Inaugural Address, and its general rules, as well as the vast majority of its addresses, reports and resolutions; organizing support for strikers, and for refugees; fijighting other tendencies within the International, fijirst the followers of Proudhon, later those of Bakunin. The beginning of the International was tied to concrete historical events. One of these was the response of the English working class to the possibility that England might intercede on the side of the cotton-growing South in the American Civil War so as to maintain supplies for its textile mills. In March 1863, a mass meeting organized by London trade unionists was held in London to protest possible English intervention. Marx was in attendance. Activity of the London Trades Council, including the establishment of a Trade Union Political Union, reflected a growing workers’ movement within England. In September 1864—following earlier visits of French worker-leaders as well as Italian worker societies hosted by the London Trades Council—a meeting to found the International was held. Marx was again present, but neither as organizer nor speaker. In the meeting he was appointed a member of a provisional committee to work out a program and membership rules for the organization. Marx would draft both an Inaugural Address and the general rules for the organization. As he wrote to his colleague Joseph Weydemeyer in America: I am sending you by post four copies of the printed “Address,” written by me. The newly established International Working Men’s Committee, in whose name it was published, is not without signifijicance. For its English members consist mostly of heads of local trade unions, that is, the real labor kings of London, the same people who prepared the gigantic reception for Garibaldi and who, by the huge meeting in St. James’s Hall … prevented Palmerston from declaring war against the United States, which he was on the verge of doing. From the French side, the members are insignifijicant, but they are the direct organs of the leading “workers” in Paris. There is likewise contact with the Italian unions, which will soon hold their congress in Naples. Although for years I systematically turned down participation in all “organizations,” etc., I accepted this time because this was something in which it was possible to be efffective. (November 29, 1864)

Marx’s active participation in the International’s General Council was the lynchpin for a form of revolutionary organization far diffferent from that of the Communist League forged in the period of the 1848 Revolutions. Among Marx’s theoretical and organizational strands within

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the International were the following: (1) the relationship between the International and his work on Capital; (2) Marx’s activity with the English working class, including the London Trade Union Council, as well as his relation to the Irish fijight for self-determination and its impact on the English working class; and (3) Marx’s effforts through the International to establish working class solidarity across borders. It was by no accident that the fijirst years of the International and Marx’s work completing the fijirst volume of Capital (1867) intertwined. In the Minutes of the meetings of the General Council, usually held weekly in London, (and which Marx attended without fail save for illness or being outside London), one can read Marx’s direct presentation of material he was working on for Capital, including sections on machinery and on wages. (See The General Council of the First International, 1864–1872) The International’s address to President Lincoln upon his election to a second term, and which spoke of “the red sea of civil war” uprooting slavery and opening the door to a movement for the emancipation of labor, found echo in the Introduction to Capital, which took up the same theme in relation to the fijight for the eight-hour day in the United States that could only proceed on a national level after the abolition of slavery. Far from work in the International being “time away” from Marx’s writing of Capital, it might be considered as one of the shapers of its fijinal form. His work with the British trade union movement through the International, and his work as Corresponding Secretary for Germany and for the United States, gave him information on labor struggles and conditions, including the fijight for the shortening of the working day. The “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council,” written by Marx and read at the offfijicial report at the Geneva Congress of the International, September 1866, contained sections on “The Struggle between Labor and Capital,” on the “Limitation of the Working Day” and on “Cooperative Labor,” where “the subordination of labor to capital can be superseded by the republican and benefijicent system of the association of free and equal producers.” Each of these sections flowed from crucial categories within Capital just being completed. Marx’s theoretical labor and his organizational activities was a two-way road. His intense work on Capital laid the foundation for the International’s fijirm concentration on class struggle and the emancipation of labor. The ideas Marx was working out served as a basis for battles against other tendencies who wished to divert the International from such a focus. Marx’s relationship to the growing trade union movement in Britain gave the International its English working class stamp, particularly in its

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fijirst years. As against France, where trade unions were barely tolerated under Napoleon III, the English working class, principally through the London Trades Council and its National Reform League, had begun struggling for parliamentary reform. The workers involved were primarily from diffferent trades—bakers, bricklayers, carpenters, furniture makers, house painters, plasterers, printers and shoemakers. English union afffijiliates included the London Masons’ Union, United Excavators, West End Cabinet Makers, Cheshire Block Printers Union; Liverpool and Birmingham House Painters, among others. Marx wrote Engels, “If we succeed in reelectrifying the political movement of the English working class our Association, without making any fuss, will have done more for the working class of Europe than has been possible in any other way” (May 1, 1865). The General Council, which met weekly, had a number of trade union  leaders in its membership. Certainly, some of these trade union leaders did not share Marx’s revolutionary views. The 1871 Paris Commune would bring this division to a head. However, Marx sought to appeal to the larger audience of the English working class in the 1860s for international working class solidarity in various labor struggles. Of particular importance was his writing, speeches and activities in relation to the Irish question, the condition of the Irish people and their fijight for self-determination. The fijirst paragraph of the Inaugural Address spoke of “the people of Ireland, gradually replaced by machinery in the north and by sheepwalks in the south … that unhappy country.” Again and again in the International in the 1860s, Marx intervenes on the Irish question, supporting their right for self-determination, calling for amnesty of Irish prisoners, support for the Fenian rebellion. He referred to English union with Ireland as “Ireland’s enslavement” In 1870 he wrote to Sigfreid Meyer and August Vogt on the Irish question in relation to the English working class: After occupying myself with the Irish question for years, I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland. … Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class that is split into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so makes himself a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thereby strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. (April 9, 1870)

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Marx worked to make the International a body that could fijight against such attitudes. In the Minutes of the International are numerous discussions and actions taken in support of strikes in various countries, including notifijications to workers to not involve themselves in strike breaking activities. As well, there were discussions and resolutions passed in relation to the Civil War in the United States, struggles on the European continent and in other regions. The kind of theoretical/organizational direction which Marx sought to give to the International did not mean losing the vision of the Communist Manifesto, nor abandoning the possibility of a new revolutionary moment. As we will see in the next chapter, the International’s relation to the Paris Commune would make that clear.

CHAPTER TWO

THE COMMUNE OF PARIS, 1871: MASS SPONTANEITY IN ACTION AND THOUGHT FUSED WITH THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUAL; OR THE TWO-WAY ROAD BETWEEN MARX AND THE COMMUNE I. A Non-State State: The Paris Commune as a Form of Workers’ Rule A whole population is discussing serious matters, and for the fijirst time workers can be heard exchanging their views on problems which until now have been broached only by philosophers … a new century has just dawned. —Villers de l’Asle-Adam quoted from Le Tribune du Peuple, May 10, 1871 (Edwards, 1971: 283) The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. … Fighting, working, thinking Paris, electrifijied by the enthusiasm of historic initiative, full of heroic reality, the new society in its throes… —Marx The social revolution that erupted in Paris on March 18, 1871 was not like anything ever before seen in history … the revolutionary proletariat reached the greatest turning point in history—the remolding of itself as the ruling class. —Dunayevskaya, 2000: 95

The ten short weeks (March 18-May 28, 1871) of the Commune gave rise to new forms of struggle and organization, new ways of thinking and doing, as proletarian women and men initiated a profound social upheaval. Three interrelated strands reveal its creativity: (1) the armed defense of the Commune against the reactionary government in Versailles and the Prussian army; (2) the struggle to obtain employment and the radical reorganization of work within the Commune; (3) the determination to speak out publicly not alone in the Commune organs of government, but in clubs and associations, in newspapers and mass meetings, and in the streets, on questions of the day—from education and breaking the stranglehold of the church, to the role and rights of women, to the need to destroy capitalism as integral to the emancipation of labor.

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Before dawn on March 18, under orders from the Republican government headed by Adolphe Thiers, the army sought to remove Paris’ cannons, leaving it defenseless against Bismarck’s army. It was clear that the reactionary Republican leaders preferred Prussian occupation over rule by the Parisian masses. The masses refused to allow the removal of these armaments—which had been paid for by their own subscription: [A] group of Parisian women stepped between armed soldiers and cannons, deploying their words and bodies to block the removal of artillery from their working-class neighborhood. Ordered to fijire, the troops instead raised their rifle butts in the air, turned, and arrested their general. Within hours, the general lay dead, the army had pulled out of the city, and the cannons remained in place. This sparked the revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune. (Eichner, 2004: 1)

What began as an act of resistance was transformed to a moment of revolution: “[T]he Paris people turned at once that incident of their selfdefense into the fijirst act of social Revolution” (Marx, Second Draft of Civil War in France, Marx and Engels, 1971). The Parisian masses opposed the government’s betrayal. Organizations such as the Montmartre Vigilance Committee (formed during the monthslong Prussia siege of Paris) and the National Guard, Paris’ organized defense, were at Montmartre to defend the city and its armaments. In the fijirst days of revolt it was the Central Committee of the National Guard which coordinated the defense of the city, (though not pursuing the Republic’s army, nor the police, both of whom escaped to Versailles along with Thiers to plan the counter-revolution), and arranged for the election of the Commune. What happened at Montmartre, occurred in other sections of Paris: Everywhere—in the Place Blanche, Place Pigalle, in Belleville, at the Bastille, at Chateau-d’Eau, and in the Luxemburg Gardens—the crowd, mostly composed of women, surrounded the soldiers, stopped the horses, cut the harnesses, forced the ‘bewildered’ soldiers to fraternize with their ‘brothers’ in the National Guard. (Thomas, 2007: 55)

The spontaneous resistance on the 18th was in fact part of the monthslong opposition to the siege of Paris imposed by the Bismarck’s army. The masses refused to yield and prepared their defense of the city, and in the process the self-actualization of their own rule. The attempt of Versailles to seize the cannons ignited Paris’ citizenry into a full-blown resistance, and within days the Commune was declared. The necessity to defend Paris brought to the fore the revolutionary role of women, who had been fijighting against the male chauvinism that had

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been part and parcel not only of the Second Empire, but of the Proudonistdominated French section of the First Workingman’s International. The fijirst declaration of the Union des Femmes Pour la Défense de Paris et les Soins aux Bessés (The Union of Women for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded) refused to accept limits upon women’s participation: “And if we have neither rifles nor bayonets, there will still be paving stones to crush the traitors with” (quoted in Thomas, 2007: 66) The Union des Femmes was organized by Elizabeth Dmitriefff (Tomanovskaya). Dmitriefff, a young women from Russia (20 years old at the time of the Commune), who had emigrated from Russia to Geneva, there discovering the ideas of the First International and of Marx. Sent by the Geneva section of the International to England in the summer of 1870, she made contact with Marx, visiting and corresponding with him on the agrarian situation in Russia. When the Revolution broke out in March, Marx sent her to Paris as a representative of the International. Far from being only an observer, Dmitriefff, arriving in the last days of March, had by the 11th of April issued an “Appeal to the Women Citizens of Paris,” and begun an organization that would be one of the most important in the Commune. In relation to the defense of the Commune, the Union des Femmes’ statues called for women citizens of Paris to serve at ambulance stations “and at the barricades.” Joining this activity were women from vigilance committees in various arrondisements who served as ambulance attendants and nurses. Others participated in the building of barricades throughout Paris. Individual women such as Louise Michel fought against many attempts to restrict the activity of women, including fijighting with arms at the barricades. As nurses, the women of the Commune were not only at the barricades (often in opposition to the male leaders of the Commune and to the military commanders of the defenders), but sought to replace the nuns who were the nurses in the hospitals. Thomas reports that the 18th arrondisement Vigilance Committee as well as the Clubs demanded the secularization of services which they saw not as charity but as acts of solidarity within the Commune: “[I]n the realm of public welfare, the Commune acted as a revolutionary power” (Thomas, 2007: 135). In the fijinal days of the Commune, “bloody week,” with Versailles troops entering the city, the heroic defense of the Commune meant the entire population was called to the barricades. It was in building barricades everywhere, attempting to defend the city side-by-side with their male comrades against the murderous onslaught launched by Versailles, that the women Communards broke still more barriers.

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By emphasizing women’s participation in the defense of Paris, we do not wish to submerge the role of men, who were the members of the National Guard responsible for the primary defense of the city, or the other proletarian men who spent days and nights building and defending the barricades. It was the men who were the vast majority of those who fought and died in Paris. Rather, we focus on the women’s determination to be full participants in social transformation: “As in every peoples’ revolution, new strata of the population were awaken. This time it was the women who were to act fijirst” (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 95). As heroic as was the Communards resistance, their failure to prevent the retreat of the Republican rulers, the army and the police in the immediate aftermath of the uprising of the 18th, followed by their failure to immediately march militarily on Versailles, sealed the fate of the Commune. Unimpeded, Thiers could construct a massive, armed counterrevolutionary force to crush Paris.

• Though the Commune necessarily had to focus massive amounts of attention and resources on revolutionary military defense, the Communards in their clubs and associations, in their newspapers and meetings, formulated demands, resolutions and plans, as well as taking the fijirst steps toward a profound reorganization of society. The reorganization of labor, an anti-clerical educational system using scientifijic methods, the rights of women, strict circumscription of religion, were among the interrelated themes debated and acted upon. “It is the people acting for itself by itself.” (Marx fijirst draft of “The Civil War in France.” Marx and Engels, 1971: 180) The Commune as legislative and executive body, under the prodding of the Commission for Labor and Exchange headed by a member of the International, Leo Frankel, passed several measures challenging the traditional capital/labor relationship: 1) a prohibition of the practice of levying fijines for alleged carelessness in all factories, private and public; 2) the abolition of night work on the part of bakers; 3) a decree concerning the reoccupation of factories abandoned by their owners and their reorganization on a co-operative basis; 4) Commune regulation of contracted wages. The bakers appealed to the Commune, “the only just government and one that cares for popular needs,” to abolish night work so that they could “return to a normal life.” (quoted in Edward, 1947: 257) The Commune did so. However the bakery owners protested with a petition denouncing the decree. The workers organized their own meetings and protests.

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In a debate in the Commune, Frankel called the measure prohibiting bakers’ night-work “the only truly socialist decree passed by the Commune.” With the decree in force, 1,500 workers matched to the Hotel de Ville carrying red flags to thank the Commune for what it had done “in their favor.” The decree on abandoned workshops read: Whereas a number of workshops have been abandoned by their directors in order to escape their civil obligations and without taking into account the interests of the workers; whereas the result of this cowardly abandonment a number of works essential to communal life have been interrupted and the workers’ livelihood threatened… (quoted by Jellinik, 1937: 402)

The trade unions were to create a list of the abandoned shops and suggest practical ways to restart work “no longer for the deserters who had abandoned them, but by the co-operative association of the workers employed in them.” (quoted by Jellinik, 1937: 402) Some ten abandoned factories were occupied during the Commune. In part, the need for a decree on contract labor came about because the Commune itself had contributed to an actual lowering of wages paid for the manufacture of uniforms for the National Guard. Before the Commune, the Government of National Defense had paid a certain rate for each part of the uniform. The Commune had originally taken over this rate. However in adopting a contract system, it had accepted the lowest bids from shops, which promptly lowered the wages of their workers. A protest went up, particularly by organized women workers who depended on this work for their livelihood. Frankel joined with a sharp protest of his own: We must not forget that the revolution of March 18 was made exclusively by the working class. If we do nothing for this class, we who hold the principle of social equality, I see no reason for the Commune’s existence. (quoted by Jellinik, 1937: 401)

The Commune appointed a team to investigate the question and produce a report. A decree was then issued by the Commune authorizing the Labor Commission to revise previous contracts and give preference to the workers’ associations for future contracts. Though the deputies of the Commune did important work on labor questions, it was in fact the working masses in Paris, through the trade unions, as well as other organizations in support of the workers— particularly Elizabeth Demitriefff’s Union des Femmes and sections of the Workingman’s International—as well as individual workers and groups of workers in workshops, who drove the process of rethinking and re-organizing a concept of labor in the Commune. They did so often in

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communication with the Commission on Labor and Exchange headed by Frankel. Workers at the Louvre armaments factory co-operative drew of a set of regulations for the operation of their workshop, which they submitted to the Commune for approval, and began to put into practice. Among the regulations: The workshop is to be managed by the delegate to the Commune. The manager will be elected by all the workers and will be liable to be revoked if found guilty of failing in his duty… He will give a precise account of his dealings both in and outside the workshop to the Council The shop-foreman and the charge-hand will also be elected by all the workers. They will be accountable for the actions and will be revocable in the same way as the Commune delegate if it can be shown they have failed in their duty. There will be a Council meeting every day without fail after the shift ending at 5:30 P.M., to discuss the next day’s work and the report and suggestions submitted by the manager, the shop-foreman, the charge-hand or the worker delegates… The Council will be composed of the manager, the shop-foreman, the charge-hand and one elected worker from each workbench. The delegates will be completely replaced every fortnight; half of them will be replaced every week. The delegates will inform the workers of what is said at the meetings; they will act as their spokesmen on the Management Council and put their suggestions and grievances before the Council. The majority of the delegates is always entitled, at the request of one of the delegates, to call a meeting of the council. To safeguard the interests of the Commune, the delegates will form a control committee and will have the right to ask for information on all dealings within and without the workshop. At the beginning of every week the delegates will elect a secretary whose duty it will be to report on everything of importance that is said and done in the course of the week. These reports will be posted up outside the workshop. The regulations also set hours of work and wages. Ten hours a day for the armaments factory in a situation of war. The factory manager’s job was to be performed at a salary less than double that of the armaments factory workers.

As mentioned earlier, The Union des Femmes Pour la Defense de Paris et los Soins aux Blesses was formed in the fijirst part of April under the influence of Elizabeth Demitrifff. Its membership was overwhelmingly proletarian women—seamstresses, waistcoat-makers, sewing-machine operators, dress-makers, lien-drapers, bootstichers, hat-makers, laundresses, cardboard-makers, embroiders of military decorations. The organization

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had a Central Committee made up of 20 members from the 20 Arrondisements, and a executive committee of seven. Its statutes announced: A responsible organization among the citoyennes of Paris who are resolved to support and defend the cause of the people, the Revolution, and the Commune, has just been founded to give assistance in the work of the government’s commissions, and to serve as ambulance stations, at canteens and at the barricades.

In each Arrondisement there were committees responsible for recruiting women who wanted to participate in these services. Summoning the women of the Union “at any hour of the day or night,” every day the committees were to send the Central Committee a report of their activity. Everyday saw new activities. Among the activities of the Union committee of the 7th Arrondisement: It sent to the Central Committee an ambulance nurse from the 106th Battalion, which had no more medicine and wanted to know if she could obtain any. It summoned women to the 20th meeting of the Union which was to be held in the municipal building on May 8th. It made a list of the working women in the neighborhood and asked for the concession for sandbags that women could sew for the barricades in order to distribute work throughout the Arrondisement. On May 17, when the Gros-Caillou gunpowder factory exploded, the Union committee attended to giving clothing to the victims and fijinding them new lodgings. With many men mobilized in the National Guard, the women faced massive unemployment. Women came to the military supply offfijice and the Ministry of Labor asking to be given work. Thousands were employed making cartridges, others sewing sandbags for the barricades. Wages were paid daily. The Union was crucial in organizing work for women. They presented the Commission for Labor and Exchange a petition for work since “our brothers, our husbands, and our sons cannot provide for the needs of our families.” They requested the distribution of the work of outfijitting of the National Guard throughout each Arrondisement. The Union invited working women “with substantial practical and theoretical knowledge” to a meeting in the 10th Arrondisment to discuss with the central committee measures to be taken for the reorganization of work. A few days later the Union advised women that this reorganization  had been approved and called upon them to register for participation in new workshops. Hundreds of poor women responded— seamstresses, laundresses, sewing-machine operators, bootstitchers, as well as non-proletarian professions such as schoolteachers and nurses.

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The Union moved to create a Federal Chambers of Working Women. The Sunday that working women were brought together to complete the fijinal drafting for the chambers was the Sunday Versailles troops entered Paris. The bloody week of resistance to repression and massacre was at hand. The call went out for all to the barricades. The Union not only fought for work for women, but posed a reorganization of work for all the Communards. They called for “free producers associations” to take work away “from the bondage of capitalistic exploitation,” and assure “the product to the producer.” In this quite extraordinary Address of the Central Committee of the Union des Femmes to the Commission of Labor and Exchange, they as well spoke to the need to change the manner to work—“the continual repetition of the same manual movement has a deadly influence upon the organism and the brain”— the duration of work—“the exhaustion of physical strength inevitable bring about the extinction of moral strength”—and to abolish “any competition between workers of both sexes,” since, in the struggle they were waging against capitalism, their interests were identical. “Equal pay for equal hours worked.” *** By the middle of May there were dozens of producers’ co-operatives in existence and the re-establishment of more than 30 trade unions. The floodgates had been opened for the praxis of Paris’ working masses. Many of these new experimental forms did not have a chance to operate in the brief weeks of the Commune’s existence. However, in its tendency there is no doubt that from below the Communards were thinking about and proposing a diffferent mode of working, one which strove to free workers from the capitalist integument.

• Those open floodgates extended to many social dimensions. Paris had found its voice, or better, its multitude of voices. There were clubs of men, of women, and of both—Club de la Révolution Sociale, Cercle des Jacobins, Club des Prolétaires, Club des Libres Penseurs, Club de la Délivrance, Club de la Victoire Club de Révolution, Club Saint-Michel, Club de la Boule Noire—to name only a few of the dozens of clubs operating during the Commune. They met often, almost daily or several times a week. All manner of topics were taken up: women in the revolution and in the church, armed defense

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of the Commune, education reforms, the rights of women. Strongly held anti-clerical sentiments, support for as well as critique of the deputies of the Commune and their actions were expressed. To these clubs could be added the vigilance committees, who often sent speakers to the clubs throughout the city as well as initiating activities in their various Arrondissments. The clubs and associations were incubators of the revolution. Lissagaray referred to them as “stockpiles of fijire and courage.” (Lissagaray, 1976) Benoit Malon, a revolutionary Communard, referred to them as places were the “holy revolt of the poor, the exploited, the oppressed, against the exploiters, against the tyrants,” was preached. (Quoted in Thomas, 2007: 94) Then there were the Commune’s many newspapers. Among them: Journal Offfijiciel de la République Francaise (La Commune), which published the documents of the Commune, Le Cri de Peuple, Le Pere Duchen, Proletaire, Bulletin Communal, and La Sociale Sometimes they were the papers of individual thinkers such as Valles and Andre Leo.1 Other journals were the organ of one or another club or the “organ of the clubs.” Within the Commune’s newspapers were not only the voices of various intellectuals, but letters from proletarian writers. The papers and a vast array of posters were a way of spreading announcements of public meetings, ways of defending the Commune and, as well, ways of critiquing and pushing the Commune forward: “Those elected by the people have the duty of keeping in constant touch with the electors in order to give account of the mandate they have received and to submit to questions” stated a poster in the 18th Arrondissement (Edwards, 1971: 278). The Proletaire, organ of the social demands of the 11th Arrondissement, published by the Club Saint-Ambroise, warned: The people alone have the right to be the judge of men and their acts, and the mission of its mandatories is limited to enabling the people to do this sanely and with a knowledge of the issues … Servants of the People, do not give yourselves false airs and pretend you are sovereigns …The people are tired of saviours; henceforth they intend to dispute your acts. (Edwards, 1971: 278)

1 See both Thomas, 2007 and Eichner. 2004 for the role of Andre Leo in the Commune. Thomas’ The Women Incendiaries is a path breaking book. Eichner’s Surmounting the Barricades raises a concept of multiple feminist socialisms in the Commune, focusing on Leo, Dimitriefff and Paule Mink.

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The May 6 edition of the Bulletin Communal proclaimed: People, govern yourselves by yourselves through your public meetings, through your Press, bring pressure to bear on those who represent you; they will never go too far along the road to revolution. (278)

The theme of education was a crucial one in the Commune, a theme which encompassed as well anti-clericalism and the role of women. An Education Commission was established by the Commune with Edouard Vaillant, a member of the International and socialist as its Delegate. An Education Commission of the Commune and a special Organization Commission were appointed. A “New Education” society was formed. A special Commission for Girls’ Education was created. An attack was launched against the iron grip of the Church in teaching. A Commune degree had separated Church and State, though it took weeks to begin to shut down Church schools. Movements were made to rid the schools of priests and nuns, to suppress all religious teaching in schools, to remove all religious objects. Instruction was to encompass only “the experimental or scientifijic method.” Instruction was to be free and compulsory. A proposal was made for day nurseries to be “scattered throughout the working-class districts, near to factories, and have their own gardens, a play-room full of toys and even an Avery full of birds to prevent the children ever getting bored.” (Edwards, 1971: 271) Another proposal for a girls’ school, and one for a Professional School of Industrial Art for Young Girls. *** We do not wish to ignore the workings of the Commune as government through its elected delegates, in their discussions, debates and decrees passed. Rather, we want to emphasize that the reality of the Commune, “its own working existence,” arose primarily from the deepest layers within Paris’ citizenry. To the extent that the deputies responded to that initiative and helped give voice to the movement from below, they were part of this revolutionary path. While forced to operate under the reality of war for its brief 10-week existence, the Commune nonetheless, has illuminated socialist thought and action at many historical moments and on many continents for more than a century. Perhaps its most explicit, direct impact, and in turn, its most profound exposition as revolutionary history and as theoretical contribution, is in relation to Karl Marx.

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II. The Civil War in France— Drafts and Address, and the French Edition of Capital These heaven-stormers of Paris —Marx

The Paris Commune had a profound influence upon Marx’s thought in the last decade of his life. For Marx, the Commune was the lynchpin between Capital and the illuminating writings of his last decade. Marx’s additions to the French edition of Capital (1872–75), his view of the role of the state in relation to the Russian peasant commune, his projection of the transition process needed to reach a new society in the Critique of the Gotha Program, his exploration of humanity’s multilinear pathways of non-capitalist development in his Ethnological Notebooks, were written under the impact of the Commune. This social revolution, a new type of revolutionary rule, was, at one and the same time, a profound illumination for Marx, and deeply illuminated by Marx. The nature of the capitalist state and its necessary destruction, the non-state nature of the Commune, the relationship of political form to economic emancipation, the content of this new political form, the specifijicity of the economic emancipation as meaning “the liberation of labor,” “the conditions of free and associated labor”—all were moments of the Communards’ praxis, and themes of Marx’s writing on the meaning of the Commune. Here an examination of two writings of Marx, The Civil War in France, and specifijic additions to the French edition of Capital, published after the Commune, can help us consider the role of the revolutionary intellectual in relation to the self-activity of a mass movement. During the Franco-Prussian War Marx had written two addresses for the First International. With the Paris Commune an unprecedented revolutionary moment arose, but one which soon faced the threat and then the horror of brutal suppression from the counter-revolution initiated in Versailles. Marx’s response, requested by the General Council of the International, was The Civil War in France. Marx’s preparatory materials for The Civil War consist of excerpts and notes from the press recorded in a copy book. In the later half of April Marx began the First Draft of the Address. The Second Draft was begun May 10. The fijinal Address was begun between mid-May and May 23. It was read May 30 to the General Council of the First International. More details can be found in Hal Draper’s Foreword and Notes to Marx and Engels Writings on the Paris Commune. (Marx, 1971)

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Marx wrote of the Communards’ smashing and thus transformation of the French bourgeois state. He held the destruction of the old and the creation of the new to be the inseparable dual rhythm of revolution: It was a Revolution against the State itself … a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life … a Revolution to break down the horrid machinery of Class domination itself. (Marx, 1971: 47)

Labor began its trek to freedom through doing away with unnecessary, class-dominated state labor: The Commune “begins the emancipation of labor—its great goal—by doing away with the unproductive and mischievous work of the state parasites.” (48) The standing army is suppressed and substituted for by an armed people. The Communards have taken the actual management of their Revolution into their own hands and found at the same time … the means to hold it in the hands of the People itself, displacing the State machinery, the governmental machinery of the ruling classes in a governmental machinery of their own. (49)

The government machinery would be “a working not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.” (50) The Commune had stripped the fetishism offf of state functions: The delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste. … Doing away with the state hierarchy altogether and replacing the haughteous masters of the people into always removable servants, a mock responsibility by a real responsibility, as they act continuously under public supervision. … The whole shame of state-mysteries and state pretensions was done away [with] by a Commune, mostly consisting of simple working men. … Making in one order the public functions,—military, administrative, political—real workingmen’s functions, instead of the hidden attributes of a trained caste (51).

The police would not be agents of a central government, but servants of the Commune. All the functionaries, the members of the Commune, were to be paid at workman’s wages. When elected, the functionaries could be immediately recalled. The destruction of the old state and the creation of the new, nonstate form, became one and the same. That same inseparability was expressed in the unity between political and economic. Marx expressed the Communards’ discovery as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.”(52) Two contemporary social thinkers, Sayer and Corrigan, have commented on its meaning: “ ‘The economical emancipation of labor’ in other words presupposed political forms which are themselves emancipatory.” (Sayer and Corrigan, 1983)

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The emancipatory political form of the Paris Commune: “was simple like all great things” (Marx, 1971: 54). With the old ‘statemachinery’ suppressed (for the moment), “the political form of the social emancipation of the liberation of labor” commenced its expression. Marx showed that these fijirst steps were the beginning of an arduous journey to be undertaken: The Commune does not [do] away with the class struggle, through which the working classes strive to the abolition of all classes, and, therefore, of all classes [class rule] … but it afffords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its diffferent phases in the most rational and human way.. … The working class knows that they have to pass through diffferent phases of class-struggle. They know that the superseding of the economic conditions of the slavery of labor by the conditions of free and associated labor can be the progressive work of time. (55)

Marx had no illusions that Utopia was at hand. He felt that the measures of the Commune were not socialist in their immediacy, but only in their tendency. And yet, even in its perilous, fleeting presence, it had already raised momentous social questions, and began the journey toward the emancipation of labor by practicing a new form of labor, “free and associated labor.” The Commune had begun “transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.” (56) That working men and working women, who had “the cannibals” at the gates, could nonetheless each and every day strive to decide in a simple straightforward manner how to take hold of the working of government, how to concern themselves with the running of production, was the truth of the Commune’s actuality. “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. … Working, thinking, fijighting, bleeding Paris … radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative.” (57) Marx worked tirelessly for the Commune, including after its demise, which came via the slaughter of 30,000-plus Communards. He enlisted support for surviving refugees, and wrote hundreds of letters to enlist aid. The drafts and fijinal Address on the Civil War in France, written in the last weeks of its existence, was delivered only two days after the Commune’s bloody suppression. The Civil War in France was Marx’s direct commentary on the Commune. At the same time, the Communards’ reaching for free and associated labor in Paris impacted the theoretical contribution of the French edition of Capital. Raya Dunayevskaya titled Chapter Six of her Marxism and Freedom, “The Paris Commune Illuminates and Deepens the Content of

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Capital.” Earlier she had written of Marx and a “Break with the Concept of Theory”: Marx shifted from “the history of theory to a history of production relations.”… He is breaking with the whole concept of theory as something intellectual, a dispute between theoreticians. … He goes directly into the labor process itself. … a new dialectic flowed out of the labor process. This new dialectic led him to meet, theoretically, the workers’ resistance inside the factory and outside of it. … Marx, the theoretician, created new categories out of the impulses from the workers. (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 89, 91)

The Paris Commune brought forth new illuminations and a deepening of the very content of Capital. These could be found in the French edition that Marx edited, making signifijicant additions and changes: Before the Commune, Marx had written that only freely associated labor could strip offf the fetishism from commodities. Now that the Communards did precisely that, the concrete doing extended the theory. (99)

Marx changed the section on fetishism of commodities of Chapter One “in a signifijicant manner” to show that not only was the commodity-form of production perverse, but that under capitalism it could have no other form: It is not that Marx did not ‘know,’ before the Paris Commune that everything under capitalism was perverted. … What was new was that the Commune, by releasing labor from the confijines of value production, showed how people associated freely without the despotism of capital or the mediation of things. … The Commune transformed the whole question of form from a debate among intellectuals to the serious activity of workers. … Marx never looked at concrete events one-sidedly to see how they conformed to his previously-established theory. The theory always gained in depth by the process of history itself. (100, 101, 102)

Marx had no “blueprint” for the future society. But he did have “sources,” and prominent among them was the experience of the Commune. The emancipatory form—a political/economic/social non-state form of state—was the creation of working men and women in Paris. The two major political tendencies within the Commune were the Blanquists and the Proudhonists. Marx had little to say about them, not because they were tendencies far from his own concepts, but because within the Commune, the newly discovered forms of organization and work had eclipsed the old ideas of these political tendencies. The ideology of the Blanquists and Proudhonists proved sterile within the creativity of the Commune. These political tendencies could only operate insofar as they were Communards, and thus swept within the orbit of its forms and ideas.

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III. The Commune Deepens Marx’s Concept of Organization— The First International After 1871 Both Marx’s Civil War in France and his two earlier “Addresses on the Franco-Prussian War” were prepared for and delivered to the General Council of the International. The Commune remained a focal point of Marx’s work in the months following its fall. The International was active in raising funds to support the Commune’s refugees. A number of refugees who arrived in London became members of the International’s General Council. When the International began, Marx had striven to include representatives of England’s working class. He wanted the International to be more than a collection of various radical tendencies in Europe lacking a working class base, and felt the participation of British trade union movement would be an important dimension of the International. He did not abandon this view. At the same time, the experience of the Commune expanded Marx’s concept of revolutionary dimensions fijinding expression in the International: The role of women—The International had opened its membership rolls to women early on. The experience of the Commune meant something more. The Minutes of the General Council of May 2, 1871 reported on a letter the Council had received from Elizabeth Dmitrieva in the midst of the Commune: The Russian lady had written that she was carrying on an active propaganda among the fair sex that she was holding crowed meetings every night, and that an amazon corps was to be raised. Some 5,000 had enlisted already. Her health was so precarious that she did not believe she would survive the struggle. (Marx, 1964: Minutes 1871–72, 184)

When the London Conference of the International met in September 1871—the Reaction that swept Europe following the Commune made the gathering of a full Congress of the International impossible—a resolution by Marx proposed the formation of Working Women’s branches in the name of the General Council and adopted on Sept. 19, 1871: Citizen Marx adds that it must be noted that the motion states ‘without exclusion of mixed section.’ He believes it is necessary to create exclusively women’s sections … (since) they prefer to meet by themselves to hold discussions. The women, he says, play an important role in life: they work in the factories, they take part in strikes, in the Commune and so forth … They have more ardor (passion) than the men. He adds a few words recalling the

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The role of agricultural workers–The same London Conference passed Resolution 8 to secure agricultural producers to the movement of the Industrial proletariat: Meanwhile, the federal councils or committees are invited to send agitators to the rural districts there to organize public meetings, to propagate the principles of the International and to found rural branches. (Marx, 1964: 63–64)

The expansion of the International to new areas and new participants–The United States: “Citizen Marx reported that he had received news from New York … the most important item of the new was that Wendell Phillips, the great anti-slavery leader, has joined the ranks of the International.” (Minutes, 8/15/71. Marx, 1964: 358.) The Council report of August 29, 1871, printed in the Eastern Post no. 153, Sept. 2, 1871, reported on “a letter from America stating the need for drawing Negro workers into the International.” (Marx, 1964: 531 footnote 70, 71) Citizen Marx read a letter from the Central Committee of the Association for the United States. Some of the Miners in Pennsylvania were still on strike, but those who were not, were dividing their wages with those out. The painters and plasterers had organized themselves on the model of Crispins—as the shoemakers called themselves. The typographical union had just held a Congress in Baltimore and a great strike of colored laborers was taking place in Washington, which was defeated by the stepping in of white labor. General Council Minutes July 4, 1871. (Marx, 1964: 228)

• Under the impact of the Commune, Marx was working out a deeper concept of revolutionary organization. Yes trade unions, but they were by no means identical to the International. In the General Council Minutes of August 8, 1871, Marx was recorded: “The misfortune was that the Trade Unions and Labor organizations held aloof from the International until they were in trouble, and then only did they come for assistance.” Added to this was the experience of reformist British trade union leaders who withdrew from the International when faced with the revolutionary nature of the Commune and Marx’s Civil War in France. Marx’s attention instead turned to others within the International, and to the possibility of new forces, “lower and deeper,” joining, including in underdeveloped lands. Branches of the International were formed in the US, New Zealand, and India.

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With the Commune form displacing the state machinery–“All [previous] revolutions thus only perfected the State machinery instead of throwing offf this deadening incubus”—and beginning a new mode of existence—“The greatest measure of the Commune is its own existence, working, acting under circumstance of unheard of difffijiculty!”–Marx, though painfully aware of the devastating setback its destruction meant, was searching for other spaces where its meaning could be caught and held, including within the International. The point is not whether Marx’s deepening concept of revolutionary organization could succeed within the International’s form. In the end it could not, both because of the reactionary political climate that swept Europe, and the intensifijied factional fijights within the International, particularly on the part of Bakunin and his followers. Marx, who throughout the years of the International’s existence had to spend considerable time battling various tendencies, now found the job overwhelming.2 A year after the London conference where he had sought new beginnings within the International, Marx saw the need to search outside its framework. At the 1872 Hague Congress, the only one Marx attended in person, the General Council was moved from London to New York. The International would wither away on American shores. The point is that the deeper concept of organization that Marx forged out of the experience of the Commune remained with him, even if it could not be realized within the International’s form. When Marx undertook

2 See in particular Marx’s letter to Friedrich Bolte, November 23, 1871: The International was founded in order to replace the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real organization of the working class for struggle. The original Statutes and the Inaugural Address show this at the fijirst glance. On the other hand the Internationalists could not have maintained themselves if the course of history had not already smashed up the sectarian system. The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers’ movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are (historically) justifijied, the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary. Nevertheless what history has shown everywhere was repeated within the International. The antiquated makes an attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form. And the history of the International was a continual struggle on the part of the General Council against the sects and amateur experiments which attempted to assert themselves within the International itself against the genuine movement of the working class. This struggle was conducted at the Congresses, but far more in the private dealings of the General Council with the individual sections. (Marx and Engels, 1989b: 251) Marx then proceeded to elaborate how in Paris the Proudhonists, in Germany the Lassalle clique, in Russia Bakunin himself all entered the International and huge battles followed.

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such diverse questions of his critique of a supposedly Marxist organization in Germany (Critique of the Gotha Program 1875), his studies of the Russian peasant commune as the possible basis for socialism in Russia of the early 1880s (Drafts and Letter to Vera Zazulish published in Marx and the Russia Road. Shanin, 1983), and his Ethnological Notebooks (Marx, 1972) commenting on pre-capitalist societies in the New World and other areas of the world—in all these moments, a deepening concept of organization, as the self-activity of masses in motion, and as revolutionaries who wish to associate themselves with such masses, and thus create revolutionary socialist organization, was at work. We will return to this question in relation to Marx in Part II.

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APPENDIX: MARX EXCERPTS FROM FIRST AND SECOND DRAFTS OF THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE Because a number of Marx’s formulations from the 1st and 2nd drafts to his Civil War in France on the meaning of the Commune as selforganization as opposed to the state are not in the fijinal address, this appendix prints excerpts from the drafts. (Marx and Engels, 1971) From the fijirst draft The Commune vs. the “statemachinery,” “stateparasite” [as one word] It is the emancipation of the producing class from the exploiting classes, their retainers and their state parasites. (126) It is the people acting for itself by itself. (130) There was, of course, no time to reorganize public instruction (education); but by removing the religious and clerical element from it, the Commune has taken the initiative in the mental emancipation of the people. It has appointed a Commission for the organization de l’enseignement (139) stateparasite [as one word] (140) The centralized statemachinery which, with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judicial organs, entoils (enmeshes) the living society like a boa constrictor. (148) The true antithesis to the Empire itself—that is to the state power, the centralized executive, of which the Second Empire was only the exhausting formula—was the Commune. (150). This was, therefore, a Revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or Imperialist form of State Power. It was a Revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life. It was not a revolution to transfer it from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other, but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of Class domination itself. (150) The Commune with its defijinite negation, and, therefore, the initiation of the social Revolution of the 19th century. (150) Only the Proletarians, fijired by a new social task to accomplish by them for all society, to do away with all classes and class rule, were the men to break the instrument of that class rule—the State, the centralized and organized governmental power usurping to be the master instead of the servant of society. (151)

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The Commune—the re-absorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression—the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artifijicial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own force opposed to and organized [one] against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies. The form was simple like all great things. (152) The general sufffrage … adapted to its real purposes, to choose by the communes their own functionaries of administration and initiation. The delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caster—the stateparasites, richly paid syco-phante and sinecurists, in the highest posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses and turning them against themselves in the lower place of the hierarchy. Doing away with the state hierarchy altogether and replacing the haughtenous masters of the people into always removable servants, a mock responsibility by a real responsibility, as they act continuously under public supervision. Paid like skilled workmen, 12 pounds a month, the highest salary not exceeding 240 pounds …The whole sham of state-mysteries and state pretensions was done away [with] by a Commune, mostly consisting of simple working men, organizing the defense of Paris, caring war against the Praetorians of Bonaparte, securing the approvisionment of that immense town, fijilling all the posts hitherto divide between Government, police, and Prefecture, doing their work publicly, simply, under the most difffijicult and complicated circumstances, and doing it, as Milton did his Paradise Lost, for a few pounds, acting in bright daylight, with no pretensions to infallibility, not hiding itself behind circumlocution offfijices, not ashamed to confess blunders by correcting them. Making in one order the public functions, – military, administrative, political—real workmen’s functions, instead of the hidden attributes of a trained caste; … Whatever the merits of the single measures of the Commune, its greatest measure with its own organization, extemporized with the Foreign Enemy at one door, and the class enemy at the other, proving by its life its vitality, confijirming its thesis by its action… Captive Paris resumed by one bold spring the leadership of Europe, not depending on brute force, but by taking the lead of the social movement, by giving body to the aspirations of the working class of all countries. (154) Such is the Commune—the political form of the social emancipation. … the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and

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therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organized means of action. The Commune does not [do] away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to the abolition of all classes, and, therefore, of all classes [class rule] (because it does not represent a peculiar interest. It represents the liberation of “labor”, that is the fundamental and natural condition of individual and social life which only by usurpation, fraud, and artifijicial contrivances can b e shifted from the few upon the many), but it afffords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its diffferent phases in the most rational and humane way…v.v It begins the emancipation of labor—its great goal—by doing away with the unproductive and mischievous work of the state parasites, by cutting away the springs which sacrifijice an immense portion of the national produce to the feeding of the statemonster on the one side, by doing, on the other, the real work of administration, local and national, for workingmen’s wages. (153) The working class know that they have to pass through diffferent phases of class-struggle. They know that the superseding of the economical condition of the slavery of labor by the conditions of free and associated labor can only be the progressive work of time, (that economic transformation) that they require not only a change in distribution by a new organization of production, or rather the delivery (setting free) of the social forms of production in present organized labor, (engendered by present industry) [,] of the trammels of slavery [,] of their present class character [,] and their harmonious nation and international coordination. … They know that the present “spontaneous action of the natural laws of capital and landed property” — can only be superseded by “the spontaneous action of the laws of the social economy of free and associated labor” by a long process of development of new conditions, as was the “spontaneous action of the economic laws of slavery” and the “spontaneous action of the economical laws of serfdom.” But they know at the same time that great strides may be [made] at once through the Communal form of political organization and that the time has come to begin that movement for themselves and mankind. (154–5) What the proletariat has to do is to transform the present capitalist character of that organized labor and those centralized means of labor, to transform them from the means of class rule and class exploitation into forms of free associated labor and social means of production. (157) On the one side a large proletariat foncier (rural proletariat) has grown out of it whose interest are identical with those of the townish wages laborers. (158).

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The new feature is that the people, after the fijirst rise, have not disarmed themselves and surrendered their power into the hands of the Republican mountebanks of the ruling classes, that, by the constitution of the Commune, they have taken the actual management of their Revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the People itself, displacing the Statemachinery, the governmental machinery of the ruling classes by a governmental machinery of their own. (162) From the second draft Its true meaning and purpose were only revealed by the Revolution of the 18th March and that revelation was a Revolution. It was to supersede  the social and political conditions of class rule which had engendered the Second Empire. (189) What is the Commune, this sphinx so tantalizing to the Bourgeois mind? In its most simple conception [it is] the form under which the working class assume the political power in their social strongholds, Paris and the other centers of industry. (195) But the proletariat cannot, as the ruling classes and their diffferent rival fractions have done in the successive hour of their triumph, simply lay hold on the existent statebody and wield this read made agency of their own purpose. The fijirst condition for the hold[ing] of political power, is to transform working machinery and destroy it—an instrument of class rule. (196) But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made statemachinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation. (197) In its most simple conception the Commune meant the preliminary destruction of the old governmental machinery at its central seats, Paris. … The commune to consist of the municipal councilors of the diffferent arrondissements, (as Paris was the initiator and the model, we have to refer to it) chosen by the sufffrage of all citizens, responsible, and revocable in short terms. The majority of that body would naturally consist of workmen or acknowledged representatives of the working class. It was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. The police agents, instead of being the agents of a central government, were to be the servants of the Commune, having, like the functionaries in all the other departments of administration to be appointed and always revocable by the Commune. All the functionaries, like the

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members of the Commune itself, having to do their work at workmen’s wages. The judges were also to be elected, revocable, and responsible. The initiative in all matters of social life to be reserved to the commune. … The public functions would cease to be a private property bestowed by a central government upon its tools.(199) To fijighting, working, thinking Paris, electrifijied by the enthusiasm of historic initiative, full of heroic reality, the new society in its throes, there is opposed at Versailles the old society, a world of antiquated shame and accumulated lies. (201) The General Council feels proud of the prominent part the Paris branches of the International have taken in the glorious revolution of Paris. Not, as the imbeciles fancy, as if the Paris, or any other branch of the International received its mot d’ordre from a centre. But the flower of the working class in all its civilized countries belonging to the International, and being imbued with its ideas, they are sure everywhere in the working class movements to take the lead. (206) The proletarians of the capital…They have understood that it is their imperious duty and their absolute right to take into their own hands their own destinies by seizing the political powers. But the workers class cannot, as the rival factions of the appropriating class have done in their hours of triumph, simply lay hold on the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purpose. (210) The workmen do want the republic, no longer as a political modifijication of the old system of class rule, but as the revolutionary means of breaking down class rule itself. (211)

CHAPTER THREE

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL, THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, AND ENGELS AFTER MARX—ORGANIZATION WITHOUT MARX’S ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT I. A Preliminary Note on Lassalle [Lassalle] … flings about phrases borrowed from us. His attitude that of the future workers’ dictator. He resolves the question between labor and capital as easily as play. The workers are to agitate for universal sufffrage and then send people like himself armed with the shining word of science into Parliament. They will establish workers’ factories, for which the state will put up capital, and by and by these institutions will embrace the whole country. —Marx to Engels (April 9, 1863) Lassalle in opposition to the Communist Manifesto and to all earlier socialism, conceived the workers’ movement from the narrowest national standpoint. He is being followed in this—and that after the work of the International. —Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875 The standpoint of Marx towards Lassalle is not that of German Social Democracy. … How could we forget the man from whose writings all we old party comrades, and some of the younger one too, derived our fijirst knowledge and inspiration as socialists? —Karl Kautsky, quoted in Footman, 1947: 244

The state socialism that Ferdinand Lassalle wished to establish in the 1860s did not die with the bankruptcy of his scheme of having the state fijinance producers’ cooperatives from on high, let alone his secret negotiations with Bismarck and the Absolutist Prussian State. Marx wrote: “It is worthy of Lassalle’s imagination that with state loan one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!” (Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx, 1979b) Lassalleanism after Lassalle continued to live through the unifijication program of Lassalleans and German Marxists (Eisenachers) in the Gotha Program. Marx issued his powerful critique of the Program in 1875, sharply rebuking the Lassallean heritage. (Chapter Ten of this study.) Yet this would not stop the German Social Democracy from organizationally

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practicing Lassalleanism as the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Its leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky, systematized Lassalle’s elitist division of labor between worker and intellectual, proclaiming “the vehicles of science were not the proletariat but the bourgeois intellectual.” Lenin would approvingly quote from Kautsky’s view in his What Is To Be Done? Luxemburg too, though aware of Marx’s critical view of Lassalle, held on high what she saw as his “liberating the German working class” from servitude to the bourgeoisie, and “organizing it into an independent class party.” (quoted in Dunayevskaya, 1982: 154) Why such admiration for Lassalle on the part of many revolutionaries even when they “agreed” with Marx’s critique? Luxemburg’s comments help us discern the decades-long attraction, if not actual preference for Lassalle over Marx by a signifijicant segment of German Social Democracy: his ability to build a working class party in Germany, the General German Workers Association, founded in 1861. As Dunayevskaya noted: This representative of labor … was no armchair socialist. He was an activist. Nor did he restrict himself to writing. He was instrumental in building the fijirst great independent political party of the German proletariat. (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 75–76)1

Lassalle was a product of the 1848 Revolutions, but his attitude to the working class who had sought an independent class role was far diffferent from Marx’s. From the vantage point of the 1860s he would comment on 1848: Look back to March and April of 1848. Have you forgotten how things were then? The police force impotent. The common people swarming along the streets. The streets and the people themselves under the sway of unthinking agitators … rough ignorant men thrown up by the storm. … You should thank those who are working to bridge the gulf between the thinkers and the masses. (Footman, 1947: 159)

From early on Lassalle was attracted to Marx’s ideas, but often distorted and misused them. Nonetheless, the objective situation within Prussia provided an opportunity for Lassalle’s ideas to fijind a receptive audience: There were, in the autumn of 1862, signs of restlessness among the German workers. The American Civil War and the cotton blockade were afffecting the textile industry. The slump was spreading and there were pay cuts and unemployment. (Footman, 1947: 155) 1 I am indebted to Dunayevskaya for providing the conceptual framework for this chapter. See “Ferdinand Lassalle: State Socialist,” in Chapter IV of Dunayevskaya, 2000, as well as Chapter IX, “The Second International, 1889 to 1914.”

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A group of workers issued a call for a Workers’ Congress in Berlin. It was in this milieu that overtures were made to Lassalle, who had written a Workers’ Program, originally as a speech in 1861, then published as a pamphlet, (“a vulgarization of what we have so often said in the Communist Manifesto and our other papers”—Marx), to begin a workers’ organization. The Workers’ Program document lead to charges of “inciting to hatred and contempt” against Lassalle, and to a trial. The now well-known Lassalle moved to form the General German Workers Association (1863). Even if his concept was of manipulation from above, his practice was to involved the active agitation of masses of workers. Thousands upon thousands joined the Association. Despite Lassalle’s death a year later, this founder of the fijirst mass worker organization in Germany was strongly influential in the future development of Marxist organization. One or another of his organizational ideas and practices—a shortcut to socialism via the state, a concept of the backwardness of the masses, a view of intellectuals such as himself “working to bridge the gulf between the thinkers and the masses” combined with mass agitation below—would fijind a hearing long after he passed from the scene. It was the beginning of a fetishism of organization which arose within “offfijicial” Marxism without due regard for Marx’s magisterial organization of thought, Capital, or his organizational principles and practice in the First Workingman’s International. II. Fetishism of Organization: The Second International and the Germany Social Democracy Despite [the Second International’s] adherence to Marxist “language,” there was no organization of Marxist thought. —Raya Dunayevskaya, 2000

The founding of the Second Workingman’s International in 1889 was the embodiment of the fijirst post-Marx Marxist organization. Its establishment, and German Social Democracy’s (its most influential member) initial growth, came, however, bereft of Marx’s most comprehensive, concrete expression of the relation of revolutionary organization and revolutionary principles—the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Critique remained generally unknown to the world of German Social Democracy for a decade and a half. Only in 1891, at Engels’ insistence, was there agreement to publish Critique in the Party press. Its publication coincided with preparations for the Erfurt Congress, where a program to replace the Lassallean-influenced Gotha Program would be passed. Lassalleans within

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German Social Democracy, and some Marxists who had been involved in writing and approving the 1875 Gotha Program, were upset at the publication of Marx’s Critique. However the greater truth was that subsequently, all of German Social Democracy and the vast majority of the world socialist movement, failed to grapple with the sharp critique and emancipatory ideas found in Marx’s commentary. Those ideas were not limited to the necessity of exposing Lassalleanism’s grave contradictions, particularly on economic matters and on the state. Rather, Marx’s “marginal notes” took up the relation of revolutionary organization to “principles” (philosophy) in the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism. Though in 1891 German Social Democracy seemingly put Lassalleanism behind it and was “on the Marxist road,” it was in fact an organization that failed to establish a continuity with Marx’s organization of thought that flowed from his greatest theoretical work, Capital. This was true, not only of the reformism of evolutionary socialism, but in relation to those who claimed the heritage of revolutionary Marxism. All of this would not become fully clear until the outbreak of World War I and the betrayal of Marxism by the leaders of German Social Democracy as well as almost all of the Marxist parties who made up the Second International, and who voted support for the bloody onslaught. Though German Social Democracy, particularly through its chief theoretician Karl Kautsky, spoke and wrote often enough of the dialectic, its alpha and omega was organization—a fetishism of organization. Its achievements were by no means insignifijicant. Not only was there a mass political party and trade unions, but cooperatives among women and youth, as well as many newspapers, journal and books. As Dunayevskaya noted: They were a world unto themselves, even having ‘socialist’ rituals for births, weddings, funerals, as well as sponsoring organized sport, travel, recreation. They began to believe that their organized strength, in and of itself, would make capitalistic war impossible, and would assure Social-Democratic power. When capitalism ‘inevitably’ and ‘automatically’ fell, they fully expected their ruling cadre to be ready to replace the capitalist managers who were ‘mismanaging’ the productive force and embarking upon colonialism and burdening the population with military expenditures. (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 154)

In fact, socialist planning for the management of capitalist enterprises was the essence of the Second International’s economic theory. As against the anarchy of the market would be the socialist managed economy. These socialist theoreticians thereby missed the crucial changes capitalism was

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undergoing. Engels caught the error of such thinking, writing directly to Kautsky criticizing his identifijication of planlessness with capitalism: “When we go over to trusts which monopolize and rule over whole branches of industry, then not only private production but also planlessness ceases.” (quoted by Dunayevskaya, 2000: 152) But the logic of such “socialist” thought had been set in motion. Not only was it economically bankrupt, but the political consequences—turning a blind eye to monopoly’s extension to imperialism, and fijinally, to support for capitalist war—would become manifest in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the socialist theoretician’s mere lip service to the dialectic vitiated its revolutionary heart— The methodology of presenting the results of Marx’s studies as if they were something to be learned by role and disregarding the process, the relationship of theory to history, past and present, in the development of Marxism (152) —and characterized the thought of the Second International.

For Dunayevskaya, the Marxist thought and practice put forth by the Second International, 1889 to 1914, was not a continuation of Marx’s Marxism, but an “Organizational Interlude.” It was an organizational interlude in two interrelated senses: (1) It substituted a fetishism of organization, organization, organization for the need to work out the relationship between revolutionary organization and a body of thought, that is a philosophy of revolution rooted in the dialectic. Marxist organization was established without due regard to the organization of thought that immediately proceeded it—Marx’s Capital. (2) The Second International was as well an interlude in that, as organization, it was established absent the principles Marx had set forth for a revolutionary organization in the Critique of the Gotha Program. It was not until the 1917 fusion of the Bolsheviks and the Soviets that a concept of revolutionary organization with threads back to Marx came to the fore. And even here, this occurred only in a partial manner, and only for a very brief period. (See Chapter Five on the Russian Revolution.) In tracing the history of the Second International, Dunayevskaya argued that established Marxism did not suddenly turn sour with the outbreak of World War. “The point here is that the slow poisoning of Marxism, long before the collapse is to this day overlooked by people claiming to be Marxists.” (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 151) During its fijirst years German Social Democracy was forced to exist under the severe constraints of Bismarck’s

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Anti-Socialist Laws. The organization and the struggles of the workers persisted. When the laws fijinally expired Germany Social Democracy expanded, winning millions of votes and sending representatives to parliament. However by then, the very organism of GSD had accepted a path of practical struggles without a viable connection to socialism: “[Social Democratic Parties] lived entirely in the realm of the diffference between immediate demands and the ultimate goals of socialism. The ultimate goals could wait.” (153) It is true that Rosa Luxemburg did break with Kautsky individually by 1910, and harbored few illusions about the revolutionary nature of the Germany Social Democracy. Yet, as we will explore later, so tied was Luxemburg to “the Party,” that she would not break fully with it until the outbreak of the 1919 German Revolution. Lenin had build a revolutionary Marxist party in Russia under conditions of Czarist rule which was in many ways worlds apart from the practice and ideology of German Social Democracy. However, his 1902 What Is To Be Done?, though written out of the specifijicity of Russian conditions, had nonetheless accepted the principle enunciated earlier by Kautsky, that socialism must be introduced to the masses by intellectuals. Lenin, in establishing his vanguard party to lead, embraced the separation of leaders and masses that Kautsky had laid out. Only with the Second International’s betrayal at the outbreak of the war, would he fully break from established Marxism, reorganizing himself philosophically and politically via a return to Hegel’s Science of Logic. However, even this “Great Divide in Marxism” did not extend to revolutionary organization, as we will see shortly. The revolutionaries in the fijinal decade of the 19th century and the beginning years of the 20th century had lost the thread to Marx’s concept of organization, the unity of organization and philosophic expression. Instead, Lassalleanism remained a pervasive dimension of established Marxism. Dunayevskaya argued that even Luxemburg and Lenin retained aspects of Lassalleanism in their concept and practice of organization. The growing socialist movement of the Second International was characterized by a Western Eurocentric view, even if its membership extended beyond Western Europe’s confijines. This could be seen in the Second International’s response to the fijirst great revolution of the 20th century, the 1905 Russian Revolution. The Revolution occurred between Congresses of the International. When it did meet in the 1907 Congress, the International simply did not put 1905 on its agenda. As Dunayevskaya argued:

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There is no such thing as Marxist theory that does not link the specifijic stage of workers’ revolt to the specifijic stage of capitalist development. The 1905 Revolution gave birth to an unheard-of new form of workers’ organization called the Soviet (Council). If such a new phenomenon was not even put on the agenda it could mean only one thing—the theoreticians were not receiving the impulses from these deepest layers of the revolutionary proletariat. (156)

III. Engels’ Relation to German Social Democracy and to Marx’s Marxism: What Tactics? What Theory? What Philosophy? [I]t is most decisive to realize Marxism is Marx’s continent of thought and only of Marx, and not of Marx and Engels —Dunayevskaya, Letter, June 30, 1978

In the 12 years Engels lived after the death of Marx, he prepared for publication volumes II and III of Capital, wrote several Introductions to new editions of works of Marx and of Marx and himself, and worked on a number of his own works including Origin of the Family and material for Dialectics of Nature. At the same time he was involved in a vigorous correspondence with leading members of German Social Democracy, entering into a number of the ongoing disputes, at times pressed into giving tactical advice on party afffairs. A sharp debate has ranged within Marxist thought, particularly in the last decades of the 20th century, on the role of Fredrick Engels in the rise of German revisionism.2 Some Left historians have accused Engels of furthering a positivism and materialist dogmatism, while others have accused him of being the spiritual father of an evolutionism that accepted parliamentarism and led to reformism. Manfred Steger, in his contribution to the collection of essays Engels after Marx, wrote that these interpretations often lacked the specifijic political historical context, treating Engels’ writings in too abstract a manner, tracing Engels’ writings on only a pure theoretical plane. Steger sought to place a number of Engels writings of the 1890s in the context of “the dramatically changed political situation in fijin-de-siecle Germany.” (Steger and Carver, 1999: 182) He noted Engels’ 2 See especially the collection Engels after Marx. (Steger and Carver, 1999) Among the writings consulted in this collection: “Friedrich Engels and the Origins of German Revisionism: Another Look,” by Manfred B. Steger, “Engels and the Contradictions of Revolutionary Strategy” by Lawrence Wilde, and “Engels and ‘Scientifijic Socialism” by Paul Thomas.

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chapter three purely tactical, and at the same time deeply ambiguous, response to concrete challenges at the party level. … [E]ndorsing short-term tactics of accommodation while at the same time seeking to maintain his overly optimistic assessment of the potential for a revolutionary seizure of power. Engels attempted to wed gradualist tactics with revolutionary objectives. Consequently he not only lost any meaningful analytical distinction between ‘evolution’ and ‘revolution,’ but also compromised Marxism’s most ambitious claim: the purported unity of theory and practice. Ultimately, Engels’s position contributed to the further decline of the status of ‘theory’ in the SPD and strengthened the role of the instrumentalist party tacticians. (182)

Engels was a revolutionary through and through. However in his last years, he felt he could separate tactics from theory without providing an explanation. In so doing Engels helped prepare the ground, so that after his death, the tactics, detached from revolutionary theory, took control and found a theoretical home in reformism. These doings were not Engels’ alone. There were powerful objective pulls toward reformism. As Lawrence Wilde noted: [R]evisionism was not simply a set of ideas set down by Bernstein. It was an outlook that reflected the daily life of the movement, including the trade unions, since progress was measured by the movement’s ability to improve the lives of the German working class. (Steger and Carver, 1999)

German Social Democracy’s earlier survival mode faced with Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws—great caution and care in its demands, pronouncements and goals—far from being only necessary tactics and strategy for the concrete moment, became the universal reformist organization of thought to match the social reforms it sought. Engels certainly fought this tendency as he saw it. His insistence on the publication of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program showed this. However, he would time and time again face constant pressure from the SPD leadership to hide the revolutionary goal and the tactics, such as street fijighting, that might be needed to achieve it. The most prominent example was that of Engels’ 1895 Introduction of Marx’s Class Struggles in France. A number of the leaders of German Social Democracy objected to the Introduction as too radical. With great reluctance Engels agreed to eliminate a number of passages. Even this did not satisfy Wihhelm Liebknecht, who published only excerpts he chose in the party publication Vorwarts, without bothering to consult Engels. Engels denounced this distortion of his views and insisted on publication of the full modifijied text. Nonetheless, when it came to Engels’ concrete contributions to German Social Democracy in  the 12 years post-Marx, the separation of tactics from theory often predominated.

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In many ways Engels faced a daunting task. The rapid growth of West European-capitalism in the fijinal decades of the 19th century had its parallel in the development of an industrial working class, trade unions and socialist political parties. As opposed to the earlier battles with anarchism in the First International, the Second International was composed of various socialist parties, many of who were pulled by reformist tendencies. Engels opposed this trend, taking issue with, among others, the “Possibilists” in France as well as the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society in Britain. His main concentration was the political-organizational fray in Germany. Wilde noted: “For Engels, socialist politics was always a politics of class struggle.” (202) However, “in the last few years of his life Engels became an enthusiastic advocate of electoral politics, and he embraced it with the excessive zeal of a convert.” (204) One fijinds in Engels’ correspondence of the 1890s much enthusiastic commentary on the electoral results in Germany. In Socialism in Germany, written in 1891–92 he followed the election results of the SPD and declared: “[I]t is possible to determine the date when it will come to power almost by mathematical calculation.” (Marx and Engels, 1990: 239–40) It is not that Engels put aside the need for the revolutionary transformation of society. But he did not often intervene against the illusions of German Social Democracy’s fostering of a “parliamentarianism-only” strategy. Did contradictions of German Social Democracy reside deeper than those manifested by a separation of tactics and theory in relation to their concrete organizational practices? And what was Engels’ responsibility in this? Dunayevskaya in her Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution argued that there was a philosophic discontinuity between the founder of a “new continent of thought,” Marx, and the post-Marx Marxists. She saw this beginning with Engels even while Marx was live, though it became decisive in the dozen years of Engels’ life post-Marx. The category post-Marx Marxism as a pejorative was created to express what Dunayevskaya saw as the post-Marx Marxists theoretical/philosophic diffferences with Marx’s thought. The German Social Democracy’s discontinuity with Marx’s concept of organization flowed from these diffferences. It was thus the lack of philosophic continuity, including between Marx and Engels, that formed a decisive component in the theoretical and organizational expression of revolutionary socialism post-Marx. Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientifijic, with its systematized popularization of theory, provided the ground for the socialism of German Social Democracy. Indeed, it was accepted as “Marxism” by the end of the

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19th Century and for much of the 20th Century throughout the movement, reformist and revolutionary alike. Lawrence Wilde writes: Socialism: Utopian and Scientifijic… set down the ‘historical materialist’ framework for the political programs adopted by the social democratic parties that grew in strength across the continent of Europe in the 1880s and 1890s … [I]t played an important role in the adoption of a Marxist program by the SPD (German Social Democratic Party) at Erfurt in 1891. The book had a strong evolution flavor, reflecting his enthusiasm for Darwin. (Steger and Carver, 1999)

What was true of Socialism: Utopian and Scientifijic, held as well for other Engels’ texts from The Origin of the Family to the post-humus Dialectics of Nature, both of which became part of the “Marxist canon.” What was the relation between these works of Engels and the Marxism of Marx? Dunayevskaya wrote on the methodological diffference between Marx and Engels in her contrasting of Engels’ The Origin of the Family to Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks: Nothing less than the vital question of transitions is at stake in the diffferences between Marx’s and Engels’s views. Marx was showing [in his Ethnological Notebooks] that it is during the transition period that you see the duality emerging to reveal the beginnings of antagonisms, where as Engels [in his Origin of the Family] always seems to have antagonisms only at the end, as if class society came in very nearly full blown after the communal form was destroyed and private property was established. Moreover, for Marx the dialectical development from one stage to another is related to new revolutionary upsurges, whereas Engels sees it as a unilateral progression. (Dunayevskaya, 1982: 180)

Engels’ capitulation to a dialogue of tactics and strategy was rooted not alone in the new developments brought forth by the growth of capitalism, or in the tensions and pulls found within the international socialist parties in general, or within German Social Democracy in particular. It was fundamentally located within his philosophic, his methodological, relation to Marx’s Marxism. The unprecedented challenge called for its continuance post-Marx through concrete philosophic/theoretic re-creation in the face in new objective-subjective moments. Here Engels, the most loyal and dogged follower and propagandizer of Marx’s thought, did not meet the challenge. He would not be alone.

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APPENDIX “THE INTERLUDE THAT NEVER ENDED ORGANIZATIONALLY” The following text is excerpted from a Dunayevskaya “Talking To Myself” document of April 4, 1987. (Dunayevskaya, 1981: #10893) It was part of her preparatory notes for “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” At the bottom of the fijirst excerpted page, Dunayevskaya had asked to be typed all in caps, “The interlude that never ended organizationally.” Next to it she had written and underlined NB, which she frequently did for emphasis in her readings and at times in her writings. We have taken this expression as the title for the excerpt. The category “Organizational Interlude,” had been created by her for a section between parts III and IV of her Marxism and Freedom that contained a single chapter on the Second International. She had decided not to create a full Part on the Second International in her book. In the following brief notes of 1987 that touch upon Lassalle, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, the German Social Democracy and Karl Kautsky, as well as Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and Luxemburg, Dunayevskaya expanded her view of what the interlude encompassed. The document was not edited by Dunayevskaya for publication. …[S]ince I just developed the idea in my head that it isn’t true that the separation of organization from philosophic principle, i.e. the whole theory of organization began with Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party, I want to develop that historic background here. First and foremost, that isn’t a fact, and it isn’t 1902 that all this occurred. The truth is that organization totally separated from philosophy, or any theory of politics … began in Germany, began with Lassalle, was not just a sect but a mass movement he got so much credit for, while Marx was shunted aside as just an intellectual, was actually the idea, the practice, the persistence, the popularization, the never-ending path for all so-called socialists, whether reformists or revolutionaries. And it wasn’t because he, Lassalle, wasn’t an intellectual; he most certainly was, and a very typical statist-Hegelian whom Marx called a “workers’ dictator.” So you have both organization and dictatorship and authoritarianism and wheeler-dealing and that equaled “organization.” So when this organization, the General Association of German Workers, decided to merge with what was supposed to a Marxist group, the Eisenachists, to form a Germany Workers Party. By the time they got to

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meet in 1875 Marx had fijinished the French edition of Capital, which further developed, at one and the same time, the fetishism of commodities and greatly extended the general law of capitalist accumulation, with its law of concentration and centralization of capital that would reach their ultimate in the hands of one single capitalist or capitalist economy. In a word, Marx was now ready to so eliminate any distinction, not only between dialectics, but between organization and principles, that is to say, theories of revolution, dialectics of philosophy, that he not only wrote a Critique of the Gotha Program but was going to make public that he was going to cut offf all relationship to this newly-formed organization. He didn’t make it public but he most certainly cut offf relations and contrasted the diffference between a national party and the International which he headed and which resulted in starting a new form of organization, the Paris Commune. To make sure that that [the International] would not die along with any physical death, that is, historic disappearance because of defeat by the counter-revolution, he asked the Marxists to go deeper and lower into the proletariat, as well as to the oppressed in general, whether they be peasant or minorities like Jew, while he went searching for precapitalist social forces and passions that we now call the Third World. The result was his very last work, the EN [Ethnological Notebooks] that stretched/included from Iroquois women and Indians in America to the intelligent Black aborigine in Australia, as well as including the Asians in general, especially the Chinese and East Indians. Which actually brought us back to the 1841 [Doctoral] Thesis and the Greeks as well as Hegel on how to begin anew when two such diffferent totalities—reality and ideas—collide. Now it’s only after still another division in the GSD [German Social Democracy] with the new Erfurt Program, that fijinally after much prodding from Engels, that Critique of the Gotha Program was made public as a mere “contribution to the discussion” of what constitutes an organization, its principles. And it’s that Kautskyian concept of the intellectual bringing socialism to the masses through a party that would lead them, which is what Lenin “copied,” concretizing it further for Tsarist conditions to become What Is To Be Done?. Luxemburg in her critique was neither at the Congress which voted to accept that, having refused to even attend a Congress that stood for self-determination of nations, nor did she criticize the specifijic principle of the fact that the workers could not get to socialism unless they had a political party to lead them.

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What is true in all the debates on Organization, spontaneity, philosophy/politics, class struggle, class struggle, class struggle is that all those who scream so much about class struggle are the very ones who think the workers are backward, and are the ones who lost all these revolutions because the workers are not “mature” enough, so they wish to subject them to further stay under capitalist to learn about “democracy.”

CHAPTER FOUR

THE 1905 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: MASS PROLETARIAN SELF-ACTIVITY AND ITS RELATION TO THE ORGANIZATIONAL THOUGHT OF MARXIST REVOLUTIONARIES [The Russian proletariat] must show that the Russian Revolution is not just the last act in a series of bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century, but rather the forerunner of a new series of future proletarian revolutions in which the conscious proletariat and its vanguard, the Social-Democracy, are destined for the historic role of leader. —Rosa Luxemburg

The 1905 Russian Revolution provides a vantage point for viewing the often contentious relationship of spontaneous forms of mass organization and Marxist organization. In embryo, 1905 posed the problematic of spontaneity and organization that was to be debated and acted upon throughout much of the 20th century in the intertwining of mass movements, revolutions and organizations, be they Marxist, nationalist, or anarchist.1 In exploring the nature of this early 20th century revolution we want to probe the power and creativity of its mass proletarian self-activity, the fijirst great uprising on the European continent after the 1871 Paris Commune. At the same time, we wish to examine its impact upon the revolutionary Marxists of the period—particularly Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg— who participated both from abroad and within, thought and wrote in its wake, and formulated and modifijied concepts and practice of organization under its impact.

1 To say in embryo, is not to disregard the fact that this problematic was as well present in important ways in the latter half of the 19th century as could be seen in such historic moments as: Lassalle’s German General Workers’ Association, which Marx felt compelled to sharply critique; the Paris Commune’s self-activity in relation to the Proudhonists and Blanquists within, which both Marx and Engels critiqued; the Gotha Program that Marx critiqued in 1875; as well as the formation and practice of the 2nd International, particularly the Germany Social Democracy which stretched into the 20th century. However, 1905, in Luxemburg’s words, the fijirst of the 20th century revolutions, was so, not alone chronologically, but because it became dress rehearsal for 1917, the revolution which stamped its imprint in a decisive way on Marxist thought and organization over the next seven decades. In a number of ways we live still under its light and shadow, which obscures even as it illuminates.

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chapter four I. 1905 in Life and in Books2: New Forms of Struggle; New Forms of Organization

In the same way that the 1871 Commune sprang spontaneously from the Parisian masses self-activity, and in its few short weeks of existence, expressed the growing revolutionary consciousness of its participants, so the 1905 Russian Revolution, from the initial protest and massacre of January 9th, the outpouring of factory strikes leading to the mass strike, the formation of trade unions, and fijinally that “peculiar mass organization,” the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, illuminated the question of spontaneous self-organization that reached towards revolutionary consciousness. At the same time, this self-developing fijirst Russian Revolution challenged Russian Social Democracy (Marxism) in both its Bolshevik and Menshevik forms to respond to the ongoing rush of objective/subjective events. But let us begin at the beginning—January 9, 1905. Whatever hopes and plans Father Georgii Gapon, a former priest in a St. Petersburg’s working-class district, had in mind for the Assembly of Russian Mill and Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, itself organized out of Tsarist police offfijicials’ scheme of labor organizations, were utterly transformed in the last weeks of December 1904 and the fijirst week of January 1905 through the spontaneous infusion of masses of Petersburg workers into the Assembly, followed by the January 9th procession toward the Winter Palace, resulting in the Tsarist troops’ massacre known as Bloody Sunday. Indeed, the new of 1905 was catalyzed by the self-activity of the proletariat in the weeks leading to January 9.3 In December, in the woodworking shop of the huge Putilov metal works plant (over 12,000 workers), there were dismissals of workers who were members of the Assembly. This was an attack on the Assembly as well as the Putilov workers. Gapon and the Assembly leaders responded through a series of protest meetings. The intimidation of Gapon’s organization and 2 For the description of events I am relying on Solomon Schwarz’s The Russian Revolution of 1905 and on Gerald Surh’s 1905 in St. Petersburg, as well as Trotsky’s 1905. Trotsky and Schwarz were of course participants, with Schwartz writing considerably later, using primarily Russian language sources. Surh, a historian, expanded his doctoral thesis into his book length study. 3 That self-activity was not alone present in the immediate period proceeding January, but characterized the years prior to 1905, particularly in St. Petersburg’s factories. See for instance Lars T. Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered – What Is to Be Done? in Context, (Lih, 2008), especially Part III, including his meticulous discussion of the attitudes of social-democratic and other revolutionaries to the Russian proletarian upsurge at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

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Putilov workers escalated as negotiations failed. A mass meeting of 6,000 Putilov workers on January 2 voted for a strike beginning the next day. “Over the next two days the Putilov strikers, led by the woodworking shop, closed down the huge engineering works, idling 12,600 workers” (Surh, 1989: 153). Tens of thousands of other workers were following the events and began to take action: By Friday, January 7, upwards of 105,000 Petersburg workers from 382 enterprises were on strike. … Worker support for the Assembly was so strong and determined that Gapon was able to revive plans to present a petition with political demands and to mount the largest political demonstration ever seen in St. Petersburg. …  So many Petersburg workers were on strike on the eve of January 9 that the strike was in fact general. … [T]his all-but-general strike was formed in less than a week. (153, 156)

How did the strike escalate so quickly? One important factor was that by the second day of the Putilov strike, groups of protesting workers began making the rounds of other Petersburg factories asking workers to strike those shops. Surh notes that workers at the Franco-Russian Machine Building Workers, the Nevsky Ship and Machine Works and three cotton textile factories struck. In addition to the mobile strikers from Putilov, Assembly supporters who were workers at other plants proceeded to organize walkouts. Their actions were not only in support of the Putilov plant, but also in support of their own grievances and demands. Worker-organizing took in the Assembly branches as well, which witnessed a series of almost continuous meetings discussing the Petition that Gapon wished to present to the authorities. Thousands flocked to the meetings, with workers “pour[ing] out all the misery and bitterness of their factory lives before their assembled fellow workers.” (158) Surh wrote of such meetings “breaking a lifetime’s silence.” The concurrence of the Putilov strike and the Assembly meetings meant that thousands of new members saw the two as related, as they participated in Assembly branch meetings then in almost daily sessions. Surh quotes the observations of the Menshevik organizer S.I. Somov: A kind of mystical religious ecstasy reigned the whole time of the meeting: thousands of people stood side by side for hours in the dreadful heat and closeness and thirstily devoured the artless, strikingly powerful, simple, and passionate speeches of their exhausted worker orators. The whole time the content of the speeches was meager, the [same] phrases being repeated in many ways: “our patience has come to an end,” “our sufffering has gone beyond all measure,” “better death than this life,” “impossible to flay three

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chapter four skins from a man,” and so forth. But they were all pronounced with such marvelous, touching sincerity, flowed so much from the very depths of an exhausted human soul, that the same phrase, pronounced for the hundredth time, brought tears to the eyes, compelled [one] to feel it deeply, and instilled the fijirm certainty that it was really necessary to resolve to do something in order to give vent to this worker bitterness and dissatisfaction, which had overflowed its limits. (161)

Besides the Assembly meetings, there were semi-secret meetings of workers in factories in which specifijic grievances and demands were taken up. In these gatherings Social-Democratic workers and organizers often took a prominent role in formulating workers’ demands. The Putilov strikers called for dismissing a foreman and rehiring two fijired workers, working out new piecework rates that had the input of workers’ shop representatives, establishing a permanent commission of workers’ representatives to examine workers’ grievances jointly with management (including the demand that no worker could be dismissed without this commission’s approval), no reprisals because of the strike, a demand for the eight-hour day, three shifts of work, pay raises for unskilled workers and for women workers, abolition of overtime work, as well as improvement of sanitation units and free medical care for sick workers. Other factories had their own specifijic demands. Many took up the demand for an eight-hour day. Despite the Mensheviks’ and Bolsheviks’ great distrust of Gapon’s organization and motives, individual revolutionary militants, through participation in factory meetings and fijinally in Assembly meetings, were forging deeper relations with St. Petersburg’s proletariat. If the self-activity of the St. Petersburg workers infused the January 9th petition-protest with its radical content, then the Tsar’s troops fijiring on the protest along the march route and in front of the Winter Palace was a transformative act. “On January 9 the guns of the Tsar’s troops laid to rest the illusion that justice could be had for the asking and announced to the world a new era of social and political struggle in Russia.” (165) Far from Bloody Sunday stopping the movement, it became evident that class warfare was not a temporary phase surrounding January 9th, but a permanent characteristic of the factories and the streets of St. Petersburg. Over the next several months the movement took a number of diffferent forms. New strikes were called. Twice they became mass strikes involving not alone the proletariat, but many sectors of the population. Factories went out three or four diffferent times over the months of protest. Agitators and striking workers moved from factory to factory. Street demonstrations sprang to life again and again.

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The state struck back. The Tsar’s disorganized, vacillating, and yet brutal response, meant that the masses endured arrests as well as death and injury at the hands of the Tsar’s army. Close to 1,000 were injured or died as a result of the January 9 protest. Later, pogroms by right-wing BlackHundreds groups throughout Russia resulted in the murder of several thousand. Employers hit out against Petersburg’s workers. Factories carried out mass dismissals, sometimes involving hundreds of workers, hiring back only those they felt were not troublemakers. Still the tide could not be quelled. The workers’ creativity continued to grow. At the end of January the Shidlovskii Commission was announced to investigate the needs of labor. The Commission was to have representatives from the government, industry and labor, including elections of representatives. Over the next two to three weeks the workers so infused the organizing process with radical demands, including the election of workers’ deputies directly from the factories, that the Tsar’s government dismissed the organizing of its own commission before it came to fruition. However, the workers on their own initiative had already begun the elections of their representatives in factories. The factory representatives were in turn to elect representatives to the Commission. “For the fijirst time in Russian history, there was to be elected representation of a large body of workers.” (Schwarz, 1967: 123) The majority of the electors issued a statement in which they gave an accounting to their constituents. Pointing to the ruinous consequences of the war precipitated by the government [the Russo-Japan war which already had seen a series of defeats for Russia and the fall of Port Arthur in the days prior to the January events] to the loss of thousands of young lives, to the unemployment and hunger, to the military defeats, to the fact that all strata of the population were protesting against the policy that was destroying the country, and to the carnage of January 9, the workers’ deputies emphasized their negative attitude toward all bureaucratic commissions, incapable of solving the vital problems. …  True, many electors were arrested and exiled from Petersburg, but the model for an all-Petersburg organization through representatives of individual factories had been given, and the masses liked it. (Observer quoted by Schwarz, 123)

Arising from the spontaneous worker-created February elections for the aborted Shidlovskii Commission was the germ for an entirely new organizational form, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, which appeared in St. Petersburg during October strikes. Here, we will not follow the multitude of events, “the soil prepared by the nine months’ strike campaign”

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(Trotsky, 1973: 118) that occurred between February and October, but concentrate on that “peculiar organizational form,” that arose, the Soviets. A. The Soviet—“A peculiar organizational form” The Soviet was, from the start, the organization of the proletariat, and its aim was the struggle for revolutionary power. —Leon Trotsky, 1905

A new round of strikes began the fijirst week in October. The printers led the way followed by workers in metal-working shops. Strike agitation was met by police revolvers, resulting in several deaths. A mass meeting was held in the main hall of Petersburg University: Some 12,000 persons, of whom about 7,000 were reportedly workers, gathered to hear news of the strikes and were treated to the usual fare of political commentary, debate, and oratory (Surh, 1989: 318).4

Railroad strikes broke out in Moscow, October 6th and 7th. Petersburg railroad workers met on the 8th, as did other workers. On the ninth, secondary school workers, shop clerks and jewelers met. Surh reports that both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks opposed an immediate general strike during the meetings of early October, with the Bolsheviks in particular calling for an armed uprising rather than a general strike. Schwarz (1967) goes into great detail in tracing the positions of both groups in the days leading up to the general strike. The Moscow railway workers strike continued. On the evening of October 11th the Petersburg railway workers, together with others, held a mass meeting at the university. They decided to strike on October 12th, and the four major lines into Petersburg were shut down. 4 Trotsky, in writing of the importance of the university as a meeting place temporarily free of the Tsar’s police and military, quotes from a Russian journalist writing of being at the university during the days leading to the October events: “A university corridor is rather like a street. All the lecture rooms offf the corridor were full of people, and independent sectional meetings were taking place inside them. The corridor itself was fijilled to overflowing; crowds were moving back and forth. Some people sat on the window sills, on benches, on top of cupboards. They smoked; they talked in low voices. One might have thought that one was attending a reception, only a rather more serious one than these afffairs usually are. And yet this was the people—the real, genuine people, with hands coarsened by hard manual work, with the earth-coloured complexion which people get from spending days in unhealthy, airless premises. And all of them had shining eyes set deeply in their orbits. … For these undersized, thin, badly nourished people who come here from the factory or the plant, from the workshop where steel is smelted or iron is cast, where the heat and smoke are stifling, the university is like a temple, lofty, spacious, dazzlingly white. And every word spoken here has the ring of prayer. … the freshly awakened desire for knowledge absorbs any and every theory like a sponge.” (quoted in Trotsky, 1973: 101) Trotsky adds, “The crowd which left the university was no longer the crowd that had entered it.”

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By October 13th and 14th, numerous strikes were coalescing into a general strike. Workers were on strike in metal-working shops, factories and cotton textile plants, the two largest industries in Petersburg. They were joined by a wide variety of other workers: printers, pharmacists, watchmakers, tram operators, secondary school students, state bank employees, among others. Even school children, age ten to fourteen, participated. Mass meetings at the University ranged from 10,000 to 50,000. Groups of strikers took to the streets to close shops and businesses. Parallel with the rapidly evolving general strike was the emergence of a new organizational form to lead the strike, the soviet. On October 10th the Mensheviks decided to support the workers’ movement for a general strike and called for the election of a “workers’ committee” to direct it, a movement toward “revolutionary self-government.” (Schwarz, 1967: Chapter 4) Agitators were sent out with a proposal of one deputy for every 500 workers. Factories with more than 500 would send two delegates. On the 13th a fijirst meeting was held with thirty or so delegates, though not all had been elected formally. By a third meeting on October 15, “226 deputies from 96 factories, fijive trade unions and the railroad strikers’ committee gathered.” (Surh, 1989: 328) On October 18th the Committee was named the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. An Executive Committee was made up of two representatives elected from each of seven city districts, plus spokesmen without voting rights from the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and the Social Revolutionaries. Later representatives were added from trade unions. By mid-November the Soviet consisted of 562 deputies from 147 factories, 34 shops, and 16 trade unions. (Surh, 1989: 319) Many of the elected deputies were workers who were also members of one or another of the revolutionary groups. Though both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were active in the Soviet and strove to influence its direction, the organization as a whole remained party-neutral. This did not mean that the Soviet did not wish the overthrow of the autocracy. It regarded armed uprising as on the horizon, perhaps having illusions as to its possibility at that time. At that moment the Soviet did not see itself directing such an uprising. Concretely the Soviet focused on conducting a political strike, and showed there was no sharp division between an economic strike and a political strike. The October strike demonstrated the inseparability of the two once the movement had developed to the level of a mass strike encompassing much of the city. The Soviet was a most concrete organ of direct revolutionary democracy among the proletariat, and at the same time, was striving to establish its legitimacy and authority among those same workers. Concentrating on leading a general strike, the Soviet became “the mediation of relations

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between the working class and state power.” (Surh, 1989: 331) While the historic circumstances prevented Russia 1905 from becoming a full scale social revolution, what did continue to be developed in a revolutionary manner was the relationship between the Soviet and the workers in the factories and workshops.5 The deputies of the Soviet strove to continue the strike through various means: enforcement of shutdown orders for factories and stores through threats of property damage, beginning the organization of a strike fund, recommending that workers not pay rent or bills during the strike. As well, they began to establish district branches of the Soviet. Most revealing, was the two-way road between the Soviet and the mass of workers in the striking factories. This was seen in a new period of mass factory meetings. At the huge Nevsky and Obukhov metal works, mass meetings of 7,000 and 10,000 workers were held. Workers from neighboring factories participated. “Beginning at the large metal plants, then gradually spreading to smaller enterprises and other industries, the factory meeting became the principal means by which the deputies, who organized and led them, communicated the Soviet’s decisions to the workers and received instructions and a sense of the factory mood from them.” (Surh, 1989: 335) In the face of a mass political strike and growing unrest, not only in St. Petersburg, but throughout Russia, the Tsar’s government on the 17th was forced to issue its October Manifesto granting certain civil liberties. On the 18th the Petersburg masses responded by fijilling the streets, holding meetings at the University, and in public squares. One demand voiced was for the removal of troops from the city. On the 19th the Soviet resolved that “only those newspapers may be published whose editors ignore the censorship committee, refuse to submit their issues for censorship, and generally act the same way as the Soviet in publishing its own newspaper.” This was part of a crucial struggle of 1905: towards a free press that reached the working masses and became an expression of their ideas. Trotsky devoted a chapter of his 1905 to “Storming the Censorship Bastilles,” relating the activities of the print workers in overcoming censorship:

5 When the Soviet reappeared a dozen years later in 1917, the historic memory of the working class and the changed circumstances (particularly the continuing disaster of the World War) meant the Soviets developed not only to be the mediation between the working class and state power, but as an actual organ of “dual power,” a power which would move to take actual state power.

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[T]hroughout 1905, illegal literature had been printed in legal print shops; but this was done clandestinely, on a small scale and with the greatest caution. From October on, the mass of rank-and-fijile typesetters were drawn into the work of publishing illegal literature. … The typesetters insisted on newspapers being published in disregard of the conditions of censorship, threatening otherwise to withhold their services. (Trotsky, 1973)

As the Tsar’s police and soldiers sought to prevent the publication of  the Soviet’s newspaper Izvestia, as well as Social-Democratic literature, the printers struck back. Each issue of Izvestia was printed clandestinely in a diffferent print shop, all organized by the Izvestia “flying squad” of printers. Two social-democratic papers had editions of 50,000. At the same  time, the Tsar’s October manifesto could not secure a private printer;  nor would the print workers allow the publication of pogrom literature designed to incite reactionary violence against the revolutionary movement. We will not further follow the events of revolution/counter-revolution that took place in mid October and through November, closing on one level with the arrest of the Soviet members, who were meeting on December 3. Moscow responded with a strike and an armed insurrection, a true highpoint, but by then Petersburg could not respond. We end our description of the Soviet with Trotsky’s words from 1905: If, then, we are to recognize the capital on the Neva as the centre of the events of the fijinal months of 1905, in Petersburg itself we must recognize the Council (Soviet) of Workers’ Deputies as the cornerstone of all these events. Not only because this was the greatest workers’ organization to be seen in Russia up until that time. Not only because the Petersburg Soviet served as a model for Moscow, Odessa, and a number of other cities. But, above all, because this purely class-founded, proletarian organization was the organization of the revolution as such. The Soviet was the axis of all events, every thread ran towards it, every call to action emanated from it. (1973: 122)

The revolution of ‘05 had the self-activity of the Russian working class written all over it. It was the working class way of knowing and doing.

II. Trotsky, Lenin, Luxemburg: Attitudes Toward and Theoretical Ramifijications of 1905, Particularly with Regard to Revolutionary Organization It is these three revolutionary leaders who have put their unique stamp on history not only as past, but as present, and this is sure to extend into the future. —Raya Dunayevskaya, 1982: 165

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The experiences of Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg in 1905–06 were unparalleled. Trotsky, who arrived fijirst in St. Petersburg, became central to the functioning of the Soviet. Lenin, who arrived in November, participated principally through his revolutionary journalism and his direct work with the Bolshevik section of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). Luxemburg, writing extensively on the Russian events in 1905, arrived in her native Poland at the very end of 1905, participating in its revolutionary activities in 1906. Trotsky developed his theory of permanent revolution in relation to 1905. One of Luxemburg’s most famous writings, The Mass Strike, came out of 1905. Lenin worked out his theory of “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” in relation to 1905. All three were active in revolutionary Marxist organizations: Trotsky, between the factions of the RSDLP Bolshevism and Menshevism, at times closer to the Mensheviks, seeking the reunifijication of the RSDLP; Lenin, founder and leading theoretician of Bolshevism, continually insisting upon and practicing his concept of organization as the authentic representation of revolutionary Marxism in Russia; Luxemburg active in the German Social Democracy and a leader of the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democracy. What was the relation between their participation in 1905, their theoretical labors, and their organizational practice? In what way did 1905 change their conception of revolutionary Marxist organization? Were there limitations in their attempts to theoretically work out the  meaning of mass proletarian self-activity in relation to Marxist organization? A. Trotsky: In the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies; As Theorist of Permanent Revolution To read Trotsky’s 1905 is to grasp the power and creativity of an ongoing revolution as living history. Trotsky wrote much of 1905 as the events were unfolding. He recognized the Soviet as the crucial revolutionary organization form self-created by the proletariat. Formation of the Soviet was the culmination of the fijirst nine months of the revolution—its 50 days of existence the engine driving revolutionary transformation. While Trotsky wrote of other dimensions of the revolution, including the ill-fated rebellion of sailors and soldiers in Sebastapol, and the growing nation-wide peasant revolt with its formation of peasant unions, it was the Soviets that were at the center of his description and analysis, as they were at the center of his participation.

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Trotsky’s activity within and descriptive analysis of the Soviet were unmatched. In turn, came his brilliant theoretical leap in posing a theory of permanent revolution. The idea had been put forth in preliminary form by Trotsky’s colleague Pauvis in his writings on the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, opening up the possibility that “the Russian Proletariat may well play the role of the vanguard of the socialist revolution.” However, it was Trotsky—out of the experience of the 1905 Revolution and in his Results and Prospects published in 1906—who worked out a full theory. Among the major theses from Results and Prospects: It is possible for the workers to come to power in an economically backward country sooner than in an advanced country. … To imagine that the dictatorship of the proletariat is in some way automatically dependent on the technical development and resources of a country is a prejudice of ‘economic’ materialism simplifijied to absurdity. This point of view has nothing in common with Marxism. (Trotsky, 1970: 63)  It is possible to limit the scope of all the questions of the revolution by asserting that our revolution is bourgeois in its objective aims and therefore in its inevitable results, closing our eyes to the fact that the chief actor in this bourgeois revolution is the proletariat, which is being impelled towards power by the entire course of the revolution. (66–67)  [I]s it inevitable that the proletarian dictatorship should be shattered against the barriers of the bourgeois revolution, or is it possible that in the given world-historical conditions, it may discover before it the prospect of victory on breaking through these barriers? (67)  In the event of a decisive victory of the revolution, power will pass into the hands of that class which plays a leading role in the struggle—in other words, into the hands of the proletariat (69).  [T]he fate of the most elementary revolutionary interests of the peasantry—even the peasantry as a whole, as an estate, is bound up with the fate of entire revolution, i.e., with the fate of the proletariat. (71)  But is it not possible that the peasantry may push the proletariat aside and take its place? This is impossible. All historical experience protests against this assumption. Historical experience shows that the peasantry [is] absolutely incapable of taking up an independent political role. (72)  From what we have said … it will be clear how we regard the idea of a ‘proletarian and peasant dictatorship’. … We simply think that it is unrealizable—at least in a direct immediate sense. (73) [The expression “proletarian and peasant dictatorship” was from Lenin.]  The primitiveness and petty-bourgeois character of the peasantry, its limited rural outlook, its isolation from world-political ties and allegiances, will create terrible difffijiculties for the consolidation of the revolutionary policy of the proletariat in power. (77)  But how far can the socialist policy of the working class be applied in the economic conditions of Russia? We can say one thing with certainty—that it will come up against political obstacles much sooner than it will stumble

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chapter four over the technical backwardness of the country. Without the direct State support of the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialist dictatorship. (105)  The influence of the Russian revolution upon the European proletariat is tremendous. Besides destroying Russian absolutism, the main force of European reaction, it will create the necessary prerequisites for revolution in the consciousness and temper of the European working class. (114)

Trotsky’s brilliant 1906 prognostication of the proletariat coming to power in technologically less developed Russia before the West certainly was prescient to the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Furthermore, his ideas would later seem to speak to the 20th century’s revolutions in what has been called the Third World. Yet, questions arise with regard to his attitude toward revolutionary forces in 1905. Paramount was his theory’s dismissive attitude toward the peasantry as a potential Subject of revolution in less developed lands. Though devoting a chapter of 1905 to “The Peasant Riots” describing rural actions against landlords and the formation of peasant unions, the majority of comments with regard to the peasantry in 1905 are negative: [T]he tactics of revolutionary attack encounter their greatest obstacle in the backwardness and distrustful passivity of the muzhik soldier. (224)  The proletariat was defeated in the insurrection of December and January, not by its own mistakes, but by a more real quantity: the bayonets of the peasant army. (277)

Trotsky’s 1905 and Results and Prospects expressed his brilliant historical analysis and ground-breaking theoretical labors, while at the same time exposing the deeply contradictory attitude toward revolutionary subjectivity when it came to the peasantry. Dunayevskaya put her fijinger on the key difffijiculty when she pointed out: “Trotsky’s concept of the peasantry was certainly not one of a self-developing Subject.” (Dunayevskaya, 1973: 132) She singled out: the contradiction between dialectics of the revolution and the specifijic Subject who constituted the majority of ‘the masses,’ when they happened to be peasant rather than proletarian. (148)

Trotsky would continue his narrow view of the peasantry as a revolutionary force at the 1907 Congress of Russian Social Democracy, when speaking on “The Party of the Proletariat and the Bourgeois Parties in the Revolution”:

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It is true that we have enormous masses of revolutionary peasantry. … [T]he peasantry, however revolutionary it may be, is not capable of playing an independent, still less a leading, political role. (Trotsky, 1973: 292)

This Congress was a most critical and revealing movement in the development of Russian social-democracy. All the tendencies of Russian Marxism participated. Luxemburg as well attended. With Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg present, it was a crucial vantage point for examining how each chose to relate the experience of 1905–06 to theoretical developments and organizational conclusions. [T]he 1907 Congress was pivotal because it centered about an actual revolution. It was that, just that, which became the Great Divide between Menshevism and Bolshevism, with all other tendencies needing to defijine themselves in relationship to it. …  Here we had a Congress where all tendencies came together to discuss a single topic which, though it seemed to be on the relationship to bourgeois parties was, in fact, on the nature of revolution. (Dunayevskaya, 1982: 7)

We are here drawing upon Dunayevskaya’s translations from and discussions of the Congress. First came the fijight over the agenda. Where Lenin wanted to discuss the present moment of the revolution, the Mensheviks dismissed the need for theoretical discussion. Dunayevskaya characterized Trotsky’s intervention on the agenda: In supporting the Mensheviks, Trotsky, surprisingly enough, insisted that this Congress must be “business-like” must not go in for abstract theoretical resolutions: “What I want to say is that the Congress, from beginning to end, should be political, that it has to be a meeting of the representatives of revolutionary parties and not a discussion club … I need political directives and not philosophic discussions about the character of the present moment of our revolution … Give me a formula for action!” (translation by Dunayevskaya in Dunayevskaya, 1982: 9)

Political for Trotsky, evidently meant only action, not rootedness in theoretical foundations. In fact, the 1907 Congress revealed Trotsky as “conciliationist” in his attitude toward revolutionary theory. We are here speaking of Trotsky’s attitude toward his own theory of Permanent Revolution, which was not discussed at the Congress. Here was the leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet, the theoretician who had made the greatest leap in cognition with respect to the revolution. And yet here, in the fijirst congress after the revolution of all the Russian Marxists groups who participated,

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Trotsky did not insist on including his theoretical concept of the nature of the revolution as part of the discussion. Instead he wished “a formula for action,” and ended up helping to defeat Lenin’s proposal to discuss “The Present Moment of Revolution.” As we noted, Trotsky did speak at the session on the relation of SocialDemocracy to bourgeois parties. There he opposed the Menshevik position supporting a bourgeois revolution carried out by the democratic bourgeoisie: As materialists, we must fijirst of all ask ourselves the question of the social foundation of a bourgeois democracy. In what classes, what strata of the population, can it fijind support? … I have not had an answer to my central question, though I have asked it many times. You have no prognosis for revolution. Your policy lacks perspective. (Trotsky, 1973: 276, 283)

But to attack others’ lack of perspective did not mean that Trotsky put forth his own theoretical view as a basis for organization. His thesis on permanent revolution was nowhere to be found at the Congress. Nor was this failure to link his organization of thought to revolutionary organization an isolated moment in 1907. Trotsky would not develop his thesis on Permanent Revolution in relation to organization in an ongoing way in the years leading to 1917. It was not that Trotsky did not discuss organization. A number of his writings after 1907 took up Russian social-democracy. So important did he consider his 1909 article, “Our Diffferences,” discussing Russian social democracy that he reprinted it in both his 1922 edition of 1905 and in his History of the Russian Revolution. Together with a 1910 article, “The Development of the Tendencies of Russian Social-Democracy,” “Our Diffferences” put forth his criticisms of Menshevism and Bolshevism. However, what he developed was not a connection between theoretical considerations and organizational practice. Instead, the practical was front and center. “Theory cannot replace experience,” begins his 1910 article. Trotsky argued that “What is needed is a party united and capable of action.” In the process, organization became reduced to “apparatus”: “What is needed is the re-organization of the Party apparatus.” Furthermore, the 1910 article revealed, as well, a disturbing view of the proletariat. In analyzing the diffferences between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, Trotsky claimed they arose out of “the process of adaptation of Marxist intellectuals to the class struggle, i.e., the political immaturity of the Russian proletariat.” How can Trotsky’s experience of participating with the proletariat in this greatest act of revolutionary self-creation, the

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formation of the Soviet in 1905, lay side by side with his elitist conception of “the political immaturity of the Russian proletariat?” Trotsky never chose to build an organization based on his original theoretic contribution of permanent revolution. Focusing on the proletariat in the founding of the Soviet, and showing how the St. Petersburg workers infused this newly created organizational form with revolutionary content, did not mean for Trotsky the need to rethink the concept of revolutionary Marxist organization, to rethink the roles of the intellectual and the proletariat within the social-democratic organization. SocialDemocracy in Russia was seen, not alone by Lenin but by Trotsky as well, as “leading” the proletariat. The preeminent role of a vanguard party remained unchallenged. This would prove to have grave consequences in the revolutionary period to come. Trotsky’s theoretical contribution was not developed in an ongoing way in the years leading to 1917. Rather, his major theoretical labor consisted of postscripts to his theory of permanent revolution. At each stage of amplifijication, what remained constant was his view of the peasantry as not being an independent revolutionary subject. A theory of revolution without a self-developing subject could not itself self-develop. It could only continue as a series of addendums, each containing contradictions within. Despite Trotsky’s brilliance as activist, orator and theoretician, the contradictions within his thought and practice in relation to the revolutionary subjectivity of the peasantry, and yes, the proletariat, and in relation to his own attitude towards the organizational concretization of his theoretical contributions, and thus the relation of mass self-activity and Marxist organization, would plague Trotsky once the October Revolution meant practicing What Happens After the Revolution?, and again in the years in exile as he sought to be the continuator of 1917. B. Lenin: A 1902 Organization of Thought that Determined Organizational Life; The Impact of 1905 If Trotsky’s theoretical work did not become determinant for building an organizational following, the same cannot be said for Lenin’s. There has been no Marxist more closely associated with a theory of revolutionary organization and its practice then Lenin. What Is To Be Done? put forth his uncompromising determination to attack what he saw as opportunism in the revolutionary movement, and to build a Marxist organization in response to the unique economic, political and social circumstances found at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia.

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Politically, Czarist Russia was an autocracy where political parties, free expression in newspapers, meetings and demonstrations, as well as the organization of trade unions were all prohibited. Economically, Lenin had already demonstrated the emergence of capitalism in Russia with his Development of Capitalism in Russia, winning the debate with the Narodniki, who had sought social transformation based on the mir, the peasant collective commune still present in Russia in the late 19th century. Yet, the economic-political reality of Czarism meant that the development of the bourgeoisie was retarded. Lenin argued that the bourgeoisie was too weak to carry out its own revolution against Czarism. Instead, “the economic content of the revolution will be capitalistic, the method will be proletarian.” (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 181) He saw the class division between the capitalist economic content and the proletarian method as the determinate of a future Russian revolution. For Lenin any Marxist organization had to be cognizant of this duality front and center, and therefore construct Russian Social-Democracy based on this reality. Otherwise socialdemocracy would end up mired in a bourgeois quagmire no matter how radical its Marxist phraseology. Lenin is rightly known as the founder of the theory of the vanguard party in revolutionary Marxism.6 We want to trace his theory of organization in relation to, and at times versus, spontaneous forms of organization, before, during, and after the 1905 Revolution. Because of the highly polemic nature of Lenin’s writings in this period, and the subsequent deeply distorting commentaries from both professional anti-Leninists and “orthodox Marxist-Leninists,” it will be necessary to quote frequently from his writings of the period in probing his views as he formulated and developed them. Recently, Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered—What Is to Be Done? in  Context, (Lih, 2008) has challenged much of the prevailing textbook 6 What is often forgotten and little explored are two dimensions: (1) the intellectual origins of Lenin’s work and subsequent practice that came fijirst from Ferdinand Lassalle and then, Karl Kautsky; (2) the concrete circumstances of building a revolutionary movement in the social, economic and political milieu of Czarist Russia. Lenin, in his 1902 What Is To Be Done, quotes extensively and approvingly from Kautsky to the efffect that workers by themselves do not reach towards socialism. They instead only have trade union consciousness. Thus, the ideas of socialism must be introduced from the outside by intellectuals (“the vehicles of science were not the proletariat but the bourgeois intellectual.”—Kautsky). Kautsky’s concept found its practical and intellectual precursor in Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle saw his role as that of “bridg[ing] the gap between the thinkers and the masses.” In eventually founding the German General Workers Association, the organized workers would send the intellectuals into government to establish socialism by compelling the Absolutist Prussia to establish producers’ cooperatives with state aid.

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interpretations by “Lenin scholars,” (often extreme anti-Leninists), as well as from Left activists who have written on Lenin. In the period leading to What Is To Be Done?, worker strikes were sweeping Russia with social-democratic revolutionaries participating. However there was sharp division and debate as to the revolutionaries’ role. The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party was fragmented. There were influences of the reformism of Eduard Bernstein and his Evolutionary Socialism. There was the experience of “Legal Marxism” with the brief period of its permitted existence in Russia, which also pulled toward parliamentarianism. There was a sharp division between economists, who argued that the fijight must be concentrated on the workers’ demand for trade union rights, that is, economic demands, and those who argued that it was necessary to fijight on the basis not alone of trade union demands, but to agitate for a Social-Democratic, that is, a Marxist program, including theoretical questions. Within Social-Democracy there were perhaps the sharpest division between Lenin and those aligned with him, vs. other social-democrats over what did it mean to agitate for a full Marxist program. However, a common thread throughout these debates, accepted by all factions, was that workers’ spontaneous activity against their employers, against Czarism, would by itself not lead to Social-Democratic consciousness. In the period of What Is to Be Done? Lenin, like his contemporaries, accepted, indeed argued for, this view of worker consciousness. Its origins were within the Erfurt Programme of German Social Democracy, particularly as propagandized by Karl Kautsky, with origins as far back as the concepts of Ferdinand Lassalle. What Lenin fought against, was not such a view of spontaneity, but the fact that revolutionaries translated this perception of worker spontaneity into a limitation in the practice of Russian Social-Democracy. He argued that it was necessary to go beyond the horizon of economic action, to a deeper political agitation, to a wider theoretical framework from which to proselytize among the working masses. Only with the 1905 Revolution would Lenin, as we will see, come to somewhat modify his narrow view of spontaneity. Only with the 1905 Revolution would he term the workers spontaneously Social-Democratic. But in 1902, he, along with those he was fijighting against, saw the intellectual within the Party as the bearer of revolutionary consciousness. This social-democratic intellectual needed to be trained theoretically, guided by the party’s leadership, disciplined by belonging to a local of the party organization. What was unique in Lenin’s 1902 view was a strong critique of the revolutionary Marxist intellectuals’ practice. What was to be their role?

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What was to be the form of their organizational participation in the political-economic reality of Czarist Russia? This was where the sharpest debates on Lenin’s concept occurred. Lenin felt a compulsion to create an organizational framework to fijight against what he saw as opportunism in the movement. What Is To Be Done? was his proposal for a diffferent basis for organizing social-democracy in Russia. Certainly it was a narrow, prescriptive response to the problems faced by Social-Democracy at that moment. At the same time, Lenin’s manifesto was an uncompromising attack not only on the economists within the revolutionary movement, but on fellow social-democrats whom he felt were theoretically trapped within the economist framework even as they proclaimed themselves to be Marxists. It is within this objective/subjective milieu that the sharply polemical What Is To Be Done? was issued. When Lenin wrote, “There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory” (Lenin, 1961), it was aimed against those revolutionaries who only moved from one struggle to the next with no serious theoretical digging. However, the responsibility for the development of revolutionary theory was aimed only at a narrow stratum, those who could become the vanguard, the propagator of theory: “[T]he role of the vanguard fijighter can be fulfijilled only by a party which is guided by the advanced theory” (Lenin, 1961). This led to his posing of the relation of the masses and social-democracy in a narrow, uni-linear form: [The] spontaneous element … represents nothing but consciousness in an embryonic form … We have said that the workers could not yet possess Social Democratic consciousness. This consciousness could only be brought to them from the outside. (Chapter on “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Mature Consciousness of Social-Democracy,” Lenin, 1961)

Lenin insisted on a sharp division between spontaneity and consciousness.7 He argued that it could only be overcome through the intervention of the party; that the party brought consciousness to the working class. The workers could gain consciousness within the party, and indeed Lenin held the conscious Social-Democratic worker in higher regard than the Social-Democratic intellectual. As we will see shortly, his ideas evolved 7 Lars (2008) discusses why he thinks that the terms “spontaneity” and “consciousness” do not fully catch what is being debated. He presents a new translation of Lenin’s work, which he believes more fully expresses Lenin’s thought. As well, he argues that what he terms the two most “Scandalous Passages” (the introduction of socialism from without, and combating spontaneity) need to be seen in the context of Lenin’s sharp polemics against other tendencies. He argues that the “textbook” interpretations that proclaim Lenin dismissive of workers’ action and thought are far offf the mark.

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during 1905, but they did not break down the division Lenin had erected between spontaneity and consciousness, and the party’s preeminent role in relation to consciousness. If the duality between the economic content of the revolution being bourgeois, but the methodology for its realization being proletariat—occurring in a country that was massively peasant— was not profoundly clear to the intelligentsia and young activists attracted to Russian Social Democracy, then the kind of revolutionary organizing taking place could not launch a democratic revolution, one that could lay the basis for a socialist revolution. Lenin saw this contradiction in the ideology being propagated, and the organizing being done, by those who focused on the economic struggles, as well as in the “legal Marxism” that wished to severely restrict the concept of Marxism and its practice. He would come to see it as well in the faction of Social-Democracy which became known as the Mensheviks. At the same time, Lenin’s critique in What Is To Be Done? was not directed against the workers’ spontaneity, but against the intellectuals’ lack of theoretical/organizational preparedness to reach out to the workers’ spontaneity; against the radical intellectuals who refused to present political theory in relation to workers’ spontaneous activity. He wrote: Thus we have come to the conclusion that the basic mistake of the ‘new trend’ in Russian Social-Democracy consists in worshiping spontaneity, in not understanding that the spontaneity of the mass demands from us SocialDemocrats a mass of consciousness. The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses, the wider the movement becomes, so much the more rapidly does the demand increase for a mass of consciousness in the theoretical, political an organizational work of Social Democracy. (Lenin, 1961)

To fulfijill this need, Lenin would call for “professional revolutionaries,” an expression he used a number of times in this writing, to argue for the type of revolutionary and revolutionary organization he was aiming at.8

• Lenin’s view of the proletarian self-activity in strikes and in the Soviet; his concept of the relationship of the proletarian activities of 1905 and the Bolshevik tendency of RSDLP 8 Is it possible today to separate and critique Lenin’s narrow view of spontaneity in this writing, while at the same time seize upon his concept of needed professional revolutionaries? Perhaps, but the long contradictory history of vanguardism, both 1902–1924, and even more so in the post-Lenin 20th century, makes the intertwining of the two very difffijicult to tease apart.

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There can be no doubt that the events of the 1905 Russian Revolution, in particular the proletarian dimension, greatly impacted Lenin’s thought and activity. Let’s follow this in the period of the revolution and its aftermath. Lenin was not able to return to St. Petersburg until November 1905. This did not mean a lack of participation, which he maintained through journalism (as “publicist”) and party organizing from afar. But it did mean tensions and disputes with other Bolsheviks. This was particularly evident in the relationship between the workers’ spontaneous activity, fijirst in strikes and then in the formation of the Soviet, and the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP within Russia. A number of the Bolshevik organizers within the country saw the workers’ self-activity as a rival or competition to the party. This was not Lenin’s position. He saw worker activity as the fertile ground within which the party needed to be active. One sees this in the request from Lenin and his companions abroad for more information on the precise nature of the worker activities. At the 3rd Congress of the RSDLP, called by the Bolsheviks in the midst of the revolution, and held abroad in April 1905, one can follow Lenin’s thought with regard to workers and the party: It has also been pointed out that splits have usually been the work of intellectuals. This is an important point, but it does not settle the question. In my writings for the press I have long urged that as many workers as possible should be placed on the committees … If in Saratov only one worker was placed on the committee, this means that they did not know how to choose suitable people from among the workers. … To place workers on the committees is a political, not only a pedagogical, task. Workers have the class instinct, and, given some political experience, they pretty soon become staunch Social-Democrats. I should be strongly in favor of having eight workers to every two intellectuals (“On the Question of the Relations Between Workers and Intellectuals within the Social-Democratic Organization,” (Lenin, 1962a: 407–08).  I could hardly keep my seat when it was said here that there are no workers fijit to sit on the committees. The question is being dragged out; obviously there is something the matter with the Party. Workers must be given places on the committees. (411)

In another session of the Congress, Lenin remarked: One cannot rely on a small periphery of intellectuals, but one can and should rely on hundreds of organized workers. I would like to connect this clause closely with the question of submitting reports. In this respect we should take an example from the Bund, which always knows the exact number of organized workers it has. And when our C.C. is constantly posted on the number of organized workers in any particular organization, it will have to reckon with their opinion and will be bound to cashier the local committee on the demand of the organized workers. (415)

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All this is not to say that Lenin repudiated his 1902 view of workers’ spontaneity, but he was in the midst of signifijicantly modifying and enriching it. One saw this particularly after the Soviets had been formed. Two of Lenin’s writings from the fijirst half of November show the development of his view. First, just before his arrival in St. Petersburg he wrote, “Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.” (November 2–4) Lenin began by criticizing the article which posed the question “the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies or the Party?”: The decision must certainly be both the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and the Party. The only question—and a highly important one—is how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian SocialDemocratic Labor Party. (Lenin, 1965: 19).  I think it would be inadvisable for the Soviet to adhere wholly to any one party. … The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies came into being through the general strike, in connection with the strike, and for its aims. Who led the strike and brought it to a victorious close? The whole proletariat, which includes non-Social-Democrats—fortunately a minority. What were the aims of the strike? They were both economic and political. The economic aims concerned the whole proletariat, all workers, and partly even all working people, not the wage-workers alone.  It seems to me that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, as an organization representing all occupations, should strive … [for] deputies from all industrial, professional and offfijice workers, domestic servants, farm laborers, etc., from all who want and are able to fijight in common for a better life for the whole working people. …  As for us Social-Democrats, we shall do our best, fijirst, to have all our party organizations represented on all trade unions as fully as possible, and, secondly, to use the struggle we are waging jointly with our fellow-proletarians, irrespective of their views, for the tireless, steadfast advocacy of the only consistent, the only truly proletarian world outlook, Marxism. To propagate it, to carry on this propaganda and agitation work, we shall by all means preserve, strengthen and expand our completely independent, consistently principled class party of the class-conscious proletariat, i.e., the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. Every step in the proletarian struggle, if inseparably linked with our Social-Democratic, methodical and organized, activities, will bring the masses of the working class in Russia and the SocialDemocrats ever closer together.  This aspect of the problem, concerning the economic struggle, is comparatively simple and hardly gives rise to any particular disagreement. But the other aspect, concerning political leadership and the political struggle, is a  diffferent matter. And yet, at the risk of surprising the reader still more, I  must say here and now that in this respect, too, I think it inadvisable to  demand that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should accept the Social-Democratic program and join the RSDLP. It seems to me that to lead the political struggle, both the Soviet (reorganized in a sense to be discussed forthwith) and the Party are, to an equal degree, absolutely necessary.

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chapter four I may be wrong, but I believe (on the strength of the incomplete and only ‘paper’ information at my disposal) that politically the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should be regarded as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government. I think the Soviet should proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government of the whole of Russia as early as possible, or should set up a provisional revolutionary government. (22–23)  The Soviet must proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government, or form such a government, and must by all means enlist to this end the participation of new deputies not only from the workers, but, fijirst of all, from the sailors and soldiers, who are everywhere seeking freedom; secondly, from the revolutionary peasantry, and thirdly, from the revolutionary bourgeois intelligentsia. (Lenin, 1965)

Clearly, Lenin was fijighting members of his own party who had a much narrower concept of the Soviet, and a mechanistic role for the party. Second, upon his arrival in St. Petersburg, Lenin writes and submits an article, “The Reorganization of the Party,” which is published in Novaya Zhizn, November 10, 15, and 16: The secret apparatus of the Party must be maintained. But at the same time it is absolutely necessary to make the widest possible use of the present relatively wider scope for our activity. In addition to the secret apparatus, it is absolutely necessary to create many new legal and semi-legal Party organizations. (Lenin, 1965: 29)  Social-Democracy has established a name for itself, has created a trend and has build up cadres of Social-Democratic workers… [T]he heroic proletariat has proved by its deeds its readiness to fijight, and its ability to fijight consistently and in a body for clearly-understood aims, to fijight in a purely Social-Democratic spirit. … The working class is instinctive, spontaneously Social-Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness. Don’t invent bugaboos comrades! … Our Party has stagnated while working underground … Forward, then, more boldly; take up the new weapon, distribute it among new people, extend your bases, rally all the worker Social-Democrats around yourselves, incorporate them in the ranks of the party organizations by hundreds and thousands. Let their delegates put new life into the ranks of our central bodies, let the fresh spirit of young revolutionary Russia pour in through them. (32)

Lenin here recognized the self-activity of Russian proletariat, even going so far as to say that they were spontaneously social-democratic. This was an advance from his 1902 view of workers spontaneously having only trade union consciousness. But the limitations of this could as well be seen in next sentence, where it remained for Social-Democracy to give consciousness to the movement. For the Bolsheviks and Lenin, “spontaneous” was

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no praise word, “consciousness” was key, and that still resided in the party. Lenin continued, It is necessary for all comrades to devise new forms of organization by their independent joint effforts. It is impossible to lay down any predetermined standards for this, for we are working in an entirely new fijield: a knowledge of local conditions, and above all the initiative of all party members must be brought into play. The new form of organization, or rather the new form of the basic organizational nucleus of the workers’ party, must be defijinitively much broader than were the old circles. Apart from this, the new nucleus will most likely have to be a less rigid more ‘free’, more ‘loose’ organization.  The initiative of the workers themselves will now display itself on a scale that we, the underground and circle workers of yesterday, did not dare dream of. The influence of socialist ideas on the masses of the proletariat is now proceeding, and will continue to proceed along paths that we very often shall be altogether unable to trace. At the 3rd Congress I suggested that there be about eight workers to ever two intellectuals in the Party committees. How obsolete that suggestion seems today! Now we must wish for the new Party organizations to have one Social-Democratic intellectual to several hundred Social-Democratic workers. (34)

Attitude Toward Peasantry Lenin’s concentration in this period was on the relation of the proletariat and the Party, seeing the growing mass of proletarian activity as necessary to concretize any transformation of the Party as well as the country. At the same time the overwhelming mass of the Russian population was peasant, a fact which Lenin had before him at each stage of the revolution. Before the events of 1905, he had written the pamphlet, “To the Rural Poor.” In the months after January 1905, he returned to the subject many times in articles and in party congresses resolutions and discussions. In March he wrote, The peasant uprisings have begun. Reports of peasants raiding landed estates and confijiscating the landlord’s grain and cattle are coming in from various provinces. … The urban working-class movement is acquiring a new ally in the revolutionary peasantry. The attitude of the class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat, the Social-Democrats, towards the peasant movement is becoming a question of immediate practical signifijicance and must be placed on the order of the day in all our Party organizations.

Lenin focused on the two-fold task that social democracy set before the  peasant movement—to support the movement as a revolutionarydemocratic movement while at the same time organizing and demonstrating the need for replacing the bourgeois system with a socialist

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system. To appeal to the rural proletariat to be “with” the peasant bourgeois against all manner of serfdom and against the serf-owning landlords, while as the same time to be with the urban proletariat against the peasant bourgeoisie and every other bourgeoisie. At the same time, Lenin warned of the need “to be wary of the peasantry, organize separately from it, to be ready to combat it, in so far as this peasantry acts in a reactionary or anti-proletarian manner.” (“The Proletariat and the Peasantry”, Lenin, 1962a) At the Third Congress of the RSDLP (April 1905), organized by the Bolsheviks, the resolution in support of the peasant movement called for developing the revolutionary-democratic characteristics of the peasant movement and the organization of revolutionary peasant committees. In The Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (July), Lenin discussed “The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry.” In “Social-Democracy’s Attitude Toward the Peasant Movement” (September), he wrote of the relation of the democratic revolution to the next moment: [W]e shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organized proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way. (Lenin, 1962b: 237)

In October, “Socialism and the Peasantry” pointed out that: In present-day Russia it is not two contending forces that form the content of the revolution, but two distinct and diffferent social wars: one within the present autocratic-feudal system, the other within the future bourgeoisdemocratic system, whose birth we are already witnessing. One is the struggle of the entire people for freedom (the freedom of bourgeois society), for democracy, i.e., the sovereignty of the people; the other is the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for a socialist organization of society. (Lenin, 1962b: 307–08)

Lenin translated these two wars to the plane of the peasantry: There is only one way to make the agrarian reform, which is unavoidable in present-day Russia, play a revolutionary-democratic role: it must be efffected on the revolutionary initiative of the peasants themselves, despite the landlords and the bureaucracy, and despite the state, i.e., it must be efffected by revolutionary means. The very worst distribution of land after a reform of this sort will be better from all standpoints than what we have at present. And this is the road we indicate when we make our prime demand the establishment of revolutionary peasant committees.  But at the same time we say to the rural proletariat: “The most radical victory of the peasants which you must help with all your force to achieve, will not rid you of poverty. This can be achieved only by one means: the victory

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of the entire proletariat—both industrial and agricultural—over the entire bourgeoisie and the formation of a socialist society.” (315)

What characterized Lenin’s attitude toward the peasantry in the period of 1905, was a recognition of the crucial nature of its role in the social transformation in Russia. While aware of the possible reactionary role of the peasantry in the midst of revolution, he seized upon its revolutionary initiative to urge social-democracy to work on the organization of revolutionary peasant committees and the fijight for the revolutionary democracy of the peasantry and proletariat. As he would write in 1908: The preponderantly peasant population, its dreadful oppression by the semi-feudal big landownership, the strength and consciousness of the proletariat already organized into a socialist party—all these circumstances give our bourgeois revolution a special character. This peculiarity does not eliminate the bourgeois character of the revolution. … This peculiarity only makes for the counterrevolutionary character of our bourgeoisie and [creates] the need of a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in this kind of revolution. (quoted in Schwarz, 1967: 19–20)

His position was far more open to a major role for the peasantry in the revolution than was Trotsky’s. Lenin was not only keenly aware that Russia was overwhelmingly peasant (Trotsky surely was as well), but constantly asking what flowed from that reality in the relation of peasantry and proletariat in the overthrow of the autocracy, and in the drive toward socialism. While surely putting the working class in a leading role in the latter, he refused to regard the peasantry in a fijixed, reactionary role for either moment. To do so in a country that was overwhelmingly peasant would mean to close a crucial pathway towards social revolution. Relation to the European Revolutions Finally, Lenin related the events of 1905 to the interdependence of the Russian and the Western revolutions: [The Social Democrat] will dream … that after the tremendous experience of Europe, after the unprecedented surge of energy of the working class in Russia, we shall succeed in raising as never before the beacon of revolutionary light before the ignorant, downtrodden masses; that we shall succeed … in realizing with unparalleled fullness all the democratic reforms, our entire program-minimum; that we shall succeed in making the Russian revolution a movement not of a few months but of many years, so that it may lead not merely to minor concessions on the part of the powers that be but to [their] complete overthrow. And it this succeeds, then—then the revolutionary conflagration will set Europe on fijire; the European worker languishing amid bourgeois reaction will rise in turn and show us ‘how it is done’; the revolutionary surge will revert to influence Russia and turn an era of a few

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chapter four revolutionary years into an era of several revolutionary decades. (SocialDemocracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, April 1905)

Lenin was speaking here, not of two stages, but of a continuous revolution. “The complete victory of the present revolution will be the end of the democratic overturn and the beginning of the decisive struggle for a socialist overturn.” (“Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” June/July 1905. Lenin, 1962b) As we noted above, two months later he wrote: “From the democratic revolution we shall at once begin to go on … to a socialist revolution. We are for continuous revolution. We shall not stop halfway. …We shall make the Russian revolution the prologue to the European socialist revolution.” C. Luxemburg’s 1905: Poland, The Mass Strike pamphlet, relation to Russian Social Democracy Dunayevskaya summed up Luxemburg’s experience in Poland: She reached Poland on 30 December 1905 and at once plunged into a whirlwind of activities. There was nothing she didn’t attempt—from writing and editing to taking revolver in hand to force a printer to run offf manifestos, articles, leaflets, and pamphlets; from participating in strikes and demonstrations to making endless speeches at factory gates. Within three days, on 2 January 1906, she wrote to Kautsky: “Mere general strike by itself has ceased to play the role it once did … Now nothing but a general uprising on the streets can bring a decision.”  It was awe-inspiring to see the familiar strikes of advanced German workers become a general political strike of “backward” Poles. No wonder that the whole concept of “backward” and “advanced” underwent a total transformation in the ongoing revolution. Luxemburg now saw the so-called “backward” Russian working class as the vanguard—not only of their own revolution, but of the world working-class movement. …  To witness a small underground party, which had no more than a few hundred members after a decade of work, grow nearly overnight into a mass party of thirty thousand was proof enough that it was neither conspiracy nor experience accumulated over slow years, much less the wisdom of the leaders, that “taught workers” either organization or class consciousness. It was the masses themselves, in motion, who brought about the end of Luxemburg’s “Germany period.” She began to “speak Russian”—Russian and Polish— rather than German. (Dunayevskaya, 1982: 5–6)

To Luxemburg’s in-person experience in the revolution can be added her important political analyses of the period. Foremost was her 1906 pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions. Her detailed tracing of the origins and development of the mass strike in Russia was

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written in the context of the political situation of social-democracy in Germany, where the emphasis of social-democratic leaders was toward parliamentarianism and the trade union leadership steered clear of considering a mass strike to enforce their demands. Luxemburg wished the German proletariat to “speak Russian,” the language of the mass strike. She saw the political mass strike that emerged spontaneously from the 1905 Revolution as a form that could help shape Germany’s revolutionary future: If, therefore, the Russian revolution teaches us anything, it teaches above all that the mass strike is not artifijicially ‘made,’ not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propagated,’ but that it is an historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability. (Luxemburg 2004: 171)

Luxemburg recounted in detail the origins of the mass strike in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897, and described a vast range of the strikes in Russia and Poland of 1905. She showed there was no need for a barrier between the political and the economic; how economic strikes lead to political strikes and the reverse: The economic struggle is the transmitter from one political center to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilization of the soil for the economic struggle. Cause and efffect here continually change places; and thus the economic and the political factor in the period of the mass strike, now widely removed, completely separated or even mutually exclusive, as the theoretical plan would have them, merely form the two interlacing sides of the proletarian struggle in Russia. And, their unity is precisely the mass strike. … The history of the Russian mass strikes is the history of the Russian Revolution. (195)

Foremost, her eye was on the self-activity of the Russian proletariat—how spontaneity and consciousness are part of a single process: The most precious, because lasting, thing in this rapid ebb and flow of the wave is its mental sediment: the intellectual, cultural growth of the proletariat, which proceeds by fijits and starts, and which offfers an inviolable guarantee of their further irresistible progress in the economic as in the political struggle. (185)

The one utterly surprising and puzzling factor in Luxemburg’s description of 1905 in the Mass Strike pamphlet was her failure to even mention, let alone discuss, the new worker form of organization, the Soviet. What one was witness to in The Mass Strike was not alone a description of the great leap made by the Russian proletariat in 1905, a leap that

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Luxemburg wished to present to the German working class and to insist that the Germany Social-Democratic Party (SPD) take into account. One witnessed as well, the profound development of Luxemburg herself. Her knowledge of and sensitivity to the mass movements grew from her experience in Poland, and her research into the events of 1905. Multiple strands of her development were coming together: breaking down walls between the political and the economic, seeing the richness of the spontaneous activity of the working class that was at the same time a deepening of the consciousness of the proletariat, challenging the German trade union leadership and the SPD leadership as well. Luxemburg questioned Lenin’s concept of organization, as she sought to work out the relation of mass struggle and revolutionary organization. For Luxemburg, the mass strike was itself a living organism of the revolution: The mass strike, as the Russian revolution shows it to us, is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects all phases of the political and economic struggle, all stages and factors of the revolution. Its adaptability, its efffijiciency, the factors of its origin are constantly changing. … It is a ceaselessly moving, a changing sea of phenomena. And the law of motion for these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution. The mass strike is merely the form of the revolutionary struggle. …  The mass strike, as shown to us in the Russian revolution, is not a crafty method discovered by subtle reasoning for the purpose of making the proletarian struggle more efffective, but the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution. …  It is absurd to think of the mass strike as one act, one isolated action. The mass strike is rather the indication, the rallying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps decades. (191, 192)

What emerged was an appreciation for mass proletarian self-activity and a new view of the relation of mass activity and Marxist organization: If the mass strike is not an isolated act but a whole period of the class struggle, and if this period is identical with a period of revolution, it is clear that the mass strike cannot be called at will, even when the decision to do so may come from the highest committee of the strongest Social Democratic party. …  The element of spontaneity, as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception, be it as a driving force or as a restraining influence. This does not occur in Russia, however, because Social Democracy is still young or weak, but because in every individual act of the struggle so very many important economic, political and social, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were a mathematical

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problem. The revolution, even when the proletariat with the Social Democrats at their head appear in the leading role, is not a maneuver of the proletariat in the open fijield, but a fijight in the midst of the incessant crashing, displacing, and crumbling of the social foundation. In short, in the mass strikes in Russia the element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because the Russian proletariat are ‘uneducated,’ but because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them. (197, 198)

Even before 1905, Luxemburg had taken sharp issue with what she viewed as Lenin’s ultra-centralist concept of social-democratic organization in Russia. In 1904, she had written a critique of Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two-Steps Back, his discussion of the RSDLP’s Second Congress: [Lenin’s book] is a systematic exposition of the views of the ultracentralist tendency in the Russian party. … The Central Committee emerges as the real active nucleus of the party; all the remaining organizations are merely its executive instruments. (Luxemburg, 2004: 250)

Again and again Luxemburg critiqued Lenin’s concept: [T]he absolute blind submission of the individual organs of the party to their central authority and the extension of the latter’s powers right to the periphery of the party organization. .… an over-mechanistic conception of social democratic organization. … [I]t seems to us perverse to think that the as yet unrealizable rule of the majority of the conscious workers within their own party organization may be ‘temporarily’ replaced by the ‘delegated’ sole power of the central party authority, and that the absence of public control of the working masses over what the party organs do and do not do might equally well be replaced by the inverse control by a Central Committee over the activity of the revolutionary workers. .… The most important and profijitable changes of the last decade were not ‘invented’ by any of the movement’s leaders, let alone the leading organizations, but were in every case the spontaneous product of the unfettered movement. (252, 253, 254)  The ultracentralism that Lenin advocates seems to us, in its whole essence, to be imbued, not with a positive creative spirit, but with the sterile spirit of the night watchman [authoritarian] state. His line of thought is concerned principally with the control of party activity and not with its fertilization, with narrowing and not with broadening, with tying the movement up and not with drawing it together. (256)  The mistakes that are made by a truly revolutionary workers’ movement are, historically speaking, immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best possible “Central Committee.” (265)

The question that arises is whether Luxemburg distorted Lenin’s view. He replied to her critique with an article in which he denied his formulations were ultra-centralist, arguing that his discussion could not be understood outside the history of the development of the Russian party, and thus the

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need to fijight opportunism. He briefly went over the history, and argued that Luxemburg’s critiques were generalities, abstractions, not tied to the specifijic conditions of the Russian developments. However, Karl Kautsky would not publish Lenin’s article. (Lenin, 1964: 474)9

• Were Lenin and Luxemburg talking past each other? Despite Lenin being supposedly “all centralized organization” and Luxemburg “all spontaneity,” were they really polar opposites? If we turn to Luxemburg’s participation in the 1907 Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party held in London, a “unifijication” congress held after the revolution, in which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks once again battled, we can see that her views on the nature of the Russian revolution, on the relationship with the bourgeoisie, and on her attitude toward the peasantry, were each generally in concert with Lenin’s views. Luxemburg’s fijirst speech to the Congress began by contrasting the view of the German Social Democratic Party prior to 1905: “Up until 1905 a very negative attitude to the general strike prevailed in the ranks of the German Social-Democratic Party,” to what was found with German workers after the events of 1905: [T]he German workers presently fijix their gaze with redoubled attention on the struggle of their Russian brothers as the more advanced fijighters, the vanguard of the international working class.10

Her focus was on the historical relation of the 1905 revolution to the 1848 revolution, in which Marx was active, and to 1905’s anticipation of future revolutions. With regard to 1848, she demonstrated how ambivalently the bourgeois fought absolutism and how critically Marx supported them: The Russian Social-Democracy is the fijirst to whom has fallen the difffijicult but honorable task of applying the principles of Marx’s teaching not in a period of quiet parliamentary course in the life of the state, but in a stormy revolutionary period. The only experience that scientifijic socialism had previously in practical politics during a revolutionary period was the activity of Marx himself in the 1848 revolution. The course itself of the 1848 revolution, however, cannot be a model for the present revolution in Russia. From it we

 9 The article was submitted as a Letter of Novaya Zhizn, the fijirst legal Bolshevik newspaper, but it was not published. (Lenin, 1964: 474) 10 Luxemburg’s talk was translated and published in Dunayevskaya (1982), and reprinted in Luxemburg (2004).

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can only learn how not to act in a revolution. Here was the schema of this revolution: the proletariat fijights with its usual heroism but is unable to utilize its victories; the bourgeoisie drives the proletariat back in order to usurp the fruits of its struggle; fijinally, absolutism pushes the bourgeoisie aside in order to crush the proletariat as well as defeat the revolution. …  Marx supported the national struggles of 1848, holding that they were allies of the revolution. The politics of Marx consisted in this, that he pushed the bourgeoisie every moment to the limits of the revolutionary situation. Yes, Marx supported the bourgeoisie in the struggle against absolutism, but he supported it with whips and kicks.

This interpretation could not have been lost to the two factions of the RSDLP, where both agreed that 1905 was a bourgeois revolution, but had quite diffferent attitudes to the role of the bourgeoisie. That Luxemburg’s view was closer to the Bolsheviks was beyond question. At the same time, Luxemburg showed the 1905 revolution was not bound by the historical framework of 1848, but reached toward the future: The Russian proletariat, in its actions, must show that between 1848 and 1907, in the more than half-century of capitalist development, and from the point of this development taken as a whole, we are not at the beginning but at the end of this development. It must show that the Russian Revolution is not just the last act in a series of bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century, but rather the forerunner of a new series of future proletarian revolutions in which the conscious proletariat and its vanguard, the SocialDemocracy, are destined for the historic role of leader.

Luxemburg spoke not only to the role of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but of the peasantry as well. In remarks to the Congress Luxemburg critiqued Plekhanov’s dismissal of the peasantry as inherently reactionary: [T]o try to make a mechanical transposition of the scheme about the peasantry as a petty bourgeois reactionary layer onto the peasantry in a revolutionary period is, without doubt, a perversion of the historical dialectic. The role of the peasantry and the relationship of the proletariat to it is defijined the same way as the role of the bourgeoisie, that is, not according to subjective desires and aims of those classes, but according to the objective situation. … [T]he peasantry, despite the confusion and contradictions in it demands, despite the fogginess in its multi-colored aims—it is, in the present revolution, an objectively revolutionary factor because it has placed the question of land seizure on the agenda of the revolution, and because it thereby brings out the very question which is insoluble within the framework of bourgeois society, and which therefore, by its very nature, has to be solved outside of that framework… [S]o long as the revolution is continuing, so long as the agrarian question is not solved, the peasant is not only a

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chapter four political rock against absolutism but a social sphinx, and therefore constitutes an independent ferment for revolution, giving it, together with the urban proletarian movement, that wide expanse which relates to a spontaneous national movement. (quoted in Dunayevskaya, 1982)

Luxemburg’s singling out the self-activity of the Russian proletariat and her critique of “ultra-centralist” forms of Marxist organization would take further signifijicance with the 1917 Russian revolution, when she again wrote in support of the revolution while critiquing certain aspects of the leadership. As we will see in the following chapter, she would crucially raise the question of democracy after the revolution.

• D. In Place of a Conclusion: Notes for Further Probing In a fundamental sense, there are limitations to drawing conclusions in relation to Trotsky, Lenin, and Luxemburg within the framework of 1905–07. Too many moments of revolution/counter-revolution lay in their future. 1905 was literally the dress rehearsal for 1917. There was the attempt at a German revolution, 1918–19. Before those revolutions came Luxemburg’s great theoretical work Accumulation of Capital (1913). The outbreak of the First World War found all three working out anti-war positions and manifestos in face of the collapse of offfijicial Marxism. Lenin, under the impact of the betrayal of the Germany Social Democracy and the disintegration of the 2nd International, would undertake a Marxist reexamination of the dialectic in his Notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic, central to his theoretical preparation for revolution. In 1917, Lenin and Trotsky returned to lead the fijirst workers’ revolution. Luxemburg in prison would write “The Russian Revolution” in praise, questioning, and critique (September, 1918). In November, she was freed from prison, only to be murdered two months later while participating in the failed German Revolution and its aftermath. Lenin’s and Trotsky’s practical and theoretical experiences in the fijirst half dozen years, 1917–23—What Happens After the Revolution?—must be central to any full commentary. Important as well, were Trotsky’s years in exile following Lenin’s death and Stalin’s rise to power. We will take up these periods shortly. Nevertheless, from 1905 we can tentatively put forth notes on mass proletarian self-activity and its relation to the organizational thought of Marxist revolutionaries. We return to the questions posed earlier: What was the relation between these Marxist revolutionaries’ participation in

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1905, their theoretical labors, and their organizational practice? In what way did 1905 change their conception of revolutionary Marxist organization? Were there limitations in their attempt to theoretically internalize the meaning of mass proletarian self-activity in relation to Marxist organization? There can be no doubt that Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky were each profoundly afffected, indeed, transformed in important ways by 1905: For Luxemburg, the proletarian spontaneity manifest in the revolution, was not alone a demonstration of masses as reason: “The most precious, because lasting, thing in this rapid ebb and flow of the wave is its mental sediment: the intellectual, cultural growth of the proletariat.” She had had a sensitivity to the movement from below prior to 1905, though her appreciation and articulation of it grew enormously in this period. What was new as well were her effforts to work out a relation between that mass spontaneity and Marxist organization. She saw the proletarian activity, particularly in the mass strike, as the force that could push the vanguard leadership of the party toward a more radical position. For Luxemburg, this took its most concrete form in relation to Social-Democracy in Germany. Despite their Marxist language, both the trade union chiefs and the SPD leadership remained mired in parliamentary forms and a narrow economic framework. In bringing to the fore the rich experience of proletarian, revolutionary Russia, with its unity of the political and economic in the mass strike, Luxemburg sought to break through barriers between socalled backward and advanced lands, as well as to strip away some of the hierarchical division between masses and leaders in revolutionary organization. In Luxemburg’s hands, the divide between spontaneity and consciousness, spontaneity and organization, if not fully transcended, was defijinitely challenged. However, we need to remind ourselves that Luxemburg was by no means abandoning a concept of a vanguard party. Hers was certainly a different concept than Lenin’s, but Luxemburg’s adherence to the party as the needed vanguard was never in doubt. Not in 1905, and not until the last months of her life, when she fijinally worked to form a new Communist Party fully independent of the old social-democracy. Trotsky as revolutionary activist, propagandist, and as leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet was unchallenged. His theory of permanent revolution was a brilliant summation of the historic moment, despite its internal contradiction. However, taking the experiences of this proletarian revolutionary moment, together with his theoretical contribution, and expressing both in terms of revolutionary organization, was not viewed by Trotsky as an urgent, concrete task.

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Instead, he remained on the outside in relation to organization, criticizing both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, but never seeking to build revolutionary organization on the basis of 1905 and its theoretical meaning, which he had posed in Results and Prospects. Organization for Trotsky seemed more a question of tactics and strategy, and in the end, influence over the proletariat. By 1917, he accepted Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party, at times adopting its most negative aspects. This would later become the basis for his attempt to build revolutionary organization against Stalin and Stalinism. Under the influence of 1905, Lenin came to see the proletariat as reaching beyond trade union consciousness, and being spontaneously socialdemocratic. During the height of 1905 he was intent on bringing proletarians by the hundreds, and indeed thousands, into the Party. He critiqued those Bolshevik organizers who viewed proletarian activity in trade unions, strikes, and the Soviet, as rivals if not under party control. While Lenin certainly believed and fought for a concept of professional revolutionaries, the organization he had in mind needed to have proletarian, social-democratic workers at its core. But 1905 did not mean for Lenin a new concept of revolutionary organization. Though he made modifijication to his original concept, he remained within the framework of the vanguard party to lead. With 1905, Lenin certainly moved toward a deeper conception of the creativity of the masses’ activity, calling them spontaneously social-democratic rather than just reaching trade union consciousness. But there was no conception within his formulations of the masses’ practice being itself a form of theory. Theory was the preserve of the Marxist organization.

• Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky all saw the creativity of the proletarian masses in 1905. Each responded to this reality in path-breaking ways. Trotsky came to head the St. Petersburg Soviet, and forged his theory of permanent revolution. Luxemburg deepened her ideas on spontaneity and consciousness, and was determined to take the lessons of 1905 back to the trade unions and Marxist organization in Germany, particularly with her Mass Strike pamphlet. Lenin strove to meet the revolutionary reality with an uncompromising Marxist party and a concept of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. However, if we return to my fijinal question—Were there limitations in their attempt to theoretically internalize the meaning of mass proletarian

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self-activity in relation to Marxist organization?—the answer would have to be afffijirmative. None saw 1905 as catalyst for totally working out anew the two-way relation between mass proletarian activity and revolutionary Marxist organization. They did not ask: If masses are spontaneously social democratic, doesn’t that mean that revolutionary theory is no longer the exclusive preserve of a vanguard party? Can masses be Reason of revolution, and if so, doesn’t that mean that Marxist organization has a diffferent role than “directing” the mass movement? If proletarian mass activity is itself a form of revolutionary theory, what contribution/responsibility for theory does the Marxist organization have? Is there a crucial form of theory, rooted in an historical world view, in Marx’s thought as a philosophy of human liberation, which fuses with the practice and reason of ongoing mass movements and upsurges, a liberatory vision that becomes the responsibility for revolutionary Marxists in organization to workout? These are among the questions, I would argue, that today’s movement activists and revolutionaries need to grapple with in light of the historical experiences of unfijinished and aborted revolutions of the 20th century, and in front of the profound challenges we face to carry out uprooting social transformation in these fijirst decades of the 21st century.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917 AND BEYOND: WORKERS’ FORMS OF ORGANIZATION: LENIN AND THE BOLSHEVIKS If 1905 was the initial moment of fusion of the spontaneous self-activity of the Russian masses with the organizational thought of revolutionary Marxists, then the Revolution of 1917 and its fijirst years of praxis, was the human workshop for exploring the creativity and grave contradictions within such a fusion. Here was a revolution which not only succeeded in overthrowing Czarism, but became the fijirst workers’ revolution in history. Its profound initial success followed by its devastating transformation into opposite from within, would have lasting impact upon revolutionary thought and practice throughout the 20th century. We who live in the beginning decades of the 21st century still need to continue to grapple with its deeply contradictory ramifijications for Marxist thought and practice. As with 1905, our concentration will be on the masses’ creative actions, in particular the organizational forms they created to express their ideas, desires and demands, (though not forgetting the grave objectivesubjective barriers they faced), and on the two revolutionaries—Lenin and Trotsky—whose practice and thought resonated not only with 1917 and far beyond, but speak in diffferent ways to our day. Luxemburg is important here as well. Her pamphlet The Russian Revolution, unpublished in her lifetime, speaks to the question of What Happens After a revolution has destroyed the old regime and assumed power. Her work will be discussed in Chapter Six. We begin with the masses’ self-activity in 1917, particularly the workers of Petrograd, 1917. I. February-October, 1917: Forms of Organization From Below; Developments and Struggles Within Bolshevism The overthrow of the Czar, accomplished by workers and soldiers in Petrograd early in 1917, was the product of largely spontaneous action of thousands of hungry, angry, and war-weary women and men who had lost

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confijidence in the government of Nicholas II. (Suny, 1987)1 Within days, this mass outpouring, sparked by working women’s challenge to the Czar on International Women’s Day, began to assume a variety of organizational forms—factory committees, sailors’ and soldiers’ committees, militias in factories and working class districts, and crucially, the Soviets—as workers as well as soldiers and sailors began to create a variety of class organizations as forums to give expression to their hopes and demands, and actively defend their interests vis-a-vis the factory owners, the offfijicers in the military, and the unelected Provisional Government that sought to fijill the void created with the overthrow of the Czar, but continued participating in the ruinous war. These organizational forms initially took spontaneous actions such as the “carting” of factory owners and managers, (literally putting them in a wheelbarrow and removing them from the factory, with threats of dumping them offf a bridge into the river), or crewmen sailors carrying out the summary killing of members of the offfijicer elite in the Baltic Fleet. Factory committees achieved the right of inspection and overseeing management in some workshops, while in others they demanded the practice of full self-management, appointing and removing of managers and technical personnel. Soldiers at the Petrograd garrison began to issue their own orders, placing themselves under the authority of the Soviets rather than the army hierarchy. Militias were formed, fijirst to protect the various factories from sabotage, then to prevent de-capitalization through removal of machinery by owners wishing to flee from the deepening worker militancy in Petrograd, and fijinally, growing into the armed power that enabled the October revolution.

1 In this chapter I am indebted to the work of a number of Russian Revolution scholars, including Ronald Suny and William G. Rosenberg in The Workers’ Revolution in Russia, 1917–The View From Below; contributors to Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War– Explorations in Social History edited by Diane Koenker, Qillim Rosenberg, Ronald Suny; Gennady Shkiarevsky, Labor in the Russian Revolution – Factory Committees and Trade Unions, 1917–1918; Steven Smith, Red Petrograd–Revolution in the Factories 1917–1918; and Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution—Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Of crucial importance for me, Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution. While my concentration will be on 1917 February to October, and on the question of what happened after the Bolshevik seizure of power and rule in the name of the Soviets, the origins of 1917, lie far deeper than the immediate catalyst of war, and hunger—in the long years of Tsarist oppression and economic backwardness, together with the deepening polarization between the nascent capitalist class and the rapidly growing industrial proletariat, surrounded by a sea of impoverished peasant masses. And crucially we need to have before us, the revolutionary experience and memory of 1905 in the mind of the Russian masses.

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If the factory committees, together with the soldiers’ and sailors’ committees, were the spontaneous, creative forms initiated by the masses to propound their demands and hopes at the factory and barracks level, the Soviet was the political form that was to represent workers’ power. Indeed, the struggle from February to October, was a struggle to transform the interior of the Soviet—its political composition from Menshevik and Social Revolutionary majority to Bolshevik majority—and thus transform the dual power represented by the Provisional Government and the Soviet, into the possibility and actuality of seizing state power. February to October was thus: The deepening of the workers own organizational forms—This was a process not without its own contradictions, as in the debates and struggles over factory committees vs. trade unions as representing worker interests, as well as what role for factory committees—overseeing and inspection vs. full self-management. The transformation of the Soviets—The Soviets initially had Menshevikdominated leadership who rejected the idea that the dual power of Provisional Government and Soviet should be transformed to All Power to the Soviets. The Petrograd workers transformed the soviets to an organization with a Bolshevik majority, and thus a willingness to take power, or, a taking of power by the Bolsheviks in the name of the Soviet—ratifijied by the Second Congress of Soviets, October 25. Changes within the Bolshevik Party itself—February to October meant a crucial transformation, its most important benchmarks being Lenin’s April Thesis written upon his return to Russia leading to the rearming of the party, and his State and Revolution. Any who think that the party was a monolith under Lenin, need to follow the debates and sharp struggle within the Party in these months. The struggles were not limited to no further support for the Provisional Government and a willingness to take power, but an array of issues including: the role of the factory committees and/or the trade unions, what kind of internationalism, was an insurrection possible, should there be a coalition government of socialist parties or a Bolshevik government. Perhaps most important, were the sharp struggles of factions within Bolshevism on the relationship of the mass of workers to the Party, a struggle that predated 1917, continued between February and October, and intensifijied after the revolution in the years of Lenin’s rule 1917–1923, abating only with Stalin’s dictatorial consolidation of power by the late 1920s. Though for sake of clarity, we will discuss the development of these three strands somewhat separately, the reality was that their intertwining

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February through October, often with sharp debate and even open ruptures, created the tapestry of the workers’ revolution of 1917. One was simultaneously witnessing a movement toward All Power to the Soviets (along with their continual radicalization), toward the factory committees having more and more control in the shops as trade unions also developed and came into conflict with these committees, the continued formation of workers’ militias, and toward the Bolsheviks Party, which was involved in all of the above. It was a sharply conflicted dialogue among the Bolsheviks, as they debated their role as vanguard party in relation to these spontaneouscreated worker and soldier organizations, to the existing Provisional Government, and to the question of taking power. Thus on the production level, the political level, the level of power and control in the factory and in the state—all came together, in a revolutionary, but deeply conflicted manner. A. The Creation and Deepening of the Workers’ Own Organizational Forms We consider the existence of the factory committees to be a matter of life and death for the working class… We will fijight with all our might and by all means, including the general strike, for the existence of our factory committees. —Obukhov factory workers [Factory committees–] the best mouthpieces of the working class and the only real and true reflection of the moods of the toiling people. —7,000 workers at the Respirator factory, 3 September 1917

We need to begin by noting the multiplicity of organizations created. Among the most crucial were: Soviets, trade unions, factory committees, peasant committees, rank-and-fijile soldiers and sailors’ committees, militias in the factory, factory districts and working-class neighborhoods. To this we can add the various conferences at the city and regional levels of many of these organizations in the fijirst months of the revolution. Our concentration will focus on the Petrograd factory committees, and in the following section, the Soviets. We do so because of Petrograd’s centrality to the revolutionary process, and because the factory committees illuminate the participation of the workers in the Russian Revolution, doing so in a way that speaks to our tracing of spontaneously-created mass organization forms in the 20th century. The working class in Petrograd in the period leading to 1917, and particularly since the outbreak of the World War, had undergone an

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enormous growth in numbers and transformation in composition. “The number of metal workers in Petrograd increased by some 400 percent between 1914 and 1917, and the number of chemical workers by 250 percent.” (Rosenberg, 1987: 102) At the same time there was “a deep instability in the workplace,” with a large turn-over of workers, many of whom went to the army, others to higher paying jobs. “In Russia as a whole, at least one-third of all workers employed in January 1914 had left their jobs by 1917, and the actual fijigure was probably much higher.” (Rosenberg, 102) Moreover, “the factory workforce of Petrograd was highly diffferentiated by degree of proletarianization, by skill and wage-level, by gender, age and education.” (Smith, 1983: 254) Smith divided the Petrograd workforce into two broad groups: proletarianized, skilled, literate, male workers who comprised around 40% of the workforce, and a second group of workers new to industry consisting primarily of rural migrants, women and youth. As we will see shortly, this broad division played a role in the kind of activities the workers engaged in the Petrograd factories. The February overthrow of the Czar released the creative energies of the Russian masses. That crucial original form from 1905, the Soviets, quickly emerged anew, at fijirst with a Menshevik party majority. But equally explosive in its growth was the movement to establish factory committees. Between March and June 1917 it is estimated that close to two million workers, or three-quarters of all workers employed in Russian industry, were in factory committees. (Shkliarevsky, 1993: 3) These committees were often the source of direct action by the workers. Sometimes this took the form of removal of management employees from the factories, including by “carting.” Smith described an incident where the women workers seized the director of one Vyborg spinning-mill, after he tried to explain to a general meeting of workers that he was unable to consider their demand for a wage-increase. He was shoved “in a wheelbarrow and carted to the canal where, poised perilously on the edge of the bank, he shakily signed a piece of paper agreeing to an increase.” (Smith, 1983: 193) The committees faced a variety of problems at the economic crisis deepened. If at fijirst it was the needed wage increases against runaway inflation, the crisis cascaded into the “offf-loading” of factories (the moving of equipment and the attempt to close factories), which the factory committees often fought. By the fall of 1917, this was combined with fijighting attempts to lay-offf workers. At plant after plant, the workers began to become the overseers and checkers of production, seeking to prevent

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what they viewed as sabotage by the plant directors and managers— attempts to close plants, to lay-offf workers, ship out needed equipment. The committees investigated shortages of stocks of fuel and raw materials, fijinding ways to keep production going. The scope of workers’ control increased, as the committees took charge of fuel and raw materials, and began to demand workers’ control of company sales and fijinances. Smith writes of how, The First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees called for the abolition of commercial secrecy, and the Central Council of Factory Committees claimed wide powers of checking company accounts, calculating debts and credits, costs of production and rates of profijit. (177)

The movement in some factory committees deepened from checking and overseeing the management as they continued to run production, to factory committees replacing offfijicial management with self-managed factories run by the workers. This was particularly the case in companies where the owners were attempting to shut the factory, or had in fact abandoned it. At times the workers would try and force the government takeover of factories. These activities were not “wild” takeovers, but measures taken in concrete response to ruinous situations. Often factory committees, trying to work in concert with others, informed the soviets and the provisional government of their actions. However in the months after February Revolution, the workers’ factory committees often found themselves opposed in their efffort to take matters in their own hands, not only by the Society of Factory and Works Owners, but by the Provisional Government, including when the Mensheviks had joined the Provisional Government, and by the leaders of the Soviet, when the Mensheviks were in a majority. On 23 August [the Ministry of Labor] issued a circular afffijirming that the right of hiring and fijiring workers belonged exclusively to the employers. On 28 August it issued a second circular which forbade factory committees from meeting during working hours. The circulars provoked uproar in the labor movement, not least because they appeared at precisely the time when General Kornilov was organizing to drown the revolutionary movement in blood. (Smith, 1983: 181)

In response, a general meeting of workers at the Obukhov factory declared: We consider the existence of the factory committees to be a matter of life and death for the working class… We will fijight with all our might and by all means, including the general strike, for the existence of our factory committees. (quoted in Smith, 1983: 181)

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Under the deepening crisis of war, and the reactionary attempt to destroy the revolutionary gains of February, the demands and ideas of the factory committees became more radical. Not only were many of the committees in favor of workers control, meaning inspection and oversight of management, but a number of factory committees were demanding direct selfmanagement of factories. This was particularly true in the state sector factories, where workers in the wake of the February Revolution had demanded the election of their foremen and other members of the shop administration. These worker ideas had come forth not as a Utopian scheme posed in the abstract, but out of the concrete need to defend the gains from February under attack, and extend the concept of workplace-democracy. From the fijirst defensive tactic of maintaining production, the factory committees were taking the offfensive to keep the factories open and running in a way that seemed feasible to them, workers’ self-management. This concept was not only opposed by the factory owners and the Provisional Government, but came under attack by the still Menshevikcontrolled Soviet and the Menshevik party. At the fijirst national congress (beginning of July) of factory and port committees subject to the Naval Ministry, participants discussed the possibility of workers’ selfmanagement. One delegate introduced a resolution which called for naval enterprises to be run solely by the factory committees, envisaging that the committees would elect a director and administrative stafff while the Navel Ministry would send representatives to the factories for ‘control.’ A Menshevik delegate introduced an opposing resolution saying that the factory committees should not run the naval enterprises, but only have rights of information and inspection. The Menshevik resolution won. (described in Smith, 1983: 182–183) The attempt to limit the scope of the factory committees came from other sources as well. Within the Bolshevik party there was continuous debate over the role of factory committees in relation to inspection and oversight vs. self-management, and as to the role of trade unions as against factory committees. What were the factories committees going to function as? Would they be trade-union organizations, battling for the 8-hour day and improved wages? Or would they go beyond this sphere of trade union activity to the realm of “control” of hiring and fijiring of workers? And would they be able to take up conditions of labor on the factory floor, and fijight to decide what those conditions should be? Perhaps at that moment, under the severe conditions of war-torn, crisis-ridden and technologically underdeveloped Russia, the last question could not be posed in a fully concrete manner, but was it there in embryo?

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The Petrograd working class was not homogenous, and its diffferentiation produced tensions. It was the predominately male, more skilled metal and chemical workers who took the lead in forming and participating in the factory committees. They had both more experience in the factories and a richer historic memory from 1905, than did the unskilled, predominately women, rural and young workers who entered the shops in the war years. These diffferences led to tensions and divisions, such as when some factory committees sought to establish rules whereby women workers, particularly married women workers, would face lay-offfs fijirst. Smith (1983) reports that, “At factory level women workers often met with active discrimination from men in their attempts to organize.” He then quotes from two activist women workers who critiqued the attitude of some male workers: At the Pipe works a woman complained ‘It happens, not infrequently even now, that the backward workers, who lack consciousness, cannot imagine that a woman can be as capable as a man of organizing the broad masses, and so they make fun of the elected representatives of the women workers, point their fijingers as though at a savage.’

One woman wrote in a leatherworker’s journal: Instead of supporting, organizing and going hand-in-hand with the women, they [her male colleagues] behave as though we are not equal members of the working family and sometimes do not bother with us at all. When the question of unemployment and redundancies arises, they try to ensure that the men stay and that the women go, hoping that the women will be unable to resist because of their poor organization and feebleness. When women attempt to speak, in order to point out that the men are behaving wrongly and that we must jointly fijind a solution, the men will not allow us to speak and will not listen. It is difffijicult even for the more conscious women to fijight against this, the more so since often the mass of women do not understand and do not wish to listen to us. (quoted in Smith, 1983: 195)

Smith also singled out the category of young workers who created a youth organization with a Bolshevik character, the Socialist Union of Working Youth: In the wake of the February Revolution, young workers began to set up committees in the factories, fijirst in the metal workers of Vyborg, Nava and Vasilevskii districts and then spreading to other industries areas. Out of these factory youth groups there developed district youth organizations and, subsequently, the city-wide youth movement.

We will not follow further the rich development of factory committees. There can be no doubt that they represented one of the most creative

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organizational forms of the revolution, one which gave voice to workers’ aspirations (and contradictions) at the shop floor level. In their creation and in their demands and activities, they began to pose, even before the October events of this workers’ revolution, questions about what happens after the overthrow of the old regime? How does one begin to reorganize production, from below and/or from above? What is the relation of the two in a workers’ state being born? What is the meaning of reorganizing production—inspection and checking by workers, or self-management? That these questions and others closely related could not be answered clearly in a time of imperialist war, and then civil war, in a time of severe isolation, (technologically underdeveloped Russia was not joined in revolution by technologically advanced Germany and others), does not mean that the questions did not have validity, nor that they are not relevant today. To probe this further, we need to turn fijirst to the political-economic form which the workers, soldiers and sailors, as well as peasants, had created anew from factory floor and military barracks, to fijields and farms in the countryside—the Soviet—as the crucial organizational form to express their revolutionary hopes and actions. Second, we need to take up the revolutionary Marxist organization, the Bolsheviks, who from February to October, came to best express, though in contradictory and incomplete ways, the Russian masses’ passionate desires. B. The Re-Creation and Transformation of the Soviets Trotsky, in his History of the Russian Revolution, reminds us how powerful were the Soviets in the memory of the Russian masses, and how almost in the immediate moment of the overthrow of Czarism they were reborn: : The revolutionary leaders did not have to invent it; the experience of the Soviets of 1905 was forever chiseled into the consciousness of the workers. At every lift of the movement, even in, wartime, the idea of soviets was almost automatically reborn.  The workers, the soldiers, and soon also the peasants, will from now on turn only to the Soviet. In their eyes the Soviet becomes the focus of all hopes and all authority, an incarnation of the revolution itself.  . … Thanks to the tradition of 1905, the soviets sprang up as though from under the earth, and immediately became incomparably more powerful than all the other organizations which later tried to compete with them (the municipalities, the co-operatives, and in part the trade unions). As for the peasantry, a class by its very nature scattered, thanks to the war and revolution, it was exactly at that moment organized as never before. The war had assembled the peasants into an army, and the revolution had given the army

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chapter five a political character! No fewer than eight million peasants were united in companies and squadrons, which had immediately created their revolutionary representation and could through it at any moment be brought to their feet by a telephone call.  . … Not all the toiling masses chose the Soviet; not all awakened at once; not every layer of the oppressed dared instantly believe that the revolution concerned them. In the consciousness of many only an undiscriminating hope was stirring. But all the active elements of the masses poured into the Soviet, and activity prevails in times of revolution. Moreover, since mass activity was growing from day to day, the basis of the Soviet was continually broadening. It was the sole genuine basis of the revolution.

Trotsky will also remind us of the very diffferent origins of the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917 vs. 1905: The organization created on February 27 in the Tauride Palace, and called “Executive Committee of The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,” had little in common with its name. The Soviet of Deputies of 1905, the originator of the system, rose out of a general strike. It directly represented the masses in struggle. The leaders of the strike became the deputies of the Soviet; the selection of its membership was carried out under fijire; its Executive Committee was elected by the Soviet for the further prosecution of the struggle. It was this Executive Committee which placed on the order of the day the armed insurrection.  The February revolution, thanks to the revolt of the troops, was victorious before the workers had created a soviet. The Executive Committee was selfconstituted, in advance of the Soviet and independently of the factories and regiments after the victory of the revolution.  We have here the classic initiative of the radicals-standing aside from the revolutionary struggle, but getting ready to harvest its fruit. The real leaders of the workers had not yet left the streets. They were disarming some, arming others, making sure of the victory. The more far-sighted among them were alarmed by the news that in the Tauride Palace some kind of a soviet of workers’ deputies had come into being.

It is precisely this duality—between the creativity of the masses, who founded this unique revolutionary form in two Russian revolutions, and the usurpers of its power, who in leadership roles proceeded to continually limit and oppose the instinctive revolutionary action of the masses— and the struggle to overcome it, which characterized the months between February and October. Every question, the continuance of the war, the role of the political parties—the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, and particularly the Bolsheviks and the need to rearm the party—the relation to the Provisional Government and thus dual power, the stream of other organizations created from below: factory committees, trade unions, workers’ and other militias, the attempts at counter-revolution—all, were

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in one way or another related to that peculiar organization form, the Soviets, and its six month-long struggle to overcome the duality between its revolutionary base, and its vacillating, non-revolutionary leadership. The duality was not, however, external to the workers and solders who made the Soviets their own, but who in the earliest weeks and months afffijirmed the self-appointed Executive Committee. For the proletariat, the Soviet, as Trotsky wrote, “was the sole genuine basis of the revolution.” For the Executive Committee, it was the form to be harnessed. The socialist aspirations of the working class needed to be limited; their creative human energy needed to be channeled in support of a bourgeois revolution and a bourgeois government. Within the Executive Committee of the Soviet this was the avowed aim of the Menshevik leadership in supporting the  Provisional Government, while the Social Revolutionary leadership stuck to abstractions about democracy and support for the Provisional Government. For the Bolsheviks, after Lenin’s return to Russia, the task was one of exposing the duality within the Soviet, supporting is revolutionary dimension, while at the same time offfering no support for the Provisional Government and its continuation of the war. In the words of Lenin’s April Thesis, the task was “to present a patient, systematic, and persistence explanation” to the Russian masses. Lenin sought to explain both to his Bolshevik Party and to the workers, soldiers and peasants that, the specifijic feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the fijirst stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufffijicient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. (“April Thesis,” Lenin, 1964b)

Lenin’s proclamation of “All Power to the Soviets” came at the time when the Bolshevik ideas were expressed by only a small minority within the Soviet, when the workers and soldiers were still giving their support to the Executive Committee of the Soviet. But he felt confijident in doing so because, though the present leadership of the Soviets had no intention of taking power, the authentic desires and hopes of the Russian masses could only be realized through “All Power to the Soviets,” and in the course of struggle, the proletarian masses would change the Soviet’s leadership. Trotsky again and again returned to the confijidence that the Russian people had in their Soviet: The workers, soldiers and peasants took events seriously. They thought that the soviets which they had created ought to undertake immediately to

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chapter five remove those evils which had caused the revolution. They all ran to the Soviet. Everybody brought his pains there. And who was without pains? They demanded decisions, hoped for help, awaited justice, insisted upon indemnifijication. Solicitors, complainers, petitioners, exposers, all came assuming that at last they had replaced a hostile power with their own. The people believe in the Soviet, the people are armed, therefore the Soviet is the sovereign power. That was the way they understood it. And were they not indeed right? An uninterrupted flood of soldiers, workers, soldiers’ wives, small traders, clerks, mothers, fathers, kept opening and shutting the doors, sought, questioned, wept, demanded, compelled action-sometimes even indicating what action—and converted the Soviet in very truth into a revolutionary government. (Trotsky, 1980)

This was the Soviet that Lenin had all his senses attuned to, and that the Bolsheviks strove from April to October to bring to a majority. We will not follow all the twists and turns within the Soviets, which the masses were constantly infusing with revolutionary content, while in the same period, not only the factory owners and the provisional government, but the Executive Committee leadership itself, sought to emasculate. Among the dualities between the workers who created the soviets and the Executive Committee that assumed the leadership one could fijind the following: When the call came to return to the shops after the February overthrow of the Czar’s regime, the workers were planning to, but they demanded the imposition of the eight-hour day. Trotsky writes: The Mensheviks answered by alluding to 1905 when the workers tried to introduce the eight-hour day by forcible methods and were defeated. ‘A struggle on two fronts-against the reaction and against the capitalist is too much for the proletariat’..… “For the working class,” they taught, “social questions are not now of the fijirst importance. Its present task is to achieve political freedom.” But just what this speculative freedom consisted of, the workers could not understand. They wanted in the fijirst place a little freedom for their muscles and nerves. And so they brought pressure on their bosses. By the irony of fate it was exactly on the 10th of March, when the Mensheviks were explaining that the eight-hour day is not a current issue that the Manufacturers’ Association, which had already been obliged to enter into offfijicial relations with the Soviet, announced its readiness to introduce the eight-hour day and permit the organization of factory and shop committees. The industrialists were more far-seeing than the democratic strategists of the Soviet. And no wonder: these employers came face to face with the workers, and the workers in no less than half of the Petrograd plants among them a majority of the biggest ones were already leaving the shops in a body after eight hours of work. They themselves took what the soviet and the government refused them. (Trotsky, 1980)

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Where the soldiers and sailors in the February days rebelled without their offfijicers, and in some actions directly against them, including summary executions, the Soviet Executive Committee aimed to put the soldiers and sailors directly back under the leadership they had overthrown. This was suppose to protect the army from universal anarchy and a disintegrated rank-and-fijile. When in periods of reaction, the workers’ faced lockouts and the threatened closure of plants, they marched on the government and began demanding state intervention to save their jobs and advocated individual action against various capitalists. The Soviet leadership refused to back the workers in their demands, saying “The laws of economic life” would not permit such actions. Initially the Executive Committee had made a decision to arm ten percent of the working class. But little had been done to form militias. The workers began, at the factory committee level, to form militias and defend themselves against the threat of military counter-revolution. In the July Days, when reaction was directed against the Bolsheviks and the workers’ self-activity, Lenin briefly abandoned the slogan All Power to the Soviets. This was done not in despair at the Russian masses. Rather Lenin was exploring whether there were other mass organizational forms, perhaps the factory committees, which more fully represented, and could bring to power, the Russian proletariat. In the weeks that followed, the fusion of the activities of the workers, sailors and solders, with the support and active agitation and leadership of the Bolsheviks, led to Bolshevik majorities in various organizations—factory committees, trade unions, militias, and crucially, in the soviets themselves. “All Power to the Soviets” could then take on concrete reality. Refusing to put the Soviet on a pedestal without critique, Trotsky summed up its signifijicance: The soviet form does not contain any mystic power. It is by no means free from the faults of every representative system–unavoidable so long as that system is unavoidable. But its strength lies in that it reduces all these faults to a minimum.  We may confijidently assert—and the events will soon prove it—that any other representative system, atomising the masses, would have expressed their actual will in the revolution incomparably less efffectively, and with far greater delay. Of all the forms of revolutionary representation, the soviet is the most flexible, immediate and transparent. But still it is only a form. It cannot give [more] than the masses are capable of putting into it at a given moment. Beyond that, it can only assist the masses in understanding the mistakes they have made and correcting them. In this function of the soviets

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C. Lenin and the Transformation of the Bolshevik Party, 1917; Relation to the Masses’ Organizational Forms 1. A Preliminary Note on Lenin’s Philosophic Preparation for Revolution— His 1914–15 Thought-Dive into Hegel’s Science of Logic To grasp Lenin of 1917, certainly a political genius and uncompromising organizational man, it is necessary to return to 1914 and the betrayal of the Second International at the outbreak of the First World War. All revolutionary Marxists, including Trotsky and Luxemburg, were opposed to the betrayal of the various social-democratic (Marxist) parties taking sides in a capitalist war, and sought to politically answer the betrayal by working to create an international anti-war revolutionary Left by their uncompromising internationalism in the face of capitalist world war. However, only Lenin felt the need to reorganize philosophically, to re-explore the origins and ground of revolutionary Marxism. Thus in the midst of World War I, he began to study anew the philosophic roots of Marx’s philosophy of revolution within the dialectic of Hegel. The result was his Hegel Notebooks or Abstract on Hegel’s Science of Logic, written for himself in the fall and winter of 1914–15, in what has been termed the break in Lenin’s thought.2 One could characterize Lenin’s leadership as solely due to political brilliance and organization building par excellence. But to do so would be to blind ourselves to Lenin’s philosophic reorganization regarding the origins Marxism, and his theoretic work post-1914 that flowed from his probing Hegel’s dialectic anew. Lenin sought to discover, but as well, move beyond, the political reasons for the betrayal of the Second International, which had always proclaimed itself to be an international of revolutionary Marxists. In the process of his exploration of Science of Logic, Lenin found that all Marxists, himself included, had not fully grasped the profound relationship between Hegel’s dialectic as developed in the Science of Logic, and Marx’s Marxism as seen in Capital. It was no longer sufffijicient to

2 For Dunayevskaya’s commentary on Lenin’s philosophic development see “The Collapse of the Second International and the Break in Lenin’s Thought,” Chapter 10 of Dunayevskaya, 2000, and “The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin,” Chapter 3 of Dunayevskaya, 1973. Also see “Part III Hegel and Lenin” of the present study.

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understand politically the betrayal of the Second International, who had come to represent, not the deepest layers of the proletariat, but the aristocracy of labor, the skilled workers, who with the transformation of capitalism from competitive to monopoly, began to have a stake in capitalism’s continued development, including capitalism’s manifestation in imperialism. This part of the working class was thus no longer capitalism’s opposite, but rather, began to have a stake in monopoly capitalism’s extension into imperialism. Within the categories of dialectical thought one could discern the concept of transformation into opposite. This is not an argument for any oneto-one correspondence between Hegelian philosophic categories and political realities. But it is to say that revolutionary philosophy opens up a crucial vantage point for exploring those realities. Lenin’s philosophic leap not only gave him such a vantage point for analyzing the betrayal of the Second International, but a vantage point for a new beginning in revolutionary Marxism, including searching out those layers of society, which, in the age of monopoly and imperialism, were new subjects of revolutionary transformation. He was able to see the struggle for self-determination of nations, particularly the Irish uprising, not as a diversion from socialist transformation, but as a bacillus of revolution. The rebellion of colonial peoples was taking its place alongside working class struggles. 2. Lenin in 1917: From the “April Thesis” to State and Revolution The Bolshevik Party’s political preparation for 1917 was two-fold: 1) its deep internationalism in face of World War; 2) its continual agitation and underground work with the restive Russian proletariat, particularly in Petrograd and Moscow. There can be no doubt that the Bolshevik Party along with certain internationalist elements in the Mensheviks, and with independent revolutionary Marxists such as Trotsky, were the deepest of internationalists, opposing any defense of the Czar’s army in the war. This is not to say they all had the same position. Lenin’s was the most uncompromising opposition, calling for the defeat of Russia in war and the transformation of the world war into a civil war as well as support for self-determination of nations in the midst of war. Others, including Trotsky, would not support all of Lenin’s slogans, but they were opposed to the war and any kind of so-called patriotic defense. Within Russia, the underground Bolsheviks continued close contact with the factories, with many of the most active workers—as new opposition surfaced in the war years—being Bolshevik militants.

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February 1917 changed everything, and the revolutionaries, especially the Bolsheviks, were challenged by this new revolutionary moment. The fact that by September they had in many ways come to be the most influential party in relation to work in the factory committees, the militias, the trade unions, and most crucially in the various Soviets, cannot obscure the fact that, with the exception of Lenin living in exile until the fijirst days of April, the leadership of the Bolsheviks within Russia, and those who quickly returned, were in a state of confusion and uncertainty with regard to the new revolutionary situation. The principle issue for the Bolsheviks in Russia was what attitude to take to the Provisional Government now that the Russia masses had overthrown the Czar and the Soviets had been born anew. Left-wing Bolsheviks in Russia continued with an anti-government and antiwar stand. But they were quickly overwhelmed by “ranking” returning members, including Stalin and Kamenev, who took over Pravda and sharply changed its editorial policy. Instead of a strong opposition to the government, they adopted the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary formula of supporting the Provisional Government ‘insofar as’ it did not directly violate the interests of the masses, and they abandoned unqualifijied opposition to the war. (Daniels, 1988: 41)

When Lenin returned in April, he took sharp exception to the direction of the party: Even our own Bolsheviks show confijidence in the government. It is the death of socialism. … In that case our ways must part. … Have the will to build a new party! (Lenin, Speech at a meeting of the Bolshevik members of the AllRussian Conference of Soviets, April 4, 1917. Quoted by Daniels, 1988: 43)

a. The April Thesis It was Lenin’s “April Thesis,” which he read to the Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on April 4, that began the process of Rearming the Party. Among its provisions: Not the slightest concession to ‘revolutionary defencism’ is permissible.  [To the Russian masses] explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.  The specifijic feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the fijirst stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insuffijicient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place

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power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.  This particular situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awaken to political life.  No support for the Provisional Government.  The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistence explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.  Not a parliamentary republic … but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Laborers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.  Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy.  The salaries of all offfijicials all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.  The weight of emphasis in the agrarian program to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Laborers’ Deputies.  Confijiscation of all landed estates.  A new International. (Lenin, 1964b)

The thesis struck like a shot across the bow of Bolshevik ship drifting without direction in the wake of the February storm. Within a month, Lenin politically won over the majority of his Bolshevik colleagues to the ideas he put forth in the April Thesis. However, the philosophic ground for such emancipatory politics remained undisclosed. No links between Lenin’s Hegelian explorations of 1914–15 and his rearming the party were forged. b. April to October Lenin’s intervention by no means meant that his became the sole voice within the party. A left-wing within Bolshevism, including Shliapnikov, (who would later be a leader of the Workers’ Opposition), was active in Petrograd. Their position in the period after the February Revolution was close to Lenin’s. At the First All-Russian Conference of Soviets held at the end of March, the left wing argued for no support for the Provisional Government and the need to struggle against it, including a Workers’ Red Guard. They hailed the soviets as the “embryo of revolutionary power.” However, they were by no means the majority in Bolshevism postFebruary. And though Lenin’s leadership was not in question, he had to drag many of the “old Bolsheviks” kicking and screaming over the next months, as All Power to the Soviets would become transformed into the

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October Revolution. What made this transformation possible was not so much convincing the old guard, but 1) winning left Mensheviks and independents such as Trotsky to be part of the party’s leadership, and 2) the crucial dimension—winning over tens of thousands of workers and soldiers to the Bolsheviks during the tumultuous summer and fall. At the end of April 1917, the Petrograd Bolsheviks numbered 15,000 members. By the end of June, over 82,000. It was only the beginning. Throughout the summer the Bolshevik influence—in the trade unions, (whose membership had grown enormously), in the soviets, (where the Bolsheviks began winning a majority of representatives in by-elections), in the militias, (which the Bolsheviks were instrumental in building), and in the factory committees (where the most militant voices siding with the workers’ demands were the Bolsheviks)—became decisive. At the same time, within Bolshevism the debates and divisions continued: not only over the question of further support for the Provisional government and willingness to take power, but over a whole range of issues—the role of the factory committees and the trade unions, over internationalism, over insurrection, over a coalition government of socialist parties or a Bolshevik government. These debates within the Bolshevik Party, and in relation to the Bolsheviks attitudes towards the forms of organization created by the Russian masses, will be seen more clearly when we turn to Russia post the October Revolution. Here we want to concentrate on Lenin’s fijinal theoretical preparation for revolution, his State and Revolution. c. State and Revolution State and Revolution was written by Lenin in August and September while in hiding in Finland and under the threat from the Kerensky-headed Provisional Government, and then the direct counter-revolution of Kornilov, both of whom sought to destroy the Bolsheviks. Often dismissed as “revolutionary utopianism,” or conversely, as a ruse to hide Lenin’s “authoritarianism,” State and Revolution was rather, a remarkable document, written in the heat of revolutionary transformation, a historicaltheoretical treatment of a most concrete problem: the question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state is acquiring not only practical political importance but also the importance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do in the immediate future to free themselves from the yolk of capital. (Preface to First Edition of State and Revolution, Lenin, 1977)

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In what passed for offfijicial Marxism, particularly in the German Social Democracy and the writings of Karl Kautsky, and in what Lenin saw as the Russian representatives of that school of thought in Plehanov and the Mensheviks, there was a wholesale distortion of Marx’s thought with regard to the state. Lenin’s decision to probe these writings on the state was not an abstract question. What was involved was the here and now of the Russian Revolution and what should be the attitude of revolutionary socialists and the workers’ soviets toward the new bourgeois state and its Provisional Government, which had quickly assumed power in the aftermath of the February Revolution. State and Revolution was a tracing of Marx and Engels’ writings on the state from the period of the Communist Manifesto through the experience of the 1848–1851 Revolutions, and especially to Marx’s Civil War in France on the Paris Commune of 1871, and his Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875. There is no need to review the well-known arguments of State and Revolution on such topics as the state as the product and manifestation of irreconcilable class contradictions, the need to smash the bourgeois state and only then—with its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat—does the state begin to whither away, the signifijicance of the Paris Commune wherein the masses created of a non-state state: “a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered upon which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.” Some have referred to State and Revolution” as “only a re-write” of Marx’s Civil War in France. Well perhaps, but this misses the more fundamental point: Why would Lenin in the midst of the Russian Revolution—struggling with the question of transforming the Soviets, and moving close to the question of a revolutionary insurrection—feel the necessity, the compulsion for such a “re-write?” Wasn’t it because this most “practical” of revolutionaries recognized the need for theoretical preparation for revolution, for further exploration of the ideas of Marx on the relation of the revolution and the state, for understanding what lessons he had drawn from the experience of the masses in the Paris Commune? Thus this moment of revolution in Russia was at the same time a moment for theoretic labor by Lenin, one in which he strove to put forth an emancipatory vision of the future, drawing upon the experience of the Commune. In his postscript to the fijirst edition of State and Revolution, (1918), Lenin wrote that he could not write the second part, “The experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917,” due to the “interruption” of preparing for October. This unwritten second part can

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best be examined in the workshop of the revolution post-October, to which we now turn. II. Russia post-October: Workers, Bolsheviks and the State—New Beginnings and Grave Contradictions in the Revolution3 It is hard to overestimate the devastation Russia underwent in the period following the October Revolution. Imperialist world war was quickly followed by civil war, involving effforts from national and international capitalism to destroy the revolution. The Russian economy was in persistent, deep crisis. An exhausted population faced massive demobilization of the army, relentless unemployment as war industries collapsed, and fijinally actual starvation in the civil war. To defend the Soviet state, the construction of the Red Army was undertaken. It took the most militant workers from the cities, further decimating the proletarian base of the revolution. War Communism was soon proclaimed, with its nationalization of all large industrial enterprises, compulsory requisition of grain from the peasantry, and a growing bureaucratization of the state. Survival of the state was assured and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was established. It was within this context that two intertwined theoretical questions became the most concrete, “practical” challenges for the revolution: how would labor assert its mastery over the economy and the state? And since the dictatorship is suppose to be a transitional state—transitional to socialism—how would it achieve its own ‘withering away’? (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 194)

Here we want to examine these questions in the practice of the revolution by focusing primarily on two periods: 1) the role and fate of factory committees and trade unions in the fijirst months post-October; 2) the Trade Union Debate within the Bolshevik party in 1920–21. A. Role of Factory Committees and Trade Unions; the Fate of Workers’ Control at the Factory Level It is important to briefly return to pre-October to see the divergent activities and debates, in the factory committees, trade unions and the Bolshevik

3 I am indebted to the theoretical framework provided by Dunayevskaya in her “What Happens After,” Chapter 12 of Marxism and Freedom (Dunayevskaya, 2000) for my discussion in this section.

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Party. As we noted earlier, there was an explosive growth of factory committees post-February with estimates that by summer, perhaps threequarters of all workers employed in Russian industry were in factory committees. The factory committees were at the forefront of radical activities. During Kornilov’s attempted coup, the factory committees mobilized thousands in response to the Bolshevik’s appeal. Numerous Red Guard detachments were recruited with the help of factory committees. At the same time, the trade unions were undergoing radicalization: “During the summer of 1917, the political course of the trade union movement changed from a tacit support to the Provisional Government to a vocal opposition against it.” (Shkiarevsky, 1993: 96) Many Bolsheviks argued that it was the trade unions, not the factory committees, that should have a leading role in relation to the proletariat. Smith gives us a sense of the role of factory committees: Factory committees were much closer to ordinary workers than trade unions. They embraced all the workers in a single enterprise, whereas the trade unions embraced workers in a branch of industry. The committees represented all workers in a factory regardless of their job, whereas workers in the same factory might be members of diffferent trade unions, despite the principle of industrial unionism. The factory committee represented everyone gratis, whereas one had to pay to be a member of a trade union. The committee usually met in working hours on the factory premises, whereas trade unions usually did not. (1983: 203)

Both the factory committees and, in the end, the trade unions, became active supporters of All Power to the Soviets and there was a ongoing debate about the relationship between the two. Many of the radical Bolsheviks in this period were directly involved in the factory committees, and saw a leading role for committees in obtaining power. Thus at the First Conference of the Petrograd Factory Committees, held May 30-June 5 1917, Bolsheviks fought for a central role for the factory committees. Shkliarevsky writes: Matvei Zhivotov, a radical Bolshevik leader in the factory committee movement, argued strongly against the subordination of factory committees to the trade unions. In his view, the two organizations should cooperate but  under no conditions should the factory committees give up their independence. In his forceful speech during the debates on the role of factory committees in the labor movement, he voiced a vaguely disguised threat and offfered no concessions: ‘If the trade unions will not heed their [factory committees’] line in the political sphere, then our paths [will] diverge. Insofar as the labor movement’s economic struggle is concerned, the factory committees will cooperate with the unions as much as will be possible.’ (1993: 27)

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The more moderate Bolsheviks tended to see the factory committees as subordinate to the Soviets and the trade unions. They asked, what would happened when a factory closed, and thus the factory committee would disappear, whereas primary organization on the level of the trade union would allow the workers’ organization to continue. The division within Bolshevism was often tied to whether their principle area of work was in factory committees or trade unions. At the same time however, the debate was not alone over trade unions vs. factory committees, that is, over forms of organization. It centered as well in how workers would be involved in controlling production—as checkers and overseers of management, or as self-managers of production. This second debate occurred both within the factory committees and between those advocating for factory committees independence and those for subordination of the factory committees to the trade unions. These debates, which developed after February as the crisis in the Russian economy became more acute, continued in the months, and fijirst years, after the October Revolution.

• Immediately after the October Revolution, the fijirst decree on Workers’ Control was written. It was based on Lenin’s draft that stated: “Workers’ control over the production, storage, purchase and sale of all products and raw materials shall be introduced in all industrial, commercial, agricultural and other enterprises. …” and called for “detailed rules on workers’ control [to] be drawn up by the local Soviets of Workers’ Deputies and by conferences of factory committees.” After the Decree was fijinalized and passed by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (VTsIK), it was sent to local soviets, trade unions and provincial conferences of factory committees to work out sets of instructions on the execution of the Decree. Two sets of instructions in particular framed the debates on trade unions vs. factory committees, and on the role of workers in the production process. One set of Instructions was issued by the Fifth Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees (CCFC), which met November 16: Workers’ control of industry, as an integral part of control over the whole of economic life, must be understood not in the narrow sense of simple inspection, but, on the contrary, in the broad sense of intervening in the employer’s disposal of capital, stocks, raw materials and fijinished goods in the factory; in the sense of actively supervising the proper and expedient fulfijillment of orders and utilization of energy and labor power; in the sense of participating in the organization of production on rational lines, etc. Control will only

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achieve its end and justify the hopes pinned on it, if it is, fijirstly, implemented by workers’ organizations at both central and local level in the most energetic and vigorous manner, not stopping short of active measures to restrain employers who are clearly approaching the fulfijillment of their duties in a negligent or harmful fashion; and secondly, if it is closely coordinated with and fijirmly tied to the general regulation and organization of production, both in the individual enterprise and in the branch of industry as a whole. Control must be seen precisely as a transitional stage toward organizing the whole economic life of the country on social lines, as the fijirst step in this direction taken from below, parallel with work at the top in the central organs of the economy. (quoted in Smith, 1983: 212)

These early post-October instructions from the factory committees conference sought to combine concrete workplace decision-making with the need for a centralized economic planning. In contrast, was an alternative set of instructions on the Workers’ Control Decree issued by the AllRussian Council of Workers’ Control. Its instructions put emphasis on a centralized system of control, in which factory control commissions were be subordinated to a control-distribution commissions of trade unions, which in turn would be under the under the Supreme Council of the National Economy. In addition to diminishing the role of the factory committees, the instructions gave priority to the employer for management operations within individual factories. Prior to the revolution the view of the trade unions role was that of waging an economic struggle in defense of workers’ living standards, not an intervention in production. After all, there had never even been a national trade union congress before the revolution. With the October Revolution, the Bolshevik trade-union leaders began to rethink the role of trade unions. At the fijirst national congress of unions in January 1918, the resolution on the role of trade unions read: The center of gravity of trade-union work must now shift to the organizational-economic sphere. The unions, as class organizations of the proletariat … must take on the major work of organizing production and reviving the disrupted productive forces of the country. (quoted in Smith, 1983: 217)

This fijirst trade union congress already began to pose the relationship between the trade unions and the state, a debate that would continue for several years. If the trade union were to become organs of economic regulation, should they be state organizations? Did the trade unions have a right to strike? What was the relation of the ruling party to the trade unions? In the period ahead, these questions would become a crucial barometer of the direction of the revolution, including a full-blown controversy within Bolshevism known as the Trade Union Debate of 1920–21.

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Here, at the end of 1917 and in 1918, the battles were framed, fijirst, in relation to factory committees vs. trade unions, and, second, on what kind of control workers should have at the factory level, as well as the relationship between the factory level and the economic direction/control from the state level. At the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions mentioned above, a Bolshevik resolution called on the factory committees to become the basic cells of the unions in the workplace. The fijinal conference of Petrograd factory committees, held at the end of January, accepted the fact that the factory committees were to become workplace cells of the unions. “By April, trade unions and factory committees in the Petrograd metal industry fijinally fused” (Smith, 1983: 222). This did not end the controversy. If factory committees were formally subordinate to trade unions, the questions of what kind of control, what kind of self-management born within the committees, continued very much alive. Perhaps the most crucial debate in this early period was not over the form of organization—factory committees vs. trade unions—but on the question of nationalization and its relation to workers control. The factory committees movement was not opposed to nationalization. “The Sixth Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, for example, passed a resolution which demanded the transfer of all factories and mines into the hands of the state.” (Smith, 1983: 225) At the time, in January 1918, the government resisted such a step, and would not undertake it until the end of June, in part due to “nationalizations from below,” on the part of workers in various factories. But crucial to this resolution of the Conference of Factory Committees, was their view that nationalization and workers’ responsibility for running production were a unity: In view of the fact that the supreme government organs have no special organizations capable of running the enterprises transferred into ownership of the republic, and in view of the fact that the government of workers, soldiers and peasants is strong only so long as it enjoys the confijidence of the toilers and their organizations, in all cases of nationalization, the workers’ committees should be put in charge of the enterprises in the localities and should work under the direction of VSNKh [Supreme Council of National Economy].

• In drawing the strands together for this fijirst period we need to return to the objective situation Russia faced in the fijirst year after the October Revolution. Smith (1983) writes of it as “Economic Catastrophe and the Dissolution of the Working Class.” As the Bolsheviks sought to arrange a

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peace with Germany, Petrograd’s economy went into free-fall. Workers faced the loss of their jobs, the possibility of German occupation of the city, and an enormous cut in the bread ration. At the end of January, it was reduced to 150 grams per day and by the end of February the ration was down to 50 grams. Dismissed workers left the capital to fijind food. In the fijirst six months of 1918 over a million people left Petrograd. … By April 1918 the factory work force of the capital had plummeted to about 40% of its January 1917 level. In the metal factories of Petrograd province, that employed more than a hundred workers, the total workforce slumped from 197,686 on 1 January to 57,995 on 1 May. (Smith, 1983: 243)

The movement of Bolshevik members out of Petrograd was equally dramatic. “In October 1917 there had been about 43,000 Bolsheviks in the capital—of whom two-thirds were workers. By June 1918 only 13,472 were left.” Some had joined the Red army to defend the revolution, others jointed the food detachments requisitioning grain, some became part of the government, and still others joined the mass migration to the countryside. It is only against this background that one can follow the events involving workplace organizations and the Bolsheviks. The crisis shifted the terms of the debate. In the fijirst blush of revolution, the workers who had made the revolution and the Bolsheviks who were now in charge of the government saw the need to maintain production and the need to develop authentic workplace democracy as a unifijied whole. Yes, there were vigorous debates and diffferent opinions on how to do it, but the goal was there. With the collapse of the economy, and the decimation of the Petrograd working class facing massive unemployment and starvation, the parameters of the debate sharply changed. Restoration of production became such a crying need that the factory committees’ and trade unions’ role focused more and more on labor discipline and labor productivity, and less on questions of workers’ control from below. In addition to general appeals, attempts to increase labor productivity and discipline were undertaken through elimination of a guaranteed wage, widening of wagediffferentials, and a revival of piece-rates, which was the most contentious proposal. In many factories, piece-rates were resisted. The idealism and hope for the future became transformed into a difffijicult, determined efffort for survival, for both the Soviet state and the masses facing deprivation. What was Lenin’s position and role in these debates? He spoke to the workers section of Petrograd Soviet, December 7 of the needed workers’ initiative:

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chapter five And the tasks of organizing production devolved entirely on the working class. They should do away, once and for all, with the illusion that state afffairs or the management of banks and factories were beyond the power of the workers. All this could be solved only by tremendous day-to-day organizational work.  It was essential to organize the exchange of products and introduce regular accounting and control—these were tasks for the working class, and the knowledge necessary for their accomplishment had been provided by factory life.  Every factory committee should concern itself not only with the afffairs of its own factory, but should also be an organization nucleus helping arrange the life of the state as a whole.  It was easy to issue a decree on the abolition of private property, but it must and could be implemented only by the workers themselves. Let there be mistakes—they would be the mistakes of a new class creating a new way of life.  There was not and could not be a defijinite plan for the organization of economic life. Nobody could provide one. But it could be done from below, by the masses, through their experience. Instructions would, of course, be given and ways would be indicated, but it was necessary to begin simultaneously from above and from below.  The Soviets would have to become bodies regulating all production in Russia, but in order that they should not become stafff headquarters without troops, work in the lower echelons was needed. …  The working-class masses must set about the organization of control and production on a country-wide scale. Not the organization of individuals, but the organization of all the working people, would be a guarantee of success; if they achieved that, if they organized economic life, everything opposing them would disappear of its own accord. (Lenin, 1972: 364–66)

Lenin wrote, One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organizational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called “upper classes”, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organizational development of socialist society. (“How to Organize Competition,” Lenin, 1972: 404–14)

At the same time he saw the question of workers organizing in the workplace, at least at this stage of Russia’s economic development, not in terms of workers transforming the actual conditions of production, but of control and accounting:

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Accounting and control–this is the main economic task of every Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasant’ Deputies, of every consumers’ society, of every union or committee of supplies, of every factory committee or organ of workers’ control in general. (“How to Organize Competition”)

One, of course, can selectively quote Lenin to show either his openness to the workers’ initiative, or to show his supposedly authoritarian view of one person rule of factory management. In his thought and practice, these were not irreconcilable concepts, but moments of a whole: The democratic principle of organization—in its highest form, in which the Soviets put into efffect proposals and demands for the active participation of the masses not only in discussing general rules, decisions and laws, and in controlling their fulfijillment, but also directly in their implementation— implies that every representative of the masses, every citizen, must be put in such conditions that he can participate in the discussion of state laws, in the choice of his representatives and in the implementation of state laws. But it does not at all follow from this that we shall permit the slightest chaos or disorder as regards who is responsible in each individual case for defijinite executive functions, for carrying out defijinite orders, for controlling a defijinite joint labor process during a certain period of time.  The masses must have the right to choose responsible leaders for themselves. They must have the right to replace them, the right to know and check each smallest step of their activity. They must have the right to put forward any worker without exception for administrative functions. But this does not at all mean that the process of collective labor can remain without defijinite leadership, without precisely establishing the responsibility of the person in charge, without the strictest order created by the single will of that person. Neither railways nor transport, nor large-scale machinery and enterprises in general can function correctly without a single will linking the entire working personnel into an economic organ operating with the precision of clockwork. Socialism owes its origin to large-scale machine industry. If the masses of the working people in introducing socialism prove incapable of adapting their institutions in the way that large-scale machine industry should work, then there can be no question of introducing socialism. That is why in the period we are now passing through, when the Soviet government and the dictatorship of the proletariat have grown sufffijiciently strong, when the main lines of the enemy opposing us, i.e., of the exploiters opposing us, have been sufffijiciently destroyed or rendered harmless, when the functioning of Soviet institutions has adequately prepared the mass of the population for independent participation in all spheres of social life—at the present moment we are immediately confronted by the tasks of strictly separating discussion and airing questions at meetings from unfailing execution of all instructions of the person in charge. This means separating the necessary, useful preparation of the masses for executing a

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chapter five certain measure and checking up on its execution, which is fully recognized by every Soviet, from the actual execution itself.  The masses can now—this is guaranteed them by the Soviets—take all power into their hands and consolidate this power. But to prevent this resulting in the overlapping of authority and irresponsibility from which we are sufffering incredibly at the present time, it is necessary that for each executive function we should know precisely what persons, having been chosen to act as responsible leaders, bear responsibility for the functioning of the economic organism as a whole. This requires that as often as possible, when there is the slightest opportunity for it, responsible persons should be elected for one-man management in all sections of the economic organism as a whole. There must be voluntary fulfijillment of the instructions of this individual leader, there must be a transition from the mixed form of discussions, public meetings, fulfijillment and at the same time criticism, checking and correction—to the strict regularity of a machine enterprise. The great majority of the labor communes of Russia, the mass of the workers and peasants, are already approaching this task or have already arrived at it. The Soviet government’s task is to undertake the role of interpreting the fundamental change that is now beginning and of giving this necessity legal form. (“Immediate Tasks of Soviet Government,” March 28, 1918. Lenin 1972: 235–77)

There is certainly room for questioning whether the Soviet state in Lenin’s time was able to practice such a dual concept of full and open discussion in meetings with unfailing execution of all instructions of the person in charge. In this extremely underdeveloped country, Lenin, who was certainly bending the stick toward the needed development of productivity, had illusions about Taylorism as a production system, and used too loosely expressions such as Soviets plus electrifijication equals Socialism. One can argue that this showed a productivist mentality created by the extreme objective situation.4

4 We are of course hardly touching the surface of the complex events and debates which occurred in the period following February-October, 1917. The period of Civil War and war Communism, of the NEP (New Economic Policy), of the failure of the German Revolution, of the vast changes within the Bolshevik party in the early and mid 1920s are beyond the scope of the present study, which focuses primarily at early moments. But this is not to minimize their importance to grasping the transformation that occurred within post-1917 Russia. Two recent, though not necessarily complementary studies, Revolution and Counter-revolution: Class Struggles in a Moscow Metal Factory, (Murphy, 2005) and The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–24—Soviet workers and the new communist elite (Pirani, 2008) give an indication of some of the complexities and difffering interpretations offfered in the years following 1917. Pirani, in particular, seeks to trace the evolution of a new ruling class before it was fully aware of its existence as a new ruling class.

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However, any analysis that reduces this to political knavery on Lenin’s part is a dead-end road for comprehending his crucial participation. An examination of the Trade Union Debate of 1920–21 can give us a fuller understanding of Lenin’s role in seeking to comprehend and resolve the extreme tensions within the Soviet state, particularly within the Bolshevik Party and its relation to the proletariat and its organization, the trade unions. B. The Trade Union Debate of 1920–21 The consequences of the Civil War were a ruined economy and a decimated proletariat. How to restore the economy, particularly the needed rebuilding of the transportation system central to any recovery, took center stage. Trotsky, who as Commissar of War had organized the defense of the Soviet state, was asked to assume new duties as Commissar of Transport. To rebuild the railroads and re-establish transportation, Trotsky created a Central Committee for Transport (Cectran) that brought together himself as Commissar, the trade unions of transport (the railroad union and the water transport union) and the political apparatus of the state. It meant running the railroads on a military basis, without formal trade union protection for the workers. For a limited period, the trade unions agreed to give up their rights. By the fall, the transportation system was markedly improved. For Trotsky, this experiment was proof that a concept of “militarization of labor,”—which he had begun during the Civil War by using military units and military discipline for tasks of civilian labor—could be applied in a situation, not of War Communism, but in “normal” times to develop the productive capacities of Russia. He argued for the establishment of such a regime under which each worker feels himself to be a soldier of labor who cannot freely dispose of himself; if he is ordered transferred, he must execute the order; if he does not do so, he will be a deserter who should be punished. Who will execute this? The trade union. It will create a new regime. That is the militarization of the working class. (quoted in Dunayevskaya, 2000: 198)

This would be the establishment of the proper “production atmosphere.” Trotsky thus launched anew a fijierce debate on the role of trade unions and thus the proletariat in the Soviet state. The debate raged over several months, expanding in encompass fundamental questions of revolutionary Marxism:

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chapter five (1) What is a workers’ state? (2) What is the role of trade unions in such a state? (3) What is the relationship between workers at the point of production and the political party in power? (4) What is the relationship between leaders and ranks, party and mass? (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 197)

For Trotsky, militarization of labor became a fijixed particular he wished to apply as a universal for the development of socialism. Thus, when the trade unions, disturbed by what they viewed as bureaucratic excesses of Cestran, asked for its dissolution and the return of their trade union rights, Trotsky demanded rather that the trade union leadership be “shaken up.” The trade unions should be stratifijied, absorbed into the state. He contended that since Soviet Russia was a workers’ state, the workers had nothing to fear from it and hence the trade unions could be incorporated into the State, and labor could be militarized. (Dunayevskaya, 2000: 198)

In opposition to Trotsky’s position was a Left faction of the Bolshevik party, which came to be known as the Workers’ Opposition. Among its leaders were Shliapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, who would soon write a pamphlet entitled The Workers’ Opposition, setting forth their ideas. Shliapnikov argued for a “separation of powers” between the party, the soviets, and the trade unions, asserting the right of the unions to have autonomous control over industry by the trade unions. His position was the mirror opposite of Trotsky’s: instead of statifying the trade unions, trade unionize the state: The organization of the management of the national economy is the function of the All-Russian Congress of Producers organized in industrial unions which elects bodies to manage the whole of the national economy of the republic. (quoted in Dunayevskaya, 2000: 198, footnote 187)  [Shlyapnikov] too began and ended with the abstraction of a workers’ state. Since that was already established, he asked, what is the necessity for political leadership to hold primacy?. … To him it was a simple matter: all that was needed in the chaotic conditions of 1920 was to turn over industry to the corresponding trade unions. Although he was a Bolshevik leader, he could not see the role of the Communist Party once there was a workers’ state. (198)

It was these contrasting positions which threatened to split apart the Bolshevik Party in the winter of 1920 and the spring of 1921, endangering the Soviet state’s survival. Other Bolsheviks presented variations of these positions or attempted to be a “bufffer.” However, it was Lenin who developed an independent, third position. He did so not by acting as a bufffer seeking to combine and modify the two positions, but by in fact rejecting

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them both and putting forth a completely diffferent point of departure. Lenin’s ability to hold as one the duality of democratization in discussion and a single direction in implementation, would come to its severest test in the Trade Union Debate of 1920–21, when so-called complete democratization lined up on one side and authoritarian administration lined up on the other. Lenin’s position rested on diffferent ground than either Trotsky or Shlyapnikov. First, as opposed to both Trotsky and the Workers’ Opposition who began with the premise the post-1917 Russia was a workers’ state, Lenin argued: A workers’ state is an abstraction. What we actually have is a workers’ state, with this peculiarity, fijirstly, that it is not the working class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and, secondly, that it is a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions. (“The Party Crisis,” Lenin, 1965b: 43–52)

Second, Lenin posed the grave dangers faced and the revolutionary pathway opened in this “workers’ state with peculiarities”: We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organized proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers’ organizations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state. Both forms of protection are achieved through the peculiar interweaving of our state measures and our agreeing or “coalescing” with our trade unions. (“The trade unions, the present situation and Trotsky’s mistakes,” Dec. 29, 1920 Lenin, 1965b: 19–42)

Dunayevskaya would write, When has anyone ever made a more profound and more devastating attack on the Russian workers’ state, than to say that the workers as workers must protect themselves from the workers as state. (2000: 198)

It is from these vantage points that Lenin could sharply oppose Trotsky’s administrative mentality, his “bureaucratic projecteering”: You have not given the masses a chance to discuss things, to see the point, and to think it over; you have not allowed the Party to gain fresh experience but are already acting in haste, overdoing it, and producing formulas which are theoretically false. Just think how this mistake will be further amplifijied by unduly zealous functionaries!. … The actual diffferences do not lie where Comrade Trotsky sees them but in the question of how to approach the mass, win it over, and keep in touch with it. (“The trade unions, the present situation and Trotsky’s mistakes,” Lenin, 1965b)

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As against an absorption of the trade unions into the state, Lenin argued that the trade unions must become “schools of communism,” transmission belts between the state and the mass of workers, between the party and the workers. At the same time, Lenin would sharply critique Shlyapnikov and the Workers’ Opposition: It was Comrade Shlyapnikov and his group, the so-called Workers’ Opposition, who showed the most pronounced syndicalist trend. This being an obvious deviation from communism and the Party, we shall have to reckon with it, talk it over, and make a special propaganda efffort to explain the error of these views and the danger of making such mistakes. (“Once again on the trade union against Trotsky and Bukharin,” Jan. 25 1921. Lenin, 1965b: 70–107)

Lenin viewed the Worker’ Opposition call for an All-Russia Congress of Producers to run the economy and thus the state, completely erroneous and a recipe for suicide of the Soviet state: As for the syndicalist deviation—it is ridiculous. That is all we have to say to Shlyapnikov, who maintained that the “All-Russia Congress of Producers”, a demand set down in black and white in their platform and confijirmed by Kollontai, can be upheld by a reference to Engels. Engels speaks of a communist society which will have no classes, and will consist only of producers. Do we now have classes? Yes, we do. Do we have a class struggle? Yes, and a most furious one! To come in the midst of this furious class struggle and talk about an “All-Russia Congress of Producers,”— isn’t that a syndicalist deviation which must be emphatically and irrevocably condemned?

Lenin took issue with what he saw as the Workers’ Opposition demagogic pronouncements on bureaucracy and lack of democracy, while at the same time their failure to offfer concrete suggestions on how to correct the errors in the Soviet state, the party, and the trade unions. He pointed to the grave danger of their positions when their general slogans could be manipulated by those out, not to correct errors, but to destroy the state. By the Tenth Party Congress, held in March 1921, with the Kronstadt revolt in progress, he saw the grave possibility of a split in the Party, one which would break the Soviet state. He argued that the Workers’ Opposition had not understood the nature of the contradictions that the Soviet state was facing. Yes, there was bureaucracy and administrative mentality on one side, but only abstract expressions of democracy and “freedom from political leadership” on the other. Did the Workers’ Opposition understand objectively what had been happening to the proletariat in the fijirst years of the revolution and thus why their faction was a time bomb at the present moment?

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It is syndicalism because—consider this carefully—our proletariat has been largely declassed; the terrible crises and the closing down of the factories have compelled people to flee from starvation. The workers have simply abandoned their factories; they have had to settle down in the country and have ceased to be workers. Are we not aware of the fact that the unprecedented crises, the Civil War, the disruption of proper relations between town and country and the cessation of grain deliveries have given rise to a trade in small articles made at the big factories—such as cigarette lighters—which are exchanged for cereals, because the workers are starving, and no grain is being delivered? Have we not seen this happen in the Ukraine, or in Russia? That is the economic source of the proletariat’s declassing and the inevitable rise of petty-bourgeois, anarchist trends.

Lenin’s position was worlds apart, on a diffferent ground, from what he saw as the syndicalism of the Workers’ Opposition and what he would later call the administrative mentality of Trotsky’s rush to a plan. None of this is to say that all his political practice needs be defended. The manner of putting down the Kronstadt revolt, the banning of factions within the Bolshevik Party, Lenin’s, at times, restricted view of workers’ control, and the vanguard role assigned to the Party, among others, are all areas for critical examination. However, if there was a dualism in Lenin’s work, it was not so much in his political genius and political errors, but in the failure to express to his comrades the philosophic vantage point, the “how” of his arriving at political conclusions, at certain political practices. Naturally those political conclusions flowed from his concrete analysis of the objective-subjective moment. He was a man supremely focused on concrete practice. But that practice was not separated from his probing of the dialectic. As we will see in part III of this study, Lenin’s study of the Hegelian dialectic halted precisely where, in his view, Hegel held out a hand to materialism, that is, toward practice. For Lenin, only in practice was there a resolution of contradictions, the confrontation with reality. On one level this was certainly true. But the failure to bring forth the philosophic vantage point of your political practice for your comrades left them philosophically rudderless in trying to navigate the contradictory developments of the Soviet state. By this, we are not at all saying that “philosophy” could have saved the Russian Revolution from its transformation into opposite. No. Deep objective conditions were present that could not simply be willed away. A workers’ state surrounded by a peasant sea, underdeveloped, and isolated in a capitalist world, cannot be rescued by philosophic thought, no matter how revolutionary. But dialectical philosophy would be indispensable for

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a comprehension of the transformation into opposite that the Soviet state would undergo. It was a transformation not only politically and economically, but as well, in the very innards of what was Marxism, now being defijined by a state power. The philosophic vantage point for such comprehension would be lost for more than a generation of Marxists in the 20th century.

CHAPTER SIX

OUT OF THE RUSSIA REVOLUTION: LEGACY AND CRITIQUE— LUXEMBURG, PANNEKOEK, TROTSKY I. Luxemburg and Two Revolutions—Russia, 1917–18; Germany, 1918–19 Luxemburg was not only the fijirst to raise the question of imperialism and its destructive efffects, but also the fijirst to raise the problematic of our day— the question of socialist democracy after the revolutionary conquest of power. —Raya Dunayevskaya A socialist society needs human beings who, whatever their place, are full of passion and enthusiasm for the general well-being, full of self-sacrifijice and sympathy for their fellow human beings, full of courage and tenacity in order to dare to attempt the most difffijicult. We do not need to wait perhaps a century or decade until such a species of human beings develop. Right now, in the struggle, in the revolution, the mass of the proletarians learn the necessary idealism and soon acquire the intellectual maturity. —Rosa Luxemburg, in the midst of the Germany Revolution, December 1918

The fijinal months of Luxemburg’s life are stamped with two revolutions,  Russia 1917–18 and Germany 1918–19. Though behind prison walls and unable to participate in the former, her September 1918 manuscript, “The Russian Revolution,” profoundly developed ideas on socialist democracy after the revolution. Her participation and writings during the German Revolution including daily articles, the founding of the German Communist Party, numerous meetings and speeches to Marxists and to workers and soldiers—all in the two months she lived after being freed from prison before the counter-revolution murdered her—reveal an activist-thinker working out new points of departure for revolutionary  transformation. Luxemburg’s magnifijicently human plunge into these two revolutions transcends the confijines of her time to impact upon ours.

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A. What Is Living Today in Rosa Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution? Unpublished in Luxemburg’s lifetime, The Russian Revolution perhaps speaks as profoundly as any Marxist work of the early 20th century to the question of “What Happens After” a revolution has destroyed the old regime and assumed power. Her work was a “critical examination of the Russian Revolution.” In exploring it we need to fijirst expose the myth that Luxemburg was in opposition to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution. Her writing clearly stood in support of the Revolution while issuing important critiques of Bolshevik practice in its fijirst year: Whatever a party could offfer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western Social-Democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism. (Luxemburg, 2004: 290).

Between Luxemburg and Lenin there had been a decade and a half of collaboration, as well as debate and critique, on issues ranging from anti-war activities to capitalist accumulation, from the national question to the organizational question. Despite sharp disagreement at times, there was a deep respect for each other as revolutionaries and as thinkers. In “The Russian Revolution” Luxemburg took issue with a number of Bolshevik policies in the fijirst year of the revolution, including their policy of land distribution and their policy which gave nationalities in the Russian Empire the right of self-determination. However, the center of her critique lay in how a new society would be built now that the Bolsheviks had assumed power. Was democracy only a bourgeois concept or was it at the heart of socialism after the revolution? Were the dictatorship of the proletariat and democracy opposites, or was socialism the fullest expression of democracy? What practices endangered the revolution from within as it was being threatened from without? Luxemburg began by questioning whether the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly—which prior to the October seizure of power the Bolsheviks had supported—was necessary as opposed to its reconstitution with new elections to make it more representative of the new moment: The remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the

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innate shortcoming of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people. (302)

Luxemburg next took up the question of sufffrage, criticizing the policy of Lenin and Trotsky that “the right to vote is granted only to those who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.” (303) Such a policy, she argued, had meaning only in a society which would be in a position to make work possible for all who wanted to work. That was not the case in Russia, she noted, as it was cut offf from the world market and raw materials, and was operating under circumstances involving a huge overturn of production relations and property relations: Under such circumstances a political right of sufffrage on the basis of a general obligation to labor, is a quite incomprehensible measure. … In reality, broad and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie and proletariat, for whom the economic mechanism provides no means of exercising the obligation to work, are rendered politically without any rights. (303)

Luxemburg also questioned the fact that “freedom of the press, the rights of association and assembly” were outlawed for all opponents of the Soviet regime. She argued, “[W]ithout the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad mass of the people is entirely unthinkable.” (304) It was precisely to support the “courage and determination” of the Bolsheviks and “all of us when we get to the same point” that she issued her profound critique and emancipatory projection, which speaks to our age after almost a century of aborted and transformed-into-opposite revolutions: Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks diffferently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its efffectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege. (305)

For Luxemburg a crucial question was how to jam together proletarian dictatorship and democracy. The Lenin-Trotsky theory of the dictatorship … that the socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice. (305)

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Such practice was “dictatorship on the bourgeois model.” (307) In contrast, she posed a political, economic and social life in which “the whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few offfijicial desks by a dozen intellectuals.” (306) “Socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase.” (306) It is not that Luxemburg was unaware of the need to suppress the threat from the bourgeoisie and its push for counter-revolution. She supported the exercise of a proletarian dictatorship. However, this meant a dictatorship of the class, not of party or of a clique—dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest public form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy. (308)

For Luxemburg, socialist democracy was not for a promised land of the future after “the foundations of socialist economy are created.” (308) Rather, socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. (308)

The dictatorship consisted “in the manner of applying democracy, not in it elimination.” It was the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class—that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing—political training of the mass of the people. (308)

Sharp, undemocratic measures might have been compelled because of the dire circumstances of the Russian Revolution faced with German armies on its land and the lack of a German Revolution. But “the danger begins,” wrote Luxemburg, when they [the Bolsheviks] make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstance, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics. (309)

Luxemburg wrote her critique in support of the Russian Revolution nine decades ago. Her prescience on the dangers of counter-revolution within the revolution transcended the historic moment she analyzed. It illuminated much of the twentieth century, and enters into the ongoing

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dialogues in the fijirst decades of the twentieth-fijirst century on whether it is possible to work out an alternative to capitalism which does not repeat the errors of 20th century revolutions. B. ‘The Revolution Has Begun’ The last two months of Luxemburg’s life, November 1918-January 1919, were consumed with her participation in the ongoing German Revolution. She was freed from wartime imprisonment on November 8 and immediately plunged into the revolution, writing numerous articles for Die Rote Fahne, the Spartacus League’s paper, meeting constantly with other revolutionaries, speaking to groups of workers and soldiers. Crucial was her work in founding the German Communist Party. It was this activity which represented a new beginning for Luxemburg on organization. The founding of the German Communist Party was Luxemburg’s fijinal break with German Social-Democracy. Despite Luxemburg’s very early critiques of the SPD—from her diffferences with the trade union leadership who showed no interest in putting into practice the lessons of the Mass Strike gained from the 1905 Russian Revolution, to her 1910–11 break with Kautsky over Social-Democratic political opportunism, and including the Party’s blind eye toward German imperialism—she continued to be a member and avoided making a complete break. She had argued that this provided the best way to agitate and reach the German proletarian masses. Even the horrid and shock of betrayal by the German Social-Democracy’s voting war credits in 1914 did not lead to a total break. Luxemburg of course opposed their betrayal and openly fought against the war both outside and inside prison. Yes, the SPD was a “stinking corpse,” and yes, she worked towards a new international. But until the German Revolution of November 1918, there would be no new German revolutionary organization founded, only an opposition tendency. In this, Luxemburg’s view difffered widely from that of Lenin who worked day and night to found and maintain a separate revolutionary organization with its own principles, tactics and form. Long before her writing on the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg had written powerful critiques of what she viewed as the Bolshevik over-centralization and rigidness. (See “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” (1904), and “Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy” (1911), Luxemburg, 2004.) This is not to say that Luxemburg rejected the concept of a vanguard party. However, she had a diffferent view of its function, rejecting

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much of Lenin’s centralized hierarchical structure, and demonstrating a deeper appreciation for the ideas of the proletarian masses. What is at issue here is the fact that in her long years of opposition to the majority leadership in the SPD, Luxemburg, unlike Lenin, never sought to found an independent organization until December 1918, when the fully counter-revolutionary role of the German Social Democracy in the events of the German Revolution compelled a new beginning. The founding of the German Communist Party was her complete break with the old. The pamphlet “What Does the Spartacus League Want,” published midDecember, outlined the League’s demands/program which would be discussed and acted upon at the founding Congress at the end of December. The pamphlet attacked the Social-Democracy now heading the government and refused any cooperation with the lackeys of the bourgeoisie, with the Scheidemann-Eberts, because it sees in such collaboration a betrayal of the fundamentals of socialism, a strengthening of the counterrevolution, and a weakening of the Revolution. (Luxemburg. 2004: 356)

An important diffference between the Spartacus League (soon to be German Communist Party) and Lenin’s Bolshevik Party could be seen in relation to relation to the conquest of power: The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat’s conscious afffijirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League. The proletarian revolution can reach full clarity and maturity only by stages, step by step, on the Golgotha-path of its own bitter experiences in struggle, through defeats and victories. The victory of the Spartacus League comes not at the beginning, but at the end of the Revolution: it is identical with the victory of the great millions-strong masses of the socialist proletariat. (“What Does the Spartacus League Want,” Luxemburg, 2004: 356–7).

In its demands in the political and social realm, the emphasis was on the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which in turn would elect delegates to a central council for the entire country, and which in turn, “is to elect the executive council as the highest organ of the legislative and executive power.” The workers and soldiers would have the right “to recall their representatives at any time.” Luxemburg’s crucial December 31 speech to the founding Congress of the new party, “Our Program and the Political Situation,” manifested a complete rejection of the SPD organizationally and ideologically.

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The SPD’s vulgarization of Marxism, Luxemburg now saw as emanating from the ideas and tactics put forth in the 1891 Erfurt Program. She challenged no less than Engels’ “1895 Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France” as helping to provide the ground for the doctrine of “parliamentarianism-only” that had been the ideological basis of the SPD’s practice for some two decades ending in the betrayal of August 4, 1914. Luxemburg was not aware of the censorship editing that the German Social Democracy had imposed on Engels’ 1895 Introduction behind his back. Luxemburg rooted her new concept of organization in the ideas of the Communist Manifesto, which she saw as putting forth “the realization of the ultimate goals of socialism as the immediate task of the proletarian revolution.” (357) She sharply contrasted The Manifesto to the quarter of a century implementation of the Erfurt Program with its minimum program. Though she defended Engels, explaining the enormous pressures the leaders of the German Social Democracy had put on him to shape the 1895 Introduction in a way to emphasize parliamentarianism as opposed to rebellion, she hit out against the conclusions he reached and the use the German Social Democracy made of them in the decades that followed. For Luxemburg: August 4 [1914] did not come like thunder out of a clear sky; what happened on August 4 was the logical outcome of all that we (German Social Democracy) had been doing day after day for many years. (362) [T]oday we have reached the point, comrades, when we can say that we have rejoined Marx. … Our program is deliberately opposed to the standpoint of the Erfurt Program; it is deliberately opposed to the separation of the immediate, socalled minimal demands formulated for the political and economic struggle from the social goal regard as a maximal program. … For us there is no minimal and no maximal program; socialism is one and the same thing; this is the minimum we have to realize today. (364–365)

Luxemburg now turned to the German Revolution of November 9 and its aftermath. She criticized its inadequacy and weakness: “What we experienced on November 9 was more the collapse of the existent imperialism than the victory of a new principle.” (366) At the same time she singled out the key notion, of November 9: “Form Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.” It was this principle that put “the stamp of a proletarian socialist revolution” on the events. How to realize that principle became the task of the revolution and the Spartacus League, the Communist Party of Germany. It had to be not just a political revolution, but an economic revolution:

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chapter six In every factory, by every proletarian against his employer … Socialism must be created by the masses, by every proletarian. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken. Only that is socialism, and only thus can socialism be created. (368)

The break with German Social Democracy was total: “We must begin by undermining step by step the Ebert-Scheidemann government through a social, revolutionary mass struggle of the proletariat. (370) Though Luxemburg had begun a new organizational course, one in total opposition to German Social Democracy, and at the same time difffering from the form and much of the ideology of the Bolshevik Party, she would not have the time and space to put it into practice. Within days she was murdered by the counter revolution. II. Pannekoek’s Council Communism A. Battles with Social Democracy In the 20th century, the idea of “council communism,” as formulated by Anton Pannekoek, was frequently posed as an alternative to “Leninism.” However, Pannekoek’s fijirst writings were not written in opposition to Lenin’s ideas on the party, but in response to social democracy’s practice at the turn of the century—its reformism, its fetishism for organization, its co-habitation with bourgeois society. In the Netherlands there was an early recognition of this opportunism with a split in social-democracy occurring in 1907–09. Pannekoek was involved in the events. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the fijirst World War, Pannekoek engaged in a series of exchanges with the leading theoretician of Germany Social Democracy, Karl Kautsky. Much of the controversy centered on the role of the state: “The proletarian battle is not just a battle against the bourgeoisie for state power, it is also a battle against state power,” wrote Pannekoek. (1978) He argued against “the Kautsky tradition, which seeks above all else to preserve the state and bend it to socialist perspectives.” Pannekoek attacked “the idea of state ‘socialism’ ”: “Nationalization of enterprises is not socialism. Socialism is the force of the proletariat.” The “force of the proletariat” would become the key to his concept of organization. Thus, Pannekoek’s fijirst ideas on organization were developed in opposition to the social democracy’s opportunism in the years before the outbreak of the First World War. At the time of the war, he was with Lenin and

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all of those who opposed the Second International’s betrayal of socialist principles. B. Attitude Toward Russian Revolution In the fijirst period of the Russian Revolution, Pannekoek rose to its defence and singled out what he saw as its creative organizational form—the workers’ and soldiers councils: What has never occurred in earlier revolutions in Western Europe—where fragmentation and powerlessness always followed political action—has become an enduring reality in Russia: the revolutionary masses are forming a powerful organization. As in 1905, the delegates of factories and revolutionary regimes are building in the form of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, a people’s representation which speaks out vigorously against bourgeois governments and exploiters. [In Russia] a form of democracy superior to formal democracy, enabling the masses to express their vital interests [has begun to develop]: the workers’ councils in the towns, the peasants’ councils in the rural areas, the councils charged with various administrations that form the basis of the government. The municipal bodies are elected by the workers’ councils of the towns, and the workers’ councils of a given branch of production elect the administrators of this branch for the whole country. A general congress of soviets is held from time to time and decides on general policy, but congresses are also held about matters concerning each branch: industry, agriculture, transport, health services, education. The local soviets send their most competent members as delegates to these congresses. (Pannekoek, 1978: 148, 151)

C. Workers’ Councils Pannekoek would later critique the revolution’s direction, calling it statecapitalist. At the same time, it was from the Russian experiences of 1905 and 1917, and perhaps the brief existence of councils in the German Revolution of 1918–19, that Pannekoek would draw his concept of workers’ councils, what became known as council communism. “The proletariat as force” would be key to Pannekoek’s concept of organization. What did he mean by this concept? In a 1938 article “General Remarks on the Question of Organization,” he wrote: Organization is the chief principle in the working class fijight for emancipation. Hence the forms of this organization constitute the most important problem in the practice of the working class movement. It is clear that these forms depend on the conditions of society and the aims of the fijight.

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chapter six They cannot be the invention of theory, but have to be built up spontaneously by the working class itself, guided by its immediate necessities. (from “Principles of Organization,” 269)

In “Five Thesis on the Fight of the Working Class about Capitalism,” he discussed the function of parties in relation to the working class and their organization: [To] spread insight and knowledge, to study, discuss and formulate social ideas, and by their propaganda to enlighten the minds of the masses. The workers’ councils are the organs for practical action and fijight for the working class; to the parties fall the task of the building up of its spiritual power. Their work forms an indispensable part in the self-liberation of the working class.

In this formulation lies a key to Pannekoek’s view of the working class: an acceptance of the division of mental and manual, a kind of elitism that failed to see the workers movement itself as a form of theory, as reason of revolution. In an earlier writing “Worker Revolution and Communist Tactics” (1920) he wrote of what he called the proletariat’s “spiritual immaturity”: The contradictions between the proletariat’s spiritual immaturity, as evidenced by the strength of bourgeois traditions within it, and the rapid collapse of the capitalist economy can be resolved only through the process of revolutionary development. … the spiritual maturity required to win power and freedom is inconceivable within the framework of a flourishing capitalism. … this problem is one of developing the preconditions within the proletariat for a permanent class power. (184)

This was a theme Pannekoek would continue in a 1928 writing: “The power of the bourgeoisie stems essentially from the immaturity, the fears, the illusions of the proletariat, from the lack of proletarian class consciousness, clear vision of purposes, unity and cohesion.” (232) It is not that Pannekoek did not think that in the end, in a period of crisis, the proletariat would “through the action of the revolutionary class as a whole” overcome this so-called “spiritual immaturity.” Nor was it that he had any illusions about the so-called leaders from within the trade unions, or the party giving direction to the working class. “It is not the party that makes the revolution, but the class as a whole.” Pannekoek did see the need to break with all those old forms which held back revolutionary change. No. The contradiction within Pannekock lays deeper. He saw no need for philosophy in the revolution despite his writing on Lenin as Philosopher,

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originally published in 1938, which focused on Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism written in 1908. (Lenin, 1972a) For whatever reason, Pannekoek did not comment on Lenin’s 1914–15 Philosophic Notebooks which contained his extensive notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic. He limited theory to the theory of the class struggle at best, and saw the struggle as one of “tactics.” It was no accident that a number of his writings centered on this theme. “Tactical Diffferences with the Workers’Movement” was the name of an early 1909 article. “World Revolution and Communist Tactics” (1920) was one of his important writings. A predominant theme within the latter: “How are we to uproot among the proletarian masses the traditional bourgeois mode of thinking that is paralyzing them?” (Pannekoek, 1978: 189) Pannekoek saw the proletariat as muscle, as the force of revolution, and even as self-acting. It was at one and the same time the strength and limitation of his idea of organization. It was proletarian centered. But he did not see proletarian thought as a form of theory, as reaching for universality. In the end, we are left with Pannekoek universalizing a form of organization—the workers councils—in contrast to party vanguardism. A step forward? Yes, but a far cry from working out the concept of a unity of theory and practice. Instead, tactics of struggle, the force not the reason of the proletariat, took center stage. Thus, despite considering workers’ councils as the universal form of revolutionary organization, Pannekoek manifested a duality: workers self-activity and, at the same time, an adherence to a form of a vanguard party, which would work to overcome the workers’ “spiritual immaturity”: When the proletariat has succeeded, through a powerful insurrection in breaking the bankrupt domination of the bourgeois and when its more clear-sighted vanguard, the Communist Party, has assumed political leadership, then its imperative mission is to use whatever means necessary to combat the weaknesses of the working class and to strengthen its power, so that it can meet the challenge of the revolutionary conflicts to come. The main objective should be to raise the masses to the highest level of activity, to stimulate their spirit of initiative, to increase their self-confijidence, enabling them to decide for themselves the task they must fulfijil and the means to do this. To achieve this, the predominance of the traditional organizations and old leaders must come to an end—and this precludes any type of coalition government, since it can only weaken the proletariat…New forms of organization must be perfected; the material strength of the masses must be increased. Only in this way will it be possible to reorganize production as the most efffective defence against the attacks of foreign capital; for, if this is not done, the counter-revolution will reappear in strengthened form. (186–187)

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In the end we are left with Pannekoek’s deep duality. He advocated the need for workers to create and act within their own forms of organization, particularly councils, and thus participate directly in the revolution without the mediation of leaders—trade union or party ones. And yet at the same time, he often wrote of the workers’ political immaturity except at times of revolution. Certainly in his early writings, he is not opposed to a vanguard which would give education to the workers, but then for the workers to take up their own education. The vanguard’s role is not one of philosophy, not even particularly theory, except a theory of class struggle. Rather, it is almost always one of tactics, the theory of class struggle as tactics. He was searching for an organization of “principle centered tactic,” and could move no further. III. In Exile: A Brief Note on Trotsky’s Concept of Revolutionary Organization and View of Proletarian Subjectivity1 “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” So reads the opening sentence of the “Transitional Program,” written in 1938 by Leon Trotsky in exile as a discussion document for the Founding Congress of the Fourth International. Trotsky’s concern from the very beginning of the Program is with leadership. It is a theme which runs throughout the document, indeed is central to Trotsky’s entire life in exile: The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership. The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the prerevolutionary into a revolutionary state is the opportunist character of proletarian leadership. The strategic task of the next period … consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard. The central task of the Fourth International consists in freeing the proletariat from the old leadership, whose conservatism is in complete contradiction to the catastrophic eruptions of disintegrating capitalism and represents the chief obstacle to historical progress. (Trotsky, 1938)

1 I have limited myself to a short commentary on Trotsky’s “Transitional Program from 1938.” For a more comprehensive critical view of Trotsky’s theoretical views, political and organizational practice, see Dunayevskaya “Trotsky as Theoretician,” Chapter 4 in Dunayevskaya, 1973, and “Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution,” appendix to Chapter 11 in Dunayevskaya, 1982.

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The theme of a crisis in leadership is found as well in the fijinal sentences of the Program: The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership. The advanced workers, united in the Fourth International, show their class the way out of the crisis. They offfer a program based on international experience in the struggle of the proletariat and of all the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offfer a spotless banner. Workers—men and women—of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!

What Trotsky’s words revealed was a concentration on needed party leadership combined with a lack of confijidence in the proletariat, in its revolutionary subjectivity. “The political immaturity of the Russian proletariat” is how he phrased it in 1910 after the experience of the 1905 fijirst Russian Revolution with the workers’ creation of the Soviet. It is not that Trotsky did not recognize the creativity, the revolutionary initiative, of the proletariat. He did, both in 1905 and 1917. However the emphasis was on the objective power of the proletariat, not on the proletariat as a self-developing Subject. In the end, proletarian initiative and creativity was made subordinate to leadership—of the Party and then the Soviet State. In the years between 1905 and 1917 Trotsky did not build a Marxist organization upon his theory of Permanent Revolution. This has been termed his theoretical as well as organizational “conciliationism.” When in 1917 he did join Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and undertook his crucial role in the Revolution and in the fijirst years of the Soviet Republic, Trotsky did so on the basis of accepting the concept of the vanguard party to lead. The twin pillars—(1) a focus on leadership of the vanguard-type party, and, (2) a continued belief in the “immaturity of the proletariat”—would defijine Trotsky’s concept of organization in the years of struggle with Stalin and Stalinism. When the revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat is seen more as force than as reason, and a concept of the “political immaturity” of the working class takes precedence, there is nowhere to go but to an external unifijier, the leadership of the vanguard party. For Trotsky the greatest challenge came post-Lenin. And yet this coleader of the Russian Revolution was is in certain ways disarmed theoretically and organizationally. His prescient theory of permanent revolution lacked a self-developing subject. His analysis of the transformation of the Soviet Union under Stalin in the 1930s was trapped within his view that nationalized property after the Revolution equaled socialism. In place of economic analysis of the retrogression in Russia, Trotsky substituted the

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betrayal of Stalin’s leadership. (See “Russian State Capitalism Vs. Workers’ Revolt,” in Dunayevskaya, 2000) His concept of organization adopted Lenin’s vanguard party, and then appended to it “the immaturity of the proletariat,” while focusing on, limiting everything to, the question of leadership, raising this to the level of theory. With such limitations and contradictions, the Fourth International could hardly be more than a stillbirth theoretically.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS FROM THE SPANISH REVOLUTION, 1936–37 [T]he outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 was followed by a farreaching social revolution in the anti-Franco camp—more profound in some respects than the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages… The committees are organs created by the people to oppose the fascist insurrection.…Without these committees which replaced the municipal and provincial administrations as well as many other organs of bourgeois democracy, it would have been impossible to resist fascism. They are revolutionary committees that the people created in order to make the Revolution. —Quotes from The Spanish Civil War—Revolution and Counterrevolution

In response to General Franco’s military rebellion (July 17, 1936) against Republican Spain, there transpired a profound social transformation, the Spanish Revolution, which, without state power in its hands, initiated from below a libertarian communism in the cities and countryside that sought to eclipse the capitalist law of value and create new human relations beginning at the point of production. Deeply radical and pathbreaking in its ideas and actions, the revolution would soon fijind itself under attack not alone from without by Franco’s military offfensive, but from within by the leaders of the Republican government, the moderate Socialists, and most especially by the Spanish Communists under the control of Stalin’s representatives. Within a divided anarchism some of revolution’s own participants would become members of a coalition government that, step by step, worked to confijine and destroy the revolution’s gains. The Revolution’s origins were rooted in social conditions that far predated Franco. However, we begin with the founding of the Republic. A liberal popular front government had taken power with the February 1936 election. In the period between the election and Franco’s July revolt, Spain experienced almost continuous labor uprisings. In the countryside, strikes for higher wages and shorter hours were manifest. Landless peasants pressed the government to implement its agrarian reform law. Finding a disappointing response, peasants across many regions took matters into their own hands, occupying lands and seizing estates. Groups of workers

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entered farms to force managers to grant them work. Crops and animals were taken. Trees were cut for fijirewood and lumber. Unrest was not confijined to the countryside. In the two months preceding the Civil War, strikes broke out throughout the Republic efffecting every trade and ever province. General strikes, sit-down strikes, and sympathy strikes swept the cities. The demands were not only for higher wages, shorter hours and paid holidays, but for the enforcement of the decree of February 29 “compelling employers to reinstate and indemnify all workers who had been discharged on political grounds.” In urban area strikes the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT (Confederation National de Trabajo) often took the lead over the more moderate UGT (Union General de Trabajadores). The ground was already being prepared for deep social transformation. I. The Revolution Begins and Develops In response to such a possibility General Franco launched a military revolt. In turn, this sparked a massive proletarian and peasant opposition, and give birth to the Spanish Revolution within the Republican camp. The military revolt lead to the disintegration of the police and large sections of the army, both of whom followed Franco. They were joined by the monarchists, the Falange, business and fijinance operatives, parts of the urban middle class, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, as well as much of the clergy, and the large landowners. The void left by the fleeing of the enforcers of law and order could not be fijilled by the weak Republican government incapable of defending itself. However, that void opened the floodgates of revolution from below by workers of the cities and towns, and of the countryside. It was an unprecedented moment in Spain’s history. It is this creativity from below, its organizational forms, and how it operated and undertook its actions that we want to briefly trace. The Spanish masses faced the immediate task of defending the Republic against Franco’s rebellion. The government at fijirst refused to give them arms to do so. It feared its own workers, whose support for the government was at best tepid, since they desired a far deeper social transformation than the liberal government wished to carry out. Of necessity the struggle became one against the ineptness and cowardly behaviour of the liberal government as well as against Franco’s revolt. The immediately problem of arms was resolved when one loyalist army offfijicer saw to it that 5,000 rifles were handed out to Madrid workers.

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Not only did the newly armed workers immediately begin patrolling Madrid’s streets and setting up their own order, but when the composition of a new compromise cabinet of the government became known, they organized large demonstrations in opposition. The government quickly collapsed and a new government had to agree to the demands that arms be distributed to the workers who moved to defend the Republic. It was the only serious way to fijight against the Franco rebellion. In town after town, garrisons either rebelled and joined the Franco insurrection, or met defeat either at the hands of troops that remained loyal to the government or by the actions of armed workers. Within days much of the army disintegrated, the Civil Guards (the constabulary created by the monarchy and preserved by the Republic) crumbled. The secret police dissolved. In a very real sense power lay not with the offfijicial government, but in the streets. Into the void created by the absence of the coercive organs of the state came the workers newly armed. The workers defended the Republic in a way the Popular Front government was incapable of doing. The control of the ports and borders was undertaken directly by workingmen’s committees or by local committees under the authority of labor unions and Left-wing parties. The upsurge from below occurred in the armed forces as well. In the navy it was reported that some 70% of the offfijicers were killed by their men. Authority was exercised by sailors’ committees. Burnett Bolloten in The Spanish Civil War—Revolution and Counterrevolution gives a flavor of this early period: The functions of municipalities and other local governing bodies in the left camp were also assumed by committees in which the Socialist and Anarchistoriented labor unions were the ruling forces. ‘These organs of the Revolution,’ declared an Anarchosynicalist leader a few weeks after the outbreak of the Civil War, ‘have resulted in the disappearance of government delegates in all the provinces we control, because they had no option but to obey the decisions of the committees. … The local organs of administration of the old bourgeois regime have become mere skeletons, because their life force has been replaced by the revolutionary vitality of the workers unions.’ ‘The committees,’ ran an article in a left Socialist review, ‘were the germ of proletarian power. All revolutionary segments were represented in them. … In the villages they assumed control of political and economic life. In the towns … they took into their hands the direction of all activities.’. … ‘There is not a single place,’ said an Anarchosynicalist paper, with reference of the province of Tarragona, ‘where a local antifascist militia committee has not been set up. These committees control the entire life of the community.’ (Bolloten, 1991: 49)

To this could be added the fact that revolutionary tribunals replaced the law courts, banks were raided, jails and prisons were invaded, with inmates

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set free and records destroyed. Decisive actions against the Church, which was supporting Franco’s rebellion, were particularly evident. Hundreds of churches and church institutions were either burned or put to nonreligious use—some being converted into communal warehouses or storage places for the antifascist forces. Along with the replacement of government institutions and forces with the self-organization of armed workers and peasants, the heart of the revolution was the profound reorganization of work and property in the cities and towns, and in the countryside. Thousands of industrial and commercial enterprises were taken over by workers’ unions: Railways, streetcars and buses, taxicabs and shipping, electric light and power companies, gasworks and waterworks, engineering and automobile assembly plants, mines and cement works, textile mills and paper factories, electrical and chemical concerns, glass bottle factories and perfumeries, food-processing plants and breweries, as well as a host of other enterprises, were confijiscated or controlled by workmen’s committees. (54–55)

At times joint CNT-UGT committees were formed to run the enterprises, as in Catelonia where they took over the telephone system, and assumed control of a hydro-electric enterprise. In both cases, the joint union committees controlled the operations and the fijinances. Management was forced to operate under the committee’s control. Collectivization was not limited to large establishments, but also meant taking over smaller enterprises. In Madrid unions took over shoemakers and cabinetmakers, but also beauty parlors and barber shops. The former owners could work in the shops for the same wagers as their employees. In regions where anarcho-syndicalists dominated, not only were businesses taken over, but collectivization of distribution occurred as well: In Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, with a population of nearly 1.2 million, the Anarcho-syndicalist workers collectivized the wholesale business in eggs and fijish and set up a control committee in the slaughterhouse, from which they excluded all intermediaries; they also collectivized the principle market for fruit and vegetables and suppressed all dealers and commission agents as such, permitting them, however to join the collective as wage earners. The milk trade in Barcelona was likewise collectivized. The anarchosyndicalists eliminated as unhygienic over forty pasteurizing plants, pasteurized all the milk in the remaining nine, and proceeded to displace all dealers by establishing their own retail outlets. (57)

All of this was occurring not via the state controlling from above, but the trade unions, and radicals in parties, particularly anarchists, acting from below. Unions began the reorganization of entire trades, closing down

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many smaller plants and concentrating production in plants with the best equipment. In the Catelonia region, CNT workers “closed down more than seventy foundries … concentrated their equipment in twenty-four. ‘In these,’ a spokesman for the socialized industry declared, ‘we rectifijied the defect (in the foundries) of those small employers who did not concern themselves with technical matters, and whose plants were centers of tuberculosis” (58). Collectivization involved working conditions and workers’ control as much as property forms. In Barcelona, the CNT and UGT woodworkers’ unions—which had already set up control committees in every shop and factory and used the former employers as technical managers at the standard wage for workers— reorganized the entire industry by closing down hundreds of small workshops and concentrating production in the largest plants. (58)

The transformation in the countryside was as deep as in the cities. Properties were seized, at times collectivized, at times divided among the peasants. The archives of deeds and other property records were burned in many towns and villages. The seizures were most often made by agricultural workers’ unions connected to the UGT and CNT. They were registered with the Institute for Agrarian Reform whose secretary general in the fijirst months of the revolution, Rafael Moryta Núñez, noted: I can afffijirm and this everyone knows that it was not the government that handed the land to the peasants. The latter did not wait for a government decision, but appropriated the estates and cultivable lands themselves. (quoted, 55)

It has been estimated that between a half and two-thirds of all cultivated land in Republican Spain was seized. Debates took place on whether the land should be collectivized or divided among the peasantry: “Collectivized,” said a local secretary of the National Federation of Land Workers, afffijiliated with the UGT “is the only means of making headway. We must not even think of parcelation at this stage. The soil is not everywhere the same and some harvests … are better than others. If we were to divide up the land we should relapse into that old state of afffairs when some hardworking peasants had no food while the lucky ones lived well, and only again we should have masters and slaves.” (quoted, 64) “I consider that voluntary membership should be the fundamental basis of any collective farm,” said left-wing Socialist leader Ricardo Zabalza, general secretary of the National Federation of Land Workers. “I prefer a small, enthusiastic collective, formed by a group of active and honest workers, to a large collective set up by force and composed of peasants without enthusiasm, who would sabotage it until it failed. Voluntary collectivization may

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chapter seven seem the longer course, but the example of the small, well-managed collective will attract the entire peasantry, who are profoundly realistic and practical, whereas forced collectivization would end by discrediting socialized agriculture.” (quoted in Bollotin, 1991)

In any case collectivization was seen as more than a economic question: The collectivist movement like no other social movement in Europe’s modern history, attempted on a grand scale to overcome not just the material but also the spiritual impoverishment that affflicted the lives of millions of people. Characteristic of most collectives, for example, was a strong sense of social solidarity: welfare programs were instituted which provided villages for the fijirst time with medical care and maintenance for orphans, widows, the infijirm and all others in dire need. There was also a strong commitment to education, one of the collectives’ fijirst activities being to establish schools, especially in remote hamlets where the people had for centuries been deprived of the basic right to education. (Esenwein and Shubert, 1995)

In some libertarian communities money was suppressed. Wages were paid in coupons where the amount received was determined by the size of the family. One observer wrote: The characteristic of the majority of the CNT collectives is the family wage. Wages are paid according to the needs of the members and not according to the labor performed by each worker. (quoted in Bolloten, 1991)

The fijirst steps to suppress value production and the market were undertaken. Bolloten notes: Locally produced goods such as bread, wine, and olive oil were distributed freely if abundant, while other articles could be obtained at the communal depot. Surplus goods were exchanged with other Anarchist towns and villages, money was used only for transactions with communities that had not adopted the new system.

II. The Communist Party Works to Dismantle the Revolution The greatest creative drama of all, the outright proletarian revolution in Spain, soon lay crushed … not only because of the victory of fascism, but also because the spontaneity of the masses had been stifled by Stalinism’s hold over the Popular Front Government. All the democratic forces, including the Anarchists, were so glad to get the arms from Russia (even though they were paid for in gold) that none exposed Stalinism’s murderous role. As for those revolutionary theoreticians who did oppose the Stalinists and who had no illusions about the ‘revolutionary nature’ of the Popular Front

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Government, they failed to create a new category from the spontaneous actions from below. That is, none thought that the way the Spanish workers occupied the factories during the very heat of the struggle against fascism disclosed a new dialectic of liberation, that that combination of economics and politics was the new form of workers’ rule and must become the ground for new theory as well. —Dunayevskaya, 1973: 123–24

Against the Revolution, the Spanish Communist Party, following Stalin’s line and under foreign dominance, strove to form a Popular Front, concentrating its activities on blocking and then destroying the revolution. They sought to transform the movement to be only an anti-Fascist one. They worked to bring the middle classes into the movement, claiming that what was happening in Spain was not a proletarian and peasant revolution, but a bourgeois-democratic revolution. They strove to decisively influence and dominate the Popular Front government. With an appeal to widen the opposition to fascism through winning the support of the middle class, the Communists used ideology as a weapon again the revolution. They stressed the need to win over France and Britain to aid in defense of a “moderate,” not a revolutionary, Republic against Franco. Their aim was too dismantle the power of the revolutionary committees that was at the heart of the revolution. They constantly used the authentic need to defeat fascism as a camouflage to disarm and defeat the revolution. In their attempts to disarm the revolution, the Communists were unwittingly aided by a section of the anarcho-syndicalists. Within the Spanish anarchism a sharp debate ensued over entering the government, though this would be in violation of its central principles. Collaborationist and abstentionist tendencies formed, while prominent anarcho-syndicalist leaders joined the cabinet. They hoped that by doing so they would be able to defend the revolution’s gains. However, their entrance into the government played into the hands of the Communists, who hoped anarchist participation would enhance the government’s influence with rankand-fijile anarchists and syndicalists in the unions. This proved to be true. It was the cover that would allow the reconstruction of the shattered machinery of state that the revolutionary committees had replaced. The aim of the Communists was now to replace the revolutionary committees with rebuilt regular organs of administration. In this, they were joined by the Republicans and the Socialists. All feared and wanted to tame the power of the revolutionary committees.

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The CNT members of the government thus provided the cover for dismantling the power of the committees. It was not their intention, but once they entered government they were trapped in its vicious logic of defending Republican Spain by non-revolutionary means. It was prosecuting the war, not deepening the revolution, which took precedence again and again. Bollotin noted: The government, with the acquiescence of the CNT members, approved decrees that, far from giving legal validity of the committees as the CNT had hoped on entering the cabinet, provided for their dissolution and replacement by regular provincial and municipal councils, in which all the parties adhering to the Popular Front as well as the trade-union organizations were to be represented. In addition, a decree was published providing for the suppression of all controls on highways and at the entrance to villages set up by local committees and by parties or trade-union organization and for taking over of their functions by the police forces under the ministry of the interior. (214)

With no protest from the CBT-FAI ministries, the government began disarming and arresting those who resisted the new order in one community after another. Revolutionary tribunals that had been set up by workingclass organizations were slowly replaced by a legalized form of tribunal composed of members of the judiciary and members of the Popular Front parties and trade-union federations. The secret police became an arm of the Soviet secret policy. The Spanish revolution and civil war would sharply expose the grave diffferences between nationalization and socialization. In the fijirst months of the revolution, proletarian and peasant actions had socialized and collectivized work and land in many regions. Soon the Communists, together with the Socialists and Republicans, moved “to weaken the power of the revolutionary committees in the factories by bringing the collectivized enterprises, particularly in the basic industries, under the control of the government.” (222) Nationalization was used to break the power of the revolution. Nationalization, once it was not under workers control, was shown to be the enemy of authentic socialization. The Communist Party proclaimed: There arose in the Spanish economy a very special kind of state capitalism. It was not the kind of state capitalism utilized or manipulated by the fijinancial oligarchy. It was a state capitalism in which control was exercised through the representatives of the Popular Front parties, which assured no small influence of the working class.

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More to the point, it assured the influence and domination of a central power not only to harness production to the needs of the war, but to remove control of production from the direct hands of the workers committees and trade unions. It was not that the newly established system of workers’ control in Spain did not have contradictions. Albert Perez-Baro, a CNT militant and a leading participant in the collectivist movement, described some of the early problems: After the fijirst few days of euphoria, the workers returned to work and found themselves without responsible management. This resulted in the creation of workers’ committees in factories, workshops and warehouses, which tried to resume production with all the problems that a transformation of this kind entailed. Owing to inadequate training and the sabotage of some of the technicians who remained—many others fled with the owners—the workers’ committees and other bodies there were. … had to rely on the guidance of the unions. … Lacking training in economic matters, the union leaders, with more good will than success, began to issue directives that spread confusion in the factory committees and enormous chaos in production. This was aggravated by the fact that each union … gave diffferent and often contradictory instruction. (223)

But measures were taken to overcome these difffijiculties. In October 1936, a decree, “Collectivization and Workers’ Control,” to legalize the status of the collectives and help bring order, was approved by the semi-autonomous government of Catalonia. This efffort to bring order to a chaotic situation was a far cry from the Communists subsequent attempts and successes in dismantling these engines of the revolution, the workers’ committees and their control over factories, enterprises and production.

• War and revolution came together in both creative and destructive ways in 1930s Spain. The launching of the Spanish Civil War via Franco’s military rebellion became catalyst for the Spanish Revolution carried out by proletarian masses in the city and countryside. At the same time, Spain would quickly become a fijiery cauldron, a testing ground for powers who would participate in the Second World War. Within such a milieu, the creative praxis of the Spanish masses was subjected not only to Franco’s military might, but to the stranglehold of Stalinist Russia’s counter-revolutionary drive to subordinate the Popular Front government to its will. The Revolution’s proletarian and peasant forms of organization, collectivization and socialization created from below, would come into confrontation with a state-capitalist vanguardism calling itself Communism. Russia not

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only sought to control and narrow the opposition to Franco’s fascist threat, but was determined to dismantle and destroy the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War. In the Spanish Revolution, forms of organization—spontaneous self-organization vs. vanguard partyto-lead—as well as ideologies from anarchism to Trotskyism to vulgar communism were put to the test. However, as Dunayevskaya noted, no revolutionary theoreticians thought that the way the Spanish workers occupied the factories during the very heat of the struggle against fascism disclosed a new dialectic of liberation, that that combination of economics and politics was the new form of workers’ rule and must become the ground for new theory as well. (Dunayevskaya, 1973: 124)

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HUNGARIAN WORKERS’ COUNCILS IN THE REVOLUTION: A MOVEMENT FROM PRACTICE THAT IS A FORM OF THEORY We can state that in Hungary today, the real interests of the working class are represented by the workers’ councils, and there is no stronger political force in the country than the power of the workers’ councils. —Central Workers’ Councils of Greater Budapest The formation of a workers’ organization was not just an expression of the spontaneous will of the workers, but was an absolutely vital condition for the consolidation of the revolution. Balazs Nagy The workers’ councils gave their stamp to the entire revolution. —Sandor Racz, Center Workers’ Council President (All above quotes from Lomax, Hungarian Workers’ Councils in 1956)

Prelude: East Germany, 1953 On June 17, 1953, three and a half months after Stalin’s death (March 5, 1953), East German workers rebelled against new work norms and totalitarian overlordship. One month earlier, May 18, the East German Communist government had announced an increase in work hours. In the following two weeks open strikes broke out. By mid-June, workers in East Berlin were assembling on the streets to hold open discussions. On June 16, construction workers organized a protest march against speed-up. “Down with the Government,” was shouted in the streets. The government revoked its speed-up order, but the demonstrations did not stop. On the morning of the 17th, thousands took to the streets, attacking major government buildings. Symbols of Communist power–flags, posters and pictures of Communist party leaders–were torn down. For several hours the strikers were the only power in East Berlin. The Russian military, the real power behind the East German government, sent 10,000 troops to East Berlin and martial law was decreed. By June 20, the Russians had put 25,000 troops in East Berlin. Over 20,000 were arrested. But strikes continued in other cities: on June 22, Leipzig was still on general strike.

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The revolt could not survive Russian tanks and troops. But the ideas and the discontent were only driven underground. The Communist statecapitalist ruling class of Russia and East Europe was aware of the danger. Khrushchev made his own attempt at deStalinization from above more than two and a half years after the East German Revolt, and almost three years after Stalin’s death, with his secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Communist Party Congress of the Soviet Union, February 1956. He thereby hoped to stem the tide of an authentic anti-Stalinism that carried the seeds of a far deeper social transformation. Anti-Stalinism took its most explosive and deepest form in Hungary, 1956. In Budapest, the Petofiji Circle, a group of intellectuals and Party dissidents, was able to meet openly during that Spring and Summer. In discussing the current crisis, they drew an audience of thousands. Various currents of dissatisfaction, often aware of the Petofiji Circle, but having their own thoughts and a willingness to act, were coming to the fore. Many were young, particularly school and university students and young workers in the factories. By the fall they would become crucial catalysts for the fullest expression of anti-Stalinism and the posing of a new humanism— the Hungarian Revolution, October-December 1956. I. Hungary: The First Days Students sparked the initial uprising with their call for a demonstration on October 23, 1956, demanding political democracy, including the return to power of Imre Nagy,1 the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and workers’ selfgovernment in the factories. They were joined by Hungary’s masses, some 100,000, marching and toppling a huge statue of Stalin. The participants no doubt included thousands of workers, particularly younger ones from Budapest’s shops and factories. In those fijirst days, and in the period following the second invasion of Soviet forces, November 4, the youth were in the streets fijighting the Russian troops and tanks. At the same time, in the factories, on the shop floor, the revolution was being carried out in a profound manner. It was here that the Hungarian Workers Councils were born and developed,

1 A veteran Communist, who fought in the Russian Civil War, Nagy became prime minister, 1953–55, in the fijirst reform after Stalin’s death. Ousted from power in 1955, he became prime minster again during the Revolution of October 1956. With the counter-revolution in power, Nagy was tried and condemned, and then executed, June 16, 1958.

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refusing to be stopped even by Russia’s armed occupation or by the Kadar government manipulations during November and much of December. This movement from below—its demands, resistance, ideas—forged a crucial point of departure. The workers’ practice—taking the organizational form of councils, political and economic demands, and a refusal to work—was itself a form of theory. I was at the time a worker in the MAVAG Engineering and Machine Works on the Kobanya Road in Pest. I can say without exaggeration that the fijirst visible sign of the new period following Stalin’s death appears on the afternoon of October 23. On that day I worked until 6 P.M. My work—as usual— takes me into several workshops. During the afternoon I notice smallish groups forming in one place after another. A piece of paper passes from hand to hand. They are talking about it. It soon emerges that something to which we are completely unaccustomed is going on. In a list of points, the university youth are demanding the nation’s freedom and independence. The employees coming to work for the 2 o’clock shift have brought the leaflets with them. In addition, news is spreading throughout the town of an enormous youth march about to get under way, that want to campaign for these points. … What the night would bring, no one even in their wildest dreams could imagine. … On the morning of October 24, work stops throughout the entire country. It is a spontaneous work stoppage. There is fijighting in the streets. Transport comes to a halt. The apparatus of state and economic administration is crumbling away. … Nor are the chimneys of the MAVAG smoking. The seats of the members of the all-powerful management are cold too. We will not learn of their whereabouts for several long weeks. Of our factory’s workers only a few turn up in the workshops.—Istvan Vida quoted in Lomax, 1990: 290)2 The general strike began immediately and the workers’ councils were set up completely spontaneously, at fijirst on an improvised basis. They often started with the workers refusing to allow the Party secretary into the factory premises and then setting up councils to run things. … Of course, it was not workers’ management over production because the whole task was to push forward the general strike. There were workers’ councils for factories and workers’ councils for districts. Their fundamental functions were to organize meetings, frame demands, keep up the general strike and organize the weekly distribution of wages.  It was extraordinary to see how identical the demands were: freedom of parties to operate, withdrawal of Russian troops, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, neutrality, the right to strike and so on.—Miklos Craso,

2 We will be relying on Hungarian Workers’ Councils in 1956, a documentary history edited by Bill Lomax, for much of quoted material in this chapter.

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chapter eight Communist journalist, defendant at Imre Nagy Trial, June, 1958. Executed June 16, 1958. (quoted in Lomax, 1990)

In the fijirst days of the revolution workers began issuing leaflets with their demands (reproduced in Lomax, 1990): Leaflet of the Baja Woolen Textiles Factory Council on or around Oct. 26, 1956 Demands of the workers’ council of the Baja woolen textiles factory Our Political Demands: We emphasize that we do not want the restoration of capitalism, but we demand the fulfijillment of the rightful demands of the people, and the full realization of our national independence. We demand that the participants in the uprising in Budapest or elsewhere be regarded as innocent of any offfense, and not to be brought before either extraordinary or normal courts. We demand real freedom of the press. We demand immediate free elections, and the dissolution of the present parliament that the people have no trust in. We demand the release and rehabilitation of unjustly imprisoned political prisoners. Those who fijired on the unarmed people must be brought to justice. We demand independent and autonomous youth organization. Our Local, Factory Demands: 1. We demand autonomous factory management, because only then will the factory be truly ours. We demand a share in the profijits of the factory. 2. We demand weekly payment of wages. 3. We demand the re-election of the trade unions. 4. The independent right to strike. 5. The re-examination of the cases of workers dismissed since 1945 and the assurance of their legal rights. 6. The raising of bonus payments for night work. 7. Annual provision of work clothes. 8. The right to free materials, by a free choice from the factory’s products. 9. The abolition of work competitions. 10. We demand the re-examination of the wages system, and its establishment on the basis of justice. 11. We emphasize that we do not agree with the telegram and the news published in the press and on the radio, and we demand their immediate correction. If this is not done, we will not tolerate the Bacs-Kiskum County Peoples Paper, nor the publisher of the article, in the town.

•

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Proclamation from Egyesult Izzo Workers, professionals, apprentices! The provisional workers’ council of Egyesult Izzo has taken over the management of the factory. The council passed the following resolutions, to be confijirmed by a workers’ council which is to be elected on broadest democratic principles. I. Organizational matters We have removed the following local executors and chief mouthpieces of the Stalinist-Rakosist tyranny: ……, Managing Director, .… Head of Department. We have also removed those who, in the past, turned a deaf ear to the justifijied demands of the workforce, who were unsuitable for their jobs and had no appropriate qualifijications. These persons have been given the chance to carry on working alongside us, according to their skills, for our common purpose. Listing 3 heads of department and one deputy head of department. In place of those managers dismissed by the workers’ council, and subject to confijirmation by a permanent workers’ council (yet to be elected), the following persons have been provisionally entrusted with management …… The workers’ council abolished the Personnel Department in charge of “cadre” policy, a main source of mistrustfulness. All personal fijiles have been destroyed. The Administrative Offfijice will henceforth carry out the work of job allocation and other organizational matters. Redundant personnel will be given jobs in production according to their capabilities. This will not only simplify bureaucracy, but will also reduce overheads.  The workers’ council will put under severe scrutiny the rampant bureaucracy and will phase out all unnecessary functions. II. Economic matters For the duration of the stoppage of work, average wages will be paid. Our heartfelt thanks to all those who stood fast in defense of our factory in these grave days and who safeguarded the conditions for productive work. According to the ruling of the Free Trade Unions of Hungry, those earning less than 800 Forints will get an increase of 15%, those earning less than 1,500 Forints will receive a raise of 10%. [less well paid receive high parentage] Technical stafff, in cooperation with workers’ council, should work out a wage system in the spirit of Leninist principles of material incentives and increased respect. III. Political Matters The workers’ council calls upon all workers to set up your workers’ councils in each section of the factor, with 5–11 members each. A permanent General Workers’ Council of 71 members will be elected in the shortest possible time.

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chapter eight Later on, shall indicate to all units the desirable numbers of delegates, so that the 71-strong will not be exceeded. Draft your suggestions and recommendations of every workplace and pass them on to the workers council. All sensible suggestions will be put into efffect.

* For the workers councils there was no separation of the economic and political demands. The revolution was for socialism, not the restoration of capitalism. Students frequently took on the responsibility of distributing the factory workers’ leaflets in Budapest. Peasants came into the city to sell their products directly to the workers. Lomax in his Introduction noted: The question of political power was also a key one within the factories themselves, where one of the fijirst actions of the revolution had been to drive out the party functionaries, and close down the party offfijices through which the Communists had imposed their control both over the workers and over the life of the factory. After the call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country, the call for withdrawal of party organizations from the factories was the second clearest and foremost demand of the revolution. (xxvii)

II. The Turning Point The events described above were in the fijirst days of the revolution, the last week in October. The old Stalinist regime of Rakosi was ousted. Imre Nagy was brought back to form a government. The workers supported the Nagy government, but were not giving a blank check. They had their demands for Nagy to fulfijill. Foremost was dissolving the secret police and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, as well as forming a government with other parties. On October 28, Hungarian intellectuals formed a new organization composed of writers, artists, scientists and university students. Among their demands: The Government should abolish the exploiting system of work norms. Low wages and pensions should be raised to the level that our economic possibilities permit. The trade unions should become organizations that genuine represent the workers’ interests, with their leaders freely elected. The working peasants should be allowed to form their own organizations to defend their interests. The Government should ensure the freedom and security of agricultural production by supporting individual farmers and voluntary cooperatives. The hated system on compulsory deliveries, that robbed the peasants of their produce must be abolished. (Lomas, 1990)

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By October 28–29 with a Nagy government in place, with workers’ councils formed in most workplaces in Budapest, the call went out for the factory workers to return to work. The workers agreed to do so, but not unconditionally: [The Nagy] government had to negotiate with the workers if it wanted to settle a question as vital to the consolidation of the revolution as the return to work. The government completely neglected the working-class parties and the trade unions as well, and appealed directly to the workers, or, rather, to their councils. In other words, the formation of a workers’ organization was not just an expression of the spontaneous will of the workers, but was an absolutely vital condition for the consolidation of the revolution. (Balaza Nagy, historian, one of the secretaries in Petofiji Circle, quoted in Lomas, 1990: 309) The oil workers of Lovasz took over the management of the oilfijields. … The workers’ council of the oilfijield removed, by immediate efffect, the socalled ‘working-class director-general,’ Karol Papp. At the oilfijields, orderly and disciplined production is going on, under the supervision of the workers’ council. However, the oil workers refuse to transport the oil: they do not want their oil used by Soviet tanks! The oil workers of the oilfijields in Bazakerettye, Nagylengyel, and of the refijinery at Zalaegerszeg fully support this embargo. Oct.28 (22) A seven-strong delegation of miners in Balinka, led by the face-worker Andras, paid a visit to Free Radio Gyor. … The delegation, representing 30,000 miners, recommends that Imre Nagy should immediately start negotiations with the representatives of the insurgents in order to form a join Government. The miners will accept a Government list, as long as it is approved by the insurgents. … Unless these demands are satisfijied, not a scrap of coal will be dug by the miners of Balinka and the neighborhood. At the railway station of Balinka, 30 wagons full of coal are standing: as soon as peace is re-established under the above conditions, the coal will immediately be sent offf to the factories, power stations, and to the long-sufffering public. As soon as a just peace returns, the miners will at once restart production. They promise that their output will outstrip every record forced on them by ‘socialist competition.’ (Lomax, 1990)

At the same time that the workers’ committees gave conditional support to the Nagy government, they continued to develop their own organizational forms within and between factories. They were beginning to question the old class-based way of laboring and searching a new way working: A parliament of workers’ councils met on October 31, attended by delegates from 24 factories and passed a resolution on “The Basic Rights and Duties of the Workers’ Councils.” Almost immediately individual workers councils from diffferent factories joined in regional groupings. Among the

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demands “the supreme controlling body of the enterprise is the workers’ council democratically elected by the workers.” “The director is employed by the factory. The director and the highest employees are to be elected by the workers’ council” These demands came after a public general meeting. The party-controlled trade union organization, SZOT, was replaced by a National Association of Free Trade Unions of Hungary. A manifesto of the provisional executive committee of the national association of free trade unions of Hungary had many points. Among them the absolute right to strike, a just and equitable wage system, a gradual reduction of the working week, initiate a wide-ranging house-building program. From a meeting of the management council at the wagon works came the following discussion: As we saw in the program of SZOT, payment by results would be abolished in many areas of work. This would mean that a number of jobs—for instance, time-and-motion and piecework control—would become redundant. This would require the reorganization of shop floor arrangements. (Lomax, 1990)

III. The Counter-Revolution and the Proletarian Response In the stealth of night on November 4, came the second Soviet invasion and occupation of Budapest. Led by the quisling Joseph Kadar, a new government had no power or support save for the occupying Russian troops. Nagy was forced to flee to the Yugoslav embassy. Into the streets poured young workers: A look at the offfijicial statistics on damage to buildings during the fijighting shows clearly that the Districts which sufffered the most were …equivalent to the working-class districts of Paris. … Another statistical publication records, with a brevity that speaks volumes, ‘The greatest number of deaths during the armed combat were recorded in the… Districts.’ These are among the principal working-class areas of Budapest. And fijinally we would cite the following: ‘According to the fijigures supplied by the hospitals, 80–90 percent of the wounded were young workers, while students represented no more than 3–5 percent.’ For the workers the signifijicance of the events of November 4 was obvious; and, just as they had been resolved on a return to work on November 5, now they became equally determined to continue their strike. This strike was a much more important weapon in their hands than the armed struggle, which from the outset had been hopeless. (This can be seen from the importance which the newly-installed Kadar government attached to ending the strike.) (Balazs Nagy, quoted in Lomax, 1990)

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Far from the workers retreating, they deepened the self-organization of their councils. It was after the Soviet re-invasion of the country, when open armed resistance was impossible, that the workers’ councils began the formation of a central workers’ council to carry on the resistance. From November 8 onwards the councils became hives of activity in Budapest, particularly in the 11th and 13th Districts, and in Ujpest and Csepel. Delegates from the workers’ councils of the 11th District met on November 12 and formulated their common demands under eight headings. This was the fijirst time since November 4 that councils from a wide area had convened and held a meeting at which—and this is the essential point—they united in drawing up a set of demands. Nor were these demands a mere list of familiar grievances; they amounted in a sense to a real program. To sum it up briefly, their demands were: collective ownership of the factories, which were to be in the hands of the workers’ councils, which were to act as the only directors of the enterprises; a widening of the councils’ powers in the economic, social and cultural fijields; the organization of a militiatype police force, subject to the councils; and on the political plane, a multi-socialist-party system. … On November 12, at the same time that the delegates from the 11th District were meeting, another important discussion was taking place in Ujpest, 30 kilometers away. At this second meeting in Ujpest a much more conscious attempt was made to bring together and organize the workers’ strength in a concrete form—in the councils. –Balazs Nagy (quoted in Lomax, 1990)

Again it was young workers who played a leading role. Nearly half of the delegates were between 23 and 28 years old. The actions to form a Central Workers’ Council were followed by a decision to try to publish a newspaper to inform the country, especially the workers, of the activities and resolutions of the Council. The Kadar government refused permission for such a paper, and Soviet troops occupied the print shops. The workers could only produce a mimeographed Information Bulletin. Before its suppression, three issues appeared at the end of November and the beginning of December. We reproduce brief excerpts: We call upon the workers’ councils to realize our demands and not to accept self-important leaders, discredited in the past, faithless to the people, and forced upon the factories from outside, and to also be on their guard against careerist elements with dubious pasts. (Lomax, 1990: 575) We protest against the arguments of the newly-formed ‘Free Trade Unions’ that the workers’ councils should be recognized as organs having solely economic functions. We can categorically state that in Hungary today the true interests of the workers are represented by the workers’ councils, and there is no stronger political power in the country today than the power of the workers’ councils. We must work with all our might for the strengthening of the workers’ power. (575)

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chapter eight In our opinion, the functioning of several parties standing on the basis of socialism must be permitted as soon as possible. Party membership should be voluntary and should be regarded as the private afffair of each person. For the time being we should not approve the existence of party organizations within the factories.

In addition to the workers’ continual resistance, other dimensions came to the fore: students from schools and the university; several hundred women organized a protest march and rally carried out December 5th; there were proposals for revolutionary peasant councils as peasant delegations came to visit and lend their solidarity. However it was the workers who gave a defijinitive stamp to the revolution: For the Hungarian workers and their delegates the most important thing about the councils was precisely their democratic nature. There was a very close relationship between the delegates and the entire working class: the delegates were elected for the sole purpose of carrying out the workers’ wishes, and it is noteworthy that workers often recalled delegates who diverged from their mandate. They didn’t like delegates who were too ‘independent.’—Balazs Nagy (321)

The revolution would put its stamp upon radical thought and action beyond the immediate moment: The outbreak of this movement was not brought about by the old right wing, by the old and discredited ruling class. The truth is that it came from the left—from disillusioned Marxists, young people fed up with lies, and proletarians who had been exploited in the most supercapitalist way. They were the ones who brought it about. The working class itself did not know just what the future held for it, but it was clear in one thing—that it could not go on in the same way as in the past. They had no wish for the return of the old masters; nor did they want to see any new ones. The vision of some form of workers’ and factory self-government floated before them. In its fundamentals, 1956 was a leftist revolution, but not a sectarian one.—Istvan Vida (294–95)

IV. Postscript: Brief Notes on East Europe, post-Hungary 1956— Resistance-in-Permanence; Contradictions Within The crushing of the Revolution did not end the opposition to Stalinist domination of East Europe. A permanent resistance continued in many areas, often underground, but at times breaking out in open revolt. Of crucial importance, there arose, as well, an intellectual flowering, which became known as Marxist humanism, or socialist humanism. Intellectuals,

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students and activists began challenging statist-Communism from the ground of Marx’s own humanism, particularly his Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. It was Hungary that opened up the space for this body of thought to develop with a rich diversity. (See for instance Socialist Humanism—an International Symposium, edited by Eric Fromm, 1965.) These developments in thought signifijied that the movements against state-capitalist domination did not view the private capitalist West as the alternative. Socialism with a human face and other expressions of an Alternative to both the East and the West were being discussed and debated. At the same time, there were contradictions within the resistance, including the pull from the West. Below, we look very briefly at two moments post-Hungary 1956: Czechoslovakia 1968, and Poland of Solidarity (Solidarność) in the early 1980s. Prague Spring 1968 opened a new moment in Czechoslovakia and in East Europe. A limited reform in the Communist Party became a flow of new possibilities outside the Party. Workers questioned their conditions of labor and life. Youth expressed their solidarity with other East European youth resisting their Communist overloads and they felt one with the young rebels in West Germany and France who opposed their own rulers. Intellectuals not only demanded freedom of the press, but the right to act, to create and build opposition parties, something which the Communist Party opposed. “We have found our tongues!” was the call. On August 20, 1968 came the response from the Russian empire: troops and tanks, the boot-heel of an occupation. What the Czechoslovakian masses had raised was not a return to the private capitalism of the West, but the beginning of an exploration of an authentic humanist Marxism, whose origin lay in Marx’s own work. It was this spectrum of a genuine Marxism that could spread in other parts of Eastern European and Russia itself, more than any threat from the West, that the empire’s rulers feared most. (See especially Czechoslovakia, Revolution and Counter-Revolution. 1968) There has been a multiplicity of tendencies in East Europe, not all searching for an authentic Marxism. An important manifestation of this was Poland, and the development of Solidarity (Solidarność), the selfgoverning trade union that arose with the important shipyard strike in Gdansk in 1980 and quickly spread to encompass massive numbers of workers throughout the country. At the same time there was the power of a deeply entrenched Catholic Church that supported the new trade union in a limited way, but was prepared for its own compromises with the Polish government, which declared martial law against the protesters.

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One important part of the Polish struggle was a group of Left intellectual advisers, the Committee for Social Self-defense, KOR, (Komitet Samoobrony Społecznej) that had original formed in the mid-1970s as the Committee for the Defense of Workers to give aid to prisoners and their families. Among its members were Marxist intellectuals in opposition to the state-capitalism of Russia and its Polish satellite. KOR worked together with Solidarity in opposition to the ruilng Communist Party. However, KOR decided to disband as Solidarity grew, thereby disrupting an important worker-intellectual collaboration. One of KOR’s leaders, Jacek Kuron, would put forth the concept of a “Self-Limiting Revolution,” that is, to not seek to challenge directly the ruling regime. This was not alone a tactical question, but rather a view that a revolutionary change was an impossibility. This became the dominant ideology of the opposition. To put forth a view of a self-limiting revolution, is to foreclose on the idea of a revolutionary transformation of society. It opened the door for problematic compromises, with the government, and including with the Catholic Church as “mediator” between the government and the workers organized as Solidarność. A “self-limmiting revolution” became no revolution at all. This is not to say that the dictatorial millitary power of a state-capitalist regime is easy to oppose. Far from it. But it is to say that without a revolutionary vision, there simply is no emancipatory pathway forward. Such view were not restricted to Poland. A link toward socialist or Marxist humanism was fractured. A decade later, the fall of the Berllin Wall, followed by the collapse of the so-called Soviet Union, led, not to a authentic socialist or Marxist humanism that Hungary, and the revolutionary humanist ferment which followed Hungary had posed so powerfully, but to the re-initiation of private capitalism from the West. None of this is to say that the power of the private capitalism of the West could have been defeated at that moment. But it is to say that posing the question as one of state-capitalist Russia and Eastern Europe vs. the private capitalism of the U.S. and the West, is to erase from history the development of a socialist humanism rooted in Marx’s Humanism that Hungary posed so forcefully in October, 1956.

PART TWO

HEGEL AND MARX

CHAPTER NINE

CAN “ABSOLUTE KNOWING” IN HEGEL’S PHENOMENOLOGY SPEAK TO A DIALECTIC OF ORGANIZATION AND PHILOSOPHY? This new world, which Hegel calls Absolute Knowledge, is the unity of the real world and the notions about it, the organization of thought and activity, which merge into the new, the whole truth of the past and the present, which anticipates the future. —Raya Dunayevskaya, “Notes on Hegel’s Phenomenology”

“[H]ow do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic?” asked Marx at the beginning of “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,” written little more than a dozen years after Hegel’s death. Marx’s revolutionary new beginning in thought and practice in the mid-1840s was rooted in grappling with that question. Post-Marx, a number of Marxist thinker-activists, including Lenin at the outbreak of World War I, Lukács in the decades between the two world wars, and Dunayevskaya in the post-World War II world, returned to this question. Each grappled with diffferent dimensions of the dialectic that had become concrete in relation to the crises in the objective/subjective world of their day. In asking if Absolute Knowing can speak to a dialectic of organization and philosophy today, we briefly note Hegel’s method in Absolute Knowledge, and then examine how Marx, Lukács and Dunayevskaya explored Absolute Knowledge. (Lenin’s relation to the Hegelian dialectic will be discussed in part III.) I. A Note on Hegel’s Method in Absolute Knowledge Absolute Knowledge is the odyssey of Absolute Spirit come to full flowering. On the one hand, “its true meaning must have already come out in the shapes or modes consciousness has assumed,” in the Phenomenology. (Hegel, 1964: 789) On the other, this fijinal moment of Hegel’s “voyage of discovery” gives birth “anew from the womb of knowledge … the new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit.” (807) What is the method whereby one is recollecting the previous modes of consciousness and at the same time entering a new world? Early in the

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Absolute Knowledge chapter, Hegel expressed the movement of Absolute Knowledge: The object as a whole is the mediated result [the syllogism] or the passing of universality into individuality through specifijication, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through canceled individuality or specifijic determination. (790)

Hegel was spelling out his dialectic of negativity, negation of the negation. Jean Hyppolite commented on “the concrete signifijicance of the Hegelian principle of negativity”: “Hegel’s system, far from being a logomachy, is a logic of the life of thought.” (Hyppolite, 1969: 21) Dunayevskaya commented on the signifijicance of this same paragraph of Absolute Knowledge in her Philosophy and Revolution: The deceptive simplicity of this logical conclusion is likely to catch the reader unaware that Hegel is here introducing the three central categories— the Universal, Particular, and Individual—of the as yet unwritten Science of Logic. It is to be noted that, though these categories are bound together into a syllogism, each remains itself or, more precisely, none is reducible to the other. Hegel underscores the fact that double negation, which characterizes the movement from Abstract (the Universal) to the concrete (the Individual) “through specifijication” (the Particular), holds true also when the process is reversed. In a word, negation of the negation, not “synthesis,” also characterized “the reverse process from the individual to the universal.”  (Hegel, 1964: 790) In his summation Hegel demonstrates that this is so in every single stage of the development, and therefore from the very fijirst section to the last, it is this which characterized the whole of the Phenomenology. It is crucial to grasp this movement from the abstract to the concrete as a self-movement, and not to view it as if it adheres to some sort of static triadic form. Though it was not Hegel, but Fichte and Schelling, who spoke of philosophy as a development of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, this statement has often been misread as an expression of the Hegelian dialectic. We must stop a moment longer to show that the three categories mentioned here are not a “triplicity,” not a synthesis, not synthetic cognition, but the dialectic of selfdevelopment through a double negation. No matter what the phenomena are, thought molds the form of experience in a way that determines both the experience and “the ways in which consciousness must know the object as itself.” Nor is the negation of the negation a “Nullity.” The positive is contained in the negative, which is the path to a new beginning. This characterizes not only the Logic, or the Phenomenology, or The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. It is the nature of development. It is a fact of life. (Dunayevskaya, 1973: 12–13)

After presenting the categories of individual, particular, and universal, Hegel journeyed back through the Phenomenology:

 

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To understand this method of grasping the object, where apprehension is a shape or mode of consciousness, we have here only to recall the previous shapes of consciousness which came before us earlier in the argument. (Hegel, 1964: 791)

He showed spirit coming to Knowledge of itself: “Spirit certain of itself in its objective existence takes as the element of its existence nothing else than this knowledge of self.” (793) The knowledge of self was not limited to immediateness, nor to a determinate existence, but encompassed as well a third moment, universality, an essence or inner reality. When these moments united the Notion became “systematic Science.” Hegel demonstrated that Absolute Knowledge was not a “tool” for grasping stages of consciousness. Rather, it was itself the totality of the movement, the immanence of the whole present as the very movement through the shapes and modes of consciousness: “[S]pirit which at once gives its complete and true content the form of self, and thereby realizes its notion and in doing so remains within its own notion—that is Absolute Knowledge.” (797) It itself is conscious that that is indeed what it is: “The nature, moments and process of this knowledge have then shown themselves to be such that this knowledge is pure self-existence of selfconsciousness.”(798) The reader arrives at where “the content is the spirit which traverses the whole range of its own being, and does this for itself qua spirit, by the fact that it poses the shape of the notion in its objectivity.” (798) This is no mere abstraction. Traversing the whole range of its own being is none other than the experiences of consciousness that has been undertaken in the Phenomenology from sense-certainty to Absolute Knowledge. Hegel has returned us to the fact that such a concept of Spirit can only come forth after undergoing this totality of experience: Science does not arrive in time and in reality till spirit has arrived at this stage of being conscious regarding itself Qua spirit that knows what it is, it does not exist before, and is not to be found at all till after the completion of the task of mastering and constraining its imperfect embodiment. (798–99)

With this brief introduction, we turn to how Marx, Lukács and Dunayevskaya explored Absolute Knowing in the Phenomenology. II. Marx’s “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” When Marx asked, “[H]ow do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic?”, he was issuing a critique of the Young Hegelians, whose attitude toward Hegel lacked an awareness of this vital question. (“Critique of the

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Hegelian Dialectic” Marx and Engels, 1975a: 326–346) In his dozen plus pages of commentary, Marx quickly moved beyond the Young Hegelians to give a profound response, focusing on the Absolute Knowledge chapter of Phenomenology of Mind. Three central moments emerged out of Marx’s 1844 reading: (1) a critique of Hegel’s dehumanization of philosophy, “the opposition between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness within thought itself” (331); (2) a singling out of Hegel’s “negation of the negation” as “the moving and generating principle” (332) of the dialectic, the source of “the true and only positive” (329); (3) a posing of his own philosophic vision—“a naturalism or humanism [which] is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both” (336)—whose center was a revolutionary humanism. Marx had written the more lengthy “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” in 1843, followed by an “Introduction” to that study published in February 1844. By mid-1844 he felt the need to probe further, to enter into “the true point of origin and the secret of Hegelian philosophy” (329), the Phenomenology of Mind (Spirit). From April to August, Marx’s study of political economy, his relation to the emergence of the proletariat as revolutionary class from Paris to Selesia, his view of Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel, as well as his exposure to communist ideas—all poured forth in what has become known as the 1844 EconomicPhilosophic Manuscripts. Unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, its themes, including “wages of labor,” “profijit of capital,” “rent of land,” “power of money,” “estranged labor,” and “private property and communism,” were inseparable from, perhaps catalyst for and catalyzed by, his continual exploration of the dialectic. Notes for an untitled essay that has subsequently been titled “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” were part of the 1844 Manuscripts.1 Marx’s Hegel commentaries were of one piece with his early critique of political economy, his discovery of the revolutionary subjectivity of the 1 A series of debates raged, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, on the meaning of these Manuscripts in Marx’s intellectual life. As against Althusser and others, who denied the importance of the Manuscripts in relation to the body of Marx’s work, were those who argued for an integrality of the economic and philosophic in Marx, including Herbert Marcuse’s 1932 pioneering essay “Foundation of Historical Materialism” (Marcuse, 1972), George Lukács ‘The Young Hegel (Lukacs, 1975), and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom. (Dunayevskaya 2000) As well, there were also the writings of a number of East European thinkers who drew upon these humanist essays of Marx in their battles to pose Marxist Humanism as a liberatory alternative to statist Communism. Erich Fromm’s Socialist Humanism (Fromm, 1965) contains a number of their writings.

 

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proletariat, separation from “vulgar communism,” and the emergence of his new world view—“a thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism.” The manuscript notes for what became “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” were interspersed on pages containing these other writings of the 1844 Manuscripts. Marx introduced his commentary on Hegel as point 6, following his writings on “Private Property and Communism,” which contained points #1–5. In contrast to the Young Hegelians’ lack of a critical standpoint, Marx fijirst singled out Feuerbach’s criticism: Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this fijield. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. (Marx and Engels, 1975a: 328)

Marx then proceeded to list “Feuerbach’s great achievements.” It was at that point that Marx also presented a diffference between himself and Feuerbach regarding a central concept of the Hegelian dialectic—the concept of negation of the negation. Marx wrote: Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself—as the philosophy which afffijirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore afffijirms in opposition to itself.” (329)

Marx did not take issue with Feuerbach’s critique of Hegelian philosophy afffijirming theology after having denied it. But he gave Hegel’s “negation of the negation” a richer reading than did Feuerbach. Where Feuerbach would fijind only a nullity in negation of the negation, Marx discerned “the movement of history” even if only in its “abstract, logical, speculative expression.” But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only the act of creation, the history of the origin of man. (329)

Here was the germ of Marx’s indebtedness to and appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic, and, at the same time, his critique and separation from Hegel. The dialectic of negativity, negation of the negation, would become the wellspring for Marx’s re-creation of the dialectic for an age of proletarian revolution. However, the dehumanization of philosophy, the fact that corporal humanity was missing in Hegel’s “abstract, logical speculative

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expression for the movement of history,” was what Marx sharply critiqued. In his view this was the source for “the lie” in Hegel’s principle.2 These twin points in Marx’s writing on Hegel—against the dehumanization of philosophy that reduced humanity to only an abstract selfconsciousness, and the re-appropriation of negation of negation for a diffferent historic moment—formed not only Marx’s point of departure, but can serve our own exploration of dialectical thought. In singling out, and as well moving beyond Feuerbach, Marx focused on what he called “a double error in Hegel.” First, where entities such as wealth and state power were seen by Hegel as estranged from the human being, they were not seen as real alienation, only as alienated thought entities, and therefore, the estrangement was presented in terms of abstract, philosophical thinking: It is not the fact that the human being objectifijies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifijies himself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that constitutes the posited essence of the estrangement and the thing to be superseded [for Hegel]. (331)

Marx noted that to Hegel, the appropriation of man’s essential power as alien object was only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought, as abstraction: Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the genuine criticism contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Phenomenology as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works—that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world. (331–32)

The second error: For humanity, the relation to the objective world was not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness, so that religion and wealth were “but the estranged world of human objectifijication, of man’s essential powers put to work and that they are therefore but the path to true human development.” (332) For Hegel, religion and state power appeared as spiritual entities, for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, the logical, speculative mind. The human character of nature and 2 The attempt to cast Marx as a Feuerbachian throughout this period, (see for instance Lloyd Easton’s collection on The Young Marx (Easton, 1967) which was characterized by his section title for the period of the entire Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts and other writings—“Feuerbachian critique of Hegel”) has served to obscure the rich, multi-layered relationship of Marx to Hegel that simultaneously expressed indebtedness and sharp critique.

 

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of the nature created by history—man’s products—appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind— thought-entities. (332)

Nevertheless, Marx, while critiquing Hegel’s substitution of abstractly sensuous consciousness for a humanly sensuous consciousness, singled out Hegel’s achievements: The Phenomenology is, therefore, a hidden mystifying and still uncertain criticism; but inasmuch as it depicts man’s estrangement, even though man appears only as mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far about the Hegelian standpoint. … The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its fijinal outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus fijirst that Hegel conceives the selfcreation of man as a process, conceives objectifijication as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labor and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labor. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real speciesbeing (i.e., as a human being) is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers—something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all mankind, only as the result of history—and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement. (332–333)

The fact that for Marx, “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle” could move beyond the Hegelian standpoint, that is, beyond Hegel’s abstract-bound conclusions, the “philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world” (332) of his later works, opened the door for Marx’s appropriation of the dialectic, and forms the foundation for our own exploration. At the same time we need to have before us Marx’s central critique of Hegel: The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced within the orbit of estrangement as something alien therefore denotes not only the annulment of estrangement, but of objectivity as well. Man, that is to say, is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being. … For Hegel the human being— man—equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human being is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. (333–334)

Marx was now directly commenting on the Absolute Knowledge chapter. While the English text of Marx’s Critique has his commentaries, it does not reproduce all the paragraphs that Marx’s excerpted from the Absolute Knowledge chapter. At times Marx was going sentence by sentence into Hegel’s paragraphs. He critiqued Hegel’s dehumanizing abstractions, his

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substitution of the estrangement of self-consciousness for actual estrangement, his criticism of religion and state power as spiritual entities, thought entities, while leaving human alienation in place. He exposed Hegel’s use of negation of the negation as a confijirmation of the pseudo-essence and not the confijirmation of the true essence of humanity. At the same time he singled out the positive meaning of Hegel’s dialectic of negativity: [B]y grasping the positive meaning of self-referred negation (although again in estranged fashion) Hegel grasps man’s self-estrangement, the alienation of man’s essence, man’s loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as selfdiscovery, manifestation of his nature, objectifijication and realization. (342)

Marx appropriated and concretized the revolutionary methodology inherent in negation of the negation, bringing to the fore, not communism, but a “thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism”: [W]hilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation—which is itself, however, a necessary premise—does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being. (341–42)

In a word there was not a limited halting negation, but a negation of the negation, an overcoming of communism to arrive at a self-deriving humanism. *** Marx’s revolutionary philosophic vision emerged through a critique of Hegel’s dehumanization of philosophy that was at the same time a reappropriation of the dialectic of negativity concretized as a naturalism or humanism through association with the new proletarian struggles of the 1840s. That this was not a “phase” limited to the young Marx of the 1840s, can be seen in his Grundrisse (1857) and in Capital (1867), where dialectic thought was further developed. Marx’s “coming to terms” with the Hegelian dialectic was no closing of a door. The fact that in critiquing Hegel’s dehumanization of the dialectic, Marx’s having discerned the objective revolutionary nature of the negation of the negation, and appropriated it as central to his own emancipatory philosophic vision and practice (1844–1883), has allowed for new generations of revolutionaries to ask for their historic moment: “How do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic?”

 

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With the outbreak of World War I, Lenin felt compelled to take his own thought dive into the Hegelian dialectic. (See part III for his study of Hegel’s Science of Logic). He did so without knowledge of Marx’s “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic.” The Hegelian Marxist Georg Lukács, writing after Lenin, did have benefijit of Marx’s 1844 writings in his probing of the Hegelian dialectic, including Absolute Knowledge.

III. Spirit’s Journey in Absolute Knowledge: Externalization (Entäusserung) and Recollection/Inwardization (Erinnerung) A. Entäusserung In exploring the Hegelian dialectic and Marx’s “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” in The Young Hegel, Lukács singled out “‘Entäusserung’ (‘externalization’) as, in his view, the central philosophical concept of The Phenomenology of Mind”: (1) He pointed to the radical historization of philosophy which made Hegel “become … a forerunner of historical materialism.” (Lukács, 1975: 466) (2) He presented Marx’s radical critique of Hegel’s idealistic mystifijication, particularly on the question of externalization, while at the same time demonstrating that the philosophic foundation for Marx’s revolutionary world view arose from within dialectical thought. (3) He pinpointed Marx’s active engagement with economics in 1844 as inseparable from his exploration/critique of dialectical philosophy. For Lukács, the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts were an integral whole of economics and philosophy. (4) He posed the relationship of Feuerbach with Marx in its true light: Marx’s critique of Hegel’s ‘externalization’ shows him entering into possession of the Feuerbachian heritage and at the same time we see him transcending the old materialism dialectically and leaving it behind. (547–48)

Externalization (alienation, estrangement) was a crucial philosophic concept in Hegel. In Absolute Knowledge it was presented as an externalization of self-consciousness: “the emptying of self-consciousness itself establishes thinghood.” (Phenomenology, 789) Marx had critiqued this form of externalization in Hegel: “[S]ince it is not real man, not therefore nature—man being human nature—who as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man, self-consciousness, so thinghood cannot be anything but alienated self-consciousness.” (Marx and Engels, 1975a: 335) In contrast, a “naturalism or humanism [which] is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth

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of both,” (336) characterized Marx’s emancipatory vision. He had appropriated and re-created ethäusserung and the Hegelian enrinnerung, inwardization. Negation of the negation, the supersession of externalization, was no simple return to the old, or mere nullity, but a revolutionary positive emerging from the negative—“a naturalism or humanism.” This origin of Marx’s humanism was catalyzed by the new proletarian subjectivity arising in the early 1840s. Despite Lukács’ important reading of Hegel on externalization and his perceptive commentary on Marx’s Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic, it can be questioned whether he caught the fullness of the entäusserung and erinnerung dialectic in Hegel, or the totality of Marx’s 1844 revolutionary enrinnerung in relation to humanism moving beyond communism. B. Erinnerung Lukács by no means ignored supersession, Er-innerung, in Phenomenology. He called attention to the concept of Er-Innerung as two-fold, internalization and recollection. However he did not see Hegel’s use of erinnrung in Absolute Knowledge as signifying a new moment. Rather, Lukács saw Hegel’s supersession in Absolute Knowledge, as an historical self-annulment: The reintegration of history in the absolute subject implies the annulment of time, which in its turn is the consequence of the annulment of objectivity. (Lukács, 1975: 545) Absolute knowledge, Hegel’s designation for the highest stage of human knowledge, has a defijinite idealistic signifijicance; the reintegration of ‘externalized’ reality into the subject, i.e. the total supersession of the objective world. (513)

For Lukács, the return from externalization, the recollection and inwardization, did not meet Hegel’s claim for “the new stage of existence, a new world.” (Hegel 1964: 807) Instead, the last paragraph of Absolute Knowing was seen by Lukács as “the self-annulment of history.” The issue is not limited to whether or not Lukács read the fijinal paragraph of Absolute Knowledge as the end of history, rather than seeking to work out possible ramifijications of Hegel’s “new embodiment or mode of Spirit.” Rather, philosophically, it was Absolute Spirit that was seen by Lukács as “introduc[ing] no really new knowledge about the actual evolution of history; it sets out only to clarify the products of that evolution.” (Lukács, 1975: 514) Lukács made the same point in relation to Hegel’s concept of erinnerung at the end of Absolute Knowledge: “It is consistent with this concept of Er-Innerung (i.e. internalization and recollection) that no new content

 

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should emerge at this point.” (508) Thus Lukács saw neither the philosophy of Absolute Spirit, nor the fijinal chapter Absolute Knowledge, as creating a new ground for liberation. Rather for Lukács, Absolute Spirit ended in an absolute idealism. Marx, of course had rejected Hegel’s false supersession, but left room for an authentic supersession: In the same way atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man’s possession and thus the advent of practical humanism, or atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation—which is itself, however, a necessary premise—does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being. (Marx and Engels, 1975a: 341–342)

This was most certainly a “new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit,” perhaps writ larger and set in motion more concretely and radically by Marx than Hegel had ever imagined. Yet its origins, philosophically, were within what Hegel was striving for within the Absolute Knowledge chapter, an inwardization after externalization, a double rhythm of entäussarn-erinnerung, an authentic positive in the negative. This Lukács did not see. Why? Perhaps in part the answer resides in the political direction Lukács followed in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite the brilliance of some of the essays in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, (though his essay on Reifijication showed a peculiar reifijication of proletarian subjectivity), the later capitulation to Stalinism and the Party seemed to indicate a halt or at least a muting of certain aspects of his dialectical thought. Thus, can it be an accident that his profound commentary on Marx’s “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” in The Young Hegel failed to quote or comment upon Marx’s call for a self-deriving humanism after the appearance of communism?: [C]ommunism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation— which is itself, however, a necessary premise does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being. (Marx and Engels, 1975a: 341–342)

Certainly established Communism (Stalinism) wished no dialogue here. Was this, as well, related to Lukács’ acquiescence to the Party as the absolute mediator to the new society, as opposed to any role for Absolute Knowledge, which he equated with the annulment of history, of objectivity? Whatever were his political reasons, we also need to keep in mind that

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Lukács, early on in his philosophic conclusions in The Young Hegel, saw the last sections of Hegel on religion, art and philosophy as introducing little that was new: We can only understand Hegel’s ideas about the absolute spirit if we realize that we are surveying in retrospect an evolution of the spirit now at an end, because an understanding of the deepest laws governing that evolution is only possible in retrospect and ‘post festum.’ (Lukács, 1975: 507)

“[N]o new content should emerge at this point” (508), he writes of Absolute Knowledge. Thus, despite his extensive quoting of the crucial last paragraphs of the Absolute Knowledge chapter, his reading of that chapter does not have the richness and openness of Marx’s reading. Lukács was not able to take the philosophic moment of Absolute Knowledge further for his own age. It was not concrete for him. Perhaps the pseudo-concrete of the Party and state-power, blinded Lukács to the possibility of new dialectic moments within Hegel’s discussion of Absolute Knowledge. IV. The Dialectic in Philosophy Itself: Does It Bring Forth a Dialectic of Organization?—A Reading of Absolute Knowing from Dunayevskaya In Absolute Knowing, spirit strives to know itself as spirit. As we noted earlier, Hegel described spirit’s journey in Absolute Knowledge: “The object as a whole is the mediated result [the syllogism] or the passing of universality into individuality through specifijication, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through canceled individuality or specifijic determination.” (Hegel, 1964: 790) This movement through negation of the negation characterized not only Absolute Knowing but the whole of the Phenomenology and indeed would characterize the movement through the as yet unwritten Science of Logic. Furthermore, within Absolute Knowing, the moments of Spirit’s externalization (entäusserung) and recollection/inwardization (erinnerung) would be fused as Hegel reached the culminating last pages. Let us see what this dialectic in philosophy brings forth in more detail. In the penultimate paragraph (Hegel, 1977: paragraph 807) Hegel wrote of self-knowing Spirit knowing not only itself but the negative of itself, or its limit, and thus how to sacrifijice itself. The sacrifijice was the externalization of spirit “in the form of free contingent happening,” as Time and as Space. That is, as History and as Nature. Hegel only briefly presented Nature here: “Nature, the externalized Spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal externalization of its

 

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continuing existence.” It was the other side of the externalization, Time (History), that Hegel chose to explore in the ultimate, dense, fijinal paragraph of Absolute Knowing: “But the other side of its Becoming, History is a conscious self-mediating process—Spirit emptied out into Time” (paragraph 808). This is an externalization as well, but no eternal externalization. Rather, here, “this Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits” where “the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfijillment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection.” We have moved to erinnerung, internalization. Hegel wrote of this absorption in itself as being “sunk in the night of its self-consciousness.” But just as one feels all objectivity has been extinguished, he noted that that vanished outer existence, (“History’s unfolding shapes”), had in fact been preserved and “this transformed existence—the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit’s knowledge—is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit.” Thus the recollection and inwardization, the comprehension of the journey undertaken yielded a new existence and a new world. Spirit was taking a new shape. Even if in the immediacy of a new existence it appeared that spirit had learned nothing from the earlier experience, it was not the case. The recollection, the inwardizing of the experience, preserved it, so that the new shape of spirit was on a higher level. What had been revealed was the depth of Spirit. Hegel wrote of this as the Absolute notion. At the same time this was its extension: “this revelation is also the Notion’s Time in that this externalization is in its own self externalized, and just as it is in its extension, so it is equally in its depth, in the Self.” Hegel would now draw all the strands together: The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. (paragraph 808)

How are we to read these fijinal sentences? Dunayevskaya, in returning to the Phenomenology of Spirit for her study of “Dialectics of Organization

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and Philosophy,” was in the process of working out an interpretation of a dialectic in philosophy that would impact a dialectic of organization. She was doing so in her exploration of Absolute Knowing. At a Resident Editorial Board Meeting of News and Letters, March 23, 1987, Dunayevskaya spoke of a new reading she had been working out on Hegel’s use of the word organization twice on the fijinal page of Phenomenology: I turned back to Hegel’s Phenomenology focusing fully on the last page with its very difffijicult, abstract climax that leads, at one and the same time, to the Absolute and its Golgotha. For the fijirst time, I abbreviated that whole page (p. 808 in Baillie’s translation, p. 492–93 in Miller’s) into two sentences and suddenly saw that in Hegel’s use of the word Organization, twice in the same paragraph, something that could be considered the actual ground for our concept of the relationship both of spontaneity and the party and its inseparability from organization of thought. Read it for yourself and see what you can work out, but here is what I saw, precisely because I’m working on a book on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: The two types of organization Hegel has in mind are, fijirst “as free existence” in its varying “historic form,” what we would call the movement from practice at historic turning points. Secondly, Hegel is defijining “intellectually comprehended” organization and concludes, “the two together, or History intellectually comprehended form as once recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.” My point is that it was no accident that Marx judged the Phenomenology of Mind as the most creative act of all of Hegel’s works, and where he began not just a critique of the Hegelian Dialectic, but the fijinding of a new continent of thought and revolution; both indeed had become the ground for what we are working out on the Dialectic of Organization and Philosophy. (Dunayevskaya, 1981: # 10727)

In my view, Dunayevskaya was not suggesting that Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge was explicitly a dialectics of organization. Rather, I see her saying that implicit within the self-movement of the idea, negation of the negation, there is a movement towards a dialectic of organization. The self-development of the Idea in its fullest manifestation will thus embrace a dialectic of organization. The dialectic in philosophy will from within itself give birth to a dialectic in organization. Let us continue exploring these fijinal sentences of Phenomenology, keeping in mind the richness of the category erinnerung, recollection and inwardization. We have already commented upon Marx’s erinnerung with respect to communism, in which his inwardization yielded a naturalism or self-deriving Humanism—a new world, a new existence. In Hegel, the process of recollection in its fullness, inwardization, was what, at this culminating moment of the Phenomenology, led to a new embodiment or mode of Spirit, the new stage of existence, a new world. This is why it

 

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cannot be possible to say there is no new content. The dialectic of second negation is the creation of new content, a new world. Hegel could do so in thought: The new sphere or mode of consciousness would be the Science of Logic, yet to be written. At the same time he left undeveloped, but nevertheless present, the possibility to develop the inwardization in other new worlds. Crucial among them was organization. How would the dialectic in philosophy express itself in the world of organization?3 Let us return to the fijinal sentences of Phenomenology: “The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirit as they are in themselves … Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History.” Here free existence appearing in the form of contingency, what Hegel designated as History, can be read to encompass the spontaneous mass forms of organization that have arisen historically. These are the kinds of organizations we wrote about in Part One: mass strikes, the Paris Commune, the Spanish Civil War, Hungarian Revolution, etc. These are what we call (from Dunayevskaya), “movements from practice that are themselves forms of theory.” We will further discuss this concept of theory in Part IV. This fijinal paragraph of Absolute Knowledge continues: “[T]he recollection of the Spirits … as they accomplish the organization of their realm … regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowledge in the sphere of appearance [Phenomenology]” This is the organization of thought that is philosophy. One of its concretizations is another form of theory: The organization of thought that (also from Dunayevskaya) manifests itself in a two-fold manner—(1) as a movement from theory reaching to meet that movement from practice. (2) At the same time, this form of theory is rooted in the fullness of dialectical philosophy. It is theory connected to both practice and to philosophy. The two concepts of organization come together in a surprising manner: “[T]he two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit.” The unity of history as actual

3 While Hegel did write on organization as such, particularly in relation to the organization of the church as representing an organized body of thought, it is not that specifijic discussion of organization that is at issue here, or that, in my view, leads towards a dialectics of organization and philosophy in any direct one-to-one manner. (Hegel’s discussion of the church as an organized body of ideas as opposed to mere faith will enter into our discussion in Part III of this study.)

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organization and the organization of thought comprise the Science of philosophy, which opens up a new world, a new sphere for Spirit. This is intellectually comprehended history. And yet, at the same time, this is the Calvary, the Golgotha of absolute spirit in its previous form! Can we not read one strand of this new world as the idea of comprehended History being expressed as actual organization? Is it not living human beings who comprehend history and the journey of spirit, and therefore can strive to express it in the creation revolutionary organization? What the philosophic journey through Absolute Knowing manifests, is that actual organization is not imposed upon the dialectic externally, but flows out of the dialectic of philosophy at the end of Phenomenology. This demands not alone comprehended History, but its expression in a new world, a new sphere. The comprehension means an exhaustion of the old modes (the Golgotha of previous forms) and an entrance upon new ones. As we will see in Part IV, Dunayevskaya read that as “Entering the New Society.” Is this not a plunge toward freedom, and as such, the actuality of Absolute Knowing? Cannot such philosophic actualization have among its manifestations a dialectic of organization?

CHAPTER TEN

CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM: MARX’S CRITIQUE OF A SO-CALLED SOCIALIST PROGRAM; HIS PROJECTION OF COMMUNISM; WHAT IS ITS MEANING FOR TODAY? The real historic-philosophic outline Marx sketched for future generations. —Raya Dunayevskaya The burning question of the day remains: What happens the day after? How can we continue Marx’s unchaining of the Dialectic organizationally, with the principles he outlined in his Critique of the Gotha Program? The question of “What happens after?” gains crucial importance because of what it signals in self-development and self-flowering—“revolution in permanence.” No one knows what it is, or can touch it, or decide upon it before it appears. It is not the task that can be fulfijilled in just one generation. That is why it remains so elusive, and why the abolition of the division between mental and manual labor sounds utopian. It has the future written all over it. —Dunayevskaya, “Year of only 8 Months.”

In a remarkable organizational document, Critique of the Gotha Program (CGP), Marx provides us a crucial foundation for thinking about what will be needed for the destruction of capitalism, the entrance into communist society and its concrete realization. His focus in these “Marginal Notes” was not on the totality of social relations in need of uprooting transformation, nor a “blueprint” for the future. Rather, the concentration was on labor in the transition from capitalism to full communism: What would be needed to free labor from its capitalist value integument? What would be required to transform labor into a creative, fully human activity? What principles would a revolutionary organization need to be based upon to join with the working masses to bring about such a uprooting/transforming change? Three themes within the CGP seem crucial: 1) The CGP was a critique of a supposedly socialist program, the doctrines of a proclaimed revolutionary organization. Marx was raising the question of the relationship of organization and principles (philosophy). 2) The CGP spoke of the immediate need to transform the mode of production, that is, the destruction of value production. To break with the law of value signaled the abolition of commodity production characteristic of capitalism, and thus the entrance

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into what Marx designated the lower phase of communism. 3) A discussion of what would be needed to reach the higher phase of communism, humanity’s long-held dream of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” followed Marx’s remarks on the lower phase. Since the end of the 19th century the Critique of the Gotha Program (CGP) might have served as an important point of departure for thinking about revolutionary organization, though the fijirst generation of Marxists post-Marx hardly saw it or probed it in this context. Those for whom it was directly written, leaders of the Social-Democratic Workers Party in Germany, ignored and/or rejected it, suppressing its publication for a decade and a half. The critique was not only of a particular socialist tendency, but of an entire school of thought, Lassalleanism. In the fijirst decades of the 20th century, admiration for Lassalle’s founding of the General Association of German Workers was such that Rosa Luxemburg held Lassalle’s national organization on a seemingly higher level than Marx’s work with the First Workingman’s International. (See “The Philosopher of Permanent Revolution Creates New Ground for Organization,” Chapter XI of Dunayevskaya, 1982) It was Lenin who felt compelled to more fully explore ideas from the Critique in his 1917 State and Revolution. Two writings from the 1870s, Civil War in France and GCP, became extremely concrete for him on the eve of October. In State and Revolution Lenin brought to the fore the profound relationship between Marx’s recognition of the need to smash the state and replace it with the non-state state of the Paris Commune and his CGP with its views on labor in a post-capitalist society. Nonetheless, what was not on Lenin’s agenda was probing CGP as an organizational document, one which could have spoken to the question of the revolutionary party in Russia. Later generations of revolutionaries in various organizations have been attracted to Marx’s expression, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” in the CGP. And yet, they failed to deeply probe the barriers that would have to be overcome in the lower phase of communism to achieve the destruction of value production, or to fully grapple with Marx’s brief sketch of the needed transformation of the labor process to make the higher phase of communism a reality.

• The “real historic-philosophic outline” Marx penned in 1875, Critique of the Gotha Program, had been written in response to the draft of a unity program formulated by the two existing German workers’ organizations—the

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Social-Democratic Workers Party (the Eisenachers) founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Babel in Eisenach in 1869 and the General Association of German Workers founded by Lassalle. At the Gotha Congress they were to unite on the basis of the draft program to form the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany. Though Lassallean in its nature, most of the program had in fact been written by Liebknecht, who was a follower of Marx. For Liebknecht and many of his co-thinkers, organizational form—a united German party—took precedence over adhering to socialist principles. It was a fetishism of organization, which would reach far beyond the initial unity congress. In critiquing a supposedly socialist program, Marx immediately had to take issue with its basic misunderstanding of categories such as labor, nature, society, capitalists, and landowners, as well as the relationship between production and distribution, and how production and distribution would manifest themselves with the overthrow of class society. In his notes, Marx gave a general view of the emergence of a post-capitalist society: What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. (Marx and Engels, 1989a: 81–99)

He took up the vacuous Lassallean expression “proceeds of labor” and showed that “the co-operative proceeds of labor are the total social product.” Where the draft had called for the “undiminished” proceeds of labor to be distributed to all members of society, Marx showed the absurdness of the concept “undiminished proceeds”: From [the total social product] must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.

From deductions for production, Marx moved to deductions in relation to the means of consumption: Before [the other part of the total product] is divided among the individuals…there has to be deducted again … First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as school, health

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Crucially in Marx’s argument, even these fijirst measures came not in a value producing society, but only in a “co-operative society.” Lassallean doctrines had prophesied that this new “undiminished.” “fair” distribution could come with the help of state-aid within existing, that is, classdominated society. In sharp contrast, Marx spelled out the initial requirements of a non-class dominated society: Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor.

In this “lower phase of communist society” capitalist value production would be abolished. Historically, this is opposed to the claim of those who argued that Stalin’s Russia was in the lower phase of communism though the law of value continued to operate. State-capitalism is not the lower or fijirst phase of communism. Marx’s comments were also in opposition to blueprints that call for the growth of co-operatives, collectives, etc. without at the same time posing the need to uproot value production so that such labor could flourish as authentically freely associated. There is no way of moving beyond capital without the destruction of value production. It is abstract utopianism to think otherwise. In the lower phase products no longer would have a dual value, value and use value, because the labor which produces these products would no longer be characterized by the duality of concrete labor and abstract labor. Co-operative labor, here freely associated labor, would begin to take hold in a society with common ownership and control of the means of production. At the same time, Marx warned that such a society, still carrying the birthmarks of the previous society, will of necessity have defects. He demonstrated these bourgeois limitations, showing that distribution of means of consumption based on commodity equivalents—“a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form”—was an “equal right” that “is still in principle—bourgeois right.” Such “equal right” is applied to unequal, that is, diffferent individuals, who are looked at only from one side, “regarded only as workers and nothing

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more is seen in them.” Looked upon only as workers meant that initially the duration/intensity of the labor would be measured in determining remuneration. These kinds of defects were inevitable in this fijirst phase: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” Marx refused to be limited by the Gotha Program’s concentration on distribution, and its erroneous concepts of “undiminished” and “fair”: “It was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.” He extended his Notes, moving beyond the lower phase of communism, and penned perhaps his most challenging, most revolutionary human, “utopian” expression of a future new human society: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want, after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirely and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

His projection encompassed the inseparability of labor and life that would be the hallmark of what it meant to be fully human. The factors Marx wrote of are, at one and the same time, barriers to be overcome, and dimensions of human freedom to be expressed. To probe what would allow us to cross “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right” and enter fully into “the higher phase of communism,” is to see the arduous task we face. To take the fijirst steps toward practicing such “utopian” concepts the day after revolution, requires us to think about them, to theorize about them, before the revolution. This is far from posing any “blueprints” for a new society. Rather, it is to take the foundations that Marx has given us, internalize them, and ask: What content can we add out of the historic experiences that have occurred and the ideas developed since Marx’s day? In discussing the “higher phase of communism,” we do not want “to stagify” the two phases. Rather it is the inter-connectedness of these two moments of a whole which is crucial. We would argue that Marx in writing of both phases of communism is expressing a revolution in permanence in the mode of production in CGP. Marx was arguing that you couldn’t approach what would be needed for the higher phase if you did not break with the law of value and thus enter the lower phase. The breaking of the

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law of value releases the possibility to approach concretely the pathways toward the higher phase of communism. The path to a higher phase of communism needs to pass in a dialectical manner through the lower phase. The relation between the phases Marx writes of in GCP is both historically, that is, materially determined, and conditioned by human intervention. When working people appropriate the second phase as their own, as their task to create, then and only then, will we have the driving force, the motor, for the full abolition of the law of value, thus overcoming the danger of regression. The connection between the two phases is what is crucial for both the fijirst and second phase. There is a need to continuously re-envision and concretize what a future society might look like. In this sense a discussion of CGP, before the revolution, can be an energizing principle for the actual destruction of value production, and the fijirst steps toward authentic communism. It is a task for the working masses and for a revolutionary organization that strives to be in fusion with the masses’ self-actualization. A thought-dive into CGP seems to be a crucial catalyst for envisioning alternative to capitalism for any revolutionary organization. There is nothing automatic, or solely spontaneous about the tasks Marx laid out in CGP. To undertake them in practice is to grasp the CGP as an organizational/philosophic document. Marx was critiquing a socialist organization for abandoning the principles (philosophy) that had been worked out over decades of struggle and theoretic labor, for abdicating its political-organizational responsibility to a body of revolutionary ideas, and thus to the working class struggles of its day. In responding to the theoretical errors of the Lassallean doctrines, Marx profoundly sketched out new points of departure for smashing the manacles of capitalist production and entering the terrain of free and associated labor leading to full communism. His Critique was both “practical” and deeply theoretical-philosophic. We can perhaps read Marx’s discussion of the lower and upper phases of communism in close association to the Hegelian dialectic with its fijirst and second negation. The fijirst negation—the negating of value production of capitalist society—can be seen as the lower phase of communism. Precisely because it is fijirst negation, this lower phase is defijined by what it is not—not capitalism. It contains the birthmarks of that previous society, and has not yet freed itself from them. Its being is a negation. At the same time, this fijirst negation contains within the seeds of second negation, the negation of the negation. With this fijirst negation, the abolition of

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value production, there simultaneously begins a movement to negate this negation, to negate a society which is determined only by directly social labor based on time and intensity, and to begin searching out a way of laboring inseparable from life. This is the second negation, a movement to transcend the lower phase of communism. It is a negation not of capitalism but a negation of what replaces capitalism, and still carries its scars. Thus the new is now defijined not only by being the negation of capitalism. This second negation, a negation of the negation, contains the positive. It is determined, realized, from its own ground, not from the ground of previous class society. This is Marx’s “Humanism beginning from itself.” It is what he meant when he wrote of “Time as the place of human development.” This absolute negativity with regard to labor is what Marx wrote of as the goal of the higher phase of communism. In posing fijirst and second negation in relation to the lower and higher  phases of communism, we are not seeking to establish a one.to-one relation, that is, we are not trying to reduce the abolition of value production to only fijirst negation. With respect to capitalism, the lower phase of communism is not only destruction of the old, but the establishment of a foundation for building a new society. In that sense, though it is defective, it is a giant leap forward, and thus contains elements of the positive in the negative, dimensions of second negation, the ground for developing a new society. At the same time, when the lower phase of communism is viewed not alone in respect to capitalism, but in respect to the vision of the higher phase of communism, we can see that it is “only” fijirst negation, and that the development of the new, the continuation of second negation is crucial. We see that fijirst and second negation are not “stages,” not isolated moments. Rather, it is absolute negativity, revolution in permanence, which is manifested in an integrality of fijirst and second negation. Marx was posing universals that were in need of concretization, beginning the day of and the day after the revolution—a view of the absolute liberation the birth of a new society would mean in terms of labor. What is meant by philosophically envisioning a new society, and is at the same time, far away from writing blueprints and project hatching? What is the organizational responsibility for helping to do that? This is what Marx was asking in this philosophical/ organizational document. It is a century and a third later and the task remains to be undertaken. Let’s probe further Marx’s notes on what would be necessary to reach the higher phase of communism: “after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor… has vanished”

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We are here speaking of the class history of humanity since emerging from primitive communism. And Marx did not exclude that earlier period that expressed social divisions within the family—including the labor of children and the sexual division of labor—as well as the beginning divisions between chiefs and ranks in the primitive gens. (See The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Marx, 1972), and Dunayevskaya’s discussion of them in Dunayevskaya, 1982.) With the technological revolutions from the Industrial Revolution, through automation, to the computerized technology of today, the social division of labor intensifijied. The sharp class divisions and the intense fragmentation of the individual worker have even become “accepted” in many quarters, as the necessary norm of the new technologies. Historically, even in times of social transformation, (Russia post-1917, China-post-1949), a drive for production and more production meant that the role of workers, as well as peasants, was seen as working within the existing conditions of production “for the revolution,” and not related to fundamentally changing the conditions of production, and thereby beginning to break down the social division of labor characteristic of class society. In contrast, Marx argued that the long history of class society was in fact the “pre-history” of humanity, and he posed the necessity for ending this enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor. Where can we fijind the sources for its abolition? Can workers’ voices, often stifled in the storm of “progress” even as they scream in protest against their conditions of labor and life, be heard as a search for a diffferent way of laboring? Can workers’ ideas about and practices of freely associated labor—if they become the determinate voice—provide pathways forward? “the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished”

If early in humanity’s history there was little separation between mental and physical labor, this fijirst unity was bound by a subservience to the power of nature, and thus a unity with limited horizons. The social division of labor as class society emerged often meant a separation of mental and physical labor. That separation was manifest to a greater or lesser degree under various forms of class society. The separation intensifijied and became a full blown antithesis with the rise of industrial capitalism. The two and a half centuries since the industrial revolution began have welded together science and industry, vastly increasing human knowledge  and capacity to transform the world. However, because science and industry were fused together within capitalist class domination, the

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antithesis between mental and physical labor has only deepened. A further fragmentation of humanity emerged. Marx would write, “To have one basis for science and another for life was a priori a lie.” Capital’s self-expanding value—“the aim of capital is not served merely by obtaining more ‘wealth’ … but because it wants more value, to command more objectifijied labor.” “Value that is big with itself”—through the extraction of surplus value from the living worker, only furthered the antithesis of mental and manual labor. It is evident that no “technological” solution is possible. Science, far from being neutral, is developed today within a class-bound, value-producing society. Perhaps science and its manifestation in technology can be expressed in a diffferent manner in a non-class society. If so, one again needs to turn to the working masses for ideas and actions for breaking the antithesis of mental and physical labor. Historically, how have workers fought this division between thinking and doing in the workplace? The principle mode of resistance within capitalist society has been the fijight for the shortening of the working day. When industrial capitalism fijirst took hold it had so voracious an appetite that it lengthened the working day at the expense of workers health and lives. Only the self-organization of the workers in fijighting for a shortening of the working day—fijirst a ten-hour and then an eight-hour day—put a limit of capital’s were-wolf appetite. Marx was certainly one with the working classes’ battles to reduce of the class-bound, capitalist working day. This can be seen in his chapter on the Working Day in Capital. At the same time as Marx singled out the struggle for a shortening of the working day, he posed a transformation in the concept of labor. The working class battles of the 1840s had shown him—see for example the struggles of the Silesian weavers and Marx’s response—that it was not the abolition of labor, but the emancipation of labor, that was crucial. In 1871, the Paris Communards began to strip the mystic veil offf commodity production, and make concrete the fact that freely associated labor created a form of working that challenged the value integument of capitalism. Thus both the kind of labor and its duration were key. In fact, workshops in Paris decided for a ten-hour day when it meant producing armaments and other goods needed to defend the Commune. They did this at the same time they formed co-operative production, appointed their own manager and foreman, and decided on production daily. The Communards in their brief existence of two and half months could, of course, not fulfijill their promise. However, in their attempts to change their conditions of laboring and replace the capitalist owners with the workers’

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co-operatives under the rule of the Commune, the Communards prefijigured later struggles on the nature of work. The fijight over the very nature of work has intensifijied since Marx’s day. In particular, have been struggles against automated, computerized production. What kind of permanent uprooting of the old society, of its ways of laboring, will be necessary for the abolition of the antithesis between mental and manual labor? To further probe this we turn to Marx’s most revolutionary, most “utopian” concept of a transformation of labor from a means of life to life’s prime want. “after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want”

This expression is crucial in grasping Marx’s view of labor. The idea was in fact embedded in his writings of the 1840s, particularly the 1844 EconomicPhilosophic Manuscripts. It is here where his concept of labor underwent a revolution. Marx had recognized that in capitalist society “my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.” (“Comments on James Mill,”: Marx and Engels, 1975a 228) However, his vision became not the abolition of labor, but the emancipation of labor. Why? The working class activities of the 1840s showed the emancipatory possibilities of labor: The Silesian uprising begins precisely with that the French and English workers’ uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat. The action itself bears the stamp of this superior character. Not only machines, these rivals of the workers, are destroyed, but also ledgers, the titles to property. And while all other movements were aimed primarily only against the owner of the industrial enterprise, the visible enemy, this movement is at the same time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy. Finally, not a single English workers’ uprising was carried out with such courage, thought and endurance. (“Critical Marginal Notes on the Article by a Prussian” (A critique of Arnold Ruge) Marx and Engels, 1975a: 201)

Marx asked what should be the role of the revolutionary intellectual in relation to the uprising: Confronted with the fijirst outbreak of the Silesian workers’ uprising, the sole task of one who thinks and loves the truth consisted not in playing the role of schoolmaster in relation to this event, but instead of studying its specifijic character. This, of course, requires some scientifijic insight and some love of mankind. (202)

In undertaking his theoretical labors over the next four decades, Marx would have his senses attuned to the activities of workers. Whether it was the mass demonstrations and struggles for the shorter working day and

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their impact on the writing of Capital, or the labor practices of the Paris Communards and their influence on the French edition of Capital, and on CGP, Marx’s theoretical labors were inseparable from a concept of workers as thinkers and doers. Thus labor as life’s prime want, was seen in relation to working peoples’ own activities and thoughts. In Marx’s day, much of the struggle focused on shortening of the working day—a ten and an eight-hour day in opposition to capitalism’s determination to extract surplus value by the extension of the working day—the production of absolute surplus value. In the latter half of the 20th century some social thinkers viewed the solution to alienated labor as laying solely in the further reduction the working day through technology, automation, and computerization. They saw humanity’s freedom as freedom from labor. This was not Marx’s view. He had certainly been one with the 19th century working classes’ battles to reduce of the class-bound, capitalist working day. At the same time, he critiqued the fact that labor within the given workday was alienated labor characterized by speed-up, the domination of machinery (dead labor) over living labor. This intensifijication of work within a given work time, Marx termed the extraction of relative surplus value. The working class of the 19th century fought concretely to limit the length of the working day. At the same time, primarily through their trade unions, they fought to control the conditions of labor, health and safety, within the given working day. Their battles entered directly into the content of Marx’s Capital. If we jump ahead to the second half of the 20th century, we see that a revolution in production methods—automation—exponentially intensifijied the extraction of surplus value within a given working day. Workers were forced to work under the domination of the automated machine. Speed-up, intense fragmentation of work in the automated factory became a way of life in mass industrial production—as steel, auto, coal, and most manufacturing came under the rule of automation. Technology transformed not so much the length of the working day, but the intensity and very nature of labor within the working day. Workers were more than ever tied to working at the pace of the machine, under its control. Working people began challenging the very basis of capitalism—its kind of labor, and posing ideas for what labor could be. Workers, through strikes against automation and speed-up, asked “What Kind of Labor?” should humanity do. The manner and intensity of work became a central question along with its duration. And while the protests and strikes began in the fijight against alienated labor in capitalist society, the discussion extended to the nature of labor in a society of freely associated labor after

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the abolition of value production. Angela Terrano, a working woman and Marxist-Humanist, questioned the very existence of automated labor: Why do people assume that Automation is the way people will want to work in a new society? Why do they assume that all that matters is that the workers will be in control? Will ‘being in control’ of the machine lighten the work or make it less boring?. … Once the factory, that ‘House of Terror,’ still dominates our lives, I cannot see that the question of who is in control changes things, really changes them from the ground up? For example, what happens to the question of how people will work? Won’t work be something diffferent—tied up with life itself—it cannot be the same as Automation that uses men as part of its operations.” (quoted in Denby, 1960: 47)

Her colleague, Charles Denby, the auto worker editor of News & Letters, had a diffferent view: I disagree that control of production would hardly change labor so long as the factory remains. The factory would not be a ‘House of Terror’ if the workers managed it. No doubt the new society will create other ways to produce. But the road to that new society can begin in no other way than by changing the conditions of labor, which means, in the fijirst place, control of production. (49–50)

When Marx wrote of the fact that in a new society we will “still [be] stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges,” the capitalist form of technology would certainly be one of those areas. Do we need to destroy it and start over, or can aspects of it be used in a new society? Is the factory a social form of capitalism that we need to destroy? There is no a priori answer. It is not that one needs to “take sides” as to the role of technology in a new society. Rather, it is to realize that workers do indeed think their own thoughts. Only workers in freely associated labor can concretely work out answers and concretely transform labor into life’s prime want. The struggles for a new kind of labor were not confijined to the West. In  East Germany, June 17, 1953, a workers’ revolt broke out in response to “communist” state-imposed speed-up in the factories. It was the fijirst open revolt against Stalinist state-capitalist rule. (See “East Germany, June 17, 1953” in Dunayevskaya, 2000 as well as “Revolt, Berlin 1953” in Hardt and Negri, 2004) An even more profound opening was signaled by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, where the revolutionary social form of Workers Councils begun by the Hungarian masses in the factories demanded an end to Russian occupation and a authentic communist government, catalyzed by the workers actions in occupying the factories and seeking to establish

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their own control of production without Communist Party bosses. From both the West and the East, do the voices of workers in those early years of automation and speed-up resonate with what we face early in the 21st century? “after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual”

Notice that Marx posed no mere increase in productive forces, but tied productive forces to the all-around development of the individual. There could be no technological solution of machinery developed in isolation from or in opposition to the individual. As we noted earlier, in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), Marx had warned against any division of science and humanity: “To have one basis for science and another for life is a priori a lie.” Marx’s two-decades of further labor resulting in Capital (1867), had demonstrated that an increase in the productive forces under the control of capital, far from emancipating the worker, further fragmented and enslaved her/him. The development of the forces of production in a new society could not take the same route as under capitalism. Human beings would need to develop a far diffferent type of relationship to technology, one which would increase the all-around development of the individual and stand in opposition to the fragmentation of human beings. “all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”

Is this a mere extension of capitalist wealth, or are the springs of co-operative wealth qualitatively diffferent? We can get an indication of where Marx was heading from an excerpt in his Grundrisse, notebooks from 1857–58: When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control for the forces of nature–those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution–i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick–an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? (Marx, 1973)

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In spending time on what is needed to actualize the higher phase of communism we do not want to ignore the lower phase as unimportant or unnecessary. It becomes especially important when one sees schemes proposing changes in distribution as if that could occur without uprooting changes in the mode of production. Or when one sees discussions of “market socialism” which seem to be based on a kind of “withering away” of capitalism and its market, rather than the need for the simultaneous destruction of commodity production and the market. At the same time, to theorize only about the lower phase of communism without at least a partial vision of the higher phase, and of the need to search out the multi-lineal pathways to reach toward a new society, risks stage-ifying, and thus halting the movement. As Marx noted, the question of equal right as remuneration is to look at human beings as “one defijinite side only … regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen.” Not only are questions of racism, ethnicity, sexism, man-woman relations, etc. crucial ones at each phase of communism, but the centrality of workers and class is itself a negation in the process of being transformed: the emancipation of labor means the abolition of workers as workers, and their development into all-rounded individuals expressing all their mental and manual talents—nothing less than reaching labor as the prime necessity of life. As we noted, Marx made no sharp separation between the two phases of communism. His concentration in CGP was a critique of the so-called socialist program that proposed wrong or imprecise ideas on the nature of the changes needed to enter the lower phase. He was questioning whether, in their drive for unity, these socialists even considered social uprooting necessary. The Critique was aimed at an organization claiming to be revolutionary: [I]sn’t that, that precisely, the overriding question—the relation of theory to organization. Wasn’t that Critique written as “Marginal Notes” to a Party’s program? Wasn’t it sent to a leader (Bracke) in the parties about to be united? (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 255)

Marx presented the international context as opposed to the narrow national view-point of the Gotha Program: “Lassalle, in opposition to the Communist Manifesto and to all earlier socialism, conceived the workers’ movement from the narrowest national standpoint. He is being followed in this—and that after the work of the International!” Marx posed the dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary political form at the beginning of the fijirst phase of communism. “Between capitalist and communist

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society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” He neither saw this as any permanent political stage, nor in any way reduced or corrupted this into a dictatorship of a party. His “model” of this “non-state state” was the Paris Commune. Marx provided no road-map for the journey to be taken on the day of and the day after revolution. However, in his call for the destruction of the capitalist mode of production, and in the fijive dimensions for entering higher communism in relation to labor, he provided a general view of how humanity might hew out an emancipatory future, at least in terms of labor. For Marx, it was not a pre-planned event. He focused on the human revolutionary process that would create it. Only human beings in revolutionary praxis could take the journey and work out the future. A task for more than one generation. However, not a fairy-land of the distant future. Rather, a pathway that women and men could concretely enter upon the morn of revolution. More than one hundred-thirty years after Critique of the Gotha Program the challenge/journey remains to be undertaken.

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APPENDIX: MARX ON NECESSITY, FREEDOM, TIME AND LABOR Marx’s 1875 discussion of the two phases of communism and what would be needed to arrive at a society based on “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs!” –presented in a document that critiqued a socialist organization’s misguided program and put forth notes on revolutionary organization’s responsibility for analyzing capitalist labor and posing an emancipatory vision of human labor—can be seen as the culmination and fullest concretization of a wealth of Marx’s writings on the dialectic of necessity, freedom and time in class and classless society. “Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the control of necessity. Everywhere the paths to freedom are open,” (Marx and Engels, 1975d: 25) wrote Marx in his 1841 doctoral thesis. However, the realization of such a view, dare we say Marx’s utopian view, could only be approached via a through-going critique of the actuality of capitalism’s perverted, reductive practice of labor and time as socially necessary labor-time. This began to be carried out in such works as Poverty of Philosophy (1847): If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposed that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labor; that men are efffaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day. (Marx and Engels, 1976: 127)

We are here witness to Marx’s working out how the factory clock, socially necessary labor time, determines value. Within these studies would come not only a discernment of the capitalist extraction of value and surplus value through the splitting of labor into labor as activity and labor-power the commodity, but glimpses of a profoundly diffferent view of labor as a creative, self-developing activity, based on free disposal time. Marx continually asked himself and explored: what would be required to move from “socially necessary labor time” to “time as the space for human development”? What great transformations were needed? What were the pathways for such transformations? This was the dialectic of labor and capital.

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At the same time, as we will see, Marx did not hesitate to pose a second dialectic of labor post-capitalism: the dialectic of freedom and necessity even as humanity reached for disposable time, that is, free time. Working out the fijirst dialectic and posing the second was particularly true in Marx’s writings in the 1860s when he was working on the manuscripts which would become the volumes of Capital. In the “1861–62 Economic Manuscripts” we fijind formulations sharply contrasting capitalist labor time verses disposable time: What distinguishes the factory system is the fact that in it the true nature of surplus value emerges. Surplus labour, and therefore the question of labour time, becomes decisive here. But time is in fact the active existence of the human being. It is not only the measure of human life. It is the space for its development. And the encroachment of capital over the time of labour is the appropriation of the life, the mental and physical life, of the worker. (“Division of Labor and Mechanical Workshop, Tool and Machinery,” Marx and Engels, 1989: 493)

When Marx writes “Time is in fact the active existence of the human being,” he is showing how in the factory, capital narrows that existence to a quantitative measure: the surplus value created by socially necessary labor time, “the encroachment of capital over the time of labor.” What happened to this “space for [human life’s] development”? The capitalist system appropriated “the life, the mental and physical life, of the worker.” Marx pointed out an anonymous pamphlet from 1821 which described the surplus that was generated by workers, and which Marx would later term “surplus value,” as “surplus labor.” Further, the author recognized that if this surplus labor were eliminated so that the worker was obliged to work only long enough for his maintenance, he would have free time (disposable time) and that “Wealth […] is disposable time, and nothing more.” It is here that Marx has a rich discussion on the meaning of “disposable time”: “that is, real wealth; time which will not be absorbed in direct productive labour, but will be available for enjoyment, for leisure, thus giving scope for free activity and development, Time is scope for the development of man’s faculties, etc.” Marx ended his discussion as follows: Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for free activity which—unlike labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfijilled, and the fulfijillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination.

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chapter ten  It is self-evident that if labour-time is reduced to a normal length and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and men, etc., being abolished, it acquires a quite diffferent, a free character, it becomes real social labour, and fijinally the basis of disposable time—the labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much higher quality than that of the beast of burden. (1861–63 Economic Manuscripts, Marx and Engels, 1989d: 390, 391).

There are two important dimensions here: (1) “Real social labor,” is qualitatively diffferent from labor under “the social contradictions between master and men” (capitalist and worker). That is, necessary labor, when it is not under class domination, is itself a new kind of labor. (2) Beyond this new kind of labor lies disposable time. Finally we come to Marx’s formulation on freedom and necessity in Vol. III. of Capital prepared by Engels from Marx’s manuscripts of the mid-1860s: The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper… Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite. (Marx, 1998)

It is here where Marx develops the dialectic of freedom and necessity in perhaps his fullest manner. “The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself” lies beyond material production, and yet is intimately tied to such necessary labor. That labor is socialized labor of associated producers, that is, it is freely associated labor Marx wrote of in Chapter One of Capital. What now becomes clear is that the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program is a further expansion/concretization of the dialectic in two senses: First, Marx in spelling out what would be necessary to reach the higher phase of communism— In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want, after the productive forces

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have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirely and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

—has presented what the pathway to freely associated labor, real socialized labor, after breaking with the capitalist law of value would look like. Second, it can be no accident that Marx chose to spell out this view of the future, a future “after the revolution” in a document on revolutionary organization, even if the organizational program he was critiquing failed to project such a revolutionary perspectives. He saw the need for an authentically revolutionary organization, authentic because it would be based on principles, as an internalization of theoretical and practical labor that had unfolded over the previous three decades, 1844–1875. When the unifijication program of Gotha failed to do that, his critique unfolded. Even if “the party” failed to take heed, Marx left for future generations the foundation for a dialectic of organization based on his philosophic labor.

PART THREE

HEGEL AND LENIN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LENIN AND HEGEL: THE PROFOUND PHILOSOPHIC BREAKTHROUGH THAT FAILED TO ENCOMPASS REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION [E]ven the one post-Marx Marxist revolutionary who did reach deeply into philosophy—Lenin—nevertheless did not do so on the question of organization. In truth, he never renounced his position on the vanguard party set out in 1902 in What Is To Be Done?, though he often critiqued it himself. He profoundly extended his new breakthrough in philosophy to a concretization of the dialectics of revolution, and yet he never changed his position on the need for the ‘thin layer of Bolsheviks’ as a vanguard party organization. In 1982 in Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, we critiqued Lenin politically. To fully work out the dialectics of philosophy and organization for our age, it is now clear that the critique must dig deep philosophically. —Dunayevskaya “On Political Divides and Philosophic New Beginnings,” June 5, 1987.

I. Introduction No Marxist in the fijirst part of the 20th Century probed as deeply into the Hegelian dialectic as did Vladimir Lenin. His 1914–15 notebooks on Science of Logic were termed his “philosophic preparation for revolution” by Raya Dunayevskaya, (the original translator of his notebooks into English), who argued that it was impossible to fully grasp the political-revolutionary activity of Lenin from 1915 until the end of his life without being cognizant of his break with his own philosophic past. Yet, as she recognized, Lenin never broke in a fundamental manner with the concept of a vanguard party that he had fijirst formulated in his 1902 polemic What Is To Be Done? How does one come to terms with this stark duality—revolutionary political practice grounded in a strand of Hegelian Marxism, but within a framework of Bolshevism—that characterized Lenin’s half dozen years as revolutionary post-1917? Most crucially, this was not alone a question of Lenin’s last half dozen years. With the rise of Stalinism, the duality split wide open and would come to impact Marxist thought and practice for the duration of

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the 20th century. Lenin’s profound philosophic reorganization was buried under an avalanche of vulgar, “offfijicial,” “orthodox,” Marxism. In Stalin’s hands the “vanguard” Bolshevik/Communist Party devoured the revolution from within, transforming Soviet power into a single party, statecapitalist monstrosity. Though Lenin certainly would have opposed this transformation, did he leave his Bolshevik colleagues unprepared for such counter-revolution within the revolution? Did the lacunae left by Lenin’s philosophic reorganization and revolutionary political practice on the one hand, but his “private enclave” of not subjecting his concept of revolutionary organization to his dialectical philosophic reorganization on the other, become fijilled by Stalin’s counter-revolution? The vast majority of the anti-Stalinist Left remained trapped in this framework post-Lenin. Over several decades Dunayevskaya returned again and again to probe Lenin’s duality. In the 1970s, she created the category “philosophic ambivalence” to characterize Lenin’s failure to openly break with his own philosophic past, particularly with his 1908 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and to share his post-1914 Hegelian standpoint with his Bolshevik colleagues. He had kept his philosophic reorganization as a private matter, not sharing his theoretic-philosophic process with co-leaders, only expressing his political conclusions. And he had never, she noted, subjected his vanguardist concept of organization to philosophic self-critique. For Lenin, philosophy and organization, at least in terms of his Bolshevik Party, remained in separate compartments. By the mid-1980s, Dunayevskaya further developed her critique. She explored whether Lenin’s failure to extend his philosophic reorganization to the Party was not only a question of the contradictory historical circumstances of the fijirst workers’ revolution occurring in a technologically underdeveloped land—necessitating, in Lenin’s view, the maintenance of the old vanguardist concept of What Is To Be Done?—but was also fundamentally rooted in his lack of full philosophical probing of “negation of the negation” in his Hegel Notebooks. Absolute Negativity reaches its most critical expression in the Absolute Idea chapter of Science of Logic, and in Hegel’s admonition, in its fijinal sentence, to follow that negativity “to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit.” Lenin chose not to explore this fijinal moment of the Absolute Idea and its opening to the Philosophy of Spirit. For Dunayevskaya, the philosophic ambivalence was now seen as internal to Lenin’s probing of the Science of Logic—what she saw as his theoretical pausing only at the threshold of Hegel’s Absolute Idea.

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Dunayevskaya thus came to a changed perception of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence. In 1986–87 while working on her projected book “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” she was exploring whether Lenin’s philosophic ambiguity lay not alone in his failure to break openly with his philosophic past, including keeping his philosophic notebooks private and not sharing their methodology with his Bolshevik colleagues, but could be found in its most critical form in what she saw as Lenin’s impatient rush to conclusions within his Notebook on the Science of Logic’s penultimate chapter “The Idea of Cognition,” and his incomplete philosophic journey into the last chapter, “The Absolute Idea.” The heart of the present chapter is an exploration of the relationship between what I am calling Lenin’s internal philosophic ambivalence and his failure to subject organization, his concept of the vanguard party, to Hegel’s methodology of Absolute Negativity. We will use Dunayevskaya’s mid-1980s changed perception of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence as our guide. II. A Preliminary Note on Lenin’s Philosophic Exploration of Hegel We do not intend to rehearse the full content of Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks on Hegel which have been covered in great detail elsewhere.1 However, a brief look of some of the principle strands of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks will help to situate our discussion. The Notebooks were a combination of Lenin copying numerous excerpts from the Logic—often accompanied by marks of emphasis including underlining, capitalization, exclamation marks, and short notations such as N.B. (nota bene or note well)—together with far more extensive commentary, including Lenin’s “defijinitions,” “materialist translations,” references to other thinkers and works, including to Marx’s Capital, and various Russian thinkers. After excerpts and brief commentary on Hegel’s Prefaces and Introduction, Lenin took up the fijirst book of the Logic, the Doctrine of Essence. Here we encounter Lenin’s initial wariness about Hegel’s idealistic framework, his references to the absolute, God the pure Idea:

1 See Dunayevskaya’s original English translation published as appendix to the 1958 edition of her Marxism and Freedom. Some of her various commentaries will be taken up in the following section of this chapter. See also Kevin Anderson’s Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, in which a detailed analysis of the Notebooks is presented, as well as commentary on various explorations by western Marxists of Lenin’s Hegel notebooks.

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chapter eleven Nonsense about the absolute. I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically: Hegel is materialism which has been stood on its head (according to Engels)—that is to say, I cast aside for the most part God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc. (Lenin, 1976: 104)

Lenin’s determination to read Hegel “materialistically” was prominent in his early notations, though later he will comment on the materialism within Hegel as opposed to the need to give it such a reading from the outside. However, Lenin never completely abandons this framework of the need to read Hegel materialistically. In the initial section of the Doctrine of Being on Quality, Lenin wrote his fijirst “defijinition”: Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical,—under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another,—why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another. (109)

It is such defijinitions or translations that yield some of Lenin’s richest commentary “en lisant (while reading) Hegel.” The question of movement, of the identity of opposites continued to be of importance in Lenin’s readings: Hegel analyzes concepts that usually appear to be dead and shows that there is movement in them. Finite? That means moving to an end! Something?— means not that which is Other. Being in general?—means such indeterminateness that Being = not-Being. All-sided, universal flexibility of concepts, a flexibility reaching to the identity of opposites,—that is the essence of the matter. This flexibility, applied subjectivity = eclecticism and sophistry. Flexibility, applied objectively, i.e., reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, is dialectics, is the correct reflection of the eternal development of the world. (110)

This movement was recognized by Lenin to be not an externally imposed movement, but a self-movement. He quoted Hegel: “the negative in general contains the ground of Becoming, the unrest of self-movement,” (113) and emphasized the concept of self-movement in his marginalia. In his notes on the last section of the Doctrine of Being, Measure, that movement will be seen as “leaps,” as opposed to mere gradualness in the dialectic, as Lenin wrote “leaps” several times in the margin next to his Hegel excerpts, and even drew an illustration of the concept. In turning to the Doctrine of Essence, we again will only give the barest indication of Lenin’s probing of Hegel, a hint of the rich wealth of his philosophical discoveries. In the fijirst section on Essence as Reflection

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Within Itself, Lenin excerpted a number of paragraphs on the Law of Contradiction. Amidst the excerpts he inserted the following comment: Movement and “self-movement” (this NB! Arbitrary (independent), spontaneous, internally-necessary movement), “change,” “movement and vitality,” “the principle of all self-movement,” ”impulse” (Trieb) to “movement” and to “activity”—the opposite to “dead Being”—who would believe that this is the core of “Hegelianism,” of abstract and abstruse (ponderous, absurd?) Hegelianism?? This core had to be discovered, understood, rescued, laid bare, refijined, which is precisely what Marx and Engels did. (141)

Lenin was again emphasizing the self-movement, internally necessary that he found within the dialectic. He immediately followed this by noting that, the idea of universal movement and change (1813 Logic) was conjectured before its application to life and society. In regard to society it was proclaimed earlier (1847) [The Communist Manifesto] then it was demonstrated in application to man (1859) [Darwin’s Origin of the Species]. (141)

Dunayevskaya in her lecture notes she prepared in the 1970s would comment on this section of Lenin: From now on, Lenin shows the highest appreciation of idealism in dialectical philosophy. Thought has its own dialectic and what is crucial is that Lenin is not merely saying: Let’s read Hegel materialistically… By now he has taken that for granted philosophically as well as in life, and instead stresses that the idea of universal movement came fijirst with Hegel, then with Marx, and fijinally with Darwin. (“Notes on a Series of Lectures.” Dunayevskaya, 1981: #3894)

Lenin continued his excerpting on contradiction and in his own commentary proceeds to link contradiction, thinking reason, negativity and self-movement: Thinking reason (understanding) sharpens the blunt diffference of variety, the mere manifold of imagination, into essential diffference, into opposition. Only when raised to the peak of contradiction, do the manifold entities become active and lively in relation to one another,—they acquire that negativity which is the inherent pulsation of self-movement and vitality. (143)

Both in the second section on Appearance and the third on Actuality, Hegel’s conception of “moment(s)” drew Lenin’s attention. Under Appearance he wrote: The essence here is that both the world of appearances and the world in itself are moments of man’s knowledge of nature, stages, alterations of

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chapter eleven deepening (of knowledge). The shifting of the world in itself further and further from the world of appearance—that is what is so far still not to be seen in Hegel. NB. Have not Hegel’s “moments” of the concept the signifijicance of “moments” of transition? (151)

In the section Actuality, Lenin will comment: “The unfolding of the sumtotal of the moments at actuality NB = the essence of dialectical cognition.” ( 159) After excerpting and commenting upon Hegel’s discussion of causality, Lenin ended his commentary on the Doctrine of Essence by noting and emphasizing Hegel’s expression “the Notion, the realm of Subjectivity, or of Freedom”: “NB Freedom = Subjectivity (“or”) End, Consciousness, Endeavour NB.” (164) In turning to the Doctrine of Notion, which Lenin excerpted and commented in a more extensive manner than for the Doctrines of Being and Essence, we will briefly comment upon his notes on the fijirst sections, leaving the crucial section, The Idea, for separate treatment below. Though Lenin’s notes on the Doctrine of the Notion were the richest, he was still at times wary of Hegel’s idealism, commenting upon it as “mysticism” on more than one occasion. At the same time, Lenin showed his appreciation of Hegel’s dialectics viewed materialistically as against vulgar materialism. Thus he would write: “Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism (and agnosticism in general) more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialecticalmaterialistic standpoint.” (179) Further, “Marxists criticized (at the beginning of the twentieth century) the Kantians and Humists more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Buchner) than of Hegel.” (179) This is, as well, where Lenin will make his provocative comment: Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its fijirst chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!! (183)

There was a constant tension in Lenin, even at the highest points within his commentary on the Logic, between fijinding tremendous illumination, profoundness, a previously unimagined philosophical richness in the Hegelian dialectic, and a constant need to be giving a materialist interpretation, fijinding a materialist kernel, a continual presenting of an historical materialist framework. This, even though Lenin often saw or was close to seeing that materialism was itself integral to dialectal thought. Thus one fijinds references to “the germs of historical materialism in Hegel,” and to “Hegel and historical materialism” and similar expressions at all stages. Lenin’s fijinal comments before his excerpts on The Idea read:

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Remarkable: Hegel comes to the ‘Idea’ as the coincidence of the Notion and the object, as truth, through the practical, purposive activity of man. A very close approach to the view that man by his practice proves the objective correctness of his ideas, concepts, knowledge, science. From the subjective Notion and subjective end to objective truth. (191)

Was it perhaps Lenin who held out practice separated from the full selfdetermination of the Idea, more than it was Hegel holding aloft the Idea as dialectically separate from reality? We will examine this in the sections to follow. III. A Brief Survey of Dunayevskaya’s Explorations, Pre-1986, of Lenin’s Hegelian Vantage Point A. 1949 Translations of the Hegel Notebooks In 1949, Dunayevskaya, a co-leader of the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the Workers’ Party, translated Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic. As the translation of each “book” (Being, Essence and Notion) was completed she sent it along with a letter to C.L.R, James, the co-leader of the Tendency. (The letters are available in Dunayevskaya, 2002: 345–356.) Of special interest for our purposes was the accompanying letter she sent with her translation of the Doctrine of the Notion. She wrote: Just as the LEAP CHARACTERIZED Lenin’s comprehension of the Doctrine of Being, LAW as Essential Relation his grasp of the Doctrine of Essence, so PRACTICE characterizes his very profound analysis of The Doctrine of the Notion, and why he chooses to single out the section on the Idea …  Lenin begins with the fact that ‘The dialectic road to cognition of truth is from living observation to abstract thinking and from this to practice’ and never lets go of this for a single second. He insists that the laws of logical cognition reflect objectivity in the subjective consciousness of man, but he does not stop at reflection. No, he states categorically, ‘Man’s cognition not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.’ (My emphasis) But if you think for a moment that this means you can get offf into the high clouds of the land beyond, he brings you right back to earth and practice, practice, practice. (352)

She proceeded to quote several passages from Lenin’s notebooks where he took up practice and action in Hegel’s discussion. Dunayevskaya continued: [Lenin’s] whole emphasis on the End, and Subjective notion is that the aims of man are generated by the objective world but that he changes,

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chapter eleven subjectively desires changes and acts; there he goes so far as to call the objective world non-actual and the desires of man actual, and the reason he hangs on so to the Idea is that “it not only has the dignity of a universal, but also the simple actual. (353)

This emphasis on Practice will be a crucial strand of Dunayevskaya’s 1986– 87 new perceptions of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence. B. 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes In the course of her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, which Dunayevskaya later came to see as the philosophic moment of the birth of MarxistHumanism, we see where she placed Lenin philosophically, and where she moved beyond his philosophic exploration of Hegel. Dunayevskaya had two direct discussions of Lenin in her May 12, 1953 Letter. In one discussion she took up Lenin’s defijinition of the dialectic as the beginning of his notes on the Absolute Idea, and wrote of fijitting in Lenin “historically”: Here I wish you to remember that in this page and in the next is where Lenin made his own 16-point defijinition of the dialectic, the essence of which was three-fold: 1) the transformation of anything into its opposite (collapse of Second International); 2) the absolute in every relative which is the transition to something else (Monopoly as eve of socialist revolution); and 3) thought reflects reality (objective world connections).That we can fijit Lenin in too here historically can now be seen from the fact that in the previous section on ‘The Idea of Cognition’ Lenin had gone further, saying ‘Man’s cognition not only reflects of objective world but creates [it]’, BUT WHEN HE REACHED THE Absolute Idea it was not the creativity that he developed but the objective world connections because to him in 1915 the Idea as ‘objective truth’ of necessity predominated over actual reconstruction of society, or the 1917 ‘socialism looking at us through all windows.’ We however, can go further, and not only further than Lenin. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 19)

In her second direct discussion of Lenin, she pinpointed where philosophically her age and the philosophic breakthrough she was in the midst of working out were a departure from Lenin: I am shaking all over for we have come to where we part from Lenin. I mentioned before that, although in the approach to the Absolute Idea Lenin had mentioned that man’s cognition not only reflects of objective world but creates it but that within the chapter he never developed it. Objective world connections, materialism, dialectical materialism it is true, but not the object and subject as one fully developed—that’s what he saw. Then he reaches the last paragraph [of the Science of Logic]: ‘For the Idea posits itself as the absolute unity of the pure Notion and its Reality, and thus gathers itself into the immediacy of Being; and in doing so, as totality in this form, it is Nature.’

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 There Lenin stops—it’s the beginning of the last paragraph—and he says ‘This phrase on the last page of the Logic is exceedingly remarkable. The transition of the logical idea to Nature. Stretching a hand to materialism. This is not the last phrase of the Logic, but further till the end of the page is unimportant.’  But my dear Vladimir Ilyitch, it is not true; the end of the page is important; we of 1953, we who have lived three decades after you and tried to absorb all you have left us, we can tell you that.  Listen to the very next sentence: ‘But this determination is not a perfected becoming or a transition. …’ Remember how transition was everything to you in the days of Monopoly, the eve of socialism. Well, Hegel has passed beyond transition, he says this last determination ‘the pure Idea, in which the determinateness or reality of the Notion is itself raised to the level of Notion, is an absolute liberation, has no further immediate determination which is not equally posited and equally Notion. Consequently there is no transition in this freedom. … The transition here therefore must rather be taken to mean that the Idea freely releases itself in absolute self-security and self-repose.’  You see, Vladimir Ilyitch, you didn’t have Stalinism to overcome, when transitions, revolutions seemed sufffijicient to bring the new society. Now everyone looks at the totalitarian one-party state, that is the new that must be overcome by a totally new revolt in which everyone experiences ‘absolute liberation.’ So we build with you from 1920–23 and include the experience of the decades. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 22)

These crucial insights would form the foundation for Dunayevskaya’s 1986–87 changed perception of Lenin. However in the decades following her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, her public presentation of analysis of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks in her three major books, (Marxism and Freedom 1957, Philosophy and Revolution 1973, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution 1982), did not concentrate on the limitations and diffferences she had discovered in 1953. Rather her concentration was on the world historic signifijicance of Lenin’s dialectical philosophic preparation for the Russian Revolution and his practice 1917– 1923. Her critique of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence was limited to the fact that he did not share those Notebooks with his Bolshevik colleagues. Only in 1986–87 would she begin to examine Lenin in a new way, which at the same time, was rooted in her 1953 treatment of Lenin. C. Discussion  of  Lenin’s  Hegel  Notebooks  in  Dunayevskaya’s   Major Writings— 1. Marxism and Freedom In this fijirst public presentation of Lenin’s Notebooks in English—they were published as an appendix to the 1958 edition of Marxism and Freedom—Dunayevskaya’s discussion of the content of the Notebooks

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was relatively brief, calling attention to Lenin’s quotes singling out movement and self-movement as the core of Hegelianism, on “intelligent idealism is nearer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism,” on his view of the dialectic “as the doctrine of the unity of opposites,” and on the relationship between Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic. For her, this “formed the philosophic foundation for the great divide in Marxism.” The bulk of Dunayevskaya’s commentary focused on what she termed this Great Divide in Marxism, beginning with Lenin’s own break with his philosophic past. She treated Lenin’s analysis of the betrayal of the Second International, and then moved on to his writings post the Philosophic Notebooks on imperialism, on the self-determination of nations, particularly in relation to the Irish Revolution. She saw the Hegel Notebooks as Lenin’s philosophical preparation for revolution, and thus part of the foundation for his State and Revolution, and the foundation of his political practice afterwords. This Great Divide was not only against the Second International, including that type of organization, but extended to his own Bolshevik co-leaders, particularly the theoretical work of Bukharin, as well as the administrative mentality of Trotsky that Lenin critiqued in the Trade Union Debate. She argued that Lenin’s new philosophic vantage point as well encompassed a deeper relationship to the self-activity of the Russian masses pre and post-1917. 2. Philosophy and Revolution In her second book, Dunayevskaya created the category of Lenin’s “philosophic ambivalence.” The principle discussion of the Notebooks took place in Chapter Three “The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin.” Here, she went into a more extensive probing of the Notebooks than in Marxism and Freedom. She commented upon Lenin’s treatment of each of the three books of the Logic. When Dunayevskaya took up the ramifijications of Lenin’s philosophical studies in relation to the objective world reality, her emphasis was not so much on Lenin’s dealing with the betrayal of the Second International, but on his relation to the Marxists who didn’t betray, who politically remained revolutionaries, but who did not undertake the kind of philosophic reorganization that Lenin had undergone. His critiques of Bukharin in particular were taken up. While she presented her view that it was Lenin’s philosophic exploration of Hegel that contributed in a key way to his political diffferences with his fellow revolutionaries, she, at the same time, wrote of a “duality” of Lenin’s philosophic heritage—between the Lenin’s open, public political

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disagreements with his Bolshevik colleagues, but keeping private his Hegel Notebooks, and thus not sharing his new dialectical vantage point: What we are concerned with is … the duality of the philosophic heritage. Far from publicly proclaiming his philosophic repudiation of Plekhanov, or his break with his own philosophic past, Lenin advised Soviet youth to study ‘everything Plekhanov wrote on Philosophy …’ and he reprinted his own Materialism and Empirio-Criticism… The duality in Lenin’s philosophical heritage is unmistakable. (Dunayevskaya, 1973)

Philosophy and Revolution was published in 1973. It would not be until 1986 that Dunayevskaya extended and deepened the category of philosophic ambivalence. She would then in fact call her prior criticism of Lenin “mild.” 3. Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution Dunayevskaya’s third book does not have an extensive commentary directly on Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks. However she does mention Lenin’s failure to relate organization to philosophy, including the way in which his State and Revolution took up Marx’s concept of the need to smash the bourgeois state, but failed to discuss the “other crucial factor in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program: the inseparable relationship of philosophy to organization itself.” (Dunayevskaya, 1982: 157) This would be important to Dunayevskaya’s changed perception of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence. IV. Dunayevskaya’s ‘Changed Perception of Lenin’s Philosophic Ambivalence’: Fusing a mid-1980s Vantage Point with a 1953 Philosophic Breakthrough2 Our concentration will be on the “Idea of Cognition” chapter of Science of Logic with additional signifijicant commentary on the “Absolute Idea” chapter. We will be “reading” the Idea of Cognition chapter three times— (1) brief excerpts-notes as an orientation, (2) as Lenin excerpted and commented upon the Idea of Cognition and the Absolute Idea in his Hegel

2 With regard to this section, I have benefijited from contributions on Dunayevskaya’s 1986–87 writings made by two of her colleagues: Franklin Bell shared several sets of notes/ presentations on Dunayevskaya’s Changed Perception of Lenin that he had made in the early 1990s; Peter Hudis, “Cognition, Objectivity and Proof: On the Responsibilities of Leadership,” Jan. 10, 1993. News & Letters.

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Notebooks, (3) as Dunayevskaya returned to Lenin’s reading and her own reading of the Idea of Cognition and Absolute Idea chapters of Science of Logic in 1986–87. We will as well refer to the Encyclopedia Logic (EL). A. The Idea of Cognition—Excerpt-Notes3 Hegel divided the Doctrine of Notion into three sections: Subjectivity, Objectivity and the Idea. “[T]he Notion,” Hegel wrote in ending the section on Objectivity, is therefore essentially this: to be distinct as an explicit identity from its implicit objectivity, and thereby to possess externality, yet in this external totality to be the totality’s self-determining identity. As such, the Notion is now the Idea. (Hegel, 1976: 754)

The Notion as Idea engages in the world and does so in a self-determining manner. “The Idea is the adequate Notion, that which is objectively true, or the true as such.” (755) Noting Kant’s reclaiming the Idea for “the notion of reason,” Hegel critiqued the view that “true thoughts are said to be only ideas,” that is only subjective, and wrote of the Idea as the objective or real Notion. It is Appearance that is “the untrue being of the objective world,” (756) while the Idea is “the unity of the Notion and objectivity.” (756) There is nothing automatic or simple about this unity. The section on the Idea, with its chapters on “Life,” the “Idea of Cognition,” and “The Absolute Idea,” is the terrain wherein the contradictory struggle to unify the Notion and objectivity is carried out. Hegel will not yield on the power of the Idea: “Everything actual is only in so far as it possess the Idea and expresses it. … the reality that does not correspond to the Notion is mere Appearance.” (756) The Idea as a unity of Notion and reality is not left as a generality. Hegel strove to show it as a specifijic unity, a concretization, which actualizes itself. In the Encyclopedia Logic he noted: “[I]n its own right the Idea is essentially concrete, because it is the free Concept [Notion] that determines itself and in so doing makes itself real. (Hegel, 1873: ¶ 213) As such, it was no abstract beyond: “[T]he Idea is what is perfectly present.” (¶ 213) Hegel was intent on breaking down the one-sidedness of objectivity and of subjectivity: “The Idea can be grasped as reason… and further as the

3 The Idea of Cognition is the penultimate chapter of the Science of Logic. It is found as Chapter 2 of Section Three, “The Idea” of the fijinal book of the Logic, “Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion.” The First Chapter of this section is “Life,” the Third Chapter, “The Absolute Idea”.

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Subject-Object, as the unity of the ideal and the real, of the fijinite and the infijinite, of the soul and the body as the possibility that has its actuality in itself.” (¶ 214) In the Science of Logic he wrote: Now the Idea has shown itself to be the Notion liberating again into its subjectivity from the immediacy in which it is submerged in the object; to be the Notion that distinguishes itself from its objectivity, which however is no less determined by it and possesses its substantiality only in the Notion. This identity has therefore rightly been defijined as the subject-object. (Hegel, 1976: 758)

However, the breaking down was not an immediate: The Idea possesses within itself also the most stubborn opposition … it eternally creates and eternally overcomes that opposition in meeting with itself. (759)  The Idea is the process of sundering itself into individuality and its inorganic nature, and again of bringing this inorganic nature under the power of the subject and returning to the fijirst simple universality. (759)

Hegel proceeded to explore the stages of the Idea: “At this fijirst stage the Idea is Life. … This Idea on account of its immediacy has individuality to the form of its existence.” (760) We will not explore this section except to note its ending: “In the genus process, the separated individualities of individual life perish,” wherein the process of generating individual is at the same time the sublimating of it, “and is thus the genus coming together with itself, the universality of the Idea in process of becoming for itself.” (774) In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel concluded “The death of the merely immediate singular organism is the emergence of spirit.” (Hegel, 1873: ¶ 222) “[T]he Idea of spirit has proved itself to be the truth of the Idea of life.” (Hegel, 1976: 780) This emergence of spirit is the Idea of Cognition, the second expression of the Idea, where “[t]he elevation of the Notion above life means that its reality is the Notion form liberated into universality.” (775) This process of cognition, a drive or “urge,” is an antithesis: “the one-sidedness of subjectivity together with the one-sidedness of objectivity.” (Hegel, 1873: ¶ 225) Its two manifestations are the true and the good, as cognition and volition. The fijirst is the movement to sublate “the one-sidedness of the subjectivity of the Idea by means of the assumption of the world that [simply] is into oneself, into subjective representing and thing; and to fijill the abstract certainty of oneself with this objectivity (which thus counts as genuine) as its content.” (¶ 225) The second is the converse, the movement

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chapter eleven to sublate the one-sidedness of the objective world, which therefore counts, on the contrary only as a semblance, a collection of contingencies and of shapes which are in-themselves null and void—[the movement] to determine this world through the inwardness of the subjective, which here counts as what is truly objective, and to in-form it with this subjectivity. The fijirst movement is the drive of knowing toward truth, or cognition as such—the theoretical activity of the Idea—the second is the drive of the good toward its own accomplishment—willing, the practical activity of the Idea. (¶ 225)

Hegel, in the Idea of the True section, proceeded from “the urge” of the subjective idea: “This Idea is … the urge of the Notion to realize itself for itself’.” (Hegel, 1976: 785) It aims to do this by sublating the object, which it regards as external, thus presupposing an antithesis of objective and subjective. The content that the Idea of the True works upon “has the character of a datum.” (785) The bulk of this section consists of Hegel’s description of two methods of fijinite cognition, analytic and synthetic, and the manner by which they relate to the subject-matter. In the analytic method, “the activity consists therefore in dissolving the concrete that is given, isolating its distinctions and bestowing the form of abstract universality upon them.” (Hegel, 1873: ¶ 227) He described a chemist breaking down meat into nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen etc. “But these abstract materials are no longer meat.” (¶227, addition) The movement of the synthetic method is the reverse of the movement in the analytic method. Whilst the latter starts from the singular and advances to the universal, the former, on the contrary, starts with the universal (as a defijinition). And advances, through particularization (in division), to the singular (in the theorem). (¶ 228 addition)

For our purposes we will concentrate on Hegel’s discussion and critique of the theorem in synthetic cognition. In theorems “the object is cognized in its reality, in the conditions and forms of its real existence.” (806) What is crucial about the theorem is that unlike the defijinition or division, “the theorem has to be demonstrated.” (Hegel, 1976: 806) It cannot be merely presented or presupposed. Proof is essential. “[H]owever complete or incomplete the content of the theorem may be, it must be proved.” (811) Hegel took geometry as the representative of this synthetic method. However, here [t]he proof is not a genesis of the relationship that constitutes the content of the theorem; the necessity exists only for intelligence, and the whole proof is in the subjective interests of cognition. It is therefore an altogether external reflection that proceeds from without inwards, that is, infers from external circumstances the inner constitution of the relationship. (812)

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Thus, there is no internal unity of the idea and reality. Rather: “It is only because the space of geometry is the abstraction and void of asunderness that it is possible for the fijigures to be inscribed in the indeterminateness of that space in such a manner that their determinations remain in fijixed repose outside another and processes no imminent transition into opposite.” (813–814) There is thus, no self-movement. We are left with Hegel’s striking critique: “If then geometry, like algebra, with its abstract, non-dialectical subject matter soon encounters its limit, it is evident from the very outset that the synthetic method is still more inadequate for other sciences, and most inadequate of all in the domain of philosophy.” (814) Nonetheless, some thinkers, Spinoza being one, attempted to use such a method in philosophy. In response, Hegel pointed to Jacobi’s attack on this method of demonstration: [Jacobi] has signalized most clearly and most profoundly the essential point, namely, that a method of demonstration such as this is fast bound within the circle of the rigid necessity of the fijinite, and that freedom, that is the Notion, and with it everything that is true, lies beyond it and is unattainable by it. (816)

In contrast to Spinoza, for Hegel, “the principle of philosophy is the infijinite free Notion.”(817) However, in synthetic cognition, “the synthesis and mediation of this method, the process of proof, gets no further than a necessity that is the opposite of freedom.” (817) Freedom and necessity remain only juxtaposed, not interpenetrated. By the end of the section, Hegel had shown that the Theoretical Idea, when expressed as either analytical or synthetic, is not the Idea of Cognition which can fully transcend the opposition between the Notion and reality. This is not to say that Hegel rejected the Theoretical Idea. Far from it. What he rejected was its manifestation as analytic and as synthetic, as the philosophic pathway forward. These methods lacked the power of self-movement, of negativity. Hegel searched for a pathway out by ending the Idea of the True with the movement to the Practical Idea that forms the core of The Idea of the Good: “The Idea, in so far as the Notion is now explicitly determined in and for itself, is the practical Idea, or action.” (818) Here the Notion is the urge to realize itself, the end that wills by means of itself to give itself objectivity and to realize itself in the objective world. In the theoretical Idea the subjective Notion, as the universal that lacks any determination of its own, stands opposed to the objective world from which it takes to itself a determinate content and fijilling. But in the practical Idea it is as actual that it confronts the actual; but the certainty of itself which the subject possesses

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chapter eleven in being determined in and for itself is a certainty of its own actuality and of the non-actuality of the world. … The subject has here vindicated objectivity for itself. (818)

Hegel noted that “this Idea is superior to the Idea of cognition already considered, for it possesses not only the worth of the universal but also of the out-and-out actual.” (818–819) Its action was in sharp contrast to that of the Idea of the True. Where “the specifijic nature of this urge [of the Idea of the True] is … to sublate its own subjectivity, to make its fijirst, abstract reality into a concrete one and to fijill it with the content of the world presupposed by its subjectivity,” (783–784) the activity of the Idea of the Good “is not directed against itself in order to adopt and appropriate a given determination; on the contrary, it is in order to posit its own determination and by sublating the determinations of the external world to give itself reality in the form of external actuality.” The Idea of the Good has here substituted itself for the reality of the external world: “The Idea of the will as explicitly self-determining possesses the content within itself.” (819) At the same time it is something that is fijinite and limited, a particularization. The practical Idea is thus “the not yet realized Idea.” (819) [The Idea of the Good’s] urge to realize itself is … not to give itself objectivity—this it posses within itself—but merely this immediate form of immediacy. Hence the activity of the end is not directed against itself in order to adopt and appropriate a given determination, on the contrary, it is in order to posit its own determination and by sublating that determination of the external world to give itself reality in the form of external actuality. (819)

Rather than seeing the determination of the external world, in and of itself containing a form of the Notion, of the Idea, the Idea of the Good (the practical Idea) sees its task as overcoming the external world, “the nonactuality of the external world.” Here we see the grave contradiction within the Idea of the Good. It presupposes the separation between itself and the world, that is, the division between subject and object. In this Idea of the Good it is only the will (volition) of the subject that can transform the world. The Good here has impatience, “an end that has not to wait to receive its truth through realization, but is already on its own account true.” (819) It is “the syllogism of immediate realization.” (819) If we “translate” this in terms of social transformation: Even when the Practical Idea wants the new society, the revolution, (the infijinite), it is stuck, fijixed, as something limited (fijinite), “notwithstanding its inner infijinitude.” (820) It has an emancipatory vision, but it is based on an “external existence,” which it

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sees “determined merely as an intrinsically worthless element.” (820) The Good, facing an “insuperable contradiction,” ends up attaining only “a contingent destructible existence, not a realization corresponding to its Idea.” (820) Thus, the Good can be destroyed not only by “external contingency” but “by the collision and conflict of the good with itself.” (820) “The good remains an ought-to-be.” The good is only a postulate (a hope) determined not by objectivity, but merely subjectivity. As Hegel wrote: “There are still two worlds in opposition, one a realm of subjectivity in the pure regions of transparent thought, the other a realm of objectivity in the element of an externally manifold actuality that is an undisclosed realm of darkness.” (820) The practical idea is faced with the gulf between its goal and the limitation of actuality—an unresolved contradiction. We have a situation in which both the Theoretical Idea and the Practical Idea, because of their respective one-sidedness, fail in their relation to the objective world. The Theoretical Idea feels it must sublimate itself and fijill itself with the content of the external world, but a content it sees as mere datum. The Practical Idea sees the objective world viable only when it is sublated by the Theoretical Idea, that the Theoretical Idea must give it its true determination. How to solve this dual one-sidedness? What is still lacking in the practical Idea is the moment of actuality in the Notion should have attained on its own account the determination of external being … The practical Idea still lacks the moment of the theoretical Idea. … [I]t separates itself from cognition, and external reality for the will does not receive the form of true being; the Idea of the good can therefore fijind its integration only in the Idea of the true. (821)

Hegel argued that, “it [the Idea of the Good] makes this transition through itself.” (821) It does so through a double negation, and thus, not through immediacy, but through mediation: [T]he realization of the good in the face of another actuality confronting it is the mediation which is essentially necessary for the immediate relation and the accomplished actualization of the good. For it is only the fijirst negation or the otherness of the Notion, an objectivity that would be a submergence of the Notion in the externality; the second negation is the sublating of this otherness, whereby the immediate realization of the end fijirst becomes the actuality of the good as of the Notion that is for itself, since in this actuality of the good as of the Notion that is for itself, since in this actuality the Notion is posited as identical with itself, not with an other, and thus alone is posited as the free Notion. (822)

If the Practical Idea does not go through this mediation, if it continues only in a fijirst negation in which actuality is presupposed as “intrinsically

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worthless,” then it is only a “spurious infijinity,” a would-be absolute. So the Practical Idea’s authentic confrontation is not with the actuality of the world, but against itself, against its attitude toward the actuality of the world. In the result the mediation sublates itself; the result is an immediacy that is not the restoration of the presupposition, but rather its accomplished sublation. With this, the Idea of the Notion that is determined in and for itself is posited as being no longer merely in the active subject but equally an immediate actuality; and conversely, this actuality is posited, as it is in cognition, as an objectivity possessing a true being. (823)

We have reached the proof or demonstration of the Notion. Actuality, the real world, has within it the Notion, and thus the proof of the objectivity of subjectivity, the creativity of cognition. The movement is within objectivity. Cognition is within reality, and thus the objectivity of cognition. The Notion absorbs objectivity not as datum but as objectivity which itself contains reason. Instead of actuality “as an objective world without the subjectivity of the Notion, here it appears as an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Notion. This is the absolute Idea.” (823) B. Lenin’s Reading of the Idea of Cognition and the Absolute Idea Lenin’s reading of the Idea of Cognition was, at one and the same time, the high point of his exploration of Science of Logic, and a reflection of an historic barrier he did not cross. As opposed to earlier in the Science of Logic, where, as we saw, Lenin often focused on reading Hegel materialistically, sharply separating himself from what he saw as Hegel’s idealism, here in the Idea of Cognition, he would fijind himself within Hegel’s dialectical flow, discovering materialism within the dialectic, fijinding the human within the Hegelian categories. At the same time, earlier in Lenin’s comments on the Doctrine of the Notion, there is a sentence that is revealing in terms of the pathway Lenin was following: “From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice,—such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.” (Lenin, 1976: 171) We will see how this pathway will fijind its strongest re-enforcement in the manner whereby Lenin interpreted a key section of the Idea of Cognition. Lenin began his notes on the Idea of Cognition by quoting Hegel “… the Notion in itself or as subjective, and of what it is as submerged into objectivity” and paraphrased this as “subjective consciousness and its

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submersion in objectivity.” But then he quoted Hegel that “Spirit not only is infijinitely richer than Nature, but the absolute unity of opposites in the Notion, constitutes its essence,” and wrote in the margin “mysticism! mysticism!,” (Lenin, 1976: 204) still feeling the need to rebut Hegel’s idealism. Soon however, Lenin would be breaking down divisions between subjective and objective, as he quoted Hegel on “the two moments cannot be separated” and wrote: Logical concepts are subjective so long as they remain ‘abstract,’ in their abstract form, but at the same time they express also the Things-inthemselves. Nature is both concrete and abstract, both phenomenon and essence, both moment and relation. Human concepts are subjective in their abstractness, separateness, but objective as a whole, in the process, in the sum-total, in the tendency, in the source. (208)

Immediately afterward, Lenin turned to the Encyclopedia Logic and singled out its translation of subjectivity and objectivity as the “theoretical” and “will” or “practical activity”: “Very good is ¶ 225 of the Encyclopedia where ‘cognition’(‘theoretical’) and ‘will,’ ‘practical activity,’ are depicted as two sides, two methods, two means of abolishing the ‘one-sidedness’ both of subjectivity and objectivity.”(208) Lenin had quickly focused on what he would be most attracted to in his reading of the Idea of Cognition, the Idea of the Good or the Practical Idea. After brief commentary on analytic and synthetic cognition under the Idea of the True—in which Lenin skipped over Hegel’s discussion of the Theorem and thus the necessity of proof, i.e. mediation—he began fuller commentary on the Idea of the Good. Following the transitional sentence to the Idea of the Good—“The Idea, in so far as the Notion is now explicitly determined in and for itself, is the practical Idea or action.”—Lenin wrote: Theoretical cognition ought to give the object in its necessity, in its all-sided relations, in its contradictory movement, in and for itself. But the human notion ‘defijinitively’ catches this objective truth of cognition, seizes and masters it, only when the notion becomes ‘being-for-itself’ in the sense of practice. That is, the practice of man and of mankind is the test, the criterion of the objectivity of cognition. Is that Hegel’s idea? It is necessary to return to this. (211) (On the side he wrote “Hegel on practice and the objectivity of cognition.”)

Now would come a flood of commentary on practice in the theory of knowledge, not simply a “translation” of idealism into materialism, but a grappling with the relation of objective and subjective within the Hegelian dialectic:

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chapter eleven Undoubtedly, in Hegel practice serves as a link in the analysis of the process of cognition, and indeed as the transition to objective (‘absolute’, according to Hegel) truth. Marx, consequently, clearly sides with Hegel in introducing the criterion of practice into the theory of knowledge: see the Thesis on Feuerbach. (212)

Lenin wrote “Practice in the theory of knowledge:” and opposite it penned an expression that was perhaps the high point of his exploration of the dialectic: “Alias: Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.” (212) This breakthrough in Lenin’s thought smashed to pieces the abstract duality between thinking and doing, theory and practice. His plunge into the dialectic of Science of Logic was not alone a discovery of the profoundness of Hegelian thought, but was releasing new philosophic creativity within Lenin himself. We will explore shortly whether he undertook the development of this profound aphorism when we turned to the fijinal chapter, “The Absolute Idea.” At times, Lenin divided the pages in his Hegel Notebooks into two columns. In one column he wrote excerpts from the Science of Logic, in the opposite column, his interpretation of these excerpts. When Hegel contrasted the Theoretical Idea and the Practical Idea, Lenin, after quoting Hegel, would write: The notion (=man), as subjective, again presupposes an otherness which is in itself (=nature independent of man). This notion (= man) is the impulse to realize itself, to give itself objectivity in the objective world through itself and to realize (fulfijill) itself.  In the theoretical idea (in the sphere of theory) the subjective notion (cognition?), as the universal in and for itself indeterminate, stands opposed to the objective world, from which it obtains determinate content and fulfijillment.  In the practical idea (in the sphere of practice) this notion as the actual (acting?) stands opposed to the actual.  The self-certainty which the subject—here suddenly instead of ‘Notion’—has in its being and for itself, as a determinate subject, is a certainty of its own actuality and of the non-actuality of the world. (212–213)

Lenin in his “translation” and interpretation of Hegel’s expression, now summed up its meaning: “i.e., that the world does not satisfy man and man decides to change it by his activity.” (213) On the one hand this was a magnifijicent “rewriting” of the Practical Idea. On the other, let us not forget Hegel’s further discussion of the Practical Idea (Hegel, 1976: 818–823) where he noted the Idea “possesses not only the worth of the universal but also of the out-and-out actual,” (818–819) and followed this by warning

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“that the practical Idea still lacks the moment of the theoretical Idea.” (821) He proceeded to the unity of the two, which is a transition that comes out of the practical Idea provided that it does not relapse into a “spurious infijinity” that comes from being only in fijirst negation and not a transcendence to a second negation, the sublation of otherness, and thus the free Notion, which is the Absolute Idea. What did Lenin do with this discussion? When we follow Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks on these pages of the Idea of the Good, he did copy out excerpts from Hegel’s warnings on the incompleteness of the Practical Idea in itself—on the Good remaining an “Ought;” on the two worlds still remaining in opposition;—and wrote, “What is necessary is the union of cognition and practice.” (Lenin, 1976: 216) He, as well, gave his interpretation of Hegel’s “syllogism of action,” where the resolution of the one-sidedness of the Theoretical Idea and the Practical Idea was carried out in the fijinal paragraph of the Idea of Cognition. Certainly Lenin was aware of Hegel’s critique of the one-sidedness of the Practical Idea. But did he workout its resolution in a unity through second negation with the Theoretical Idea? Or was this seen as only a return to idealism? Did Lenin fully comprehend the need for the Idea of the Good “to turn, not against an outer actuality, but against itself”? (Hegel, 1976: 822) Did he grasp the need to have not only a recognition of the objective world as such, but as well to see that objective world as one “whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Notion”? (823) We need to follow Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks into the Absolute Idea chapter to give us an indication of Lenin’s direction. Lenin’s notes on the Absolute Idea chapter were extensive, primarily consisting of direct excerpts from Hegel, with his own comments for the most part restricted to marginalia. However there are exceptions, and some particularly noteworthy and revealing comments by Lenin. Early on in his excerpts and commentary on the Absolute Idea chapter, he decided to interject a list of what he called “Elements of dialectics.” He began with, “1) the objectivity of consideration (not examples, not divergences, but the Thing-in-itself),” (Lenin, 1976: 221) and continued with a total of sixteen elements. Among them are “the thing (phenomenon, etc.) as the sum and unity of opposites,” “the struggle, respectively unfolding, of the opposites, contradictory strivings, etc.,” and “not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other [into its opposite?].” Somewhat surprising was Lenin’s treatment of negation of the negation, the 14th element in his list: “the apparent return to the old (negation of the negation.)” (222) Surprising, because

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negation of the negation will be central to Hegel’s discussion of the Absolute Idea, and his development extended far beyond “the apparent return to the old.” (As we will see, Lenin did engage Hegel’s discussion of negation of the negation in the Absolute Idea chapter.) He ended his “elements of dialectics” with the following: “In brief, dialectics can be defijined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics, but it requires explanations and development.” (223) It was the unity of opposites, along with the transition or transformation into opposite, rather than negation of the negation, which was most concrete for Lenin, living at the outbreak of World War I and the betrayal of the Second International. Only after these examples or defijinitions of the dialectic did Lenin proceed to excerpt the chapter in his Notebook. There he would return to the concept of negation, copying down Hegel’s statement, “To hold fast the positive in its negation, and the content of the presupposition in the result, is the most important part of rational cognition,” (226) and followed with his own comment: Not empty negation, not futile negation, not skeptical negation, vacillation and doubt is characteristic and essential in dialectics,—which undoubtedly contains the element of negation and indeed as its most important element—no, but negation as a moment of connection, as a moment of development, retaining the positive, i.e., without any vacillations, without any eclecticism. (226)

Lenin would comment additionally on the “dialectical moment” noting the relation of fijirst and second negative, the connection of negative and positive, “the presence of this positive in the negative.” He followed this with a number of important insights on the dialectic, including an interpretation of Hegel’s attack on formal thought, “come before consciousness without mutual contact,” which Lenin called “the essence of antidialectics,” as well as his singling out from Hegel, “The richest consequently is also the most concrete and subjective, and that which carries itself back into the simplest depth is also the most powerful and comprehensive.”(232) Certainly, Lenin was within the rhythm of much of Hegel’s concept of negativity. And yet, what happened to Lenin’s aphorism from the beginning of the Idea of the Good, “Man’s cognition not only reflects the objective world, but creates it”? Did Lenin subject it to the fullness of dialectical methodology that comes to the fore in so powerful a manner in Absolute Idea? How would it be concretized in face of the need to have a unity of

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the theoretical and the practical idea? How would the creativity of humanity’s cognition face the “two worlds in opposition, one a realm of subjectivity in the pure regions of transparent thought, the other a realm of objectivity in the element of an external manifold actuality that is an undisclosed realm of darkness”? (Hegel, 1976: 820) On the one hand “The Absolute Idea has shown itself to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical Idea,” (824) but on the other, the Absolute Idea “contains within itself the highest degree of opposition.” (824) It is with these questions in mind that we continue with Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks to the fijinal page of Science of Logic and notice Lenin’s sharp stopping point before the end of the Absolute Idea. Lenin quoted Hegel: “For the Idea posits itself as the absolute unity of the pure notion and its Reality, and thus gathers itself into the immediacy of Being; and in doing so, as totality in this form, it is Nature”. In the margin Lenin wrote, “Transition from the Idea to N a t u r e …” The sentence on the last page of the Logic is highly noteworthy. The transition of the logical idea to nature. It brings one within a hand’s grasp of materialism. Engels was right when he said that Hegel’s system was materialism turned upside down. This is not the last sentence of the Logic, but what comes after it to the end of the pages is unimportant. (Lenin, 1976: 234)

He further added in the margin next to this comment “NB: In the small Logic (Encyclopedia, ¶ 244 Zasatz.) the last sentence of the book reads: ‘but this Idea which has Being is Nature’ ” He concluded, “End of the Logic. December 17, 1914.” However, the sentences in the Absolute Idea chapter of the Science of Logic that continue after Lenin stopped his excerpts contain not alone the transition to Nature, but to Spirit. The last sentence of the Science of Logic reads: But this next resolution of the pure idea—to determine itself as external idea—thereby only posits for itself the mediation out of which the notion arises as free existence that out of externality has passed into itself; arise to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit, and to discover the highest notion of itself in that logical science as the pure notion which forms a notion of itself. (Hegel, 1976: 486)

For Dunayevskaya, as we will see in the next section, Lenin’s stopping point was precisely his historic-philosophic barrier, while at the same time, she saw the rest of the Absolute Idea fijinal paragraph and its admonition to proceed to Philosophy of Spirit (Mind) as the philosophic opening for the post-World War II world.

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Lenin found in his consultation of the Encyclopedia Logic the philosophic rationale for stopping with the transition to Nature, which he had interpreted as practice, holding a hand out to materialism. Hegel, of course, could do so in the Encyclopedia Logic, because the Philosophy of Spirit (Mind) would be at hand as the third book of the Encyclopedia after Logic and Nature. However, Lenin seemed to take this turn toward nature (practice) as the end, the resolution of the contradiction. One sees this perhaps as well, in the fact that after ending the Science of Logic excerpting, Lenin turned to the Encyclopedia Logic to do his fijinal excerpting. Thus Lenin, far from immersing himself fully in the fijinal chapter’s Absolute Idea, seemed rather to prefer, in a certain sense, to remain with the Idea of Practice in the penultimate chapter, The Idea of Cognition. It was this which Dunayevskaya characterized as Lenin remaining on the threshold of the Absolute Idea. We turn to her work directly on Lenin to explore this question further, and particularly to ask, what were the organizational ramifijications of Lenin stopping philosophically on the threshold of the Absolute Idea? V. Dunayevskaya’s New Reading of Lenin: Fusing 1986–87 Perceptions with Her 1953 Philosophic Moment [M]y work on “Dialectics of Organization … will take sharp issue with Lenin, both on the Idea of Cognition and on the Absolute Idea —Dunayevskaya, July 3, 1986

In 1986–87 Dunayevskaya developed what she termed a “changed perception of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence.” Turning to re-examine Lenin’s writings on “The Idea of Cognition” and “The Absolute Idea” chapters of the Science of Logic, as well as his preference for the Encyclopedia Logic with regard to these chapters, and re-exploring her Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes from 1953, she wrote of the need to critique Lenin not alone politically, but philosophically. In following these developments we will take up several of Dunayevskaya’s documents from 1986–87 that explore this changed perception: In one of a series of letters to non-Marxist Hegel scholars she took up her new reading of Lenin, relating it to the diffferent manner Hegel had presented the Idea of Cognition and the Absolute Idea in Science of Logic and in a much abbreviated form in the Encyclopedia Logic. She wondered in fact if the diffference between Hegel’s two treatments had opened the door for what she saw as Lenin’s truncated and even impatient reading of these chapters:

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The debate I’m having with myself centers on the diffferent ways Hegel writes on the Idea of Cognition in the Science of Logic, and the way it is expressed in his Encyclopedia … The fact that the smaller Logic does the same type of abbreviation with the Absolute Idea as it does with the Idea of Cognition, turning that magnifijicent and most profound chapter of the Science into ¶ 236–44, and that ¶ 244 in the Smaller Logic was the one Lenin preferred to the fijinal paragraph of the Absolute Idea in the Science, has had me ‘debating’ Lenin ever since 1953…  Whether or not Lenin had a right to ‘misread’ the diffference in Hegel’s two articulations in the Science and in the smaller Logic, isn’t is true that Hegel, by creating the subsection B, ‘Volition,’ which does not appear in the Science, left open the door for a future generation of Marxists to become enthralled with Chapter 2, “The Idea of Cognition”—which ended with the pronouncement that Practice was higher than Theory—that they saw an identity of the two versions? …  There is no reason, I think, for introducing a new subheading which lets Marxists think that now that practice is ‘higher’ than theory, and that ‘will,’ not as willfulness, but as action, is their province, they do not need to study Hegel further. (Letter to Louis Dupre, July 3, 1986, Dunayevskaya, 2002: 326–327)

Dunayevskaya proceeded to go through Lenin’s interpretation of the Idea of Cognition chapter with focus on the section on the Idea of the Good (the Practical Idea), termed Volition in the Encyclopedia Logic. She noted that Lenin begins seriously consulting the Encyclopedia for the Idea of Cognition, and that rather than truly entering the Absolute Idea chapter, he fijirst proceeds with several pages of his own interpretation of the Idea of the Good. I consider that he is still only on the threshold of the Absolute Idea. Indeed, all that follows p. 219 in his Notes [where Lenin’s excerpts and comments on the Absolute Idea chapter begin] shows that to be true, and explains why Lenin proceeded on his own after the end of his Notes on the Absolute Idea, and returned to the Smaller Logic. (328)

The fact that Hegel in the Idea of the Good was developing the point that there were still ‘two worlds in opposition,’ “did not,” argued Dunayevskaya, “faze Lenin because he felt that the objective, the Practical Idea, is that resolution. … Nothing, in fact, led Lenin back to the Idea of Theory and away from dependence on the Practical Idea.” (328–29) Throughout 1986 and into 1987, Dunayevskaya continued probing Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks from her new perspective. In a presentation to News and Letters colleagues that contained a discussion of “New Perceptions of Lenin’s Philosophic Ambivalence,” she extended her new perception to include what Lenin had left out of his brief notes on the contents page of the Encyclopedia Logic:

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chapter eleven He then began quoting the Smaller Logic; and now I see what I didn’t see [originally in my 1953 Letters on the Absolutes] in Lenin’s brief contents page of that work. That is to say, Lenin’s outline of the Smaller Logic fijirst begins with Being, which is p. 103 of Hegel’s book. Lenin had entirely left out Attitudes to Objectivity as well as the Introduction. Yet these are the very sections added to the Smaller Logic after the Later Logic [Science of Logic] was written—a full decade after. (“The Year of Only 8 Months,” Jan. 3, 1987, Dunayevskaya, 1981: #10690)4

In 1986–87, as Dunayevskaya was working out points of departure for her projected book on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, she re-examined her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes in relationship to Lenin, and discerned further critique. In notes of January 21, 1987 that she termed “Talking to Myself” she wrote: The above title may sound strange but it is one way in which I make notes for future development, not only on the book-to-be on organization, but in all of my works when I have not yet worked out a defijinitive form in which to present the issue. The focus is on the May 12, 1953, Letter on the Absolute Idea, paragraph by paragraph.  Page 21 [of the Letter of May 12, 1953] calls attention to p. 483 of the Science of Logic [Science of Logic Vol. II, 483 Johnson and Struthers translation; 840–41 Miller translation] which shows how the stage of ‘exteriorization’ is also that of intensifijication, i.e., ‘interiorization,’ i.e., objective manifestation makes the inward extension more intense.  The paragraph on p. 21, which attacks impatience in ‘an absolutely uncompromising Bolshevik’ manner, I attribute to Hegel, after which I quote from p. 484 of the Science of Logic [SL II, 484; SLM, 841–42]:  ‘That impatience whose only wish is to go beyond the determinant … to be immediately in the absolute, has nothing before it as object of its cognition but the empty negative … or else would-be absolute, which is imaginary because it is neither posited nor comprehended.’  The dialectic flow of this quotation is in no way related to the two names quoted in the preceding paragraph of the letter, but even if said unconsciously has everything to do with what I follow the Hegel quotation with:  ‘I am shaking all over for we have come to where we part from Lenin. I mentioned that, although in the approach to the Absolute Idea Lenin had mentioned that man’s cognition not only reflects the objective world but 4 Not only did Dunayevskaya develop extensive commentary on these Attitudes to Objectivity, particularly the Third Attitude on Intuitionism, which she saw as speaking concretely to her age, (See particularly her “Notes on the Smaller Logic from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,” February 15, 1961, Dunayevskaya, 2002: 77, and Chapter One, “Absolute Negativity as New Beginning—The Ceaseless Movement of Ideas and History,” Dunayevskaya, 1973), but in 1986 she began developing new ideas on the Third Attitude to Objectivity in relation to organization. This will be discussed in the next chapter.

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creates it, but that with the chapter he never developed it. Objective world connections, materialism, dialectical materialism, it is true, but not the object and subject as one fully developed.’  Stop for a moment. Hold tightly to the fact that ever since 1948–49, when I fijirst translated Lenin’s Abstract of the Science of Logic, I have done nothing less than extol Lenin philosophically, specifijically on the Science of Logic. There is no question about the fact that it was Lenin who created the great divide in Marxism in 1914–17. Our present changed perspective of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence shows here that I actually did have some philosophic diffferences as far back as the early 1950s.  The fact is that it was not only Lenin who, by keeping the Philosophic Notebooks to himself, separated philosophy from politics. When we broke politically with the concept of the vanguard party, we kept philosophy and politics in two separate compartments. What this 1953 Letter shows now is that embedded in it was a sharper critique of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence than shown in Marxism and Freedom. In 1953, on the other hand, as we saw above, I had stressed that in the chapter on The Idea of Cognition Lenin had not concretized the objectivity of cognition. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 333–34)

What this section of Dunayevskaya’s Talking to Myself document reveals is that she had related Hegel’s critique of impatience in the Absolute Idea to Lenin’s impatience in the manner by which he commented upon the Absolute Idea. This was not a question of the extent of his excerpting and commenting upon material in the chapter. Rather it was a question of Lenin’s philosophic impatience, of not rigorously following the dialectic of second negativity that Hegel developed in this ultimate chapter of the Science of Logic. Later in the same Talking to Myself document she continued on this theme and how her work on Absolute Idea in Science of Logic lead her to Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit (Mind) and its ultimate chapter: Here is how the May 12, 1953 Letter manifested the dialectical flow on p. 21 from exteriorization/interiorization it lapsed into a would-be ‘absolute’ which led Lenin to remain at the “approach to”, i.e., on the threshold of the Absolute Idea. This is the reason why Lenin preferred to let the Absolute Idea stop at Nature (Practice), crediting Hegel with ‘stretching a hand of materialism,’ instead of following Hegel to the last part of that paragraph when Hegel insists that the Absolutes had not been completed with the Absolute Idea, and must still go through the Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind before completion is reached with Absolute Mind. Put another way, in place of any self-criticism or objectivity, Lenin left future generations without full illumination of what may befall them—Stalinism. It is the generation that followed, our age that sufffered through those three decades of Stalinism, that had to face the reality of what happens after. It is this point, this objectivity, this concreteness, that emboldened me not to

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chapter eleven stop where Lenin stopped at the approach to the Absolute Idea, but to follow Hegel to the Philosophy of Mind. This Absolute Method opened new doors already in the Absolute idea, which Hegel defijined as:  ‘The pure Idea, in which the determinateness or reality of the Notion is itself raised to the level of Notion, is an absolute liberation, having no further immediate determination which is not equally posited and equally Notion. Consequently, there is no transition in this freedom. … The transition here therefore must rather be taken to means that the Idea freely releases itself.’  Now stand up and shout: ‘The Idea freely releases itself.’ Shout this while a flashing light illuminates Reality and its meaning, philosophy and revolution.  Instead of placing a ‘No Entrance’ sign over organization as ‘pure politics,’ we fijinally are in the process of working out dialectics of philosophy and organization.

VI. Organizational Ramifijications What are the organizational ramifijications of Lenin’s profound but incomplete thought-dive into Hegel’s Idea of Cognition and Absolute Idea? There simply is no one-to-one relationship between philosophic probing and organizational conclusions/ramifijications. We are certainly not saying, “If only Lenin had plunged deeper into the Absolute Idea everything would have been diffferent.” There were historical, objective barriers standing in Lenin’s pathway, preventing him from discerning philosophy’s possible organizational manifestations. We are not simply trying to run the historical fijilm a second time. However, there are powerful organizationalphilosophical lessons for ourselves in focusing on the precise nature of Lenin’s philosophical probing and its relation to his organizational practice. In this respect we wish to look at some of Dunayevskaya work in the 1980s relating to the relationship of philosophy and organization with respect to Lenin. As she wrote in 1982: By skipping over the question of the Party, we can neither understand the tragedy as the early bureaucratization of the workers’ state unfolded, nor grapple with why Lenin was still relying on the ‘thin stratum’—Lenin’s own expression—of the Bolshevik Party, despite all the criticisms he leveled against the leadership in his Will. (“On the Battle of Ideas: PhilosophicTheoretic Points of Departure as Political Tendencies respond to the Objective Situation,” Dunayevskaya, 2002: 239)

By the mid-1980s Dunayevskaya began raising the need to critique Lenin philosophically, and to do so in relation to a very high level in Lenin—his return in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, which he “rewrote” on the eve of the November Revolution as State and Revolution:

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We have, after all, by now broken also with Lenin not just politically, against any elitist organization, which we had done way back as still a united Johnson-Forest Tendency [State-Capitalist Tendency]. No, this time it was philosophically, and on the very text Lenin himself had to return to as ground for State and Revolution, that is, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, which Lenin read profoundly enough when it came to smashing the bourgeois state, but managed to escape saying anything on Party structure, for which Marx had laid a totally diffferent ground.  Indeed, not only ground, but ‘Absolute.’ Philosophy of ‘revolution in permanence’ cannot possibly be only ground, or even content, substance; it is Subject, and that both objectively and subjectively. The unchained dialectic—both as dialectics of liberation and dialectics of thought, dialectics of self-development—that self-development is both Individual and Universal. (“Not by Practice Alone: The Movement from Theory,” September 1984, 287–88)

Did Lenin have such a view of Critique of the Gotha Program? He certainly “read” Critique along with Marx’s Civil War in France on the Paris Commune in a profound manner when it came to the need to destroy the state, but he seemed to have experienced a void when it came to a realization that Critique was, as well, Marx posing philosophic vision for revolutionary organization. Dunayevskaya would further write, “[A]t Lenin’s very highest political-philosophic achievement on the eve of Nov. 1917, in State and Revolution, [there was] the absence of a Dialectic of Organization, the Party. Instead What Is To Be Done? became very nearly a Bible.” (“The Year of Only 8 Months,” Dunayevskaya, 1981: #10690) She was grappling with the greatness and the limitation of Lenin’s philosophic probing: The principle Lenin singled out in the dialectic, as we noted, was the transformation into opposite, which he related both to capitalism and to a section of the proletariat, but not to his concept of the ‘party-to-lead’ … [H]e failed to submit ‘the party’ to the Absolute Method of the dialectic of second negativity—that remained his untouchable ‘private enclave,’ that one that remains the noose around us all. (“Dialectics of Revolution and Women’s Liberation,” 1985, Dunayevskaya, 2002: 300)

In the last presentation she prepared for her colleagues, June 1, 1987, she reached the conclusion that “[F]or Lenin there was no philosophic moment insofar as organization was concerned.” (“Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” Dunayevskaya, 2002: 10) She wrote this in a presentation in which the development of the concept of the Philosophic Moment, in Marx and in Marxist-Humanism—Marx’s 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts and Dunayevskaya 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes—was of central importance. In relation to Lenin she continued:

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chapter eleven Lenin … never raised philosophy directly in relationship to organization. It was at most a phrase, like the famous reference in the Trade Union Debate, where he brings in, in a general way only, dialectics and eclecticism. …  Lenin did return to Marx’s roots in Hegel, and did see that the Critique of the Gotha Program had never really been concretized as the smashing of the bourgeois state, without which you could not have a revolution. In a word, he certainly worked out the dialectics of revolution, and made it be in Russia. But, but, but—he too didn’t touch the question of the party. On the contrary, it didn’t even go as far as his own varied critiques of What Is to Be Done?, once the Bolsheviks gained power. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 11)

• The discontinuity between Lenin’s philosophic exploration of Hegel’s Science of Logic and his remaining within the anti-emancipatory confijines of the vanguard-party-to-lead was a product of the objective-subjective moment he lived within. The great revolutionary reality of the Russian Revolution could not overcome the profound historic barriers it faced of being an underdeveloped country in a world of rapidly developing capitalism, a capitalist world whose crises birthed the horror to the First World War and, at the same time, was strong enough to prevent revolution from succeeding in Europe post-1917. It was this reality inside and outside the Soviet Union that Lenin grappled with in the half dozen year he lived post1917. It consumed his energies and his life. Though Lenin created the Great Divide in Marxism with his profound revolutionary exploration of Hegelian dialectics, he was not able to discern how a dialectics in philosophy would manifest a dialectics of organization. Thus, the barriers he faced were in thought as well as in reality. It is this separation of philosophy and organization that we must come to grips with. In a sense, the lesson from Lenin’s grappling with Hegel is a dual one from which we can learn a great deal: profound philosophical preparation for revolution, and yet, at the same time, an incompleteness when it came to working out the dialectics of organization together with the dialectics of philosophy. It is this challenge that Dunayevskaya sought to meet. One of her colleagues expressed the problematic as: “Organization is not just a ‘bearer’ of philosophy but is a manifestation of ongoing philosophic praxis.”5 To explore this further we turn to what Dunayevskaya called “a totally new way” of seeing the “Third Attitude to Objectivity” that Hegel had created for his Encyclopedia Logic in 1827.

5 Franklin Bell, Notes from 1992 on Organization and Philosophy, (personal communication).

CHAPTER TWELVE

HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF THE THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY—ITS RELATION TO ORGANIZATION I see the dialectic flow in the third attitude to objectivity from a critique of the one-sidedness of the Intuitionalists to organizational responsibility. —Dunayevskaya, Dec. 8, 1986

I. Introduction: The Three Attitudes to Objectivity Despite Lenin’s preference for some of the Smaller Logic’s (Encyclopedia Logic) formulations in his Hegel Notebooks, particularly in relation to the fijinal two chapters of the Science of Logic, he did not make excerpts or comments on the three Attitudes or “Positions (Attitudes) of Thought with Respect to Objectivity” that Hegel had developed for the extensively enlarged second edition of the Encyclopaedia (1827). Nor did Lenin include a listing of the Attitudes in the brief contents listing of the smaller Logic he wrote in 1915. For Dunayevskaya, these Attitudes to Objectivity, particularly the Third Attitude, Intuitionism, would loom large in her treatment of the Hegelian dialectic. She discerned that the Intuitionism that Hegel described historically and critiqued strongly with respect to the writings of Friedrich Jacobi, was of more than historical interest. In 1961, she had written “Notes on the Encyclopaedia Logic” that included commentary on the Attitudes to Objectivity. In the 1970s, she had developed a political-philosophic critique of Mao Zedong based in part on Hegel’s analysis of Intuitionism. In 1986, while working on “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” she would write: “This addition to the [Smaller] Logic—the Third Attitude to Objectivity—I see in a totally new way.” (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 331) This “totally new way” centered on what she saw as a Hegel’s contrast of the faith of Intuitionism as expressed by Jacobi’s philosophy resting only on personal revelation, whereas the faith of Christianity rested on the authority of the Church, an organization expressing a doctrine, “a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge.” A body of ideas, was mediated, was found to have a concrete organizational expression.

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We have been exploring whether the Hegelian dialectic is an organization of thought whose fullest, most concrete expression/realization gives birth to and encompasses actual organization. One further way to probe this question is through examining the Attitudes to Objectivity in the Smaller Logic, using the lens of Dunayevskaya’s commentary as our guide. The three Attitudes to Objectivity were formulated in 1827, after Hegel had written his major works Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Science of Logic (1812–1816), and the fijirst edition of the Encyclopedia (1817) with its Logic, and Philosophies of Nature and Spirit. Only then, (following commentary/critique of his earlier work and further contemporary development of philosophic thought in Germany), did he chose to present the range of previous philosophic thought in summation form as three attitudes to objectivity at the same time as he presented an expanded second edition of the Encyclopedia. Such compression of thought surely came from profound comprehension of the themes at issue. The First Attitude to Objectivity, termed metaphysics, Hegel called “the naïve way of proceeding … unconscious of the antithesis of thinking within and against itself.” (Hegel, 1991: ¶ 26) It encompassed pre-Kantian philosophy, “from faith and abstract understanding through scholasticism, dogmatism, and metaphysics.” (Dunayevskaya, “Notes on the Smaller Logic from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,” Dunayevskaya: 2000: 80) Hegel did not see this attitude as only in the historical past, “for, on its own account, it is always present as the way in which the mere understanding views the ob-jects of reason.” (Hegel, 1991: ¶ 27) It is through critique of this fijirst Attitude that we are at the same time given a glimpse of what will be known as the dialectical attitude. In treating Cosmology with its conception of freedom and necessity merely as an absolute antithesis, Hegel posed a far richer relation of the two: “A freedom that has no necessity within it, and a mere necessity without freedom, are determinations that are abstract and hence untrue. Freedom is essentially concrete, eternally determinate within itself and thus necessary at the same time.” As opposed to “merely external necessity,” Hegel found “a genuinely inner necessity, for that is freedom.” (¶ 35) Freedom animates Hegel’s magisterial philosophic journey. In the Second Attitude to Objectivity Hegel treats fijirst Empiricism and then Critical Philosophy (Kantianism). Hegel opened his discussion by giving empiricism credit for putting “a concrete content as opposed to the abstract theories of the understanding” (¶ 37): “[W]hat is true must be in actuality and must be there for our perception.” (¶ 38)

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As in his commentary of the First Attitude of Objectivity, a view of freedom informed Hegel’s commentary: “On the subjective side we must recognize also the important principle of freedom that lies in Empiricism; namely, that what ought to count in our human knowing, we ought to see for ourselves, and to know ourselves as present in it.” (¶ 38) Nevertheless, he quickly added that as far as content, “Empiricism restricts itself to what is fijinite,” and remained unknowing that it itself “contains a metaphysics and is engaged in it, and that it is using those categories and their connections in a totally uncritical and unconscious manner.” (¶ 38) The “defect of Empiricism” rests with the fact that “perception is the form in which comprehension was supposed to take place”: Perception as such is always something singular that passes away, but cognition does not stop at this stage. On the contrary, in the perceived singular it seeks which is universal and abides; and this is the advance from mere perception to experience. (¶ 38)

Empiricism’s method of investigation takes the form of analysis: [T]he advance from the immediacy of perception to thought, inasmuch as the determinations that the analyzed ob-ject contains united within it acquires the form of universality by being separated. [In so doing] empiricism falls into error in analyzing ob-jects if it supposes that it leaves them as they are, for in fact, it transforms what is concrete into something abstract. As a result it also happens that the living thing is killed, for only what is concrete, what is One, is alive. Nevertheless, the division has to happen in order for comprehension to take place, and spirit itself is inward division. But this is only one side, and the main issue is the unifijication of what has been divided. (¶ 38)

For empiricism it was only matter that counted. This “Materialism” was “the realm of absolute isolation into oneself, and where everything is external to everything else.” (¶ 38) Hegel here manifested a far diffferent attitude toward freedom than Empiricism’s: Since for Empiricism this sensible domain [matter] is and remains something given. This is a doctrine of unfreedom, for freedom consists precisely in my not having any absolute other over against me, but in my being dependent upon a content that is just myself. (¶ 38)

Empiricism’s great merit for Hegel was that of dealing with concrete content. However, he noted that the contents, at most, simply followed one after the other, and only lay side by side. Empirical observation, Hegel noted, “does not provide any necessary connection,” only “a subjective contingency.”

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In the second moment of Hegel’s Second Attitude to Objectivity, Critical Philosophy (Kantianism) would seek to show that “universality and necessity” were not merely “a subjective contingency” in experience, but belonged “to the spontaneity of thinking” that was a priori. (¶ 40) This was a revolution in philosophic thought, a canon shot across the bow of Empiricism. And yet, Hegel immediately took issue with the fact that the Kantian critique, which defended the objectivity of thinking against empiricism, nonetheless created an “antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity,” in which “experience in its entirely falls within subjectivity … and nothing remains in contrast with subjectivity except the thing-in-itself.” Thus thinking, which Kant had shown to be a priori, was at the same time interpreted by him not as objective, but as “merely subjectivity,” separated from the object, the thing-in-itself. (¶ 41) This Hegel could not accept. He would spend the rest of the Second Attitude to Objectivity exposing and critiquing what he regarded as the duality of Critical Philosophy: “In any dualistic system, but especially in the Kantian system, the fundamental defect reveals itself through the Inconsistency of uniting what, a moment earlier, was declared to be independent and therefore incompatible.”(¶ 60) While Kantian reason did get “involved in antinomies, i.e., in the assertion of two opposed propositions about the same ob-ject,” (¶ 48) it was limited to four antinomies, whereas, [t]he main point that has to be made is that antinomy is found not only in the four particular ob-jects taken from cosmology, but rather in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts and ideas. To know this, and to be cognizant of this property of ob-jects, belongs to what is essential in philosophical study. (¶ 48)

Hegel was here bringing forth “the dialectical moment of logical thinking.” (¶ 48) Even when Kant’s sets of antinomies were “a very important result of Critical Philosophy, and one that is worthy of recognition,” Hegel commented on the limitation of Kant’s treatment. Thus, on the relation of freedom and necessity, which, as we saw, Hegel critiqued in regard to the treatments found in the fijirst Attitude and in Empiricism, he now wrote with relation to Critical Philosophy: [W]hen the antinomy of freedom and necessity is more closely considered, the situation is that what the understanding takes to be freedom and necessity are in fact only ideal moments of true freedom and true necessity; neither of them has any truth if separated from the other. (¶ 48)

Dunayevskaya remarked in her notes on the Second Attitude: “[Hegel’s] greatest criticism of Kant[‘s system] is that it fails to unify, that is to say, its

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form of unifijication was completely external and not out of the inherent unity.” (“Notes on the Smaller Logic from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,” Dunayevskaya, 2002: 81–82) In contrast to such posed external unity, Hegel early on in his critique of Critical Philosophy made the following oral addition on the dialectic: The forms of thinking must be considered in and for themselves, [and] they must determine their own limits and point out their own defeats. This is the same activity of thinking that will soon be taken into particular consideration under the name ‘dialectic’ … it is not brought to bear on the thoughtdeterminations from the outside; on the contrary, it must be considered as dwelling within them. (¶ 41)

Indeed, throughout Hegel’s discussion of Critical Philosophy, one feels oneself to be on the verge of entrance into the dialectical Attitude to the world, that is, Hegel’s emancipatory vision. The shock is that Hegel does not yet have us enter directly into the dialectic. Instead, he prepared still one more Attitude, “The Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity,”—“Immediate Knowing.” In fact he tells us: “Nowadays we have gone beyond the Kantian philosophy, and everyone wants to go further. There are two ways of going further, however: one can go forward and backward.” (¶ 41) It is immediate knowing or Intuitionism, represented foremost by Jacobi, which Hegel regarded as a retrogression, and which he would proceed to examine in the Third Attitude. The Encyclopedia Logic was by no means the fijirst time Hegel had taken up the school of thought represented by Jacobi. In 1801 he had written an essay “Faith and Knowledge” with a substantial critique of Jacobi. In the Preface to Phenomenology of Mind (Spirit) (1807), Hegel noted: Since the man of common sense appeals to his feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is done with anyone who does not agree. He has just to explain that he has no more to say to anyone who does not fijind and feel the same as himself. In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to impel men to agree with one another, and its very existence lies simply in the explicit realization of a community of conscious life. (Hegel, 1964: 127)

The Science of Logic, as well, took up Jacobi. However, with the second edition of the Smaller Logic’s Attitudes to Objectivity, a crucial category was made of Intuitionism. Dunayevskaya called attention to this in her Smaller Logic Notes of 1961: To me, this chapter on what Hegel calls ‘Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge’ and which is nearly entirely devoted to Jacobi, is the most important and

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chapter twelve essentially totally new as distinguished from the manner in which Hegel deals with other schools of thought in his Larger Logic. The newness comes not from the fact that he does not criticize Jacobi (and Fichte and Schelling), as devastatingly in the Larger Logic, but in the sense that he has made a category out of it by devoting a chapter and by making that chapter occur when, in the ordinary mind, it would have appeared that from Kant he should have gone to his own dialectical philosophy. Hegel is telling us that one doesn’t necessarily go directly to a higher stage, but may suddenly face a throwback to a former stage of philosophy, which thereby is utterly ‘reactionary’ (that’s his word, reactionary). (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 82)1

One note on Dunayevskaya’s titles for Hegel’s three Attitudes in her Smaller Logic Notes: Not satisfijied with “attitudes to objectivity,” she referred to them formally as “Attitudes of Thought Toward the Objective World.” For her, Hegel’s attitudes were not alone a critique of schools of philosophic thought, but had objective world manifestations, in Hegel’s day and in her own.2 Where Hegel saw Critical Philosophy interpreting thinking “as being subjective, and its ultimate, unsurpassable determination is abstract universality,” (¶ 61) he saw Immediate Knowing interpreting thinking “as an activity of the particular… [Thinking] is declared to be incapable of grasping the truth.” II. Dunayevskaya’s 1961 Reading of the Third Attitude to Objectivity Dunayevskaya singled out several points from Hegel’s critique of Immediate Knowing in her Smaller Logic Notes: “The fijirst critique of Jacobi’s philosophy is the analysis that even faith must be proved; otherwise there would be no way to distinguish in anyone’s say-so whether it is something as grandiose as Christianity, or as backward as the worshiping of an ox. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 82) Dunayevskaya proceeded to quote Hegel on “Philosophy of Faith” (Jacobi) in contrast to Christian faith: Firstly, Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the church; but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of the philosopher who revealed it. And, secondly, Christian faith is objective, with a great

1 The second edition of the Wallace translation, 1892, used the expression “the reactionary nature of the school of Jacobi.” (¶ 76) The Geraets et al. translation, 1991, does not use the word “reactionary.” 2 See for instance Dunayevskaya’s discussion of the Third Attitude in relation of Mao Zedong, and of the duality of Kantianism in relation to Leon Trotsky in her Dunayevskaya, 1973.

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deal of substance in the shape of a system of knowledge and doctrine while the contents of the philosophic faith so utterly indefijinite, that, while its arms are open to receive the faith of the Christian, it equally includes a belief in the divinity of the Dalai-lama, the ox, or the money, thus, so far as it goes, narrowing Deity down to its simplest terms, to a Supreme Being. Faith itself, taken in the sense postulated by this system, is nothing but the sapless abstraction of immediate knowledge. (Hegel, 1873: ¶ 63)

As we will see in the next section, it is Hegel’s linking of ideas, (in this case Christian faith), and organization, (in this case the Church),—and thus organizational responsibility for a body of ideas—that will form the basis of Dunayevskaya 1986–87 reading of the Third Attitude to Objectivity. Hegel’s critique of the “exclusion of mediation” in Jacobi was singled out by Dunayevskaya: “[Hegel] rises to his highest height in his critique of Jacobi when he states: ‘Its distinctive doctrine is that immediate knowledge alone, to the total exclusion of mediation, can possess a content which is true.” (¶ 65) She then proceeds to quote from ¶ 71 where he developed this argument further: Since the criterion of truth is found, not in the character of the content, but in the fact of consciousness, all alleged truth has no other basis than subjective knowledge, and the assertion that we discover a certain fact in our consciousness. What we discover in our own consciousness is thus exaggerated into a fact of the consciousness of all, and even passed offf for the very nature of the mind.

Finally, Dunayevskaya called attention to the fact of what was at stake for Hegel: “[W]hat he cannot forgive is that in his own period, after we had already reached Kantian philosophy, one should turn backward.” (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 83) She proceeded to quote from the penultimate paragraph of the Third Attitude, whose last line read: “Philosophy of course tolerates no mere assertions, or conceits, or arbitrary fluctuations of inference to and fro.” (Hegel, 1873: ¶ 77) Hegel in his observations on the Third Attitude to Objectivity argued that there was no such thing as immediate knowing. He was out to show that “a knowing without mediation … is … factually false.” The same factual falsehood resided in immediate knowing claiming “that thinking only proceeds by way of fijinite and conditioned determinations.” In response to such claims, Hegel will pose “the Logic itself and the whole of philosophy.” (¶ 75) Hegel was thus defending the project of Philosophy, of the dialectic method that he was about to unfold in the rest of the Encyclopedia Logic, as against the abandonment of method that Intuitionism represented.

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It is precisely this defense of the dialectic that gives the Third Attitude to Objectivity its power and importance, its here and now. What was as issue in the debate between two schools of philosophic thought was an entire way of thinking about and acting toward the objective world. In returning to this crucial text in 1986, Dunayevskaya discerned a new point of departure from within that she saw as speaking to the question of the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy. III. Dunayevskaya’s 1986 Reading of the Third Attitude to Objectivity In writing to a non-Marxist Hegel scholar, George Armstrong Kelly, Dunayevskaya explored “a totally new way” of seeing the Third Attitude to Objectivity: We present the letter in full to help us grasp the direction of her probing: Despite the acknowledged gulf between us on the Absolute Method, may I discuss with you (and may I hope for a comment from you?) my latest selfcritique on organization? On that question I also see Hegel in a new way. That is to say, the dialectical relationship of principles (in this case the Christian doctrine) and the organization (the Church) are analyzed as if they were inseparables. All this occurs not in the context of a philosophy of religion as much as in the contest of the great dividing line between himself and all other philosophers that he initiated with the Phenomenology of Mind, on the relationship of objective/subjective, immediacy/mediation, particular/universal, history, and the “Eternal.” This addition to the [Smaller] Logic—the Third Attitude to Objectivity—I see in a totally new way.  I can’t hide, of course, that though it’s not the Absolute, I’m enamored with that early section of the Encyclopedia outline of the Logic, because it was written after Hegel had already developed Absolute Knowledge, Absolute Idea, Absolute Method.  Here History makes its presence felt, by no accident after the Absolutes both in the Phenomenology and in the Science of Logic, as well as in anticipation that he is fijinally developing the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind. Indeed, that to me is what made possible the very form of compression of those innumerable polemical observations on other philosophers and philosophies into just three attitudes to objectivity.  This time, as we know, a single attitude, the First [Attitude], embraces everything preceding the modern age. Further emphasis on this compression is evident when Hegel comes to the modern age and includes both empiricism and criticism in the Second Attitude.  My attraction to the Third Attitude was not due to the fact that it was directed against those who placed faith above philosophy—the Intuitionalists. (I’m not renewing our old debate, just because I’m an atheist; atheism, to me, is one more form of godliness, without God.) Rather, the

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attraction for me continued to be the dialectic. Far from expressing a sequence of never-ending progression, the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one even tries to escape regression by mere faith.  Here again, history enters, this time to let Hegel create varying views of Intuitionalism, depending on which historic period is at issue. Intuitionalism is “progressive” in the period of Descartes because then empiricism opened the doors wide to science. On the other hand, it became regressive in the period of Jacobi.  It is here that I saw a diffferent concept of organization when it comes to the Church than in all of Hegel’s many oppositions to the clergy’s dominance in academia. Do please follow my strange journeys that I identify as the selfdetermination of the Idea.  The Third Attitude begins (¶ 61) with a critique of Kant, whose universality was abstract so that Reason appeared hardly more than a conclusion with “the categories left out of account.” Equally wrong, Hegel continues, is the “extreme theory on the opposite side, which holds thought to be an act of the particular only, and on that ground declares it incapable of apprehending the Truth.”  In praising Descartes, Hegel points not only to the fact that empiricism opened the door to science, but that Descartes clearly knew that his famous “Cogito ergo sum” wasn’t a syllogism, simply because it had the word “therefore” in it. This becomes important because Hegel’s critique could then be directed against the one-sidedness of the Intuitionalists, for equating mind to mere consciousness, and thus “what I discover in my consciousness is thus exaggerated into a fact of consciousness of all, and even passed offf for the very nature of mind.” (¶ 71) That too is by no means the whole of the critique. What excited me most about this attitude to objectivity is the manner in which Hegel brings in organization. As early as ¶ 63 Hegel had lashed out against Jacobi’s faith, in contrast to Faith: “The two things are radically distinct. Firstly, the Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the Church; but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of personal revelation.” As we see, Hegel now has suddenly equated organization to principle, doctrine: “And secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine; while the scope of the philosophic faith is so utterly indefijinite, that, while it has room for faith of the Christian, it equally admits belief in the divinity of the Dalai Lama, the ox, or the monkey.”  Hegel proceeds (¶ 75) “And to show that in point of fact there is a knowledge which advances neither by unmixed immediacy nor unmixed mediation, we can point to the example of the Logic and the whole of philosophy.”  In a word, we’re back to the Dialectic and it’s only after that (¶ 76) that Hegel uses the word “reactionary” in relationship to the whole school of Jacobi, that is to the historic period, “The Recent German Philosophy.” “Philosophy of course tolerates no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw.” (¶ 77) Freedom and Revolution

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chapter twelve (which word I “borrowed” from Hegel’s very fijirst sentence on “The Recent Germany Philosophy”) will hew out a new path. In this way I see the dialectic flow in the third attitude to objectivity from a critique of the one-sidedness of the Intuitionists to organizational responsibility. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 331–333)

Hegel, who on many previous occasions had critiqued the established church for the way in which it set forth its doctrines, nonetheless here defended: (1) the idea that knowledge was based on doctrine, a body of ideas, and, (2) that the doctrine had an organization, in this case the church, to interpret and carry out those ideas. For Dunayevskaya, seeing Hegel’s Third Attitude to Objectivity “in a new way,” was not rooted in either religious faith or the doctrines of the Church. Rather, she saw the treatment of principles and organization as inseparables, as transcending the particular manifestation Hegel was taking up in the Third Attitude, and reaching toward the problematic she was exploring: the inseparability of revolutionary philosophy and revolutionary organization, organizational responsibility for a body of ideas, a dialectics of organization and philosophy. In 1986–87, Dunayevskaya’s view of dialectics had become tightly tied to working out its manifestation in revolutionary organization.

• Even after Hegel had spent some three decades working out the dialectical attitude to objectivity, he nevertheless felt the compulsion to set forth to a concentrated form his view of other attitudes to objectivity before he would lay out anew the dialectic attitude in the Encyclopedia of Philosophic Sciences with its Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. In so doing Hegel would come to formulate in a new manner the relationship between principles, a body of ideas, and organization. Lenin under the impact of the Second International’s shocking betrayal at the outbreak of the First World War worked out a new attitude toward the Hegelian dialectic in his Hegel Notebooks. This in turn aided him in understanding the objective world of his day. As crucial and revolutionary as Lenin’s break with his own philosophic past was in this period, as we have seen in the previous chapter, it was not without its own limitations. As important and revolutionary as was his new view of Hegel, and of the relation of the Hegelian dialectic to Marx’s Capital, Lenin felt compelled to read Hegel as a materialist, and did not fully transcend reading Hegel within the boundaries of an idealism/materialism framework. This, even

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when he saw the revolutionary and materialistic aspects of Hegel’s thought. Lenin’s attitude to objectivity did not break with the idea that, in the end, revolutionary practice was the key, with theory primarily at its service. He saw “transformation into opposite,” and “objective world connections” as key categories. However, the self-determination of the Idea was not seen as crucial as the self-determination of nations. The category of revolutionary organization, and particularly his own Bolshevik Party, remained outside the dialectical attitude to objectivity in Lenin’s thought. As we noted in the last chapter, this of course is no simple question of “If only he had read Hegel on …” The far deeper truth is that Lenin felt no compulsion in the objective/subjective circumstances he lived in, “the maturity of his age,” to probe the Hegelian dialectic in relation to revolutionary organization. It was thus an objective historic barrier he did not cross. Dunayevskaya, lived in a diffferent age, one which had witnessed the concept not alone of transformation into opposite, but of Stalinism’s counter-revolution within the revolution, and Trotsky and Trotskyism’s inability to provide a revolutionary pole of attraction philosophically, politically and organizational. Her journey into the Hegelian dialectic, her conception of working out an attitude to objectivity for her day, was compelled by a more fully developed maturity of the age, that is, by a diffferent objective/subjective situation, to probe deeper philosophically, and to work out the relation between a body of revolutionary Marxist ideas and its organizational expression. This was so even when it was not understood explicitly, as in her 1986–87 view of the Third Attitude to Objectivity, but was only implicit in her break from other tendencies whether Trotskyism or later, Johnsonism (C.L.R. James) and the founding of a Marxist organization inseparable from the working out of the body of ideas called Marxist-Humanism (1955). The attitude to objectivity represented by Marxist-Humanist ideas and organization was to defijine her revolutionary thought and life for the next three decades. It is to these developments we now turn.

PART FOUR

DIALECTICS OF PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II WORLD: THE WORK OF RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA

CHAPTER THIRTEEN1

MOMENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DUNAYEVSKAYA’S MARXIST-HUMANISM I am concerned only with the dialectic … of the type of grouping like ours, be it large or small, and its relation to the mass. —Dunayevskaya, May 12, 1953 Letter on Absolute Idea, (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 16) (W)hat happens to a small group ‘like us’ who know that nothing can be done without the masses, and are with them, but [such small groups of] theoreticians always seem to be around too. So, what is the objectivity which explains their presence, as the objectivity explains the spontaneous outburst of the masses? In a word, I was looking for the objectivity of subjectivity. —Dunayevskaya, “Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” June 1987, commenting on her May 12, 1953 Letter, (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 7)

I. A Preliminary Note on War and Revolution as Turning Points for Radical Thought: The Moment of the Theory of State-Capitalism as Needed Ground for Marxist-Humanism Dunayevskaya lived through the period of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War that became tragically transformed into the testing ground for the coming world war. Of the 1930s she wrote: The Depression signaled the end of private capitalism, while out of the Spanish Civil War there emerged a new kind of revolutionary who posed questions not only against Stalinism but against Trotskyism, indeed against

1 Some may object to devoting a Part and Chapter to a small organization (less than 100 members during Dunayevskaya’s life time) that cannot compare in size or influence to the forms of organization and struggle covered in Part I. Our point of course, is not News and Letters Committees as such, which has had to struggle to exist in the bastion of world capitalism. Rather, the focus is on the dialectic of organization and philosophy, the methodology Dunayevskaya sought to develop and practice within the small organization she headed. It is that working out of the Idea in practice and theory that can be shared with other generations of revolutionaries across boundaries of time and geography.

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chapter thirteen all established Marxists. (“Postscript to the 1986 Introduction/Overview to Vol. XII of Raya Dunayevskaya Collection.” Dunayevskaya, 1981: 12)

That questioning became a full critique when the Hitler-Stalin “nonaggression” Pact that opened the door to the Second World War was signed: To my utter shock and disbelief, I realized that with the outbreak of the war, Trotsky, who had been fijighting the Stalinist bureaucracy for over a decade, would now turn to the workers and ask them to defend Russia, because it was a ‘workers’ state though degenerate.’ … I was not only opposing the Hitler-Stalin pact, I was opposing Trotsky’s conception that nationalized economy equaled workers’ state. (Interview, Chicago Literary Review, March 15, 1985, Dunayevskaya, 1981: #10228)

Dunayevskaya began to analyze the economic form of Stalin’s Russia, reaching the conclusion that it was a neither a socialist workers’ state nor a new bureaucratic form, but rather, a state-capitalist society. She would see this as not alone a Russian question, but a world stage of capitalism encompassing the New Deal in the U.S., the co-prosperity sphere in Japan, and Nazism in Germany. (See Volume I of Dunayevskaya, 1981, and Dunayevskaya, 1992) In facing the challenge to work out an analysis of this new world economic stage that emerged out of the Depression and gave birth to World War II, Dunayevskaya sought out its opposite in the forces and forms of revolutionary opposition emerging in the decade of the 1940s: in Russia there was the absenteeism and the slow-downs within factory gates, in Europe the Resistance movement, in the United States the independent movement of the American Negro, as well as the miners who resisted unbridled sweated-labor in the midst of war. Dunayevskaya’s writing in the 1940s and early 1950s, with its new beginnings in terms of economic analysis and emerging human forces of social transformation, crucially encompassed a further dimension: an exploration of what was revolutionary Marxism in terms of philosophic roots and organizational expression. These labors were initially undertaken by Dunayevskaya and her colleagues, C.L.R. James and Grace Lee, as part of the State-Capitalist Tendency (Johnson-Forest Tendency, JFT) within the Trotskyist Movement. Their questioning and subsequent rejection of the vanguard party, was as well a search for a new relation between revolutionary Marxism, (as an organization of thought rooted in Marx’s Marxism and in Hegelian dialectics), and its concrete organizational form and expression.

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Embedded within Dunayevskaya’s development of the theory of state capitalism were seeds that would lead far beyond an economic analysis of the Soviet Union as another form of capitalism: First, she was an American revolutionary who had her senses attuned to opposition movements and protests occurring in the United States in the midst of the Second World War and after. Of particular importance were a number of her writings on “The Negro Question,” which argued for “the signifijicance of their independent struggles.” (See in particular Vol. I, Section III “1944–46, The Negro Question and the Writings of Johnson and Forest,” Dunayevskaya, 1981.) As well, the Tendency was cognizant of the activity of workers, particular the strikes of mine workers in the midst of WWII. Second, in the immediate post-war period, Dunayevskaya traveled to Europe to present the State-Capitalist position in a conference of the 4th International. In addition to debating state-capitalism with the orthodox Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, she met with a number of European Marxists. Of particular importance for her, was a meeting with a young Cameroonian, who described a remarkable mass uprising in his country still under French colonialism. For her, “that dialogue anticipated the whole Third World founded in the 1950s.” Excerpts from her letter describing the meeting are included as appendix to this chapter. Third, Dunayevskaya made translations of Marx, including from the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, which were part of the development of the theory of statecapitalism. (See particularly her essay “Labor and Society,” Dunayevskaya, 1981: #87.) As well, there were translations into English of material from Lenin and Luxemburg. The immediate post-war period was followed by four critical years for the development of Marxist-Humanism, 1949–53, that “began with a new stage of production, Automation, and of revolts, the Miners’ General Strike. They ended with Stalin’s death, in April, 1953, followed by the East Germany Revolt of June.” (Guide to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, Dunayevskaya, 1981) In this period, Dunayevskaya translated Lenin’s Abstract on Hegel’s Science of Logic from his Philosophic Notebooks. Her commentary on the translation was part of a three-way philosophic correspondence on Marx, Lenin, and the Hegelian dialectic, with C.L.R. James and Grace Lee. She also was active in the Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50. Out of the strike and translations Dunayevskaya posed two new vantage points for the book she was working on with them: “the American proletariat and Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks.” In 1953 came the death of Stalin:

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chapter thirteen For Dunayevskaya … a world-shaking event which—in the weeks between Stalin’s death and the East German Revolt—led to her philosophic breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolute Idea as a movement from practice as well as from theory. (Dunayevskaya, 1981)

Dunayevskaya characterized the period, 1949–1955, beginning with the Miners’ General Strike and her translation of “Lenin’s Abstract on Hegel’s Science of Logic”: And since our age refuses to keep separate the objective and the subjective in totally separate compartments, it was during that period that I was working on three things… : 1) I was active in the Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50 during the day and evening; 2) Late at night I was translating Lenin’s Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic, sending these translations with covering letters to Johnson [C.L.R. James]; 3) I was working on a book on ‘Marxism and StateCapitalism.’ These three activities led to a three-way correspondence between myself, Johnson, and Lee Grace Lee Boggs. (Dunayevskaya, 1980: 1)

Let us look at little further at these crucial strands that led from the Theory of State-Capitalism to the “Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism.” A. Translation of Lenin’s Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic What became signifijicant for Dunayevskaya concerning her translation of Lenin on Hegel was three-fold: First, the importance in and of itself of Lenin’s return to Hegel at the outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of offfijicial Marxism in the betrayal of sections of the Second International. She viewed Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks as his philosophical preparation for revolution. Her analysis of this can be found in Dunayevskaya, 2000 and 1973. Second, the diffferences she found between Lenin’s exploration of Hegel and that of C.L.R. James in his Notes on Dialectics, and the response of James and Grace Lee to the translation of Lenin. Dunayevskaya had sent the translation of James in three parts for the three diffferent books of the Logic, with a covering letter for each section that contained her fijirst commentaries. What was clear was that Dunayevskaya’s view of the importance of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks was not matched by James and Lee, who quickly were focused on their own contribution rather than grappling with Lenin’s plunge into Hegel. Dunayevskaya’s commentary on the responses of James and Lee vs. her own view of the centrality of Lenin’s plunge into Hegel can be found in the Prologue to 25 Years of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.–A History of Worldwide Revolutionary Developments, “New stage of production,

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New stage of cognition, New kind of organization.” (Dunayevskaya, 1981) Third, her translation set crucial ground for her own exploration the Hegelian dialectics, particularly Hegel’s Absolutes. See section III of this chapter. B. The Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50 Dunayevskaya, along with her co-leaders in the State-Capitalist Tendency, had been carrying on a philosophic correspondence since the mid-1940s centered on the relationship of the dialectic to Lenin as well as to our age … Now, however, with an ongoing strike in progress, what had been a discussion of ideas assumed, to me, concreteness and urgency. Indeed, it gained a whole new dimension through what the miners were doing and thinking. (Dunayevskaya, 1981)

So crucial did Dunayevskaya consider the miners’ action and thought in that strike, and with it, her own development as a revolutionary theoretician, that the retrospective pamphlet she co-authored, issued 35 years later was entitled The Coal Miners General Strike of 1949–50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism, with her own essay entitled “The Emergence of a New Movement From Practice that Is Itself a Form of Theory.” (Phillips and Dunayevskaya: 1984) Dunayevskaya described how the miners’ actions and ideas coalesced with her own work: The dialectic of the 1949–50 Miners’ General Strike, as it was transformed from a Lewis-authorized strike that already had lasted some six months into a challenge to John L. Lewis himself, laid the ground for new ways of thinking…[T]he totally new question the miners raised: “What kind of labor should man do?” In a word, by being concerned not just with the unemployment that is always caused by new machinery, but with the unbridgeable gulf between mental and manual labor, which the continuous miner widened, they were pointing to new direction. I had for some years been developing the theory of state-capitalism, and to me the Miners’ General Strike seemed to touch, at one and the same time, a concept Marx had designated as alienated labor and the absolute opposite to it, which Marx had spelled out as the end of the division between mental and manual labor.  … It led me to conclude that two new vantage points were needed for the book I had been working on, titled State-Capitalism and Marxism. One was that the American worker should become a point of departure not only as “root” of Marxism but as a presence today. I therefore proposed to my coleaders in the Johnson-Forest Tendency – C.L.R. James and Grace Lee – that a worker be present at future discussions of the drafts of the book. The second vantage point was to be the dialectic as Lenin interpreted it in his Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic. (Phillips and Dunayevskaya, 1984: 33)

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C. A Transformed Concept for the Book on Marxism The proposal was a major turning point in Dunayevskaya’s conception of the kind of book the Tendency would be writing. Its development would not be limited to a discussion among Marxist intellectual revolutionaries. Its audience would not be restricted to a debate among intellectuals. (1) The ideas and responses of a worker-member of the Tendency became part of the process. (2) Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks, his philosophic preparation for revolution, would be a crucial point of departure for the Tendency’s theoretical work. The decision was as well a turning point in the manner by which the book would be written. The invitation to have a worker within the organization participate in the discussion foreshadowed the way Marxism and Freedom would be written in the mid-1950s, involving the deepest layers of society, and having the development of revolutionary Marxist philosophy within a Marxist organization. The 1949–50 Philosophic Correspondence of the Tendency leaders included discussion of Lenin’s Hegel exploration and the consequences for his political activity, the “dialectical plan” of Marx’s Capital, and commentary on aspects of the Hegelian dialectic. It was both the high-point in the theoretical development of the Tendency and contained the seeds of its termination, as diffferences began to emerge on the meaning of the dialectic in the post-World War II world. These diffferences became manifest not so much philosophically, but politically and organizationally in the period ahead. In 1951 after a decade as a Tendency within the Trotskyist movement, the JFT broke with Trotskyism to form an independent organization. Rejecting the hierarchical structure of the vanguard party, the Tendency formed Correspondence Committees, a Marxist decentralized organization form. At James’ insistence, it fijirst produced only a mimeograph “practice” workers’ newspaper. It was a period which Dunayevskaya came to see as one of deep “depoliticalization,” as there was little engagement with ongoing events in the world. Finally in 1953, the Tendency decided to issue a public newspaper. The Tendency based itself on state-capitalist theory and on seeking to record the “voices from below” in its editing committees and newspaper. “Everything changed with the death of Stalin on March 5, when suddenly, it wasn’t only the objective situation that had so radically changed, but divergences appeared between Lee and me within the Tendency,” wrote Dunayevskaya. A dispute ensued between Grace Lee and

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Dunayevskaya as to the meaning of Stalin’s death, with Lee insisting on quoting some women workers who preferred discussing hamburger recipes while ignoring news of Stalin’s death, while Dunayevskaya sought to work out the impact his death would have both in the Russian orbit, (The fijirst revolt against state-capitalism and its work norms occurred in East Berlin, June 17, 1953, six weeks after Stalin’s.), and the response of the American proletariat. Dunayevskaya, while insisting that her political analysis of Stalin’s death be published in full in Correspondence, felt as if an incubus had been lifted from her head in terms of philosophy. After a decade of philosophic probing of the dialectic together with the new objective-subjective stage brought to the fore by Stalin’s death, she would write two letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, May 12 and 20, 1953. Later she would characterize them as the “Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism.” Organizationally, in less than two years the State-Capitalist Tendency would split apart. Dunayevskaya and her colleagues would found News and Letters Committees. II. Dunayevskaya’s Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, May 12 and 20 1953: “The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism” The 1953 Letters (Dunayevskaya, 2002: Chapter 2) exploring the meaning of Hegel’s Absolutes for the post-World War II world, together with the dialectical humanism of Marx’s writings, provided the philosophic vantage point for Dunayevskaya’s political-organizational labors for the rest of her life. In 1987, after more than three decades of the development of MarxistHumanism, she would single out the 1953 letters as “the Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism.” Here, we are not proposing to explore the totality of those letters, what Dunayevskaya called “the many universals inherent in it.” (For a further discussion of my view of these Letters see Gogol, 2004: Chapter 3 and Part V.) Rather we are focusing on how the Letters, in forging a new dialectical moment in the post-World War II world, created the philosophic framework for the birth and organizational praxis of Marxist-Humanism in News and Letters Committees. A. The May 12th Letter The theoretic premise with which Dunayevskaya began her May 12th letter was to probe within the Absolute Idea chapter of Science of Logic what

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her co-leader of the State-Capitalist Tendency, C.L.R. James, had termed “the dialectic of the Party.” In the fijirst paragraph Dunayevskaya writes: “I brazenly shout that in the dialectic of the Absolute Idea is the dialectic of the party and that I have just worked it out.” (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 15) She immediately followed by noting that she was neither taking up the mass party, “the workers will do what they will do and until they do we can have only the faintest intimation of the great leap,” nor the question of spontaneity versus organization, nor Stalinism, “which the workers will overcome.” Instead, “I am concerned only with the dialectic of the vanguard party of the type of grouping like ours, be it large or small, and its, relationship to the masses. (16) Though Dunayevskaya used the term vanguard party, and perhaps had not fully yet broken with all aspects of the vanguard party, two aspects of her view were in opposition to the classical formulation of the Party. First, she was practicing a concept of the masses as creative in their activities and as source of revolutionary theory. One can see this in her 1940s writings on the independent struggle of the Negro people in the United States, and in her activity in the Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50. Out of participation in the strike she would propose a new form for the book she was involved in writing with the other leaders in the Johnson-Forest Tendency: Direct worker participation in the book discussions. (See Dunayevskaya, 1980 and 1984 as well as “Discussion led by Raya Dunayevskaya on ‘The new form of book-in-the-making from two vantage points: American proletariat and Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks’ ” Feb. 15, 1950. Dunayevskaya, 1981: #1585.) Second, when she wrote of “the type of grouping like ours,” she had in mind not the orthodox Marxist parties with their programs, but the “strictly theoretical-practical grouping” that was searching for the philosophic basis of its existence, what she would later call “the objectivity of subjectivity.” Nonetheless, in the beginning pages of the May 12th letter, the framework of “the dialectic of the party” led her to excerpt a number of quotes from the Absolute Idea chapter to the Science of Logic and the Absolute Knowledge (Knowing) chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit and “translate” these Hegelian terms into elements of the dialectic of the party. Thus: • Hegel’s expression of the Absolute Idea being “the identity of the Theoretical and Practical Idea,” became “the party is the identity or unity of the activity of the leadership and the activity of the ranks.” • “The Absolute Idea is the only object and content of philosophy” became “the party is the only object and content of our philosophy…”

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The Absolute Idea’s self-determination or particularization though “various phases” became the “various phases as stages of development within the party such as 1903, 1920–23, etc.” • Hegel’s discussion of the Notion and Other in two diffferent ways in the chapter was equated with “the proletariat outside,” and with “the party itself.” • Hegel’s treatment of the “mediated result” or syllogism of universality, individuality and specifijication in the Absolute Knowledge chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit was discussed in relation to the party as the totality and “the mediated result of the three layers.” (The “three layers” was Johnson’s formulation for Marxist organization in which there was a fijirst layer of intellectual leadership, a second of experienced politicos and a third layer of rank-and-fijile workers, women, Blacks and youth.) • Hegel’s commentary on “form-determinations” in relation to Absolute Idea was taken up in terms of the specifijicity of the party: “forms of relations between leaders and ranks, between the various layers and within each layer tell the whole story. There is no content outside of that.” • Hegel’s discussion of “internal intuition” and “the immediate of sensuous intuition” was interpreted in terms of ranks and leaders: “note the contrast between ‘the immediate of sensuous intuition’ and which comes from that which is, from the way, we would say, the third layer lives, and ‘the internal intuition’ of the leader which comes from the way he thinks.” However, these “applications” of Hegel’s Absolute Idea and Absolute Knowledge quotes to a “dialectic of the party” in Dunayevskaya’s May 12th letter, were only the initial framework for the probing of Hegel’s Absolutes. Her thought-dive went far deeper. First, Dunayevskaya brought to her reading of the Absolutes the experience of a practicing Marxist revolutionary with profound, non-hierarchical ties to mass forces of social revolt both historically and ongoing. Thus her probing of the dialectic was not a question of the “party” giving “consciousness to the masses” in the manner of the classical vanguard party. Rather, she was asking what was the role of a revolutionary grouping in grappling with dialectical philosophy. Did having a philosophic basis for organization create a qualitatively diffferent kind of revolutionary grouping, a diffferent way of working out the responsibility of revolutionary organization? Would it mean creating a diffferent relationship between a revolutionary organization and the mass movement?

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After Dunayevskaya quoted Hegel from the Phenomenology where “Spirit is the movement which empties (externalizes) itself of self,” (Hegel, 1964: 804) she commented: “So Socialism too as it ‘externalizes’ itself in parties, and in this case I mean not the vanguard grouping but the Paris Commune, the Soviets, the CIO…” Thus, the externalization as History she saw not simply as the role of parties, but of revolutionary movements. The movement itself in its self-organization developed the concept of socialism. When she was concentrating on the party, she was seeing the party not alone politically, but philosophically: “the party both as political organization and as the realization of the theory of knowledge.” (Dunayevskaya 2002: 18) Parties were not alone organizations, but philosophies: “none of the other philosophies (parties to us) just degenerated or died, but their achievements have been incorporated in the new philosophy or party.” (21) Second, as crucial as what Dunayevskaya brought to her reading of Hegel’s Absolutes, was what occurred when she freely subjected the “dialectic of the party” to the rhythm, the dialectic of Hegel’s Absolutes. She was not merely translating phrases of Hegel into party-political terms. She was reading all of the Absolute Idea chapter, excerpting and commenting on full paragraphs as well as paragraphs from the Absolute Knowledge chapter of Phenomenology, and in the May 20th letter, the Absolute Mind (Spirit) Section of Philosophy of Mind. It was the movement of Hegel’s Absolutes, as Dunayevskaya quoted them, that transformed her exploration from a “translation” or “application” of the dialectic to the creation of a new dialectical moment. This movement, not the dialectic of the party, became the core of her reading of Hegel. In the paragraphs she excerpted, what came more to the fore was not the initial “translation” of philosophic terms into “party” and political terms, (what she had called her reading “at this moment”), but the actual movement of the Idea, its self-development, the power of negativity. Everything would become tested by the absolute negativity of the Idea. It became the basis for the forging of this new dialectical moment. Thus, when she singled out two expressions of Other in relation to the Notion in the Absolute Idea chapter, she quoted from the second expression as follows: The second or negative and mediated determination is at the same time the mediating determination. At fijirst it may be taken as simple determination, but in truth it is a reference or relation; for it is negative—the negative, however of the positive, and includes the latter. It is not therefore the Other of a term to which it is indiffferent, for thus it would be neither an Other, nor a

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reference or relation; it is the Other in itself, the Other of an Other. It thus includes its own Other, and so is contradiction, or the posited dialectic of itself. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: 16–17)

This expression of Hegel brought to the fore the concept of second negativity, of a negativity that does not cease but continues at the highest stage of the dialectic, the Absolute. Dunayevskaya had earlier quoted that the Absolute Idea “contains the highest opposition within itself,” and had commented on “the staggering truth of this last phrase.” (16) When she turned to quote from Phenomenology’s Absolute Knowledge in the midst of her commentary on Science of Logic’s Absolute Idea, she singled out the aspect where “Spirit comes into being, History,” but pointed out: [Hegel] does not leave it at history. … He ends Absolute Knowledge with: ‘The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, fijinds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms (Geister) as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. This conservation, look at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears. Both together, or History (intellectually) comprehended (begrifffen), form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless, solitary, and alone.’ (17)

In moving to this complex fijinal paragraph of Phenomenology of Mind, Dunayevskaya was within the movement, not alone of the unfolding of history, but the self-development or self-determination of the Idea. It would be this self-development of the Idea that became the driving force of the May 12th and May 20th letters. Second negativity was central to her discussion of “internal intuition.” As we noted, her “application” of this category was in relation to the leader of a revolutionary grouping. However, she does not put the leader on any pedestal: “And the beautiful part about the ‘internal intuition’ is that this ‘beginning must be inherently defective and must be endowed with the impulse of self-development.’ ” (19) What was crucial for Dunayevskaya was not the word of the leader, but the self-development of the Idea, its negativity. The test of leadership became a revolutionary’s relationship to the Idea in its manifestation as Absolute. Dunayevskaya would write: So that, fijinally, we reach Hegel’s conclusion that nothing in life or in thought has a beginning so simple as is imagined but that ‘every beginning must be made from the Absolute, while every progress is merely the exhibition of the

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chapter thirteen Absolute. … The process is therefore not a kind of overflow, which it would be if in truth that which begins were already the Absolute; rather the progress consists in this, that the universal determines itself and is the universal for itself, that is, is equally also individual and subject. It is the Absolute only in its completion.’ (19)

One fijinds not an Absolute that is static or fijixed, but absolute negativity, absolute becoming. Neither the leadership, nor for that matter, the mass movement from below, was the ultimate. Each had to be measured against the self-determination of the Idea. *** What we are witnessing with the May 12th letter, (and that of May 20th as well), was a two-fold process. The fijirst process was how Dunayevskaya began her reading of the Absolute Idea chapter: a striving to interpret, “translate,” “apply the dialectic,” to the question of the party. But a second process, the one that carried her forward because she insisted on following out the logic of the Idea, was one of second negativity, the dialectic in philosophy itself. In this sense her exploration of Hegel’s dialectics was an aufhebung, a process which sublimates, overcomes, the initial concern with dialectic of the party. (We should as well remember that aufhebung in Hegel’s hands means a preservation as well. This can be seen in Dunayevskaya’s return to the 1953 letters as part of her work on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.) Where did this drive of second negativity take Dunayevskaya? We can follow this in her discussion of Lenin within the May 12th letter. Though she had begun with the dialectic of the party, she did not take up Lenin’s concept of the party as in What Is To Be Done? in the Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes. Rather, in her reading of the Absolute Idea chapter, she was pulled by where to “fijit Lenin … here historically,” (20) and “where we part from Lenin” (22) philosophically. As we saw, Lenin had felt compelled to return to Hegel’s Science of Logic with the outbreak of the First World War in order to fijind his philosophic bearings. The result was his “Philosophic Notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic.” Dunayevskaya had translated and begun commentary on them in 1949. She would call the Notebooks Lenin’s philosophical preparation for revolution. They had served as a crucial entry point for her own study of Hegel. Now in 1953, as she took her own plunge into Hegel’s Absolutes, she was able to begin to place the meaning of Lenin’s commentary on the Idea of Cognition and the Absolute Idea within her own study of Hegel. What was striking about

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her commentary on Lenin in 1953 was her focus on the barriers and limitations of his study. Thus she would write that in the previous section on ‘The Idea of Cognition’ Lenin had gone further, saying that ‘Man’s cognition not only reflects the objective world but creates [it],’ but when he reached the Absolute Idea it was not the creativity that he developed but the objective world connections because to him in 1915 the Idea as ‘objective truth’ of necessity predominated over any actual reconstruction of society, or the 1917 ‘socialism looking at us though all widows.’ (20)

The historic barrier that Lenin faced could now, in 1953, be overcome, as Dunayevskaya would enter fully into the Absolute Idea chapter, working out second negativity in the post-World War II world. She excerpted Hegel, concentrating on the second negation: The fijirst or immediate term is the Notion in itself, and therefore is the negative only in itself; the dialectic moment with it therefore consists in this, that the distinction which it implicitly contains is posited in it. The second term on the other hand is itself the determinate entity, distinction or relation, hence with it the dialectic moment consists in the positing of the unity which is contained in it. (20)

She then continued: We have reached the turning point despite the unity or the party as a totality, since ‘The negativity which has just been considered is the turning point of the movement of the Notion. It is the simple point of negative selfrelation, the innermost source of all activity, of living and spiritual selfmovement, the dialectic soul which all truth has in it and through which it alone is truth; for the transcendence of the opposition between the Notion and Reality, and that unity which is the truth, rest upon this subjectivity alone. The second negative, the negative of the negative, which we have reached, is this transcendence of the contradiction, but is no more the activity of an external reflection than the contradiction is: it is the innermost and most objective moment of Life and Spirit, by virtue of which a subject is personal and free.’ (20)

This was a crucial turning point of Dunayevskaya’s journey into the Absolute Idea chapter. She would now exclaim, all in capital letters: NOW STAND UP AND SHOUT PERSONAL AND FREE, PERSONAL AND FREE, PERSONAL AND FREE AS LENIN SHOUTED LEAP, LEAP, LEAP WHEN HE FIRST SAW DIALECTICAL DEVELOPMENT TO BE THAT AND ALSO THE OBJECTIVE WORLD. (20)

She continued quoting Hegel until she reached the fijinal paragraph of the chapter, there singling out where Lenin stopped:

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chapter thirteen I am shaking all over for we come to where we part from Lenin. … [H]e reaches the last paragraph: ‘For the Idea posits itself as the absolute unity of the Notion and its Reality, and thus gathers itself into the immediacy of Being; and in doing so, as totality in this form, it is Nature.’  There Lenin stops—it is the beginning of the last paragraph—and he says ‘This phrase on the last page of the Logic is exceedingly remarkable. The transition of the logical idea to Nature. Stretching a hand to materialism. This is not the last phrase of the Logic, but further till the end of the page is unimportant.’ (22)

Dunayevskaya objected: “But my dear Vladimir Ilyitch, it is not true; the end of that page is important; we of 1953, we who have lived three decades after you and tried to absorb all you have left us, we can tell you that.” (22) Dunayevskaya would proceed to examine the rest of that fijinal paragraph with its discussion of “absolute liberation,” of “the Idea freely releases itself.” (22) She brought in Marx, seeing his discussion of the form of the commodity based on Hegel’s syllogistic Universal, Particular and Individual while “the Accumulation of Capital (the General Absolute Law) is based on The Absolute Idea.” (23) She then quoted the fijinal sentences of the Logic: But this next resolution of the pure Idea—to determine itself as external Ideal—thereby only posits for itself the mediation out of which the Notion arises as free existence that out of externality has passed into itself; arises to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit, and to discover the highest Notion of itself in that logical since as the pure Notion which forms a Notion of itself. (23)

The flow of Hegel’s dialectical development at the end of Absolute Idea does not end, but enters another sphere: “to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit.” Dunayevskaya immediately asked, “[C]an you get a hold of a copy of Philosophy of Spirit or is it Mind?” She was determined to follow out absolute negativity in Philosophy of Spirit, and its fijinal chapter “Absolute Mind [Spirit].” B. The May 20th Letter The May 20th letter began with an “outline of the development of the vanguard party and its relationship to the mass movements,” (25) ending with the Johnson-Forest Tendency within Trotskyism (1941–50) and as an independent group (1951–53). Dunayevskaya then turned to sections of Philosophy of Mind, excerpting and discussing the Introduction, Free Mind, and Absolute Mind. We focus on Absolute Mind where she noted,

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“I will limit myself to the concluding four paragraphs, 574–577.” (27), and where the new dialectical moment fully emerged for Dunayevskaya. The fijirst sentence of ¶ 574 begins, “This notion of philosophy is the selfthinking Idea, the truth aware of itself …” After excerpting and commenting upon signifijicant segments of ¶ 574, Dunayevskaya turned to ¶ 575, where this self-thinking Idea had its fijirst appearance in the form of a syllogism, Logic-Nature-Mind: “The Logical principle turns to Nature and Nature to Mind.” Dunayevskaya expressed her reading of this fijirst syllogism: “The movement is from the logical principle or theory to nature or practice and from practice not alone to theory but to the new society which is its essence.” (28) This reading–stating that within Hegel’s Absolutes there is a movement from theory to practice, and a movement from practice that reaches out to theory and to the new society– would come to have enormous implications for the development of Marxist-Humanism and its organizational expression, News and Letters Committees. Following Lenin, Dunayevskaya “translated” Nature as practice. But whereas Lenin had done so at the beginning of the last paragraph of the Absolute Idea chapter of the Science of Logic, and had not followed Hegel to the end of the chapter or into Philosophy of Mind, Dunayevskaya was doing so within the fijinal paragraphs of Absolute Mind. Thus, Nature was not outside the Idea, an “answer” in the revolutionary practice of the masses alone. Rather, Nature was the mediation, “Nature is essentially defijined as a transition-point and negative factor, and as implicitly the Idea.” (¶ 575) As such, Dunayevskaya noted, “that practice itself is ‘implicitly the Idea.’ ” (28) Such practice not only expressed theory, but reached toward the new society. This conception showed philosophically that the practice of masses was not only muscle of revolution, but Mind as well. The link between theory and practice was not a one way road from theory to practice, with practice having only a static presence in relation to the Idea. If practice itself was “implicitly the Idea,” the practice of the masses had Reason within. Masses as reason meant that the task “of the type of grouping like ours” was not to give consciousness to the masses, but to help make what was implicit in the masses’ practice, explicit. In the 1953 Letters Dunayevskaya would not spell out how this would be accomplished, how a small revolutionary group could carry out such a task. It would be two more years before News and Letters Committees was formed. Only then, would a

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group, founded on this new reading of Hegel’s Absolutes and the Humanism of Marx, strive to carry out such a task.2 Dunayevskaya continued exploring absolute negativity in these fijinal paragraphs of Absolute Mind, “[L]et us not forget that this is only the fijirst syllogism,” proceeding to quote the second syllogism, whose form was Nature Mind Logic: [T]hat syllogism is the standpoint of the Mind itself, which—as the mediating agent in the process—presupposes Nature and couples it with the Logical principle. It is the syllogism where Mind reflects on itself in the Idea: philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it. (¶ 576)

With Mind now “the mediating agent in the process,” Dunayevskaya gave her reading of this syllogism: I cannot help but think of Marx concluding that the Commune is ‘the form at last discovered to work out the economic emancipation of the proletariat,’ and of Lenin in Vol. 9 [of Selected Works] saying that the workers and peasants ‘must understand that the whole thing now is practice, that the historical moment has arrived when theory is being transformed into practice’. … And so I repeat Mind itself, the new society, is ‘the mediating agent in the process.’(29)

Dunayevskaya now moved to “where Hegel arrives at Absolute Mind, the third syllogism,” quoting him: The third syllogism is the Idea of philosophy, which has self-knowing reason, the absolutely-universal, for its middle term: a middle, which divides itself into Mind and Nature, making the former its presupposition, as process of the Idea’s subjective activity, and the latter its universal extreme, as process of the objectively and implicitly existing Idea. (29)

She summed up the dialectical movement she had discerned: No wonder I was so struck … with the Syllogism which disclosed that either the Universal or the Particular or the Individual could be the middle term. Note carefully that the ‘middle which divides itself’ is nothing less than the absolute universal itself and that, in dividing itself into Mind and Nature, it makes Mind the presupposition ‘as process of the Idea’s subjective activity’ and Nature ‘as process of the objectively and implicitly existing Idea.’ (29)

2 “So it is Philosophy of Mind i.e., the May 20 rather than the May 12 Letter, that completely frees me from CLR[James] and from concern with party, as with the fijinal 3 paragraphs of Mind, I end not with the form of organization, but instead say, ‘we have entered the new society.’ ” (“Crucial on Book yet 1953 as concept vs. experience,” May 13, 1987. Dunayevskaya,1981: #10923)

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Dunayevskaya’s recognition that either the Universal, or the Particular, or the Individual could be the middle term, the mediation, a “middle which divides itself” and thus “the absolute universal itself,” released the Absolute as an absolute movement of becoming. There was nothing static about the categories Universal, Particular and Individual—all was movement, selfmovement through double negation, second negativity, both forward and rearward. Each of the terms, Universal, Particular and Individual—the new society as cognition and reality, the particular (specifijic) forms of practice and thought to get there, the social individual striving for liberation—could be the middle, the mediating agent, and thereby implicitly the whole. She quoted the last sentences of ¶ 577— The self-judging of the Idea in its two appearances (¶ 575, ¶ 576) characterizes both as its (the self-knowing reason’s) manifestations: and in it there is a unifijication of the two aspects,–it is the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition. The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind.

—and ended her letter: “We have entered the new society.” *** For Dunayevskaya a new dialectical moment had been born. Not only was Nature (practice) “implicitly the idea”—masses as reason, a movement from practice to theory that was itself a form of theory—but theory itself—in the form that a theoretician has responsibility for—not only must recognize that movement from practice as reason and strive to meet it as such, but must itself be rooted in the fullness of the Idea, that is, philosophy, dialectic thought, if it is to have a concrete, emancipatory reaching for the future. These two manifestations, the nature of the fact and the action of cognition are what allow her to write, “We have entered the new society.” To show that this new dialectical moment was not only the experience of the theoretician who had created it, but the characteristic of the age, would now require the further self-development of this dialectical moment, including its organizational expression. Within two years of her philosophic breakthrough came the break-up of the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the founding of a new organization, News and Letters Committees, and with it, a new praxis.3 3 For Dunayevskaya’s view of this period, see “Prologue: New Stage of Production, New stage of cognition, New kind of organization,” in Dunayevskaya, 1980.)

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III. The Organization of Thought which Determines Organizational Life: Developing Marxist-Humanism and News and Letters Committees For more than three decades, 1955–1987, Dunayevskaya sought, at one and the same time, to theoretically develop “the philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism” that she viewed her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes as being, and to give organizational expression/concretization to the 1953 “Philosophic Moment” in the founding and the praxis of News and Letters Committees, including in its journalistic expression News & Letters. Here, we can follow that journey in only an abbreviated form. We will indicate crucial moments in the development of the Idea of MarxistHumanism in relation to organization—“the creation of MarxistHumanism as Organization.” The fullest record of these developments can be found in the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (Dunayevskaya, 1981) and in the three decades of News & Letters newspaper while Dunayevskaya was chairwoman of its Editorial Board. As well, I have written on these developments in Gogol, 2002. In the fijirst section of this chapter we took up the Moment of StateCapitalist Theory. Developed while Dunayevskaya and others were within Trotskyism, the Theory drew upon Marx’s economic categories of what constitutes a capitalist society, using not alone Marx’s Capital, but also quoting from the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. As well, the State-Capitalist Tendency were practicing radicals in the U.S., writing about the independent movement of the Negro masses, and of labor struggles of miners during World War II. Dunayevskaya has written of the incompleteness of state-capitalist theory without the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism. As the same time, she was quite explicit about the crucial nature of this theory: “[I]t would have been impossible to get to the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism without the theory of state-capitalism.” (“Not By Practice Alone: The Movement from Theory,” Dunayevskaya, 2002: 273) The Letters of May 12 and 20, 1953 on Hegel’s Absolutes constituted the second Moment in the development of Marxist-Humanism, and were taken up in the second section of the present chapter. These were written when the State-Capitalist Tendency had taken the form of an independent organization, Correspondence Committees. However, the Letters did not become a topic of discussion or practice in the organization from 1953 to the break-up of the Tendency at the end of 1954. C.L.R. James did not comment on them. Grace Lee initially commented, but then followed

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James into silence on what Dunayevskaya came to the view as “the Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism.” It was only with the founding of News and Letters Committees in 1955 that a new beginning would be made organizationally as well. Dunayevskaya strove to have the new organization explore how the new beginning she had found philosophically in Hegel’s absolutes—that there was a movement not only from theory to practice but also from practice to theory—would become further expressed in philosophic terms, and as concrete new beginnings organizationally and politically, including in a new kind of journalism. News & Letters, the Committees’ newspaper, was fijirst published in June 1955, on the 2nd anniversary of the June 17th East Germany Revolt against Communist totalitarianism. The Committees’ fijirst pamphlet, issued in November, contained “Lenin’s Abstract on Hegel’s Science of Logic” and Dunayevskaya’s 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes. Though not yet creating the full category—dialectics of organization and philosophy— Dunayevskaya was seeking a way of uniting her new philosophic vantage point within Hegel’s Absolutes and the kind of organization she wanted to create with her colleagues. She used the expression “an organization of thought which determines organizational life” to focus on the type of organization she was reaching for. Later she would entitle the second part of her archives, The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, ”Creation of MarxistHumanism as Organization – News and Letters Committees – and as Theory For Our Age” How did News and Letters Committees reflect this concept? It sought: (1) to be a non-vanguardist, committee-form of organization based on a new kind unity of workers and other forces of revolution with intellectuals; (2) to create a newspaper that would manifest, in the way it was written and in its content, the need to end the division between mental and manual labor which characterized capitalist society; (3) to become a philosophic action group which would not separate its political activity and journalistic expression from the philosophic vantage point of theoretical preparation for revolution by striving to work out Marx’s Humanism anew as Marxist-Humanism in book form. This would be an organization rooted in dialectical philosophy of Hegel and of Marx, particularly exploring Hegel’s Absolutes for our day. All the subsequent Moments of the development of the Idea of MarxistHumanism—in particular, the writing of Marxism and Freedom, of Philosophy and Revolution, of Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and

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Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, as well as her fijinal labors on the projected book, “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy”—were undertaken while she was chairwoman of News and Letters Committees. One needs to be remember that the Committees and News & Letters were founded while McCarthyism polluted the United States. Indeed, the disintegration of Correspondence Committees followed the putting of the State Capitalist Tendency on the U.S. Attorney General’s List as a “subversive organization.” It was no minor achievement to form a MarxistHumanist organization at such a time. At the same time, 1955–56 saw the emergence of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and then the explosion of the Hungarian Revolution. How would this new Marxist organization respond to momentous objective-subjective events? A. News and Letters Committees and Its Constitution In three intense years, 1955–1957, the theoretical and practical foundation for Marxism-Humanism, as organization, as newspaper and as theoretical expression in book form was established: At the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955 Correspondence Committees was broken up by followers of James. Even though the group supporting Dunayevskaya constituted a majority of the membership, they did not have legal title to the newspaper Correspondence. A conference was held by Dunayevskaya and her colleagues to establish News and Letters Committees and begin a new newspaper, News & Letters, (named after the Boston Newsletter from the time of the American Revolution). In the fall of 1955, the new organization published its fijirst pamphlet. Its contents were Dunayevskaya’s translation of Lenin’s Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic and her Letters of May 12 and 20, 1953 on Hegel’s Absolutes. Dunayevskaya was intent on making her 1953 Letters the basis, “the ground and roof,” for News and Letter Committees. It was the beginning of a threedecade long process of working out the development of the Idea of Marxist-Humanism and its organizational expression. At the founding Convention of News and Letters (July 1956), Dunayevskaya delivered the opening presentation, “Theoretical and Practical Perspectives: Where to Begin.” (Dunayevskaya, 1981: #2568–86) The gathering took place seven months after the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and fijive months before the Hungarian Revolution erupted— events that would contribute to the development of the new organization. A Constitution was written; a National Editorial Board was elected as the leadership and as the committee responsible for continuing the

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publication of News & Letters; Dunayevskaya was assigned the task of writing a restatement of Marxism in book form. The Convention adopted a Constitution, whose Preamble—a statement of its founding principles— was three typewritten pages that began: People everywhere, today, are looking for a new way of life under which man can be free to guide his own destiny: to set and establish his own way of living, his own conditions of work, and his own forms of association with his fellow-man.

It characterized the age lived in as the age of state capitalism, both “in its totalitarian form and its capitalist-democratic form,” and singled out working people as “the only force in the world capable of changing present-day society and of evolving the forms and shape of future society.” With the advent of automation, American working people at the point of production were posing the question, “What kind of labor?” Abroad, the June 17, 1953 revolt of East German workers, followed by the revolts in the Vorkuta prison camps, and the 1956 Polish workers’ uprising, “answered afffijirmatively the question: Can man be free in this age of totalitarianism.” The document linked opposition to war to the vision of a new society. It singled out the struggle of the Negro people, who “occupy a place of special signifijicance in American life.” The Constitution established News and Letters Committees and the newspaper News & Letters, “whose editor shall be a worker and the articles for which shall be written on a decentralized basis.” The paper and the committees sought “to promote the fijirmest unity among workers, Negroes and other minorities, women, youth and those intellectuals who have broken with the ruling bureaucracy of both capital and labor.” Youth were singled out as organizationally independent and having space available to them in the paper to write and edit for themselves. The need for News and Letters Committees to present an interpretation of Marxism on native grounds in book form was stated in the following terms: “We hold that the method of Marxism is the guide for our growth and development.” So crucial did the new organization see the need to be founded and developed in relation of a dialectical organization of thought for the post World War II world, that even before it was fully drafted in book form, the Constitution included the necessity for such theoretical labor. In less than two years, the book would be completed and published as Marxism and Freedom … from 1776 until today. On organizational form, the Constitution noted: “We make no pretense of being a political party. We constitute ourselves as News & Letters

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Committees whose members come together to promote their ideas in an organized manner.” The By-Laws provided for an elected leadership, the National Editorial Board (NEB). Dunayevskaya was elected chairperson of the NEB. The original Preamble to the Constitution is printed as an appendix to this chapter. B. News & Letters Newspaper—Theory/Practice How did Dunayevskaya describe the origins and development of the paper? To examine the fijirst year of our existence, especially the fijirst issue of News & Letters (N&L), will reveal, fijirst, what we heard, and second, the meaning we gave to what we heard by declaring it to be “a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory.” It is this we held to be the challenge which theoreticians must face in working out the dialectic philosophy of the age. The uniqueness of the simultaneity of act and of thought in the 1950s—in such events as the 1949–50 Miners’ General Strike and the 1953 East German Revolt—was a spur to the publication of News & Letters. Thus we set aside a specifijic section entitled “Coal and Its People,” which we explained in an article in the fijirst issue, “A Coal Section because…” That section had been born from the kind of questions posed by that 1949–50 Miners’ General Strike against Automation, which was then merely known as the struggle against the introduction of a new kind of machine, “the continuous miner,” into the coalfijields. In battling what the miners called a “man-killer,” the miners insisted they were not interested mainly in the question of wages. Rather, they asked what kind of labor man should do. Why was there such a big division between thinking and doing?  In 1953, in a very diffferent country, East Germany, there was a rebellion against “work norms” (speed-up). Here the workers coupled their economic demands at the point of production with the political demand for freedom. It was the fijirst-ever general strike from under Communist totalitarianism. Their slogan was “Bread and Freedom.” This new battle spread through East Europe. It came to a climax in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which brought onto the present historic stage philosophic questions that had been raised in Marx’s Humanist Essays of 1844.  Issue number one of News & Letters demonstrated our international dimension in its very appearance in June, 1955, to commemorate the second anniversary of the June 17th East German Revolt. This was discussed in our “World Comment” section of this fijirst issue. Our editorial, “Why We Appear,” expressed our relation to our readers as writers here in America. The uniqueness of our paper was manifested in the following:  The editors were two workers, Johnny Zupan and Charles Denby. Denby, a Black production worker, was soon to become the sole editor. This was the fijirst time ever that a U.S. Black production worker became the editor of a Marxist paper.

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 2. Nor was the Black Dimension limited to editorship. The very fijirst issue of N&L reproduced a picture of Njeri, Kenyan woman who was a central fijigure in the Mau Mau struggle for freedom from British imperialism. It was to her that the booklet, People of Kenya Speak for Themselves, was dedicated.  The year 1955 was fijilled not only with McCarthyism, but with racism of the most barbaric kind—as witness the murder of Emmett Till. Always seeing the new opposition, the absolute opposite of the barbarism, is the only way to know how to fijight in a positive way. Thus, our front page article, Oct. 5,1955, was not just a report of the horrors of Till’s murder, but of the Black mass reaction to it. When the Montgomery Bus Boycott broke out later that same year, our editor, Charles Denby, went to Alabama to meet with the participants in that bus boycott. What we presented in the pages of N&L was a report of the beginnings of the Black Revolution. It became crystal clear that this movement wasn’t the act of any single individual but was masses in motion—what we would later call Black masses as vanguard.  3. The category of Women’s Liberation as Reason as well as revolutionary force was seen in N&L from the start. It was not alone that a Black woman, Ethel Dunbar, authored a column she called “We Are Somebody”, but that N&L had no less than two other women columnists—Jerry Kegg on the Labor page and Angela Terrano, who was also a worker, writing a column called “Working for Independence,” fijirst on the Youth page and later on the Labor page.  4. The Youth column was then written by Robert Ellery, who edited the page and called his column “Thinking It Out.” He later wrote the front page article which clearly showed that, far from the youth being a “Beat Generation,” they were in fact a new force of revolution—”Rebels With A Cause.” (N&L, Feb. 5, 1957)  5. To be noted as pivotal as well was the section devoted to “Readers’ Views” which, was created to give priority not merely to letters to the editor, but also to unwritten letters, i.e., to views of non-members, often only spoken. The purpose of this section was to reveal what people thought and said of the world, and of their own lives, which would not depend on whether or not they were writers. Rather, it was a question of our members needing to be alert to what the masses said to each other, what they thought, how they felt, whether at work or just on public transportation. Involved here is the whole concept of oral history…  6. An “MD” column was written by a doctor. It did not limit itself to medical problems, though central to the column would be specifijic questions about industrial illnesses and about the social nature of illness. Thus, the MD column dealt with such other topics as a review of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (N&L, Feb. 5, 1957); and a series of four articles developed a view of “The Biological Basis of Marxist-Humanism.” (N&L, AprilOctober, 1960)  7. Finally, there was my column, “Two Worlds,” which had an over line, “Notes from a Diary,” and was, at fijirst, unsigned. My fijirst column dealt with “Letter Writing and the New Passions” that signaled the birth of a new epoch.

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chapter thirteen In 1955 our very fijirst conference, which had decided to publish this paper, News & Letters, edited by workers, had at the same time assigned me to complete the study of Marxism that I had been working on for a decade. It would be called Marxism and Freedom and would articulate both the American roots of Marxism and Marx’s world Humanist concepts. (“Retrospective/ Perspective Thirty Years of News & Letters”, Dunayevskaya, 1986)

We will not here take the time to further follow the development of News & Letters over the three decades Dunayevskaya chaired its Editorial Board. The reader can follow that development by examining the individual issues at www.newsandletters.org Rather, we turn to the other Moments in the development of Marxist-Humanism during Dunayevskaya’s lifetime, with a focus on how she saw these Moments. C. Dunayevskaya’s “Trilogy of Revolution” and News and Letters Committees: Developing the Philosophic-Moment of MarxistHumanism, 1955–1985 In March 1985, Dunayevskaya delivered a lecture, “Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and Marx’s World Humanist Concepts” during which she spoke briefly about each of her trilogy of revolution—Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution: By the mid-1950s, the category I had worked out as the movement from practice provided the structure for my major philosophic work—Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 until Today. That was the fijirst of what we now call the “trilogy of revolution.” It illuminated the fact that the movement from practice was itself a form of theory. It is this concept of philosophy as being rooted in the movement from practice which creates a challenge for theoreticians to work out a new stage of cognition. It created the structure of Marxism and Freedom, where we fijirst concretized those American roots of Marxism—from Abolitionism to the then ongoing Montgomery Bus Boycott which opened the Black Revolution. In that work, the world Humanist concepts were also spelled out, not alone in the United States, but in the very fijirst mass revolts from under Communist totalitarianism in East Europe— East Germany, 1953; Poland, 1955; Hungary, 1956.  In the 1960s we began recording the new voices of a new generation of revolutionaries, and in 1968 had to face the aborted near-revolution in France, which made imperative our return to Hegel on an altogether new level. What was needed was a working out of the Hegelian dialectic, this time in and for itself, as well as how it was grappled with by Marx and Lenin. This resulted in the second unchaining of the Hegelian dialectic for our age as the dialectics of revolution. We examined, as well, the Alternatives: Trotsky, Mao, and the outsider looking in, Sartre. 1973 saw the publication of

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Philosophy and Revolution: from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao. I there extended the concretization of Absolute Idea not just as a totality—the unity of theory and practice—but as the development of Absolute Idea as New Beginning.  The fijirst chapter of Philosophy and Revolution was entitled “Absolute Negativity as New Beginning: The Ceaseless Movement of Ideas and of History.” Here I argued that seeing Absolute Idea as a unity of theory and practice, as totality, is where the task fijirst begins. Absolute Idea as New Beginning challenges all generations to concretely work out such a new beginning for their own age.  We see the development of theory in Frantz Fanon, who, in The Wretched of the Earth, likewise called his philosophy “a New Humanism.”  The 1970s also saw the emergence of a new revolutionary force: Women’s Liberation, which had grown from an idea whose time had come, to become a Movement. Its uniqueness expressed itself in their refusal to put offf for “the day after the revolution” the questions they demanded answers to. The so-called Marxists at fijirst would not even bother to listen to the women who proclaimed that “male chauvinism” was by no means restricted to capitalism. It not only appeared before capitalism, but is present right now and has reappeared after the revolution. It must be faced here and now. The women insisted that the Left must face the male chauvinism within that movement, and must recognize the need to grapple with this question before, during, in, and after the revolution. It became the impulse for the third major philosophic work, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. …  When I began my study, it was just on Luxemburg—and the intended climax was to have been the year 1910. This was the year when her flash of genius, in grappling with the new phenomenon of Imperialism, resulted in her break with Karl Kautsky, the leader of the German Social Democracy. This was some four years before the outbreak of World War I and the Second International’s betrayal. It was four years before any male Marxist, Lenin included, saw the coming betrayal. And yet, suddenly, even this seemed to me to be inadequate, because Luxemburg remained a member of the German Social Democracy as if her break with Kautsky was “personal.”  I felt the need for a decisive philosophic grappling, which I worked out as Part III of the so-called Luxemburg book: “Karl Marx: from Critic of Hegel to Author of Capital and Theorist of Revolution in Permanence.” As against Luxemburg’s half-way dialectic, Marx’s multilinearism of human development, of paths to revolution, as they related to so-called backward countries, to Women’s Liberation, and to nationalist opposition – all made me question not only Luxemburg but all post-Marx Marxists, beginning with Frederick Engels, whose unilinearism permeated the whole German Social Democracy. Post-Marx Marxism, to me, became a pejorative.  Engels’ unilinearism was glaringly revealed in the very fijirst work he wrote after the death of Marx—Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels claimed it was a “bequest” of Marx, but it expressed anything but Marx’s view either on the Man/Woman relationship or on the relationship

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Each of these books was written in the context of the ongoing events worldwide, objectively and subjectively, and with Dunayevskaya as Chairwoman of News and Letters Committees. It meant that the Committees participated in discussions with Dunayevskaya as each of the works was developed, including the Committees’ projection of the books, and, as well, had ramifijications in the kind of pamphlets produced by the Committees together with new developments with the newspaper. Thus, following the Moment of Marxism and Freedom, a series of pamphlets concretizing and expanding on its themes were written. Workers Battle Automation had the American proletariat speaking for itself. Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions took up the emerging Third World. Dunayevskaya wrote a chapter on “The Challenge of Mao Tse-tung” for an expanded edition of Marxism and Freedom. American Civilization on Trial was a statement of News and Letters Committees on the Black Movement in the United States and its relation of Marx and to Labor Dimension from before the Civil War to the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. Philosophy and Revolution, the second of her trilogy of revolution and next Moment of philosophic development, created new points of departure within News and Letters Committees. A pamphlet, Working Women for Freedom, was issued by Women’s Liberation—News and Letters Committees. It was a history pamphlet and at the same time captured a wide range of the voices of women in the 1970s, telling stories from women in factories, farm fijields, hospitals and offfijice. At the same time the pamphlet contained an essay from Dunayevskaya, “Women as Thinkers and Revolutionaries. As a supplement to News & Letters, Dunayevskaya began a new series of Political Philosophic Letters in 1976. In taking up world events, the Letters’ focus was to manifest politicalization as a concretization of philosophy, and thus, help to develop “a nucleus of philosophic leadership” in News and Letters Committees. Dunayevskaya constantly sought to engage her News and Letters Colleagues in philosophicpolitical-organizational dialogue. One of the more important of these in this period was a presentation titled, “Our Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning: In Theory, and Leadership and Practice,” April 10, 1976. (Dunayevskaya, 1981: #5622) While working to complete Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Dunayevskaya began an examination of

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the whole body of Marxist-Humanist thought, developed over the course of more than four decades, “Marxism-Humanism emerging out of MarxistHumanism.” She viewed such retrospectives as the needed vantage point for forging perspectives in the 1980s. She wrote the pamphlet 25 Years of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. (1980). New Introductions were written to several works on the Black Dimension: American Civilization on Trial— Black Masses as Vanguard (1983), Nationalism, Communism, MarxismHumanism, and the Afro-Asian Revolutions (1984) and Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought (1986). Dunayevskaya created a collection of her writings on women over a 35-year period, Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution (1985), and wrote an Introduction/Overview. The pamphlet Coal Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. (1984) had her essay “The Emergence of a New Movement from Practice that is Itself a Form of Theory.” And she wrote a retrospective on thirty years of News & Letters as well as new Introductions to both Marxism and Freedom and Philosophy and Revolution. As chairperson of the National Editorial Board (NEB) of News and Letters Committees, Dunayevskaya was not only the founder of the philosophic tendency of Marxist-Humanism, but practiced the philosophic process in the Committees on a continuous basis. Every year she gave the Perspectives talk to the national gathering of News and Letters Committees. This came after presenting a Draft Perspectives with the collaboration of the Resident Editorial Board of News and Letters (REB, those members of the NEB who resided at the Center) in the months before the bi-annual Convention. At the Convention, she participated vigorously in the ongoing discussions, and delivered a fijinal Executive Session presentation on diffferent aspects of dialectics of leadership. In alternate years she addressed the gathering of the NEB, writing a Draft Perspectives in the months prior to the meeting, and giving a Perspectives report at that meeting. On a bi-weekly basis, she chaired meetings of the REB (which assumed responsibility for the functioning of News and Letters between conventions and gatherings of the NEB). The full minutes of the REB were shared with the local committees of News and Letters. They often reported philosophic-political-organizational presentations by Dunayevskaya and discussion by her colleagues. Other times, members of the REB would make reports and Dunayevskaya was among those who contributed to the discussion. ***

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Dunayevskaya’s fijinal philosophic labors, the last Moment in the development of the Marxist-Humanism body of ideas, her work on a new book “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy” were cut short by her sudden death in June, 1987. Thought she did not draft any chapters for the work, she left hundreds of pages of notes, and “One Possible Outline for Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” a document we reproduced in the Introduction, and which has served as a guide for the present book. Here we turn to “Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, June 1, 1987,” her last writing for her News and Letters Colleagues, which took up both some themes of the book-in-progress, and her view of News and Letters Committees relationship and responsibility toward this work. IV. Dunayevskaya’s Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, June 1, 1987—A New Philosophic Category and a Challenge for News and Letters Praxis In her presentation prepared for delivery to the Resident Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees, Dunayevskaya most fully developed the meaning of being organizationally and philosophically “responsible to History as to Today as well as to future.” She called it a “Pre-pre PostPlenum, i.e.—Executive Session Type of Talk in three parts: I. The Philosophic Point, II. Dialectics of Organization. III. Untrodden Paths in Organization. The term “post-Plenum Executive Session” referred to the fact that Dunayevskaya generally gave a talk to the membership of News and Letters Committees at the conclusion of its national gatherings (convention or plenum), in which she spoke of the responsibilities of leadership in relation to the philosophic-political-organizational tasks for the coming year. At times, she presented new philosophic points of departure that she was working on. The fact that she decided to do this three months prior to the national gathering, and no doubt planned to share its contents with the entire membership, was certainly related to her calling the year post the 1987 News and Letters Plenum “the year of the book,” and thus the needed, deep involvement of the organization in the philosophic and organizational challenges of the year ahead. In publishing this presentation, which was not checked by Dunayevskaya for presentation in printed form, the editors gave it the title “Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” The presentation’s principle themes were: (a) the exploration of a new theoretical development for the book-in-process on organization and

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philosophy, (b) how that development illuminated the philosophical origins and unfolding of News and Letters Committees, and (c) how it shaped the responsibilities/tasks of the members of News and Letters Committees in relation to the writing of the new book. The theoretical development centered on Dunayevskaya’s creation of the category philosophic moment to grasp the decisive origins of Marx’s new Humanism in the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, and of Marxist-Humanism in her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes. She wrote: In Hegelian dialectics the philosophic moment is a determinant; even if the person who was driven to articulate that ‘moment’ was very nearly unconscious as to its depth and its ramifijications, it remained the element that governed the concretization that follows the laborious birth that poured forth in a torrent. (Dunayevskaya, 1988: 7)

In discussing the concept of philosophic moment in Marx’s work, Dunayevskaya began with 1844, that is, the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, “that laid the ground for all future development.” The “new Humanism” as Marx developed it in 1844 was the philosophic moment. She wished to trace how that became manifest in Marx’s concept and practice of organization; how this new Humanism became “the ground for organization throughout his life.” (5) The 1847 Communist League and Communist Manifesto, the 1864 First International, and the 1871 Paris Commune “as the form, the working existence, the communal non-state as needing only release of all the mental, manual and emotional potentiality,” (5) were crucial manifestations/ developments of Marx’s concept of organization. And yet for Dunayevskaya, “the full organization expression of all came only then, i.e., the last decade, especially the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Why only then?. … Only with the Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875 did Marx fully return to that moment [the philosophic moment of 1844] as it was concretized for organization, and even then, he did not call it philosophy, but ‘principle.’ ” (3–4) The Gotha Program was a socialist unifijication document of Lassalleans and Eisenachers (German followers of Marx in the 1870s). “Why then is the actual concretization of a new unity so sharply critiqued as in the Critique of the Gotha Program?” (5) Dunayevskaya turned to history. The unifijication congress at Gotha had been carried out after all the historic working class experiences from the 1840s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, after the publication of Marx’s greatest theoretical work Capital, including its French edition, “that has philosophy spelled out in the most concrete terms from the fetishism of commodities to the new passions and new forces that go against the accumulation of capital.”

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(6) After all that history of class struggle, revolution, theoretical analysis and emancipatory vision—after all that—a supposedly Marxist group willingly jettisons everything in the name of “unity.” Marxist organization had become so sharply separated from an underlining economicphilosophic foundation that Marx felt compelled to write his critical notes. Not only did his critique sharply separate his view from the programmatic points of the Gotha unifijication document, but, as Dunayevskaya noted, he posed “a general view of where we’re headed for the day after the conquest of power the day after we have rid ourselves of the birthmarks of capitalism when a new generation can fijinally see all its potentiality put an end once and for all to the division between mental and manual labor.” (7) Thus Marx linked his critique of a supposedly revolutionary Marxist program to the emancipatory vision of a future society, a vision that had its origins in the philosophic moment of 1844. Dunayevskaya saw Marx’s sharp critique of the socialist organizational unity at Gotha not alone as history, but as “the urgent problematic of our day.” To explore this, she turned to the Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism, found in the May 12, and May 20, 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes. She wrote of Hegel’s view of philosophic point/ philosophic moment— Let me now state something general from Hegel on the question of “The Philosophic Point” which would also apply to us.  In Hegelian dialectics, the philosophic moment is a determinant; even if the person who was driven to articulate that ‘moment’ was very nearly unconscious as to its depth and its ramifijications, it remained the element that governed the concretization that follows the laborious birth that poured forth in a torrent nevertheless. (7)

—just as she proceeded to examine the 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes and the development of News and Letters Committees with the concept of Philosophic Moment. She questioned whether the Committees had fully grasped the meaning of her breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes: the unity I singled out, a dual movement, from theory to practice, from practice as well as from theory.  We were so overwhelmed with the movement from practice that we were hardly as enthusiastic or as concrete about the movement from theory, if not actually forgetting it. (7)

She noted that even when one singled out crucial developments, 1955 and the founding on the organization News and Letters Committees, and 1957 with the publication of Marxism and Freedom and the expression

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Marxist-Humanism, developments which became manifest when the objective and subjective merge, what became clear was “we are back to focusing on the philosophic moment.” (9) Because Dunayevskaya saw the philosophic moment as the determinant, she wanted to explore with her colleagues, “the many Universals inherent in it [the 1953 Letters], so that we can see what is still new in it that we must develop for the book [Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy].” (7–8) Dunayevskaya proceeded to a new reading of the May 1953 Letters through the prism of her 1987 concept of Philosophic Moment of MarxistHumanism. Though she had begun her original exploration of Hegel’s Absolute Idea in her May 12, 1953 Letter with James’ formulation on “dialectics of the party” in hand, she was not interested either in the mass party “which the masses will build, or in the elitist party, which we defijinitely oppose but in what happens to a small group ‘like us’… what is the objectivity which explains” such a presence “as the objectivity explains the spontaneous outburst of the masses? In a word I was looking for the objectivity of subjectivity.” (10) Where did this journey into the Absolutes take her? So, whatever it was that was driving me in 1953 to write those letters of May 12 and May 20, it suddenly become the whole of Hegel’s work, beginning, as always, with what Marx said was most important in Phenomenology of Mind, going through the Science of Logic with Lenin, but refusing to follow either Lenin in the last paragraph, or C.L.R. James on the fact that he found nothing in Philosophy of Mind, and delving not only into that work, but into those last fijinal syllogisms that nobody, including bourgeois academia, had seriously tackled the next decade. (11)

What had begun as “the dialectic of the Party as well as the contradictions in the Absolute Idea itself, resulted in my seeing what I called ‘the new society,’ i.e. the end of the division between mental and manual.” (12) The untrodden paths in organization was not something Dunayevskaya was working on only philosophically. She was as well challenging News and Letters Committees organizationally to enter on that path of the dialectical relationship of organization and philosophy, in its organizational work as the book was being written: 1988 is the year of the book. … the actual presentation of the dialectics of philosophy and the book as one, and for that it needs a whole organization, and not just the author… The real point is the meaning that this is not a question of the ‘author’ but the whole organization. I want to stress the word, ‘the whole,’ not in the sense that each one is going to write a chapter, but rather that the context of each person’s activity and special point of

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chapter thirteen concentration—be it labor, Women’s Liberation, youth, Black, etc.—will be inseparable from the meaning of that activity, and that meaning, whether of an objective event or the subjective activity, will be projected to those notyet Marxist-Humanists, because in meaning, i.e. philosophy, is both ground and roof of all we do, survey, strive for, as we prepare for that ‘revolution in permanence.’ (18)

This challenge to “the whole organization,” News and Letters Committees, was to reorganize its praxis, including the newspaper. At the beginning of 1987, News & Letters had become transformed from a monthly into a bi-weekly. Now after several months of practice, Dunayevskaya felt another change was needed: I would very strongly suggest that the Plenum consider that beginning in January, 1988 we become a monthly twelve-page paper in a very new way, where the book—Dialectics of Philosophy and Organization—becomes the dominant force not only in essay-articles, but in every activity we undertake, especially in discussions with subscribers, with not-yet Marxist-Humanists, not just as the recording of the events and their experiences, but the meaning of those events and experiences and their direction in a global context. (19)

She felt the need for this transformation because the whole organization which this year has been so preoccupied with making a success of the biweekly that the organizational growth from which it was supposed to be inseparable was very much separated. It sufffered that because what got put very much on the back burner, and back again to only me writing it, was philosophy. I want to repeat, because philosophy has not permeated the paper, therefore, it didn’t permeate the organization. (19)

Dunayevskaya was arguing that a recognition of and return to the Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism was necessary for any reorganization. It would not be a return “in general,” but a return which asked how that philosophic moment could impact upon the praxis of News and Letters Committees, the whole organization, to work out the dialectic of organization and philosophy as book and as organization. *** In concluding this Part and Chapter on the work of Dunayevskaya in the post-World War II world, I want to discuss the signifijicance of an expression she dictated for “One Possible Outline for Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy” (Dunayevskaya, 1981: #10922), an expression that I believe

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speaks to the half-century plus trajectory of Dunayevskaya as theoretician and practitioner of Revolution-In-Permanence for her time. The expression reads as follows: “Dual movement is not alone, but Self-Thinking Idea = Mhism [Marxist-Humanism]”

What is the meaning of this expression that I have puzzled over it for quite a while? A couple of ideas– “Dual movement”– certainly must mean the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory and the movement from theory toward practice that is rooted in and reaches for the fullness of philosophy. This is the dual movement Dunayevskaya found within Hegel’s Absolutes in her 1953 Letters, and counts as the heart of her breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes. “is not alone”—I read this to mean that in 1953 there was this philosophic breakthrough on dual movement that was inseparable from the birth of “Mhism,” though the expression “Marxist-Humanism” does not occur until 1955 or ‘56, or ‘57. Inseparable, in that Dunayevskaya was not a philosopher studying Hegel, but a practicing Marxist revolutionary exploring the dialectic of Hegel’s absolutes. Thus the philosophic had ramifijications in the praxis she was undertaking. Once the dual movement was identifijied, Marxist-Humanism began its development, rooted in dual movement. It begins a life of its own over three decades 1955–1987. This I see as the: “self-thinking Idea” —that had its own logic of development in response to ongoing objective-subjective developments, 1953–1987. Perhaps another expression for this was Dunayevskaya writing of “Marxist-Humanism emerging out of Marxist-Humanism.” We can think about: (1) the 1953 breakthrough as fijinding the dual movement in Hegel’s fijinal three syllogisms, and in life; and (2) the working out all the concretizations of it, all the universals inherent in it, as the self-thinking idea whose name for our age is Marxist-Humanism, 1955–1987. We reach not alone the Self-Thinking Idea as Hegel expressed it, but (1) its realization in the praxis of Marx after his philosophic moment of 1844, Marx’s new Humanism 1844–1883, and then, (2) its realization after 1953 philosophic moment, but now with the explicit name of Marxist-Humanism and the 30-plus years that move through the “trilogy” (Dunayevskaya’s three major books), through the development of News and Letters Committees, including its journalistic expression News & Letters.

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The challenge for us: Does Marxist-Humanism post-Dunayevskaya retain its role as the Self-Thinking Idea for our age? The Self-thinking Idea is philosophy, not solely a philosopher. Yet, how does that become expressed/concretized post the philosopher who created MarxistHumanism as the Self-Thinking Idea for our age? *** After Dunayevskaya’s passing, working out a Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy has remained a crucial task, for this and future generations of revolutionaries. This present study does not presume to do more than cast a small illumination on the problematic that Dunayevskaya posed. We briefly discuss some contemporary debate on the relevance of dialectics in the concluding Part. A fuller discussion on its meaning in Latin American Liberation will be presented in a succeeding book.

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APPENDICES 1. Dunayevskaya Letter on Meeting a Cameroonian Revolutionary (excerpt) In 1947 while in France, Dunayevskaya met with a young Cameroonian revolutionary and wrote about it to C.L.R. James (Dunayevskaya, 1981): I love these Africans! When they do something, they do it “to a man,” so that I feel that Lenin at this time would embrace them very warmly. I have just heard of the most remarkable of all national resistance movements— the one that has occurred—and has not been squashed entirely—in Cameroon. It seems like during the war a movement for independence from France and so spontaneously and overwhelming was it, without a party or any other form of political organization, (there trade union is strong and has 3 mil. members), the people literally en mass, turned out during an election campaign, disregarded entirely the established French colonial government, elected their people, enacted their laws; everybody seems to belong to this movement; there seems to be no such things as membership cards. It is just taken for granted that all are members because all are. Until 6 months ago it was truly a state within a state… 2. Dunayevskaya in 1949–50 Miners’ General Strike Andy Philips, a miner, member the State-Capitalist Tendency, Dunayevskaya’s co-author of  The Coal Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., and later a member of News and Letters Committees, wrote of Dunayevskaya’s participation with the mine workers in that period. I fijirst met Raya Dunayevskaya in 1948 in Scott’s Run, West Virginia, a coal mining area near Morgantown… Dunayevskaya wanted to go into the coal area to see how the miners lived. Afffijinity to workers and their families remained a characteristic throughout her entire life… At this time, coal dominated the national energy supply, providing power for locomotives, home heat, steel production, electricity and all of industry. A disruption in coal production disrupted the nation’s entire economy, which is why there were huge stockpiles of coal in the U.S. and the government monitored the supply closely. In addition, labor contracts then were negotiated each year, and the coal miners had a long principled position of “No contract, no work” that often resulted in long strikes. The post-war labor strikes that

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swept the nation had spawned the Taft-Hartley Act, which could impose a 90-day stay on a strike if it posed a “national emergency,” as a coal strike would. … The coal contract expired on June 30, [1949] and everyone expected a coal strike, but Lewis adopted a new tactic–reducing work to three days a week and selective strikes, calling miners out in one part of the country while keeping them working in another. This prevented Truman from declaring a national emergency since coal stockpiles remained high, but Lewis had violated the time-honored principle of “No contract, no work.” … By the end of 1949 the in-again out-again tactic of Lewis created much poverty in the mine regions, as well as much frustration among the miners. This all changed in early January of 1950, when miners in northern West Virginia refused Lewis’ order to return to work, held several mass meetings and took over control of the strike that spread nationwide. This transformation in the rank and fijile was truly remarkable: here were men who six months earlier passionately defended Lewis and would have willingly died and gone to hell for him, but now booed loudly every time his name was mentioned at the mass meeting when they took over the strike. Lewis, seeking to regain control, called a national strike. Truman threw the Taft-Hartley Act at Lewis and the union in February, declaring the strike illegal, which prohibited anyone from providing any assistance to the striking miners. This completely dried up the paltry aid that some charitable organizations had provided miners and their families, and prevented all help from other sympathetic national labor unions. Dunayevskaya, who had moved to Pittsburgh, about 60 miles from Morgantown, worked closely with us during the entire course of the strike. Recognizing the urgent need for aid that the miners were now expressing, she suggested that those of us who were miners, and who had a very good relationship with area union leaders from our strike activity, request a meeting to set up a miners’ relief committee that would select rankand-fijile representatives to go out and seek assistance for the miners. This idea was accepted, and three militant miners went east and three west to solicit aid… Aid poured in from throughout the country, ending with a caravan of fijive trailer trucks full of food and clothing from Detroit that went to fijive mining regions, with the last van going to Scott’s Run. It was clear the miners would not be starved into submission. The strike ended the next month…

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At the time that the strike began, the continuous miner was introduced by the coal operators and totally transformed the mining process as well as the relationship of the miners to production. Cutting two-thirds of the work force and imposing horrendous working conditions on the miners, the continuous miner became the precursor of what later was dubbed automation that created not only a new stage in production, but also in cognition. As Dunayevskaya pointed out, under the impact of the continuous miner, which the miners called “a man-killer,” the miners were the ones who moved the question of labor from what should be the fruits of labor (wages, benefijits) to what kind of labor should humans do? In this new formulation, Dunayevskaya also saw that the whole question of the separation of mental and manual labor under capitalism was implicit. The answer that Raya discerned revealed itself in the miners’ thoughts and actions, especially as reflected in the mass meetings. These were not only demonstrations of revolutionary democracy, they revealed that the miners were putting their thoughts into action by making the decisions and carrying them out by themselves. (“On the 60th Anniversary of the Coal Miners’ General Strike: Automation and Marxist-Humanism’s Birth,” News & Letters, Jan.-Feb. 2010.) 3. Preamble to the Original Constitution of News and Letters Committees, 1956 People everywhere, today, are looking for a new way of life under which man can be free to guide his own destiny: to set and establish his own way of living, his own conditions of work, and his own forms of association with his fellow-man. The totality of the world crisis is seen in the basic inability of either the Russian or America social, economic, or political systems to solve any of the basic problems of the working-class, or to be able to offfer any present or future freedom from exploitation, discrimination, degradation or misery. The age of state-capitalism, whether in its totalitarian form or its capitalistic-democratic form, can offfer nothing to humanity but the prospect of another war. The advent of nuclear weapons, possessed by both sides, seriously raises the question of the survival of mankind in the event of such a struggle.

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We believe that the working people are the only force in the world of today capable of changing present-day society and of evolving the forms and shape of future society. Just as in the 1936–1937, the American working people found their own way, through the sit-down strikes, to industrial organization and the CIO, so they are searching today for the new political and social forms to fijight the labor bureaucracy. Since the 1949–1950 miners’ strike and the advent of automation, the problem of guiding their own destiny has moved to the point of production itself and posed the basic question: What kind of labor? Abroad, the June 17th, revolt of the East German workers in 1953, and the revolts, a few weeks later, of the slave laborers in the Vorkuta prison camps in Russia itself, and the 1958 revolt of the Polish workers, show man’s determination to fijight for his freedom. They have answered afffijirmatively the question: Can man be free in this age of totalitarianism? The necessity for a new society is clear from the working people’s opposition to war. That opposition is based upon a vision of a new society in which they, to a man, control their own lives. Any opposition to war, which is based on less than this, must end in capitulation to the warmongers. We feel that the Negro people occupy a place of special signifijicance in American life. Their struggle for equality and justice, which is taking place every day in every city of the country and increases in tempo and efffectiveness, stands in the forefront of the minorities struggle for full freedom. As part of the total search for a fundamentally new way of life, we hereby establish News and Letters Committees. In keeping with this principle, we establish the paper, News & Letters, whose editor shall be a worker, and the articles for which shall be written on a decentralized basis. The establishment of the publication, News & Letters, is an integral part of this quest by workers, Negroes, youth and women, for totally new relations and for a fundamentally new way of life. We undertake that space be available in the paper for youth, which they will write and edit for themselves in keeping with the principle that they are organizationally independent of these News & Letters Committees. In establishing News & Letters, the purpose is to create a means of communication among working people on their common problems, aspirations, ideas and needs. We are creating a center around which the basic ideas of workers emancipation and freedom can crystallize and fijind the broadest possible form of public expression and acceptance, and, in this sense, to be a weapon in the class struggle. News & Letters shall be published at least once every two weeks. It is our aim to assure its publication and to promote the fijirmest unity

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among workers, Negroes and other minorities, women, youth and those intellectuals who have broken with the ruling bureaucracy of both capital and labor. We hold that the labor bureaucracy is the last barrier to the full emancipation of the working-class. We hold that the method of Marxism is the guide for our growth and development. Just as the struggle for the shortening of the Working Day and the Civil War in the United States gave shape to Marx’s greatest theoretical work, Capital, so today, Marxism is in the lives and aspirations of the working people. We hold it to be the duty of each generation to interpret Marxism for itself because the problem is not what Marx wrote in 1843 or 1883 but what Marxism is today. We reject the attempt of both Communists and the Administration to identify Marxism with Communism. Communism is totalitarianism and the exact opposite of Marxism which is a theory of liberation. Heretofore, American radical groups failed to establish the theory of Marxism on native grounds despite the historic contributions the American workers made of Marx’s thinking. We have therefore undertaken to set forth our own interpretation, in book form. It will express Marxism as a world view and as an exposition of the workers; struggles in America in this period of automation. Our concern is, of necessity, with the American workers and their striving for a better life. We make no pretense of being a political party. We constitute ourselves as News & Letters committees whose members come together to promote their ideas in an organized manner. We have no interests separate and apart from those workers as a whole. Those who join us in these committees do so of their own free will by acceptance of these general principles. They are bound only to carry out the decision which members have arrived at democratically. Others, who are not members, are free to contribute material for the paper and to participate in the discussions of these committees.

PART FIVE

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WHAT PHILOSOPHIC-ORGANIZATIONAL VANTAGE POINT IS NEEDED? I. Recent Challenges to Hegel’s Dialectics of Negativity Today’s deeply transformed, contradictory reality—bounded on the one hand by capitalism’s logic of a totalizing hegemony, and on the other by the growth of emancipatory social movements—has compelled thinkeractivists to search out political-economic-philosophic frameworks that give meaning to the present moment. John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude as well as their earlier Empire, and Istvan Mészáros’ Beyond Capital, are three such recent contributions. A. John Holloway and the Limits of “Negative Dialectics” The theoretical heart of Change the World Without Taking Power is negation: “The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. … We start from negation.” (Hol1oway, 2002) “Doing is practical negation.” (23) It is a powerful and needed point of departure. Holloway uses it with great skill to critique the state, to analyze power as power-over and what he sees as its total opposite—anti-power, to probe Marx’s crucial category of fetishism in relation to commodity production, to look at the “critical-revolutionary subject’ in opposition to capitalism, and to critique so-called “scientifijic Marxism.” And yet, the projection of only a negation or series of negations poses difffijiculties not alone theoretically, but in the practice of revolutionary transformation. Before examining these we need to briefly look at the philosophic foundation of Holloway’s work in Theordor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. (Adorno, 1997) In opposition to a new beginning emerging out of the negativity, out of negation of the negation that we have examined previously as the driving spirit of Hegel’s dialectic, Adorno saw his project as centering on a rejection of negation as any possible transition to a new sphere, or new beginning. To be sure, both Adorno and Hegel saw contradiction as the truth of reality, unfreedom as the nature of the existing world. However, where Hegel’s Afuheben posed a pathway forward, Adorno absolutized the

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contradiction. Unlike the Hegelian Absolutes at the end of Phenomenology, the Logic and Philosophy of Mind, which pose openings and the possibility of new beginnings, and can do so precisely because negation of the negation (second negation) resides at the heart of the absolutes, Adorno’s absolute remains only at the level of fijirst negation, only as a series of “No’s,” In his hands, contradiction is made perpetual, and takes the form of an absolute that limits, and indeed, closes offf any possibilities of selfdevelopment. As D. Zoltai noted: Adorno only recognizes thesis and anti-thesis. For him afffijirmation and negation are poles with no connecting links which can only come into contact with each other when exaggerated to an extreme degree. This philosophical construction would have no truck with synthesis, with negation of negation. (“Musical Culture in the Modern Age in the Mirror of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.” (Zoltai, 1968)

How does the philosophic vantage point of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics impact Holloway’s view of the practice of revolutionary transformation? A central discussion of Change the World Without Taking Power is powerover verses power-to/anti-power. Power-over is the domination over others. Power-to is the creativity of human beings. Holloway discusses how capitalism is the ultimate expression of power-over, robbing humanity of the creativity of power-to. However, because Holloway is tied to the philosophic concept of negative dialectics, power-to becomes equated to antipower which is in confrontation with power-over. To be sure, anti-power is a necessary moment in the confrontation with power-over. But power-to holds within itself not alone anti-power, the fijirst negation, but the second negation, the emergence of the new, which Marx’s expression—“Human power which is its own end”—captures beautifully. Instead of seizing upon this, Holloway reduces the multi-dimensionality of power-to to the uni-dimensional anti-power. In so doing, he skips over the crucial point that power-to holds within itself both anti-power and human power which is its own end. This is no abstract philosophic point, but the ground from which the philosophic vision of a new society is worked out and from which revolutionary praxis carries forward the journey toward its concretization/realization. Holloway’s determination to take the particular of anti-power and make it a fijixed particular, and thus a false universal, leaves him not grasping the full revolutionary dimension of human subjectivity. He is confijining such  subjectivity to fijirst negation, and at most a philosophy of desire, rather than the fullness of second negativity, and the possibility of constructing the new. Thus he writes, “The fact that power-to can exist only as

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 337 antagonism to power-over (as anti-power) means of course that, under capitalism, subjectivity can only exist antagonistically, in opposition to its own objectifijication.” (Holloway, 2002: 37) But to exist in antagonism to power-over does not mean that power-to is only anti-power. It is antipower, but it contains as well the element of creativity, and thus the potential construction of the new as well—a negation of the negation. However, Holloway is dismissive of any negation of the negation: The notion of struggle is inconsistent with any idea of a guaranteed negation-of-the-negation happy ending: the only way that dialectics can be understood is a negative dialectics, as the open-ended negation of the untrue, as revolt against unfreedom. (98)

Of course negation of the negation has no guaranteed outcomes, happy or otherwise. It is only the process by which negativity fijinds what it stands for, not as an a priori, but as internal to the process of revolution. It is no accident that Hegel wrote, not of happy endings, but of “the labor patience and sufffering of the negative.” When Holloway writes, “There can be no positive dialectic, no fijinal synthesis in which all contradictions are resolved,” he is mischaracterizing or misunderstanding the nature of second negativity in the Hegelian dialectic.1 There simply is no “end to history,” no fijinal resolution within Hegel’s Absolutes. Absolute negativity has the new within, not as an endpoint, but as a process of becoming. It is what Marx caught when he wrote of human beings in “the absolute movement of becoming.” Holloway’s dismissal of negation of the negation as a dimension of concrete struggle of live human beings is part and parcel of his rejection of the creative philosophic power of second negativity. Thus the responsibility of revolutionary thinkers to work out the theoretical concretization of negation of the negation in unity with how the masses work it out in their revolutionary praxis is not seen. Instead he writes, “[O]ur scream and our

1 Holloway’s recent Crack Capitalism (2011) contrasts “power to do” as opposed to “work” under capitalism, and thus touches upon the concept of second negation. However there is a limitation in that Holloway only discusses this in the realm of practice, and not in the realm of theory. Thus in my view, he still remains conceptually in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Furthermore, he repeats the old, reductive defijinition of the dialectic as thesis– anti-thesis–synthesis, which Hegel never proposed or practiced. Grappling with absolute negativity, negation of the negation, the central categories of Universal, Particular and Individual, would help to arrive at a richer concept of the dialectic. I should also mention that in Holloway, 2002, he does write, “The scream-against and the movement of power-to (the two axes of this book) are inextricably entwined.” (153) The difffijiculty lies in that these twin axes are not worked out philosophically, that is dialectically.

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criticism are perfectly ordinary … the most we can do as intellectuals is to give voice to that which is voiceless.” Certainly, to give voice to the voiceless is a crucial task, but it does not exhaust the power of negativity. The challenge is to articulate a fuller responsibility of the intellectual with regard to philosophy. This begins with recognition of the self-development of the Idea itself. Of course the role of the individual thinker-activist is present, but as part of a recognition of the power of philosophy that comes from grasping its previous creation and journey, and its needed new manifestation/concretization undertaken jointly by the masses in motion and the thinker-activists, who are thus philosophers of praxis. Perhaps the limited role for intellectuals that Holloway articulates comes from examining the contradictory and troubling experience of Left intellectuals in the 20th century. When Holloway discusses Lukács he writes, The attempt to combat fetishism leads, because of the way fetishism is understood, to be the creation (or consolidation) of a new fetish: the idea of a Hero (the Party) which somehow stands above the reifijied social relations of which, however, it is inevitably a part. (84)

While Holloway is correct in critiquing Lukács’ fetishism of the Party as the true knower, (see my discussion of Lukács in part II), not all intellectuals substituted the Party for philosophy’s Power of Negativity. The heart of the question for Holloway is not alone the role of the theorist—“There is no hero. Above all, the theorist is no hero. She is not a Knower.”—but the role or meaning of theory: Theory does not stand above the fray but is simply part of the articulation of our daily existence of struggle. It does not look down at society from above, but is part of the daily struggle for emancipation, striking out at the forms that negate our subjectivity. Theory is practical because it is part of the practice of living. …(104)

To circumscribe theory to “our daily existence of struggle,” and to the “practical” may sound most concrete, but it is an abdication of the transformative power of negativity.2 It is to turn philosophy into mere reflection, in this case identity’s mirror opposite, non-identity. “What is it that is at the core of rebellious theory?. … It is non-identity” (151) 2 Philosophic attitudes can make strange bedfellows. Nothing could be further away from Holloway’s emancipatory conception of practice than Mao’s conception. Yet, Holloway’s imprisonment of theory/philosophy in the “practical” fijinds a strange echo is Mao’s admonition to make philosophy “practical.” See his “On Contradiction” and “On Practice.”

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 339 Another difffijiculty of “negative dialectics” can be seen in Holloway’s discussion of the category of identity. He quotes Adorno to the efffect that dialectics is “the consistent sense of non-identity.” The only revolutionary dimension for Holloway in this regard is anti-identity: for the worker to reject being a worker, for minorities, or women, not to become defijined by identity. But does this not put him in conflict with the thrust of a movement he admires and writes about in important ways, the Zapatistas? The unity of scream against and power-to can perhaps be referred to a dignity, following the language of the Zapatista uprising. Dignity is the refusal to accept humiliation, oppression, exploitation, dehumanization. It is a refusal which negates the negation of humanity, a refusal fijilled, therefore, with the project of the humanity currently negated. (154)

Two pages later he will add: “The problem of anti-power is not to emancipate an oppressed identity (women, indigenous) but to emancipate an oppressed non-identity …” He now quotes the Zapatistas “Ours is the struggle of non-identity, ours is the struggle of the invisible, of those without voice and without face.” But is not the “non-identity” of the Zapatistas behind a mask, in fact a hiding so that they will be seen, be recognized for who they are? It is a refusal to accept a life of oblivion for Indigenous people, a demand that their traditions, their thought, their way of life be recognized and respected. “Now we will not be forgotten,” they tell us. Does not Holloway concept of identity end up close to Rosa Luxemburg’s dismissal of national self-determination, seeing it only as a reactionary concept of narrow nationalism? Lenin and other Marxists battled against her view. Closer to our age Franz Fanon profoundly expressed a concept wherein national consciousness was not a narrow nationalism but the pathway to internationalism. Fanon’s concept of dialectics of negativity opens up the possibility for a liberatory vision of nationalism. Can identity be such a particular on a pathway toward revolution in fusion with dialectical philosophy? Finally, there is Holloway’s concept of change the world without taking power. One can fijind much agreement with Holloway’s critique of the 20th century Left for its concentration on obtaining state power as centerpiece of the revolutionary process. As he notes, the fetishism of the state has not been alone a question of the capitalism, but of revolutionaries as well. However, is taking power vs. not taking power the crucial question? Can we ask instead, Is there a way of taking power and a manner of practice after that expresses power-to not only as anti-power vs. power-over—the needed uprooting of the old, class-based state—but as human power which is its own end?

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Here we have some historical precedent, particularly in such a form as the Paris Commune as the non-state state. Did they not “take power”?— but with an entirely new form of organization and a new type of practice. In contemporary terms, we have the current practice of the Zapatistas. They do as an organization refuse to take power. But they have not made anti-taking power their universal, their philosophy. They argue that it makes no diffference who is in power in this social-economic system. Thus, they are, as they note, anti-capitalist and from the Left. They are against hierarchical, vanguardist concepts of organization and power. But that is not the same as having anti-power as ones ideology. It is a diffferent way of doing politics, and opens up a diffferent way of “taking power.” John Holloway’s important, creative study is self-limiting. The limitation is rooted in his philosophic vantage point of a negative dialectics. Two-hundred years ago Hegel wrote of “spirit in self-estrangement” in his Phenomenology of Spirit. He there caught the philosophic kernel of a mode of thought which wishes to establish a new world, a new mode of existence, but remains ensnared in what it wants to be free from. It does so because it continues to defijine itself only in opposition, as the negation of what it opposes. As a consequence its existence is proscribed by what it opposes, and fails to proceed on its own self-determined ground, a second negation. It is thus a spirit in self estrangement. B. Hardt and Negri’s Multitude “Keep in mind that this is a philosophic book,” Hardt and Negri write in Multitude’s Introduction. “Our primary aim is to work out the conceptual bases on which a new project of democracy can stand.” They seek to establish a new paradigm for looking at the present moment—a postmodern world of Empire they see characterized by: (1) “immaterial labor” as the concept of labor that will be the determinant in a “post-industrial” stage of production; (2) an “emerging global class formation, the multitude” as reflective of a new subjectivity in opposition to Empire; (3) “a new science of global democracy”—the unfijinished project of modernity and unrealized under socialism—which multitude, through its organizational networks, brings into being/becomes. What philosophy governs their work?—What is their concept of immaterial labor that they argue is in Marx’s footsteps in terms of method and yet beyond Marx? What is their concept of multitude that is “composed of a set of singularities,” where each singularity is “a social subject whose diffferences cannot be reduced to sameness, diffference that remains

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 341 diffferent”? What is their concept of democracy and of the organizational form needed to achieve it? 1. Is “Immaterial Labor” Outside of Marx’s Concept of Labor? By the second decade of the 20th century, the phenomenon of imperialism—which Rosa Luxemburg had recognized as early as any revolutionary at the end of the 19th century—had come to shine so brightly in the life of capitalism that it blinded Luxemburg as to the essence of capitalist accumulation. She felt imperialism was a development that Marx had not foreseen, and that accumulation from non-capitalist lands was becoming more crucial then the laws capitalist accumulation he had posed in Volume II of Capital. Her Accumulation of Capital (1914) sought to give a theoretical explanation to this new economic situation. Imperialism’s appearance overwhelmed capitalism’s essence, and became the center of accumulation in her work. When the particular of imperialism came to the fore, Luxemburg transformed it into a universal, and found herself unmoored from Marx’s concept of labor as she strove to work out the theoretical questions of this phenomenon. (For further discussion see Dunayevskaya, 2000 and Gogol, 2002.) At the dawn of the 21st century, Hardt and Negri see a new economic situation. They see immaterial labor, which was present only as a minor key in Marx’s day, as presently the determinant of the relation of capital and labor, and as the pathway to overcoming that relation and thus forging a diffferent future. This phenomenon of immaterial labor, they claim, necessitates a revision of central parts of Marx’s analysis of capital, including how the law of value operates in relation to socially necessary labor time. I would argue that in so quickly jettisoning socially necessary labor time as a crucial category of capitalism, they have become unmoored from both the specifijicity and the revolutionary, dialectical implications of Marx’s concept of labor. To explore this further we want to concentrate on the section “Method: In Marx’s Footsteps,” of Multitude. (2004: 140–157) The key to Marx’s method of historical materialism is that social theory must be molded to the contours of contemporary social reality … [O]nce history moves on and the social reality changes, then the old theories are no longer adequate. We need new theories for the new reality. To follow Marx’s method, then, one must depart from Marx’s theories to the extent that the object of his critique, capitalist production and capitalist society as a whole, has changed. (140)

What do Hardt and Negri’s understand Marx’s method to be? For them the primary elements of Marx’s method are “(1) historical tendency, (2) the

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real abstraction, (3) antagonism, and (4) the constitution of subjectivity.” They write that, “Marx’s great efffort in the mid-nineteenth century was to interpret the tendency and project capital, then in its infancy, as a complete social form.” (141) At the present moment, they see “the immaterial paradigm of production” as an historical tendency distinct from Marx’s analysis, which centered on industrial production. Their challenge to Marx’s relevance today does not end with the question of whether immaterial labor forms a fundamentally new historic tendency. It continues with their discussion of the second aspect of what they see as Marx’s method—the real abstraction—and their view that immaterial labor fundamentally changes it. Marx’s split in the category of labor under capitalist—labor as activity and labor power the commodity, that is, into concrete labor and abstract labor—is the key for comprehending value production, the logic of capitalism. The heart of abstract labor was Marx’s concept of socially necessary labor time. The production of value and surplus value was related to the labor time necessary to produce a commodity. In a stunning reversal, and yet at the core of their conception of immaterial labor, Hardt and Negri argue that the value produced under the hegemony of immaterial labor can no longer be measured by socially necessary labor time: The temporal unity of labor as the basic measure of value today makes no sense… [T]he working day and the time of production have changed profoundly under the hegemony of immaterial labor. The regular rhythms of factory production and its clear divisions of work time and nonwork time tend to decline in the realm of immaterial labor. … [W]e have to revise Marx’s notion of the relation between labor and value in capitalist production. (145, 146)

By a few strokes of the keyboard, Marx’s economic categories of abstract labor, socially necessary labor time, are thrown overboard. But then, how are we thus to elucidate the logic of capital in the present moment? For Hardt and Negri, the logic of immaterial labor comes close to escaping the clutches of capitalist production: In the paradigm of immaterial production … labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication and cooperation directly. … [I]n immaterial production the creation of cooperation has become internal to labor and thus external to capital. (147)

Immaterial production, “external to capital,” becomes part of the “common,” that which allows the multitude “to communicate and act together.” “A theory of the relation between labor and value today must be based on

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 343 the common.” (148) Hardt and Negri do recognize that “immaterial labor is still exploited under the rule of capital as material labor is. In other words, the labor of women, men, and children is still controlled by capitalists who appropriate the wealth this labor produces.” But they argue for the need to disconnect from Marx’s theory of abstract labor: “[T]oday, in the paradigm of immaterial production, the theory of value cannot be conceived in terms of measured quantities of time.” (150) Hardt and Negri have thus become removed from Marx concept of labor in two crucial ways: (1) They have left aside the origins of Marx’s concept of labor residing in his philosophic discussion of the interchange of humanity and nature. (2) They have focused so narrowly on the phenomenon of immaterial labor as to not critically explore its relation to Marx’s explication of labor under capitalism having a material product. It was the historical interaction of human beings and nature, and not alone the particular class formation of capital and labor, that gave birth to Marx’s concept of labor. For Marx, labor was a formative process: the conscious, purposeful transformation of nature, which was one with the transformation of human beings: “the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature.” (Marx, 1975a: 298) The origins of Marx’s concept of labor are thus philosophic as well as concrete in exploring the relation of humankind and nature. As such, Marx’s concept fijinds resonance with Hegel, a relation to which we will return to in the fijinal sections of the present concluding chapter. When humanity’s relation to nature became manifest in class society, and particularly in capitalist class society, a profound rupture occurred. In capitalism, the alienation—not alone of the products of labor, but as the very process of laboring—fractures the intimate bond of humanity and nature. The process which leads to the accomplished humanism of nature and the accomplished naturalism of human beings has been corrupted. In its place is the degrading, the commodifijication, of both nature and humanity. This is expressed in the extraction of value and surplus value, the split of the category of labor into labor power the commodity and labor as activity in Marx’s analysis, which reached its fullest expression in Capital. Because Marx spent some four decades discerning the relation between capital and labor, there has been a pull upon many theorists, including Hardt and Negri, to place Marx’s concept of labor in a productivist framework, tied to a stage of capitalism that has an immediate material product. Today, since immaterial labor is said to not have a direct material product, a claim is made for the need for a new analysis, indeed a new concept of labor.

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Hardt and Negri proceed to give their take on Marx’s specifijic analysis of the capitalist concept of labor in the factory that creates a material product—whose value is measured by the factory clock as socially necessary labor time—without showing regard to Marx’s grounding his concept of labor in interchange of nature and human beings. Thus, when a so-called new phenomenon emerges, which they call immaterial labor, they neither root themselves in the philosophic origins of Marx’s concept of labor, nor do they critically ask what is the relation of immaterial labor to Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s concept of labor. First, they seem unaware or dismissive of the idea that Marx’s concept of labor is not limited to industrial capitalism and the production of material product, or even to capitalism per se. Rather, it can more properly be viewed as rooted in the metabolic interaction between nature and humanity. Indeed, Marx’s view of labor is neither exhausted in pre-capitalist origins nor in his critique of capital’s exploitative despoliation of the relation of human beings and nature, reducing both to objects. Rather, his discourse on labor reaches toward the future: When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, productive power, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature—those of his own nature, as well as those of so-called ‘nature’? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution—i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick—an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? (Marx, 1973)

It is not that Hardt and Negri do not know this passage of Marx. They, in fact, quote it in part. It is that they have not fully examined its implications for their own work. Second, in Hardt and Negri’s examination of how Marx analyzed capitalist labor, they focus exclusively on industrial, that is material labor, and do not seek to tie their concept of immaterial labor— “analytical and symbolic tasks” as well as “production and manipulation of afffect”—to how Marx saw labor. They see immaterial labor as the new paradigm that has emerged post-Marx. But is this correct? Here we draw upon Sean Sayers’ “The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics,” (Sayers, 2007) for a critique of the concept of immaterial labor. Sayers writes, The error here is to imagine that ‘immaterial’ symbolic work has no material result and that only work which directly creates a tangible material product,

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 345 like industry or craft is ‘formative’ activity.…Symbolic work is not primarily concerned with production as such, but rather with the realization of value through distribution, exchange, marketing, etc. However, it is important to see that these activities are essential to the process of production in a developed industrial economy … Even though [the] work is not primarily aimed at creating a material product, it has material efffects that produce and reproduce social and economic relations. In this respect it is ‘formative’ activity in Marx’s sense and does not difffer from other kinds of work. For all human labor occurs within a network of social relations which it creates and sustains. (445–6)

In terms of a second kind of immaterial labor—“afffective labor,” service work as well as caring and helping work—Hardt and Negri’s view is that Marx did not take into account this type of work since it has no material product. Again, Sayers critiques their view as too narrow: Afffective labor is necessary to establish and maintain economic and social relations. Housework is needed to create and maintain a home, education to produce socialized individuals. Receptionists, social workers, cleaners, shop workers, etc., are needed to maintain social and economic relations in a modern economy. None of these activities is primarily aimed at creating a material product, yet they are formative activities nonetheless … they have material results that serve to produce and reproduce social relations. In this way, they are forms of self-creation, the fijinal product of which is society. (448)

It is true that the nature of work has changed since Marx’s day. Hardt and Negri as well as many others have shown this. The question is whether these changes have fundamentally challenged Marx’s concept of labor, either within the confijines of a capital/ labor relation, or with regard to his discussion of the interchange of humanity and nature. In both cases, a view that we have moved “beyond Marx” seems problematic. The third category in Hardt and Negri’s view of Marx’s method is “antagonism.” They link it to the exploitation of workers, and see that exploitation as “the expropriation of the common.” For them, “The common … has become the locus of surplus value.” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 150) We will not here debate the validity of this. However, we ask whether the category of contradiction, as opposed to antagonism, isn’t more central to Marx’s method, and a far richer concept, involving dialectics in Hegel as well as Marx? Dialectics is a concept only lightly touched upon in what they term more than once “a philosophic book.” Even when Hegel is discussed more fully in Empire, (Hardt and Negri, 2000) it is in reference to Hegel’s political philosophy, not his major philosophic writings. The last category that Hardt and Negri present as their view of Marx’s methodology is subjectivity, the production of subjectivity. For them, its

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manifestation is singled out as “the poor” in this section, and in its fullness as multitude. 2. Multitude as Category, as Subject/Subjectivity—Is Multitude Only a Quantitative Term? Much of Hardt and Negri’s book revolves around an attempt to conceptualize multitude as subject/subjectivity for the 21st century: “Multitude is a class concept,” (103) where “class is determined by class struggle. … collective resistance to power” that “. … not only reflects the existing lines of class struggle, it also proposes potential future lines.” (104) It is based on “conditions of possibility. The question to ask, in other words, is not ‘What is the multitude?’ but rather ‘What can the multitude become?’ ” (105) For them, multitude can be conceived “as all those who work under the rule of capital and thus potentially as the class of those who refuse the rule of capital.” (106) Hardt and Negri argue that immaterial labor with its emphasis on cooperation and communication helps bring multitude to the fore. One has to be cautious here. In addition to the critique presented above as to whether the concept of immaterial labor is a needed vantage point for viewing capitalist production, one wonders whether they have sufffijiciently taken into consideration Marx’s sharp division between the despotic plan of capital and the cooperative plan of freely associated labor. Freely associated labor arises only when the fetters of value production are actively destroyed. At times Multitude seems to suggest freely associated labor of cooperation and communication arises almost automatically out of the objective conditions. To write, “in immaterial production the creation of cooperation has become internal to labor and thus external to capital,” is to sow illusions that there is today labor as such, independent of capital as the dominant, voracious system. There is only labor within, or under the pull of this particular class system, and thus the need to overcome value production. Hardt and Negri’s observation that “the multitude gives the concept of the proletariat its fullest defijinition as all those who labor and produce under the rule of capital” (107) is of interest because it seeks to provide a wider view of what constitutes the proletariat then has generally been accepted. However, why tie such a view of the proletariat, or indeed a concept of plural subjects, to the problematic category of immaterial labor being determinant? In addition to multitude as a class concept, Hardt and Negri conceive of  multitude as “the subjectivity that emerges from the dynamic of

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 347 singularity and commonality.” (198) Thus, they seek to replace an identity/diffference contradiction with a complementary singularity/ commonality: In practice the multitude provides a model whereby our expressions of singularity are not reduced or diminished in our communication and collaboration with others in struggle, with our forming ever greater common habits, practices, conduct, and desires—with in short, the global mobilization and extension of the common. (217–218)

They fijind “a multitude of singularities,” (138) or multitude as a set of singularities that act in common. As we will see, what is projected to bring these singularities together is the project of democracy. Multitude’s organizational form is seen as a network. This is in contrast to either being “organized under central leadership, such as the party” or “the right of each group to express its diffferences and conduct its own struggle autonomously. … based on race, gender, and sexuality. … either united struggle under the central identity or separate struggles that afffijirm our diffference.” They argue that their concept of network gives these old models new life in a diffferent form. … [W]e should simply emphasize the divergent organizational forms. The new global cycle of struggles is a mobilization of the common that takes the form of an open, distributed network, in which no center exerts control and all nodes express themselves freely. (217, 218)

The project of the multitude is one of democracy (Democracy being the title of the third and fijinal section of their book): We believe that the creation of democracy is the only way to consolidate the power of the multitude and, conversely, that the multitude provides us with a social subject and a logic of social organization that make possible today, for the very fijirst time, the realization of democracy. … The multitude is one concept, in our view, that can contribute to the task of resurrection or reforming or, really, reinventing the Left by naming a form of political organization and a political project. (219, 220)

Democracy is a radical term for Hardt and Negri. Their vantage point is Spinoza’s “absolute democracy,” and includes fijigures from the period of the American Revolution such as Jeffferson and Madison. Their historical references encompass as well the Paris Commune as democratic governance, the East Berlin June 1953 workers’ revolt (“They demanded a democracy of the workers by the workers, everywhere.”), and include present-day social-political-economic struggles, such as the Zapatistas. A new science of global democracy would not simply restore our political  vocabulary from the corruptions it has sufffered; it would also have to

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Are networks and similar forms of organization, together with a radical concept of democracy rooted in Spinoza’s political philosophy, sufffijicient ground for the uprooting social change needed? In extending multitude to organizational expression, Hardt and Negri stress form of organization. They reject the hierarchical form of the old Left with its vanguard party-to-lead, favoring “an open, distributed network.” Decentralized non-elitist forms are certainly important and needed organizational forms. But form of organization does not exhaust the organizational question. What is the content of the organization? In writing of present-day resistances they note: “We have to look not only at the form but also the content of what they do.” (93) Does this not bring us to philosophy as a dimension of the content? However, philosophy is conceived by Hardt and Negri as primarily political philosophy. (See particularly their Commonwealth, 2009) with the creation or realization of democracy as its most developed conception, and with multitude representing the potential of democracy’s most radical manifestation. But does not political philosophy need to be rooted in philosophy proper, in and of itself—the dialectic in philosophy? Hardt and Negri keep their distance in this regard. Their limited discussions of Hegel in Multitude and in Empire are concerned with Hegel’s political thought, not the dialectic as such. Their exploration of Marx on method fails to explore his indebtedness to Hegel. Their discussion of Spinoza fails to take up his central category of Substance and determinate negation, and to ask, what does that mean for his political philosophy? Spinoza’s call of absolute democracy may be quite radical as political philosophy, but what of his central philosophic concept of Substance? Does it provide a philosophic pathway forward? Hegel singled out what he saw as Spinoza’s insight and limitation: Determinateness is negation—this is the absolute principle of Spinoza’s philosophy and this true and simple insight is the foundation of the absolute unity of Substance. But Spinoza does not pass on beyond negation as determinateness or quality to a recognition of it as absolute, that is, self-negating, negation. … Therefore, Substance lacks the principle of personality. (Hegel, 1929, Volume 2: 168)

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 349 The political conclusion of absolute democracy lacks a philosophic basis within Spinoza’s concept of absolute substance. There is only a fijirst negation, determinateness as negation, and not the movement, the second or self-negating negation. “Substance lacks the principle of personality.” There is no possibility of dialectical flow between Spinoza’s absolute substance and his call for absolute democracy. Contrast that to Hegel on Subject: “In my view … everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.” (Hegel, 1964: 80) Hegel’s dialectic of second negativity has self-movement. There is no need to bring in an external force as any pathway forward. Please note, we are not referring to Hegel’s political philosophy, his political conclusions as in Philosophy of Right. Hegel’s political conclusions were far from being rooted in the radical nature of his dialectics of negativity. Marx strongly critiqued this limitation of Hegel’s thought. However, that did not necessitate a rejection of the Hegelian dialectic of negativity. It is the mistaken conflation of Hegel’s revolutionary dialectic philosophy with his reactionary political conclusions that has so often laid the ground for an avoidance of critical engagement with the dialectic in philosophy itself. Hardt and Negri, among others, focus on Hegel’s political conclusions, not on the dialectic. Can one fijind in a “science of global democracy,” driven by/shaped by a concept of multitude that encompasses class, a model for the present moment? One cannot answer such a question if philosophy is confijined to political philosophy, if organization is confijined to form of organization. For political philosophy to have an authentic radical expression, it is insuffijicient to fijind only the possible live subjects for a given historic moment, in this case the multitude. Rather, revolutionary subjectivity in its fullness is not only human beings in rebellion. It is also the revolutionary subjectivity of the self-development of the Idea of freedom. That is, it is the dialectic in philosophy itself. This is the dialectic of absolute negativity that Hegel’s revolution in philosophy created. It needs to fijind political and organization expression, a task Marx undertook as part of its philosophic re-creation. Instead, Hardt and Negri leave us with: the extraordinary accumulations of grievance and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand. … In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future. (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 358)

True enough. But will we have thereby undergone the “the seriousness, labor, patience and sufffering of the negative,” that is dialectical philosophy, which enables us to meet the challenge from the insurrectional event,

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fusing it with an emancipatory philosophic vision, thus creating a concrete universal that truly reaches for and makes real a new society founded on new, human beginnings? C. Istvan Mészáros and the Dialectic: Seeking to Move Beyond Capital by Moving Beyond Hegel From almost the very fijirst moment of his Beyond Capital (1995)—Chapter One, “Breaking the Spell of ‘Universal Permanent Capital’ ”—Mészáros seeks to take the reader “Beyond the Hegelian legacy.” In this important Marxist writing of the latter part of the 20th century, the Hungarian-born philosopher, student and critic of George Lukács, launches a no holdsbarred analysis and critique of Hegel as the political philosopher of “universal permanent capital” (Hegel). At the same time, Mészáros (1) produces a magisterial critical study of the social metabolic form of capital as elucidated by Marx, and (2) shows that the deeply contradictory effforts of 20th century revolutions in the name of socialism/communism failed to move beyond capital. More recently, when Mészáros published his Social Structure and forms of Consciousness, particularly its fijirst volume, The Social Determination of Method (2010), his attack was not alone against Hegel’s political philosophy and conclusions that Marx had critiqued profoundly in 1843. Rather, Mészáros now focused his critique on the dialectic itself—including the concept of the negation and the Absolute Idea chapter of the Science of Logic. Thus, the philosophical pathway our Marxist philosopher has chosen to move beyond capital is to move “beyond the Hegelian legacy” by critiquing the Hegelian dialectic itself. However, does such a pathway, in fact, vitiate the very revolutionary project Mészáros is striving to put forth? Can Mészáros elucidate the revolutionary elements needed to move ‘beyond capital,’ his “theory of transition,” when he reduces ‘the Hegelian legacy’ to the standpoint of ‘universal permanent capital,’ and considers Hegel’s development of the dialectic itself, not alone his political conclusions, as primarily as way of defending that standpoint? Has not Mészáros thereby cut himself offf from the very dialectical philosophical legacy that Marx appropriated, appropriated in a manner that encompassed both a revolutionary transcendence of and a continual return to? I would argue that there is a contradictory philosophic dimension to the revolutionary project of moving ‘beyond capital’ in the manner Mészáros poses it. To explore it, we begin with Beyond Capital and then move to The Social Determination of Method.

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 351 1. Beyond Capital—Does ‘Universal Permanent Capital’ Signify Hegel’s Legacy for Today? Mészáros’ profound study, Beyond Capital, together with his more recent The Burden and Challenge of Historical Time (2008), are high-water marks of recent Marxist analysis of the uncontrollable and unsustainable nature of capitalist production. In a painstakingly detailed and far reaching manner he lays out the destructive internal logic capital’s death-producing development. In parallel with his critique of capital, Mészáros focuses on Hegel, particularly on his political philosophy in Philosophy of Right. A frontispiece quote cites what Mészáros regards as Hegel’s crucial standpoint: the defender of “universal permanent capital.” This does not mean that Mészáros is totally dismissive of the dialectic proper or of Marx’s indebtedness to it. Rather, Mészáros argues that “the Hegelian legacy represented a challenging problem for the socialist movement both in a positive and a negative sense.” He calls for appropriating its achievements, but as well, “subjecting to a radical critique its capital-eternalizing mystifijications.” To move “beyond capital,” Mészáros argues that it is crucial to critique Hegel’s concept of “universal permanent capital,” and uses his vast intellectual arsenal to do so. This is not alone a question of the past for him. Rather, “the task of breaking the spell of Hegel’s ‘universal permanent capital’ remains on the historical agenda.” (Mészáros 1995: 7) In doing so, he does not dismiss the totality of Hegel. He calls attention to Marx’s relation to the Hegelian dialectic, and recognizes that Marx was not simply “beyond Hegel” after his 1840s Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right and the “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. Rather, “Marx’s most important works, Capital and the Grundrisse… happened to be considerably more rather than less positive towards Hegel than the young Marx’s Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right.” (2) Furthermore, he notes that there has been “the substantive ground from which the afffijinities between Hegel’s and Marx’s theories have arisen under determinate historical circumstances,” and that even though for Mészáros, Hegel ended under the focal point of capital’s eternalized present, under European colonial supremacy[, this] could not alter the fact that he grasped history in the fijirst place as an inexorable objective movement, with a compelling logic of its own which could not be tamed by wishful subjective design and corresponding voluntaristic intervention. (Chapter 1)

This is not to say that Mészáros views the philosophic system, as opposed  to the political Hegel, is without contradiction. But it is to say that he

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recognizes aspects of a radical core in the Hegelian system. He points to the category of contradiction: “[Hegel] could not help assigning to the dialectically defijined category of contradiction a place of central importance in his system…” And he calls attention to the objective dialectic of the historical process as such: its continuities in discontinuity and discontinuities in continuity. Hegel’s insights could be, and had to be, preserved because they have arisen from that objective continuity of antagonistic class relations which the socialist project was attempting to master in its own way.

The above noted, it must be said that Mészáros’ focus is not on the objectively revolutionary aspects of the dialectic. Rather, Hegel as the great political philosopher-apologist for capitalism, particularly embodied in his illusionary concept of an “eternalized social metabolic control,” is the Hegel who is most alive for Mészáros at the end of the 20th century. Thus Mészáros chooses to focus on Hegel as capital’s ardent defender, citing Marx’s view that “Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy,” while leaving to the side Marx’s view of “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle.” (“Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic”) Furthermore, he argues that Hegel’s “universal permanent capital” was not just Hegel’s political conclusions, but infected the very core of Hegel’s philosophy, “philosophy conceived from the vantage point of capital at a certain stage of historical development.” (4) Can such a charge, that the fullness of Hegel’s philosophy is conceived from the vantage point of capital, be sustained? Or does the concept of negation of the negation become, not an apology for capital—whatever were Hegel’s political/personal intentions, (Mészáros’ “wishful subjective design and corresponding voluntaristic intervention”)—but rather an absolute negativity that forms, though often in an abstract and at times in a mystical manner, a needed philosophic basis for a revolutionary critique and overthrow of capital, of moving beyond capital? When in 1844 Marx asked, “How do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic?”, his answer was both a through-going critique and a revolutionary re-appropriation/transformation of the Hegelian dialectic. He exposed Hegel’s de-humanization of the idea, the true “lie of his principles,” as well as showing the limitation of his viewpoint: “Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. … We shall now demonstrate in detail Hegel’s one-sidedness—and limitations …” And yet Marx also singled out, “[t]he outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 353 of its fijinal outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle…” (“Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” Marx, 1975a)3 Marx in this 1844 essay and in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right demonstrated Hegel’s erroneous views on economics and social questions, his apologia for the bourgeois state. At the same time, Marx did not feel the need to return to that part of his critique over and over in the years following. Instead, it was his return to “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle,” (of course fully reconstituted with corporeal men and women as subject, Marx’s “new Humanism”), that remained fully alive in the decades that followed. Mészáros in Beyond Capital, has not followed that same method. Despite his recognition of Marx’s later return to the Hegelian dialectic, for himself Mészáros has chosen to let go of any return to the Hegelian dialectic in and of itself for today. His only return is as critic of Hegel as philosopher of “universal permanent capital.” This is what I would regard as his misplaced concreteness with regard to the Hegelian dialectic. What are the reasons for it? What does it mean in relation to Mészáros’ aim with Beyond Capital: that is, ‘Towards a Theory of Transition’? There are certainly important reasons for Mészáros’ critique of Hegel’s standpoint of permanent universal capital at the end of the 20th century. Foremost, is the fact that in near century and a half since Marx’s Capital—a critical analysis of the production-process of capital, (Mészáros calls attention to this proper translation of the subtitle to Marx’s Capital), not alone the bourgeois world, but the radical material and intellectual world that associated itself with Marxism, has failed to come to grips with Marx’s revolutionary critical view of what would be needed to abolish capital and move towards a humanist, socialist society. The standpoint of capital’s permanence (an acceptance of the law of value in supposedly socialist societies) was in fact adopted by the orthodox Communism of the “Soviet” Union by the 1940s, as well as social democratic reformism, and thus both projected a limited-theoretical as well as practical horizon. Their ideology obfuscations of Marx’s theoretical labor have aided the continuance of capital’s dominance. Furthermore, Mészáros saw that theoretical underpinnings for such a distorted view of Marxist thought in the 20th century came from even the 3 One recent study (Sayers, 2011) makes an important contribution in setting the record straight on the complex Hegel-Marx relationship.

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most original revolutionary thinkers. For him, Georg Lukács was the foremost representative. And Lukács, according to Mészáros, had his philosophic roots primarily within Hegel’s dialectic. Indeed, wrote Mészáros, Lukács’ methodology was one of “out-Hegelizing Hegel,” borrowing the expression from Lukács’ own 1967 characterization of his 1923 History and Class Consciousness. Thus Hegel becomes as much the target as Lukács in Mészáros’ critique. It is not that Mészáros’ important discussion of Lukács is not often on target. However, what is somewhat problematic is that Mészáros roots his critique of Lukács in Lukács’ appropriation of Hegel’s philosophic categories, particularly the concept of “Identical SubjectObject.” Mészáros thus begins the extension of his critique of Hegel from political philosophy to the philosophic categories of the dialectic in and of itself. We want to ask whether the direct philosophic link Hegel-Lukács that Mészáros strives to demonstrate—an appropriation of Hegel’s idealized, mystifijied “Identical Subjecd-Object”—can instead be viewed more as Lukács’ misreading and misapplication of Hegel’s dialectic for his own political reasons? To the contrary, Mészáros’ critique of Lukács leads him to a critique of Hegel rather than a probing of the manner whereby Lukács mis-appropriated Hegel. This misplaced concreteness with regard to Hegel, blinds Mészáros from probing the need to return to the Hegelian dialectic, not alone through Marx, but through Hegel’s own thought, the dialectic of absolute negativity in and of itself, as a need of the present moment. To explore this further, we need to move to Mészáros’ most direct critique of the Hegelian dialectic, which we fijind in a number of chapters in The Social Determination of Method. 2. The Social Determination of Method—Critiquing the Dialectic Itself In The Social Determination of Method, the fijirst volume of Mészáros’ two volume Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, he sets forth his most comprehensive critique of the dialectic as Hegel formulated it. We focus on three areas of his critique. First, Mészáros proceeds to conflate the political and the philosophical Hegel over and over again. There is no question that Hegel in his political writings drew conclusions that often supported bourgeois society, and had reactionary implications. His lectures on world history were as well extremely problematic with a Eurocentric bias, and included racist observations. Hegel’s “application” of the dialectic in the fijields of politics and world history were and are indeed problematic. However, there is no reason to follow along Hegel’s path in this regard. Rather it is necessary to separate Hegel own miss-application

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 355 of the dialectic in these areas, from the dialectic in his philosophical works. But Mészáros chooses to conflate Hegel’s political and philosophic writings in his belief that they are a single dialectic, and that the philosophic writings are themselves contaminated from the beginning with the viewpoint of “universal permanent capital.” Second, in exploring the relation between Marx and Hegel, he focuses almost entirely on Marx’s critique of Hegel, and while pointing out the praise of Marx for Hegel, makes it an aside in comparison to the critique. Mészáros ends up fragmenting Marx’s complex view of the Hegelian dialectic in the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. The challenge is not alone to grasp Marx’s critique of certain aspects of the Hegelian dialectic, but why at the same moment Marx holds fast to that dialectic in a manner which is transcendence and appropriation—or perhaps better, transcendence as appropriation—and has continual returns to that dialectic over the more than three decades that followed the Manuscripts. The philosophic dimension which Marx holds as the key to the Hegelian dialectic, “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle,” “negation of the negation,” is precisely what Mészáros chooses to attack in the dialectic itself. His methodology seems far afijield from Marx’s with regard to Hegel. The question of course, is not that Mészáros needs to have the same interpretation of Hegel that Marx has. Rather, it is that he is so dominated by what he views as Hegel’s standpoint of “universal permanent capital,” that it blinds him as to why Marx insisted on preserving the dialectical method even as he critiqued Hegel’s dehumanizing abstractions and false positivism. Marx never threw out Hegel’s negation of the negation or reduced it to a mystical conjuring or manipulation, supposedly justifying a reconciliation with capitalist economics. Rather, one can follow Marx’s profound re-creation of negation of the negation over and over in his labors. To cite one instance from 1844: Marx’s 1844 critique of communism, not only primitive communism but even positive communism, hinged precisely on the dialectic, on negation of negation, and thus for Marx, positive humanism arising from itself after communism. Thus for Marx, a further negation, negation of the negation, would arise after positive communism’s overcoming of capitalist society. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but

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chapter fourteen communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society. (“Private Property and Communism”, Marx, 1975a)

While Marx did not extensively comment on the totality of Hegel’s Absolutes, he did explore Absolute Knowledge in Phenomenology, and never dismissed Absolute Idea, in the manner Mészáros does. Again, what is at stake is not difffering interpretations of the Hegel-Marx relation. Rather, at issue is the Hegelian dialectic, particularly Hegel’s Absolutes as crucial points of departure for a theory of transition, for the overcoming of capital today, in our historical moment in the fijirst decades of the 21st century. This is what Mészáros has cut himself offf from, even as he profoundly and importantly critiques the persistence and death logic of capital, and the failures of what he terms post-capitalist capital societies. Has he not thereby cut himself and ourselves offf from the vary source of dialectical thought that we need for today? Put another way, as crucial as is what Mészáros identifijies as the “Marxian Reorientation of Method,” as opposed to all the methods which he importantly critiques in Social Determination of Method as pre-Marx in the era of capital, Mészáros has not fully grasped Marx’s method because he minimizes and fails to fully explicate Marx’s indebtedness to and revolutionizing of the Hegelian dialectic. For Mészáros, after Marx’s settling accounts with the Hegelian dialectic, there is no need to return to the Hegel, no need for Hegel’s dialectic as a way to critique of bourgeois society, in its classic form or its so-called socialist form. Unlike Marx, Mészáros chooses not to use the Hegelian dialectic against Hegel’s political conclusions, against his false positivism. He is not open to the possibility of returning to the Hegelian dialectic in and for itself for our day. Third, Mészáros in The Social Determination of Method focuses on the dialectic itself, directly attacking a number of the philosophic categories of Hegel. He is determined to demonstrate that the Hegelian dialectic itself, (not alone Hegel’s political conclusions), is conciliatory to bourgeois society, and not a radical rupture in the manner of Marx. He thus undertakes a critique of a number of Hegelian philosophic categories: measure, mediation, negation in relation to Spinoza, object-subject identity, the Absolute Idea. What is at the center of Mészáros’ critique of Hegel’s development of these philosophic categories is in fact his attempt at a full-blown attack on the heart of the Hegelian dialectic: “negation of the negation,” or second negativity. To explore this further we focus on three aspects on Mészáros’ critique: (1) His interpretation of Hegel’s praise for and transcendence of Spinoza’s crucial concept of “determinateness as negation”; (2) His view of negation

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 357 of the negation, particularly as Hegel develops it in the chapter on the Absolute Idea of the Science of Logic; and (3) Mészáros’ reading of the Absolute Idea Chapter, including his biting dismissal of this key dialectical thread—“negation of the negation.” I will contrast Mészáros’ interpretation of the Absolute Idea chapter to Raya Dunayevskaya’s reading of the same chapter. For Mészáros, the Absolute Idea is the ultimate reconciliation with capitalist society, “universal permanent capital.” For Dunayevskaya, Hegel’s absolutes are crucial points of departure for our age, “Absolute Negativity as New Beginning.” a. Hegel’s Recognition of, as Well as Transcendence of Spinoza’s Concept of “All Determination is Negation” vs. Mészáros’ Reductive Interpretations To arrive at second negation, we begin with simple negation, and it is here where we fijind the source of Hegel’s praise for Spinoza: “Determinateness is negation—this is the Absolute principle of Spinoza’s philosophy, and this true and simple insight is the foundation of the absolute unity of Substance.” However in the same moment, Hegel critiques the limitation of Spinoza insight for stopping at absolute substance: “But Spinoza does not pass on beyond negation as determinateness or quality to a recognition of it as absolute, that is as self-negating negation. … Therefore, Substance lacks the principle of personality. …” (Hegel, 1929, Vol. 2: 168) Hegel comments on the power of Spinoza’s thesis in a number of places: “Determinateness is negation posited afffijirmatively is the meaning of Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negatio,—a proposition of infijinite importance” and then stresses Spinoza’s failure to go further: “Only, negation as such is formless abstraction. Speculative philosophy must not be accused of making negation, or Nothing, its end: Nothing is the end of philosophy as little as Reality is the truth.” (Vol. I: 125) Hegel is arguing that the truth cannot be found in substance alone, but must move to Subject, selfmovement, self-development. [W]ith Spinoza, Substance and its absolute unity, have the form of an inert, that is, of a not self-mediating, unity—of a rigidity wherein the concept of  the negative unity of the self (Subjectivity) has not yet found a place. (Vol. I: 266)

Thus, Hegel singled out Spinoza’s concept of negative determination as an important philosophic concept, part of a dialectical view. At the same time, he pointed out that Spinoza had limited this negation to Substance, inert, and thus without movement, not self-mediating. Hegel argued that without a self-negating negation, that is a second negation, there could not be movement forward. Hegel’s point was that dialectical thought is

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not alone negation, but negation of the negation; not alone substance but Subject, including “personality;” that dialectics is movement and selfmovement. Negation of the negation contains the positive emerging from within the negation. Rather than seeking to grasp both Hegel’s praise and critique of Spinoza, Mészáros makes a caricature of Hegel’s commentaries, with tiny phrase quotes: “negatively self-negating negation,” “circle of circles,” and “return to the beginning,” that are meaningless without context and serious examination. Hegel’s initial praise of Spinoza is in Mészáros’ view related to the fact that “Spinoza sums up in a most striking fashion the inescapable negativity of the philosophical concepts which are representative of capital’s social formation.” To Mészáros, the Hegelian dialectic only supports capital’s social formation, never contains a movement to potentially transcend capital: “The Hegelian conceptualization of the world from the standpoint of political economy,” (Mészáros, 2010: 77) is the one and only truth. In diffferent ways, he repeats this over and over in his study. He surely is entitled to his viewpoint. However, the end result is that there is no serious exploration of Hegel’s dialectic of second negativity, only a ridicule of isolated expressions in a manner that moves beyond skepticism and borders on cynicism. b. Negation of the Negation in the Absolute Idea: Contrasting Readings of Mészáros and Dunayevskaya At times, Mészáros seeks to bolster his critical reading of the Hegelian dialectic with a detailed examination of paragraphs of the Absolute Idea Chapter of the Science of Logic. Thus in the chapter, “Negative Determination of Philosophy and Social Theory,” in a section he entitles “Reconciliatory Function of ‘Negativity as Self-Transcending Contradiction’ ” Mészáros, in commenting on a complex passage from Hegel’s Absolute Idea, asserts that Hegel is not interested in removal of contradictions but only in their reconciliatory preservation; that Hegel’s use of the negative as mediator is a hopeless task because real extremes and opposites cannot be mediated; that absolute negativity and absolute mediation based on subjectivity are brought in as merely semantic solutions which solve nothing. However his analysis seem prejudiced a priori, colored by his determination to take every philosophic category of Hegel and look for the hidden political root of “universal permanent capital.” Thus Hegel almost becomes reduced to an ideologue. At other times, Mészáros strings together isolated sentences to claim his point. Thus his reductive view of the Hegelian dialectic reaches an

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 359 absurd level when the rich, complex dialogue of the twenty pages of the Absolute Idea chapter of Science of Logic is dismissed in four isolated sentence quotes from various pages of the chapter. This is supposedly to demonstrate that the Absolute Idea chapter is part of “determinations and contradictions of capital’s constraining horizon … reproduced in his [Hegel’s] philosophy at the highest level of abstractions.” (72) The assertion is just left to hang nakedly. Most telling of Mészáros’ critiques is his failure to fully grasp Hegel’s concept of “negation of the negation.” At times he characterizes is as “pseudo-positivity of apologetic inversion,” or “a formula problematically extended far beyond it validity.” Mészáros of course does recognize the need not just for negation, the negation of capitalism, but the necessity for posing the positive: In order to succeed in the envisaged historic sense, the socialist approach must defijine itself in inherently positive terms. Marx made this absolute clear when he insisted that “Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness.” (391)

But for Mészáros “negation of the negation” relies only on negativity and thus positive self-consciousness cannot emerge from it. He rejects a reading of negation of the negation that contains a positive within the negative, which we can “translate” in revolutionary terms as the destruction of the old, capitalism, (fijirst negation), and the construction of the new, the creation of a humanistic socialist society, (negation of the negation), which moves beyond a dependence on the old and emerges on its own ground. Marx did not view negation of the negation in the narrow, undialectical manner that Mészáros does. In the Critique of Hegelian Dialectic he wrote: “communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation— which is itself, however, a necessary premise—does positively selfderiving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.” This is second negation; this is self-negating negation that is far from being only a return to the old or reconciliation, or a simple wishing away all the real contradictions. Marx was able to fijind the methodology for this within the Hegelian dialectic. It became one of the keys for his conceptualizing and practicing the overcoming of the real, concrete contradictions of the world. If Mészáros wants to criticize Hegel for his abstractions, for his reconciliatory political writings, well and good. But when he claims that the dialectic itself only has this reconciliatory end as its foundation, not only is he flying in the face of Marx’s view, but most crucially, he has cut himself offf from the philosophic construction that can most profoundly assist us in

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the destruction of capital, and the creation of a humanist, socialist, future society. Mészáros’ reductive view of negation of the negation is one with his dismissal of the Absolute Idea in Hegel: “The fundamental methodological orienting principle of the Hegelian philosophy, centered on the Absolute Idea, is inseparable from its deeply reconciliatory ideological orientation.” (305) What is most problematic here is Mészáros’ attempt to conflate the revolutionary dialectic of Science of Logic (as well as in Hegel’s other philosophic writings, Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Spirit) with all Hegel’s reactionary writings on the state, etc., and thus to defijine Science of Logic, and indeed the Hegelian dialectic, as at heart reconciliatory and apologetic to capital: [E]ven a great philosophic genius, Hegel, who identifijied himself with capital’s standpoint of political economy, had to terminate history in the present: by postulating colonially dominant Europe as “absolutely the end of history” in his own version of the perfect “organic system” corresponding to the historically objectifijied, and fully realized, eternal present of the Absolute Idea. (Mészáros, 2010)

For Mészáros, Hegel’s Absolute Idea is this eternal present, reconciliatory, apology for capital. In contrast, we are not arguing the Absolute Idea contains the key for overcoming capital. One of course needs Marx and the revolutionary subjectivity of masses in motion. But that too does not solve the problem. The question is whether a return to the Hegelian dialectic in and of itself, and not alone via Marx, can assist us at the present moment. Mészáros does not believe so, and argues that an active rejection of the Hegelian dialectic in the Absolute Idea can help us clear away mystifying, obscuring debris. Can we have a more illuminating, richer way to explore “negation of the negation,” and the Absolutes of Hegel than Mészáros offfers? Raya Dunayevskaya, in contrast, sees Hegel’s Absolute Idea not as an apologia for capital, but rather as ground upon which to create new beginnings— “Absolute Negativity as New Beginnings”—for uprooting social transformation. In her 1961 “Rough Notes on Science of Logic” she wrote: [I]n reaching this fijinal chapter, the Absolute Idea, he [Hegel] is through with all which we would politically describe as “taking over”; that is to say, capitalism will develop all technology so perfectly for us that all the proletariat will have to do will be to “take over.” As we reject this concept politically, Hegel rejects it philosophically. He has now so absorbed all the other systems that, far from taking over, he is fijirst going back to a TOTALLY NEW BEGINNING.

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 361 Here is what I mean: Take a philosopher like Spinoza. Despite his profound dialectical understanding that “every determination is a negation,” he went to God taking over. This concept of Absolute, Absolute Substance, Hegel rejects, even as he rejects the Absolute Ego of Fichte and Schelling, and the Absolute of the General Good Will of Kant. Note how every single time, in no matter which section of the Logic you take, [when] Hegel reaches an absolute for that stage, he throws it aside to start out all over again. So that when he reaches the Notion, he is dealing with it as a new beginning after he rejected Absolute Substance, and that even his Notion has the dialectic of further development; indeed Universal, Particular, Individual is the absolute Mediation, or the development of the Logic. If, for example, we stop in the Absolute Idea at the Expression: “the self-determination in which alone the Idea is, is to hear itself speak,” we can see that the whole Logic (both logic and Logic) is a logic of self-determination and never more so than at the very point when you have reached an Absolute—say, growing internationalization of capital. You then go not to taking over, but breaking it down to the new beginning in the self-determination of nations; or when the state had reached the high stage of centralization, you most certainly do not go to taking over, but rather to the destruction of the state. Hegel can reach these anticipations of the future because a very truly great step in philosophic cognition is made only when a new way of reaching freedom has become possible, as it had with the French Revolution. If at that point you do not cramp your thoughts, then you will fijirst be amazed on how very close to reality—the reality of the present which includes the elements of the future—thought really is. To me, that is why Hegel makes so much of the method. It is not because that is all we get from Hegel—method—but because the end and the means are absolutely inseparable. Thus, on p. 468, Hegel writes: “The method therefore is both soul and substance, and nothing is either conceived or known in its truth except in so far as it is completely subject to the method; it is the peculiar method of each individual fact because its activity is the Notion.” It isn’t true, for example, as Lenin stated that Hegel ended this chapter at the point where Notion and reality unite as Nature, which Lenin translated to mean as Practice. In this fijinal paragraph, Hegel proceeds on to show the link back from Nature to Mind, and of course we know that those two transitions were in themselves two full books. Or as Hegel puts it: “The transition here therefore must rather be taken to mean that the Idea freely releases itself in absolute self-security and self-repose. By reason of this freedom the form of its determinateness also is utterly free—the externality of space and time which is absolutely for itself and without subjectivity.” Marcuse thinks that it is this statement about the Idea releasing itself freely as Nature, “this statement of putting the transition forward as an actual process in reality that offfers great difffijiculty in the understanding of Hegel’s system.” But he himself doesn’t attempt to overcome these difffijiculties. On the contrary, he disregards them, accepting the idea that it is a closed ontology and the best we can do is take this method and use it as a critical theory.

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chapter fourteen One thing is clear to me, that when Hegel wrote that the “transcendence of the opposition between Notion and Reality, and that unity which is the truth, rests upon this subjectivity alone”, the subjectivity was certainly not to be that of the philosopher, despite all of Hegel’s hopes that it would be, but that of a new, lower, deeper layer of “world spirit,” or, to be specifijic, the proletariat and those freedom-fijighters in backward Africa, who just will freedom so much that they make it come true. For what happens after [the revolution], however, that truth must arise not only from the movement from Practice, but also that from Theory. The negation of the negation will not be a generality, not even the generality of a new society for the old, but the specifijic of self-liberation, which is the humanism of the human being, as well as his philosophy. (From “Rough Notes on Science of Logic,” Dunayevskaya, 2002: Chapter 4)

We are not arguing that Dunayevskaya’s Notes on the Absolute Idea Chapter provide the only ground for interpretation. Rather, so rich is the movement of Absolute Negativity in Hegel, that it provides for the possibility of multiple New Beginnings, if revolutionaries are not dismissive of its difffijicult abstractness, but undertake the “labor, patience and sufffering of the negative” to work out concretizations, and new universals in relation to the problematic of human liberation today. II. What Is the Dialectic of Marx’s Capital? It is impossible completely grasp Marx’s Capital, and especially its fijirst 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!! —Lenin, Notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic, section on book 3, Doctrine of the Notion

Lenin’s comment on the relation between Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital came well into his notes on the Doctrine of the Notion, after he had already studied the Doctrines of Being and Essence. These notes were in fact more extensive than both his notes on Being and Essence combined. Thus Lenin’s vantage point was “the whole of Hegel’s Logic.” He writes: “Marx applied Hegel’s dialectics in its rational form to political economy.” And notes “NB Hegel’s analysis of the Syllogism (I-P-U), individual, particular universal, P-I-U, etc) is reminiscent of Marx’s imitation of Hegel in Chapter I.” Individual, particular and universal are the central categories of the Notion. Lenin thus saw Marx’s Capital as a philosophic text. A near century of commentary on Marx’s Capital by Marxists postLenin’s remarks on the dialectic and Capital has passed. It is beyond the

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 363 scope of this study to conduct a survey of these many works. I want to limit myself to three interpretations which expressly take up the question of dialectics in relation to Capital. Coming from very diffferent positions, and certainly with very diffferent interpretations of its meaning, Michael Lebowitz and Moshe Postone—independently studying Capital with Hegel’s Science of Logic in hand, that is, with the Hegelian dialectic as crucial background—arrive at the conclusion that Marx’s Capital traces a dialectic of capital, its development, and not a dialectic of the laborer in resistance. They thereby separate, or deny, what the third interpreter of Capital, Raya Dunayevskaya, saw as integral to a full comprehension of Marx’s greatest work: “The Humanism and Dialectic of Marx’s Capital, Volume I.” (Dunayevskaya, 2000) A. Michael Lebowitz: ‘The [so-called] Silences of Marx’ Principally in his Beyond Capital—Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (1992), and reafffijirmed in his Following Marx—Method, Critique, and Crisis (2009), Lebowitz states his claim that Capital is defijicient, “onesided” as it lacks the “missing book on wage-labor”; that there is “a silence in Capital”: “the worker as subject is absent from Capital,” and that “the worker is not present as the subject who acts for himself against capital,” that “the only subject [of Capital] is capital.” Many other quotes from his works focus on this same theme. Furthermore, proclaims Lebowitz, that “silence in Capital … is at the root of the defijiciencies of Actual Existing Marxism.” Thus the source of the twists and turns, the betrayals and vulgarizations of Marxism post-Marx, the barbarism of what we have witnessed in the 20th centuries monstrosities calling themselves “Communist,” seem to lie at the doorstep of these alleged defijiciencies of Marx’s Capital! These charges have been levied not by an anti-Marxist, nor former Marxist. Rather, they are put forth and seriously developed by a Marxist economist, who though from academia, is a practicing Marxist revolutionary, and not just an armchair theorist. Without doubt, Lebowitz’s purpose is not to attack Marx. It is instead to re-interpret Marx in light of the experience of “Marxism,” and the further development of capitalism in the 20th century. How to have a new beginning in relation to a critique of capitalism and a new development of Marxism is surely his purpose. Such a necessary task has had a long, though problematic history, beginning almost with the fijirst appearance of Capital. Among its most famous practitioners was the great revolutionary and theoretician Rosa Luxemburg with her justly famous Accumulation of Capital and Anti-Critique. Her best

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intentions did not save her from revising Marx in a decidedly un-revolutionary manner as she sought to analyze the economic signifijicance of the phenomenon of imperialism. Here, however, is not the place to analyze her labors, nor to follow in detail the long contradictory, history of “interpretations” of Capital by 20th century Marxists. Rather, we which to take up Lebowitz, precisely because he, unlike many a Marxist economist, has sought to incorporate dialectics into his view of Marx’s Capital, and yet, I would argue, ends up with an undialectical view of the Dialectic of Marx’s Capital. How does he arrive at such a view? What are we to think of Lebowitz’s important effforts to read Marx’s Capital via some of Hegel’s philosophic categories, while at the same time failing to grasp the deeply humanistic-dialectical thrust of the totality of Capital, Volume I? How are we to understand on the one hand, his serious appreciation/commentary in relation to examining Capital through philosophic as well as economic eyes, and on the other, his commentaries on what he sees as missing in Volume I? We raise these questions not to challenge Lebowitz’s effforts to locate particular Hegelian philosophic categories within Capital. They surely do exist there, and Lenin in his Philosophic Notebooks makes mention of Hegelian categories within Capital. Rather the difffijiculty with Lebowitz’s view lies elsewhere. The question is not which Hegelian philosophic categories we can fijind in Capital, but, what is the nature of the dialectic as a totality in Vol. I? That is, do we see Vol. I not so much as an “application” of Hegelian categories in the study of capital and capitalism, but as a recreation of the dialectic in Marx’s hands, so that the humanism of the dialectic in terms of proletarian struggles is decidedly within the Volume? I would argue that we can see that dialectic without needing additions of this or that “missing” books not written, nor is it necessary to add important Marx works and activities outside of Capital Vol. I to make it “complete.” There can be no doubt that Lebowitz has seriously sought to read Capital with certain categories of Hegel’s Science of Logic at hand. One can see the results of his labors in Following Marx—Method, Critique, and Crisis, particularly in a section entitled “The Logic of Capital.” There, in the chapters “Following Hegel: The Science of Marx” and “Explorations of the Logic of Capital.” he focuses on the Hegelian categories essence and appearance, and what he calls Marx’s sensitivity to the gap between essence and appearance. Lebowitz delves into the relation of the concrete and abstract as he sees them in Hegel and how he views Marx putting them to use in his critique of political economy. Not many a Marxist

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 365 economist in the post WW II world has been willing to labor in such a manner. Certainly much of Lebowitz’s observations and commentary are on target, such as when he singles out that for Marx it is not the form private property which is key; that that is not the source of the alienation. Rather, it is alienated labor that produces private property, something which much of 20th century Marxism managed to obscure. It is not that Lebowitz thinks that Marx is blind to the self-activity, the creative actions of works. Far from it. He is an excellent researcher, thoroughly knowledgeable of the scope of Marx’s writings and activities. Again and again he cites Marx’s writing about “rich human beings” and is familiar with Marx’s activities as a revolutionary in concert with the working class of Europe. However, he believes that all this is missing in the content and the focus of Capital. Thus his conclusion is the following: There is no place in Capital for living, changing, striving, enjoying, struggling and developing human beings. People who produce themselves through their own activities, who change their nature as they produce, being of praxis, are not the subjects of Capital.

Furthermore, Lebowitz believes he has the explanation for this. In the Grundrisse and elsewhere Marx cites his plan for future study—and one of the topics is the missing, never written book on Wage-Labor. It is here, Lebowitz argues, where Marx would have put all the material on the activity of the proletariat, a dialectic of labor/laborer. This is what Marx never had a chance to write, never took-up in Capital, and thus the “silences of Capital.” But does such an explanation really hold up? I would argue not. First, Lebowitz does not seem to grasp the signifijicance of the great changes that the drafts of Capital underwent from the 1857–58 notes entitled the Grundrisse, through the fijirst publication of some of his ongoing economic studies in his 1859 Critique of Political Economy, to the further need to begin anew, arriving at the fijirst edition of Capital in 1867, and then the many additions Marx made to the French 1872–1875 edition of Capital, which came post the great working class uprising of the Paris Commune. Second, Lebowitz does not link the working class activity Marx was carrying out in founding and being the principle motor for the First Workingmen’s International, and the form of the manuscript for Capital that Marx was writing in the midst of all this activity. Third, Lebowitz in  his discussion of the dialectic in Marx’s Capital limits his commentary to the question of appearance and essence. However, the profound

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re-creation of the dialectic in Marx’s hands in his working out of Capital encompassed not alone moving from appearance to essence, that is, from the market to production. Crucially the Notion, the Doctrine of the Notion from Hegel’s Science of Logic, was central of Marx’s Capital. Is not the fetishism of commodities the very Notion, (a contradictory one for certain), of capitalist society? This was no mere application of categories from Hegel, but their re-creation in the hands of Marx. Without sensing the meaning of Notion—not only the “spirit” of capitalism, but of the Idea and movement toward human liberation as Marx posed it in Volume I— the fullness of Marx’s Capital, that is the dialectic of Marx’s Capital cannot be grasped. We will examine these three strands in more detail below by bringing in Dunayevskaya’s concept of “The Humanism and Dialectic of Marx’s Capital Vol. I.” First, however we need to turn to Moishe Postone’s view of the dialectic in Capital. B. Postone: Capital as the Dialectical Subject of Marx’s Capital As we have noted above, “How to Read Marx’s Capital?” has a long history. What (Who) is the subject of Marx’s Capital, has been a crucial dimension to the ongoing debate. What is the dialectic of Marx’s Capital, remains a key question. In Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Postone seeks to provide “a reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory” in answering these questions. Arguing that freeing production from direct human labor is the ongoing logic, the dialectic of capital, Postone proceeds to read Capital from this point of departure. In pointing to capitalism’s logic of developing production with less and less human labor Postone has of course caught a part of the development of capital/capitalism that Marx’s Capital demonstrated. There is no need here to rehearse Marx’s arguments on the organic composition of capital, or the domination of dead labor or living labor. However, in catching the essence of capitalist production has Postone expressed the fullness of where Marx was headed? That fullness is not exhausted in revealing the essence of capitalism, as crucial as that is. In dialectical terms, Marx moved from the appearance in the market—the vast collection or abundance of commodities–to the essence: production, where labor, or rather the laborer was the embodiment of both concrete labor and abstract labor (labor power). This was the secret of commodities having both a use value and a value. Furthermore, instead of stopping with a fijinally-detailed and meticulous explanation of this essence of capital, Marx wove into his analysis the dialectical dimension of the Notion. One sees this beginning in

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 367 Chapter One on Commodities with its famous section on Fetishism of Commodities. This fetishism, the worship of things, is the true “spirit” of capitalism. This fetishism, together with what Marx will develop further as capitalism’s logic, “production for production’s sake,” form the notion of capitalism. We will not review these two crucial concepts here. However, what is necessary to grasp is that Marx never presented either the essence or the notion of capitalism as undiffferentiated, as not containing the highest opposition within. Thus for Marx, the logic of capitalism’s development, including the domination of dead labor over living labor, was inseparable from the crucial contradiction that only living labor was the creator of value, and from the laborer’s resistance, his/her seeking a diffferent way of laboring and a fuller, human life. In opposition to capital’s universal of production for the sake of production, to its “spirit” of the fetishism of commodities, came the worker’s “quest for universality,” the fact that only freely associated labor, as in the Paris Commune, could strip away commodity fetishism. It is this opposing, revolutionary dimension of Notion that also resides in Capital. However, Postone fails to recognize Marx’s concept of the Notion when it comes to this human dimension, the self-activity of the proletariat who both resists capitalism’s logic, and points to the pathway for negating capital—the co-operative plan of freely-associated labor. Instead, over and over again, what distinguishes Postone’s reading of Capital is his view that the subject of Capital is capital itself: Marx … explicitly characterizes capital as the self-moving substance which is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social grouping, such as the proletariat or humanity. Rather, Marx analyzes it in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value). (Postone, 1993: 75) [T]he historical Subject analyzed by Marx consists of objectifijied relations, the subject-objective categorical forms characteristic of capitalism, whose ‘substance’ is abstract labor, that is, the specifijic character of labor as a socially mediating activity in capitalism. (76) Marx analyzes those very relations [capitalist relations] as constituting the Subject. (78) Marx’s assertion that capital, and not the proletariat or the species, is the total Subject clearly implies that the historical negation of capitalism would not involve the realization, but the abolition, of the totality. (79).

What we end up with in Postone’s treatise is a dehumanization of Marx’s Capital. Postone, in his acceptance, or better advocacy, of capital as

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subject of Capital, places his focus on the “wealth-creating potential of science and technology,” which in his view makes the human being’s role in the production of wealth superfluous. It is true that there is a wealth potential of science and technology, but there is no such thing as machines as such—only their use under a given social system. So it is only potentiality that is present in science or technology. Its realization or use takes form in a given social-economic order, in this case capitalism, where science and technology have taken on the form of industrial production, the factory. Under capitalism, science and technology takes a certain form in relation to human beings as subjects, in this case not primarily aiding them, but dominating them. However, for Postone, those subjects in capitalist society will be abolished, that is, the proletariat as a class will be eliminated. This abolition, he argues, it the logic of capitalism. Marx too, was for the abolition of the proletariat as a class. But there is all the diffference in his view of what that meant, how it would be not the elimination of the proletariat by capital, but the negation of capital by the proletariat. It would be a negation of the negation that would at one and the same time abolish capital, and eliminate the proletariat as a class as humanity recreated itself as fuller, richer beings. That is, it would be human agency, humanity’s quest for universality, that would at one and the same time abolish capitalism and abolish the proletariat as a class. That would be the logic of capitalism’s destruction. That logic of Marx in Capital is a far cry of Postone’s view that the logic of capitalism’s own development, without the intervention of the proletariat and the other human forces of resistance, is the destroyer of capitalism. The appropriation of science and technology for a diffferent society begins with a negation of the capitalist social system, a negation of labor under capitalism. Human beings consciously are needed for this negation to take place and for the second negation of appropriating science and technology in the creation of a socialist social system. Postone distinguishes between two contradictory forms of wealth in capitalism, as discussed by Marx in the Grundrisse: “value as a historically specifijic form of wealth measured by the expenditure of human labor time,” and material wealth, “measured in terms of the quantity and quality of products created.” (192–200) Postone’s argument is that historically science and technology has vastly increased material wealth. This has made wealth as measured by value an anachronism in the present stage of capitalism’s development. Whether or not one wants to accept his argument— capital(ism) certainly seems intent on forever searching for new ways to

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 369 extract that human labor under the clock—Postone has failed to grapple with Marx’s concept of what is real human wealth: When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange. What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature—those of his own nature as well as those of so-called ‘nature’? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution— i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick—an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming. (Marx, 1973)

Of course it is necessary to draw a distinction between value and material wealth as Postone has done. However, it seems no accident that there is the absence of this profoundly human concept of wealth as Marx elaborated it. That human dimension is not alone in the Grundrisse, but in Capital as well. It is the missing dimension in Postone’s reading of Capital. To explore that human dimension further we turn to one of Dunayevskaya’s central studies of Capital. C. Dunayevskaya: “The Humanism and Dialectic of Capital, Volume I, 1867–1883” In her Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya wrote four chapters on Capital. The fijirst dealt with the historical circumstances surrounding the writing of Capital, “The Impact of the Civil War in the United States on the Structure of Capital,” while the second encompassed Marx’s editing of the French edition of Capital, 1872–75, “The Paris Commune Illuminates and Deepens the Content of Capital.” The fact that she has these two chapters centered on the activities of Black slaves in resistance and revolt as well as the Abolitionists in the U.S., and on the Communards in Paris, speaks to her view that the movement from below, from practice, has been central to the creation of revolutionary theory, especially in Marx. At the same time, the heart of her analysis of Capital is her analysis of the fijirst volume: “The Humanism and Dialectic of Capital, Volume I, 1867 to 1883.” Here we want to focus on Dunayevskaya’s view of what was central to and revolutionary in how Marx created Capital, citing excerpts from her commentaries in Marxism and Freedom:

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chapter fourteen No one is more blind to the greatness of Marx’s contributions than those who praise him to the skies for his genius as if that genius matured outside of the actual struggles of the historic period in which he lived.

In her chapter on the Civil War’s impact on Capital Dunayevskaya summarized Marx’s activities with regard to publishing the speeches of the Abolitionists in Europe, and how the struggle for the abolition of slavery that was at the heart of the Civil War entered in Capital, as it had a decisive efffect on the development of a national labor movement in the United States, which following abolition could launch a movement for the 8-hour day. These developments can be found in the chapter on “The Working Day,” where she quoted Marx: In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfijigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The fijirst fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation that ran with the sevenleagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacifijic, from New England to California.

Dunayevskaya contrasted Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859) with Capital (1867), designating the former as “The Limits of an Intellectual Work” and the latter as containing “The Working Day and the Break with the Concept of Theory.” She noted the diffference between an application of dialectics to political economy, verses “the creation of the dialectic that would arise out of the workers’ struggles themselves.” “The establishment of a normal working day,” he wrote, “is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and laborer.” Marx’s method of analysis was revolutionized thereby. Where, in his Critique, history and theory are separated with a historical explanation attached to each theoretical chapter; in Capital history and theory are inseparable. Where, in Critique, history is the history of theory; in Capital, history is the history of the class struggle. …  Marx’s shift from the history of theory to the history of production relations gives flesh and blood to the generalization that Marxism is the theoretical expression of the instinctive striving of the proletariat for liberation. More than that, he says that ultimately the fundamental abolition of inequality lies in the shortening of the working day. In 1866, he made this the historical framework of capitalism itself. The struggles of the workers over the working day develop capitalist production. The ultimate creation of freedom rests upon the shortening of the working day. The philosophy of the shortening of the working day, which arose out of the actual struggles, embraces all concepts inside and outside of it. Thus, the thinking of the theoretician is constantly fijilled with more and more content, fijilled by workers’ struggles and workers’ thoughts. …

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 371  The real movement of the proletariat, at this specifijic stage of capitalist development, revealed not only the negative aspects in the fijight for the working day—the struggle against unlimited capitalist exploitation—but the positive aspects—a road to freedom. This then, was a new philosophy, the philosophy of labor, arrived at naturally out of its own concrete struggles. We see why Marx had to “to turn everything around.”  He is breaking with the whole concept of theory as something intellectual, a dispute between theoreticians. …  For Marx, the theoretical axis of Capital—the central core around which all else develops—is the question of plan: the despotic plan of capital against the cooperative plan of freely associated labor. …  Planned despotism arises out of the antagonistic relationship between the workers, on the one hand, and the capitalist and his bureaucracy on the other had. …  Cooperation under the mastership of the capitalist is indirect opposition to the cooperating laborers. …  Cooperation is in itself a productive power, the power of social labor. Under capitalistic control, this cooperative labor is not allowed to develop freely. Its function is confijined to the production of value. It cannot release its new, social, human energies so long as the old mode of production continues. Thus the nature of cooperative form of labor power is in opposition to the capitalist integument, the value-form.  Marx’s concept of the degraded worker seeking universality, seeking to be a whole man, transformed the science of political economy into the science of human liberation. …  By introducing the laborer into political economy, Marx transformed it from a science dealing with things, such as commodities, money, wages, profijits, into one which analyzes relations of men at the point of production. …  The very term, labor power, opened all sorts of new doors of comprehension. It enabled him (Marx) to make a leap in thought to correspond with the new activity of workers. …  Cooperation chapter—Its twenty-fijive pages seem merely to describe how men work together to produce things, but in reality, by analyzing how men work together, Marx described how a new social power is created. He could discover this new social power in production because, fijirst of all, he distinguished between the productivity of machines and the productivity of men. What characterizes Capital from beginning to end is the concern with living human beings. …  In Capital, he shows how the stripping offf the fetters of individuality and the development of capacities of the human species, discloses what is second nature to workers as the result of years in large-scale production—the vast store of creative energy latent in them. …  Capitalism knows this new social power as a rival and as opponent. The capitalist Plan exists to stifle and suppress it. … Proletarian knowledge, on the other hand, grasps the truth of the present. Because it is not a passive, but an active force, it at the same time restores the

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chapter fourteen unity of theory and practice. These very acts by the workers against the machines Marx called “revolts against this particular form of the means of production as being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production.” These professional Marxists thus miss the central point of Marxist theory that revolt marks every stage of capitalist progress. As Marx put it ‘It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1830, for the sole person of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.’ The revolt caused the change to advanced methods; the revolt saved the life of the country. In turn, each revolt caused a greater centralization, exploitation, socialization and great organization, both objectively and subjectively of the proletariat. …  [In Machinery and Modern Industry Marx] reaches the “absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form,” and sees how “this antagonism vents its rage in the reaction of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army,” and “the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity.”  Marx stress that this is “the negative side.” He shows how the resistance of the workers is the positive aspect which compels Modern Industry “under the penalty of death” to replace the mere fragment of a man “by the fully developed individual, fijit for a variety of labors, ready to face any change in production, and to whom the diffferent social functions he performs, are but  so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.” …  Marx concludes that there is no other than the historical solution to the “revolutionary ferments, the fijinal result of which is the abolition of the old division of labor, diametrically opposed the capitalistic form of production and to the economic status of the laborer corresponding to that form. …” Marx wished, above all, to analyze the law of development of capitalism. For, no matter what its beginnings were, the contradictions arise not from its origin but from its inherent nature, which ‘begets with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation’.  [Quoting Marx] “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”  The positive side of all this is that “it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated. It is annihilated.”  Thus the development of capitalism itself creates the basis of a new Humanism—the “new forces and new passions” which will reconstruct society on new, truly human beginnings, “a society in which the free and full development of every individual is the ruling principle.” It is because Marx based himself on this Humanism, more popularly called “the inevitability of socialism,” that he could discern the law of motion of capitalist society, the inevitability of its collapse. The Humanism of Capital runs like a red thread

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 373 throughout the work. This gives it both its profundity and its force and direction. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: Chapters 5, 6, 7)4

The contrast of Dunayevskaya’s view of the dialectic in Marx’s Capital to that of both Lebowitz and Postone could not be greater.5 III. Once Again Hegel’s Dialectic of Negativity— Its Concretization/Praxis in Organizational Expression; Its Meaning for Today The negation of the negation will not be a generality, not even the generality of a new society for the old, but the specifijic of self-liberation, which is the humanism of the human being, as well as his philosophy —Dunayevskaya, “Rough Notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic, 1961, (2002: 73) Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. 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.’ —Dunayevskaya, 1982

4 See as well, “The Adventures of the Commodity as Fetish,” Chapter 2 of Dunayevskaya, 1973. 5 A recent erudite study of Marx’s Capital (Jameson, 2011) makes an argument that it is not so much a study of capital or of labor. Rather, “it is a book about unemployment.” In his complex chapter on “Capital and the Dialectic,” Jameson characterizes “Marx’s dialectic in this book, for it must be repeatedly be stressed that Capital is not dialectical philosophy, but rather, if the term conveys the diffference, dialectical theory. … Marx’s text, to use another current word, may be seen as a practice of dialectical immanence. … Each dialectical moment is unique and ungeneralizable. … Capital is itself a unique historical event, and this constitutes its dialectic.” (136, 137) Jameson’s shying away from Marx’s labors in Capital as being dialectical philosophy (as in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts), but rather a concretization as dialectical theory seems true, but at the same time not the whole truth. By making, in my view, a too sharp separation between philosophy and theory in Capital, Jameson skips over the two-way road between the two. Theory is the needed concretization of philosophy, while at the same time dialectical philosophy needs to be returned to again and again. It is not exhausted by a concretization, or a series of concretizations. Rather, dialectical philosophy is itself enriched by these concretizations. Thus, there is the need to return to the fullness of the philosophic expression with the experience of the concretizations. Marx’s dialectic in Capital can perhaps better be seen as the continual interplay between philosophy and theory, together with his eyes, ears and mind focused on the activity of working masses, included the army of unemployed as an army of revolt.

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What are the pathways whereby the dialectic of negativity becomes concretized/forged as a praxis that encompasses revolutionary organization? How does a dialectic of philosophy and organization come to be expressed? Historically, praxis has been seen as a unity of theory and practice in which each informs the other. Dunayevskaya gave a rich reading to this concept by spelling out the manner whereby each informs the other: The practice from below, of masses in motion, is not alone practice, but is itself a form of theory. In turn, radical theory, as formulated by thinker/ activists as individuals or in small radical groups, not only meets the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory, but is itself rooted in philosophy, in “the self-development of the Idea” (“the self-thinking idea”). She came to this reading from two vantage points: (1) out of a reading of Hegel’s Absolutes in his major philosophic works; (2) from her organizational experience in relation to mass movements. Put diffferently, she was looking at two dimensions of revolutionary subjectivity and how they interact. One arises from the practice of masses; the other arises as an expression/concretization of the Idea (dialectical thought). Praxis is twofold: the self-activity of human beings as unity of mental and manual, of thought and action. Self-liberation, “the humanism of the human being,” is not a departure from dialectical philosophy in favor of “action,” but encompasses philosophy’s ongoing realization, that is, its “action.” The dialectic of negativity, in life and in thought, stands at the heart of humanity’s liberatory project. This is not to say that emancipatory philosophy and liberating action are one and the same. The self-bringing forth of liberty that is humanity’s true history, and the Self-Thinking Idea that is dialectical philosophy’s freedom-fijilled letter to the future, are intertwined but not identical strands. Their coalescence signals important leaps for both. Revolutionary organization can be a space for such merging, a place where the dialectic of ideas and the dialectic of humanity’s fijight for freedom can become manifest as a single dialectic. To arrive at such a point involves a recognition of the dialectic of each. As opposed to vanguard-party-to-lead forms of the 20th century, where the movement from below was often seen only as an object to be fijilled with the vanguard’s content, today there is a deeper appreciation of forces of revolution as thinking subjects. Can the same be said for a recognition of the power of philosophy, the power of negativity? Dunayevskaya wrote of this as a “challenge”: At the point when the theoretic-form reaches philosophy, the challenge demands that we synthesis not only the new relations of theory to practice,

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 375 and all the forces of revolution, but philosophy’s ‘sufffering, patience and labor of the negative,’ i.e. experiencing absolute negativity. Then and only then will we succeed in a revolution that will achieve a classless, non-racist, non-sexist, truly human, truly new society. (“Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” Dunayevskaya, 2002: Chapter 1)

“Experiencing absolute negativity” is the philosophic journey rooted in Hegel’s absolutes. To reach the dialectic of negativity’s concrete manifestation in dialectics of organization and its realization in humanity’s selfliberation we begin by reaching in the seemingly opposite direction— toward the power of abstraction, as seen in Hegel’s absolutes. We are asking how the power of philosophic negativity brings us to the here and now of a New Humanism. Can the three major journeys of the Hegelian dialectic—Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, Philosophy of Mind (Spirit)—culminating in Absolutes, be seen as expressions of a unity of theory and practice, of the self-thinking idea and the self-bringing forth of liberty, a ceaseless movement of ideas and action, an absolute negativity? Can each of Hegel’s Absolutes—Knowing, Idea, Mind (Spirit)—be seen as containing a dual movement—a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory, and a movement from theory toward practice that is at the same time rooted in philosophy? Can those Absolutes be seen as absolute negativity or revolution in permanence, and thus not as an ending, but as new beginning? Hegel wrote of his Absolutes in some head-cracking ways, including at the end of Philosophy of Mind: “the self-thinking idea. … philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it. … it is the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition.” (Paragraphs 574, 576, 577) And yet, this culmination of Hegel’s thought, we would claim, is an argument for a single dialectic of action and thought: It is the nature of the fact and the idea of cognition—both are part of the same movement, both are “actions.” Rather than being a flight into absolute idealism, a willingness to become part of the Idea’s journey via the power of abstraction is the pathway that can lead to the forging of concrete universals for one’s age. Such concrete universals open the door for the realization of the liberatory ideas. This journey is at one and the same time the unfolding of the Idea, its self-determination, and is “the labor, patience and sufffering of the negative” of those living human beings—mass movements/organizations and small groups of thinker/activists—whose praxis drives toward a New Humanism. This is the birth of concrete universals for a given age.

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This is the journey revolutionary thinker-activists are challenged to undertake. The self-determination of the Idea, as it unfolds itself within the concrete experiences of consequential historic moments becomes the most profound liberatory journey, a journey of absolute negativity that births the new society. It is in this sense that we can read Hegel’s dialectic of negativity as a philosophic letter of emancipation to the future. In summary form, we want to bring together three strands of the present study: 1) the dialectic at the level of the absolutes in Hegel; 2) a return to Marx in relation to the dialectic of freedom and necessity and how it impacts organization; 3) Dunayevskaya’s concept of a dialectic of organization and philosophy in our age. A. Three Forms of the Absolute—Knowing (Knowledge), Idea, and Spirit (Mind) Phenomenology’s fijinal paragraph ends: The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the from of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. (Hegel, 1977)

From the side of contingency, I see in Dunayevskaya’s terms, History as the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory, including the organization forms arising from below. From the side of intellectually comprehended organization, I see again from Dunayevskaya, the Science of knowing as the movement from theory toward practice that at the same time is rooted in philosophy. Both together, history intellectually comprehended, is the unity of theory and practice. It is a unity that is not the end of history, but an opening to a new beginning: a recollective inwardizing, a further deepening that is, at the same moment, the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit. However, Golgotha not as an end, but as a death that brings forth a new life in diffferent realms (Science of Logic and Philosophy of Mind). Can such “history comprehended organization,” a unity of theory and practice, be manifest in actual revolutionary organization? We need to continue into these new realms to probe further.

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 377 In Science of Logic’s Absolute Idea: [T]he Idea freely releases itself in its absolute self-assurance and inner poise. By reason of this freedom, the form of its determinateness is also utterly free—the externality of space and time existing absolute on its own account without the moment of subjectivity. In so far as this externality presents itself only in the abstract immediacy of being and is apprehended from the standpoint of consciousness, it exists as mere objectivity and external life; but in the Idea it remains essentially and actually the totality of the Notion, and science in the relation to nature of divine cognition. But in this next resolve of the pure Idea to determine itself as external Idea, it thereby only posits for itself the mediation out of which the Notion ascends as a free Existence that has withdrawn into itself from externality, that completes its selfliberation in the science of spirit, and that fijinds the supreme Notion of itself in the science of logic as the self-comprehending pure Notion. (Hegel, 1976)  Arises to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit, and to discover the highest Notion of itself in that logical science as the pure Notion which forms a Notion of itself. (Hegel, 1929)

What does “the idea freely releases itself” signify? Again this seems to be an absolute negativity, the absolute movement of becoming. Why? Because it moves to other realms: to Nature, and most especially to the science of Spirit. To complete its self-liberation in the science of spirit, that is Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, signifijies the continuance of absolute negativity. Its “self-comprehending pure Notion,” “the pure Notion which forms a Notion of itself,” manifests itself in other realms. Here the two realms are Nature and Spirit. For the realm of nature, if with Lenin, one translates nature as Practice, or with Marx, nature as Human Nature, then cannot one read this as part of a dual movement from practice, on the one side, holding a hand out to practice as Lenin noted? On the other side, the movement leads to the realm of Spirit. Thus the Science of Logic is compelled to move to Philosophy of Mind (Spirit). One has here a concept of theory that not only unifijies with the movement from practice, but is at the same time rooted in, (and moving toward) philosophy. What perhaps seems strange at a fijirst reading is Hegel’s ending of the Encyclopedia Logic (Smaller Logic) as opposed to the more fully developed Science of Logic. In the Smaller Logic, the Absolute Idea ends with Nature: “in its own absolute truth it [the Absolute Idea] resolves to be the ‘moment’ of its particularity, or of the fijirst characterization and other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflected image, go forth freely as Nature.” This, as we have noted earlier, was very compelling for Lenin. But on a second reading it isn’t so strange or incomplete an ending because Hegel really isn’t ending the totality of the Encyclopedia as “go forth freely as Nature.”

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In that same sentence he writes that it is only the “fijirst characterization.” In other words, the Smaller Logic is only the fijirst volume of the three volume Encyclopedia. Nature is the second. Hegel will then present Mind as the third volume. The Encyclopedia thus contains the whole, continuing not alone to Nature, but to Spirit. Philosophy of Mind, paragraph 577, ends: The self-judging of the Idea into its two appearances (paragraphs 575, 576) characterizes both as its (the self-knowing reason’s) manifestations: and in it there is a unifijication of the two aspects:—it is the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition. The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind. (Hegel, 1971)

Here one has the two manifestations of the self-thinking idea: the nature of the fact, (I again read this as the unfolding of history, the movement from practice) and “the same movement is equally the action of cognition,” (I read this as the science of philosophy). I see these manifestations as “two expressions of revolutionary subjectivity.” As for the fijinal sentence of paragraph 577, Dunayevskaya has “translated” the eternal Idea as Marx’s concept of “revolution in permanence.” In 1953 she ended her letter on Absolute Mind’s fijinal three syllogisms, “We have entered the new society.” Have we here arrived at “the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy”? The argument I would make, a reading from Dunayevskaya, is that with each of the concluding paragraphs of the absolutes one fijinds not an ending, but a movement to a new sphere. Each successive sphere constitutes a new journey of Absolute Spirit. That Absolute Spirit has a drive within— the self-thinking idea—that becomes manifest in concrete universals. One of those concrete universals is a dialectic of philosophy and organization. We need to be cognizant that Hegel’s own concretizations were often erroneous and reactionary. We can see this in such works as his Lectures on World History and his Philosophy of Right. Marx had critiqued profoundly the political philosophy of Hegel. (See his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.) Even more crucial was his critique of Hegel in the 1844 Manuscripts. There, he critiqued the dehumanization of ideas in Hegel which left the  dialectic of negativity as a mystifijication and abstraction. At the same time he appropriated/transformed the Hegelian dialectic, and in the succeeding decades of his life, re-created that dialectic of negativity as concrete universals in discerning the logic of the world of capital, and

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 379 seeking its overthrow in uniting with the living revolutionary human subjects of change. Though Marx had no theory of organization he had a concept of organization that had two crucial dimensions. First, he focused on the living movement from below, which we can see in Marx’s hailing the selforganization of the masses in the Paris Commune. Second, he critiqued revolutionary organization that failed to take into its foundation the vast theoretical-practical labor, that is, the body of ideas developed over several decades. As we examined, his Critique of the Gotha Program was a manifestation of this. Marx strove to create concrete universals flowing from the Hegelian dialectic of negativity. Put diffferently, Marx transformed Hegel’s revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution. B. The Dialectic of Organization in the Hands of Marx: Once Again the Paris Commune and the Critique of the Gotha Program; the Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity As we noted in Chapter One, while Marx participated in revolutionary organization at many moments in his life—prominent among them the Communist League and the First Workingmen’s International—he refused to make a fetish of organization. When a particular organization had exhausted its historic reason-to-be, he did not hesitate to dissolve it or take leave. At the same time, what was constantly developing for Marx was a concept of organization. One dimension of this could be seen in Marx’s focus on the self-organization of the masses historically. This is seen most fully in Marx’s relation to the Paris Commune, as we pointed out in Chapter Two. He wrote of the Commune’s greatness as “its own working existence.” A second dimension for Marx was organization as coming out of, and responsible to, a body of ideas, to its historical development. Here Marx referred to “the party in the broad historical sense.” Marx was not hesitant to use the expression “Party” even when it meant only himself and Engels. Nor was he hesitant to sharply critique and separate himself from socalled revolutionary organizations, when he saw that such organizations did not represent the body of ideas of “the Party,” and were “bargaining on principles.” As we saw in Part II, Marx wrote his Critique of the Gotha Program in opposition to what would become the principle socialist party in Germany. Marx was looking for organization that was an authentic representative of the working masses and at the same time an organization that carried forth a revolutionary body of ideas. It was that

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revolutionary body of ideas, what today we express as Marx’s Humanism that could assist humanity in its liberatory struggle. In Marx’s day the great difffijiculty was developing organization(s) that understood, and therefore became responsible for, this living body of ideas. The Communist League, which Marx founded with other German communists, participated in important ways in the revolutions of 1848–49. (See especially the daily periodical Marx edited, Neue Rheinische Zeitung.) However, after the defeat of those revolutions, when some members of the League sought to continue organization as a conspiratorial faction rather than as a representation of a revolutionary theoretical and practical tendency, Marx took his leave. The founding of the First Workingmen’s International signifijied a new beginning based on the concrete changes taking place, particularly with the European proletariat. However, when it deepened its revolutionary nature under the impact of the Paris Commune, a number of English trade union leaders resigned, saying that was not the kind of revolutionary change they had in mind, Marx proceeded to cross offf their names and add those of Communards, noting that the First International’s roots were deeper into London’s working class than were those of the British trade unions. When soon afterward, the ideas of the First International came under fijierce attack from Bakunin’s anarchism, Marx was forced to move the organization to the United States, where it eventually died out, rather than see its takeover by ideas that would subvert its revolutionary history and being. The ideas of the Gotha Program, written by those who considered themselves his followers, was so far offf the mark from what Marx had developed over three decades that he felt the necessity of responding with his marginal notes known as The Critique of the Gotha Program. There, he sharply separating himself from the Gotha Program, laying out a few principles of what kind of transformation would be needed in terms of labor: the need to uproot value production; the concept of freely associated labor that need to be developed in its place. Only an organization based on such principles would be able to join with the proletariat in revolutionary transformation. Have any revolutionary organizations sought to dig into Marx’s profound critique of capitalism’s “socially necessary labor time,” where the worker is reduced to “time’s carcass”? If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposed that simple labor has become the pivot of industry.

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 381 It presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labor; that men are efffaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day. (Marx, 1976: 127)

Have any such organizations contrasted “time’s carcass” to Marx’s posing of “time is the place (space) for human development” in a future new human society, where there would be “the development of human powers as an end in itself”? The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper … Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite. (Marx, 1998: 959)

As we have seen, no revolutionary organizations post-Marx have arisen that fully grappled with his body of ideas; with their own responsibility to bring to the fore Marx’s revolutionary vision. The above two expressions from Marx give us a hint of what would be needed to be uprooted, beginning the day before, the day of, and the day after revolution. This was the beginning, but it could not become truly concretized if one was not cognizant of the dialectic of freedom and necessity in relation to labor. Only radical organizations that had such an emancipatory vision as their basis could hope to make a revolutionary contribution. The difffijiculty Marx faced in terms of revolutionary organization in the middle of the 19th century has only intensifijied. As has been shown earlier, we have a deeply conflicted history of post-Marx Marxism in terms of revolutionary organization for the 20th century. Today, what are the great transformations needed? What are the pathways of transition? What are the organizational expressions that can concretize, that is, make real, such a transformation?

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C. Finding a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization Today: Its Reading as Absolute Negativity as New Beginning and as Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy in the Hands of Dunayevskaya Hegel’s Absolutes and Organization How does a reading of Hegel’s Absolutes as New Beginning Lead to Organization, to a Dialectic of Organization and Philosophy? Dunayevskaya’s initial reading of Hegel’s Absolutes came as part of a search for a “dialectics of the party” on the part of the State-Capitalist Tendency. As we have seen, this became transformed into a new philosophic category, “absolute negativity as new beginning,” which determined the trajectory of Dunayevskaya’s philosophical-political-organizational life. It did not mean the abandonment the working out a relationship between dialectics and organization. Rather, it meant moving from an “application” of dialectics to organization to the task of recreating the dialectic in the realm of organization, or what Dunayevskaya came to express as the “dialectic of organization and philosophy.” Philosophy born of the quest for freedom demands an organizational home for its concretization/realization. This can be nothing short of a dialectics of philosophy and organization. Here, the organizational expression is not alone that of the mass movement, but as well, the dialectic of small revolutionary organizations. This is not to privilege such revolutionary organizations over mass organizations arising from below. Rather, we are seeking to work out the relationship between mass organizations often arising spontaneously and the thinker-activists who reject elitist, vanguardist organizational solutions and want to work out and practice a revolutionary relation to the mass struggle. What is the role of such revolutionaries and their organizations in aiding the mass movement to come to the fullest expression of itself? What is “the objectivity of such subjectivity”? Objectivity, can a historic right to exist, be found within a small revolutionary group’s relation to the dialectic of negativity that in turn determines its relation to the mass movement? This study’s journey has on one level taken us from Hegel’s forging of  the dialectic of negativity, through Marx’s re-conceptualization/ re-creation as it as revolution-in-permanence, to Dunayevskaya’s view of its manifestation as absolute negativity as new beginning in a dialectic of revolutionary organization. It is here where not alone history but philosophy is crucial. The burden of the present study has been to ask and explore whether dialectical philosophy itself, when it becomes concretized in the

what philosophic-organizational vantage point is needed? 383 realm of organization, can assist us in opening the door to a diffferent path, a way of entering not party or state, but the new society? This study makes no pretense of “answering” that question. The task is one for the entire present generation “of thought-divers”/activists to undertake. Only their praxis can make the question alive. The only “proof” of a dialectic of philosophy and organization resides in “entering the new society.”

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INDEX Absolutes in Hegel 376. See also Hegel Adorno, Theodor 10, 335–339 Negative Dialectics 335–340 Althusser, Louis 214 Anarchists 190, 192, 193 Bakunin 44, 61, 81, 380 Bell, Franklin 259, 278 Bolsheviks 93, 106, 108, 109, 116, 122, 124, 126, 132, 133, 136, 139, 141, 142, 147–163, 168, 174–176, 249, 278 Council communism 6, 180, 181. See also Pannekock Czechoslovakia 207 Prague Spring 207 Dmitriefff, Elizabeth 67 Dialectics. See Dunayevskaya Hegel, Marx Dialectic in philosophy 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 222, 224, 225, 304, 348, 349 Draper, Hal 70, 75 Dunayevskaya, Raya 1, 3–11, 39, 65, 68, 77, 78, 90–95, 97–99, 111, 114, 115, 118, 128, 132, 134, 152, 158, 167–173, 184, 186, 193, 196, 211–234, 238, 240, 249–253, 255–289, 291, 293–331, 341, 357, 358, 360, 362, 363, 366, 369, 370, 373–378, 382 Absolute idea 3, 7, 250, 251, 256, 259, 260, 271–276, 286, 293, 296, 299–318, 323, 350, 356–362 Absolute knowing 9, 211, 213, 220, 222–226, 376 Absolute negativity as new beginning 39, 250, 251, 274, 302, 304, 306, 308, 317, 357, 360, 362, 375, 376, 382 American Civilization on Trial—Black Masses as Vanguard 318, 319 Cameroonian revolutionary 6, 327 Changed perception of Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence 251, 259, 272 Dialectic of Marx’s Capital 362–366 “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy” 1, 3–5, 7–9, 39, 99, 224, 225, 251, 274, 277, 279, 286, 293, 304, 311, 312, 320, 323, 324, 326, 375, 378, 382

“Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and Marx’s World Humanist Concepts” 4, 249, 277, 278, 316, 319 “Emergence of a New Movement from Practice that Is Itself a Form of Theory.” 297, 319 Hegelian dialectic 9, 11, 211–224, 249, 254, 278–295, 297, 298, 316, 321, 322, 358–363, 375, 378 “Humanism and Dialectic of Capital, Volume I, 1867–1883” 369 Idea of cognition 251, 256, 259–261, 272, 273, 275, 304, 305, 375 James.C.L.R 7, 255, 289, 294–297, 300, 308, 310–312, 323, 327, 373 Johnson–Forest Tendency, (JFT) 6, 7, 255, 277, 294, 297, 300, 306, 309, “Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, May 12 and May 20, 1953” 3, 4, 6, 256, 257, 272, 274, 277, 299, 304, 310, 311, 321, 322 Marx’s humanism 4, 7, 8, 214, 224, 256, 277, 289, 293–331 Marxism and Freedom 7, 77, 99, 158, 214, 251, 257, 258, 275, 298, 311, 313, 316, 318, 319, 322, 369 Miners’ General Strike 6, 295–300, 314, 319, 327, 329 Nationalism, Communism, Marxism– Humanism, and the Afro–Asian Revolutions 318, 319 “Negro Question” 295 News and Letters Committees 4, 7–9, 299, 307, 309–316, 318–327, 329, 331 News & Letters 4, 7, 8, 238, 259, 310–316, 318, 319, 324, 325, 329, 331 “One Possible Outline for Dialectics of Organization and Spontaneity” 4 Philosophic Moment of Marxist– Humanism 4, 7, 296, 299, 310, 311, 322–324 Philosophy and Revolution 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 212, 257–276, 288, 311, 316–319 Post–Marx Marxism 6, 97, 317, 363, 381 “Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, June 1, 1987” 3, 320, 375, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection 4, 294, 295, 310, 311

390

index

“Retrospective./Perspective Thirty Years of News & Letters” 316 Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution 7, 97, 249, 257, 259, 311–312, 316–318 “Rough Notes on Science of Logic” 360, 362 State–capitalist Tendency 277, 294, 297, 299, 300, 310, 327, 382 Theory of State–Capitalism 293, 295–297, 310 Third attitude to objectivity in Hegel 9, 278–280, 282–286, 288 Trotsky 6, 7, 9, 11, 111, 114, 115, 134, 152, 167–173, 184, 196, 258, 284, 289, 293–298, 307, 310, 316 25 Years of Marxist–Humanism in the U.S.–A History of Worldwide Revolutionary Developments 296, 319 East German Revolt 1953, 198, 295, 296, 314 Engels, Fredrick 6, 9, 43, 48–54, 60, 63, 66, 68, 75, 81, 83, 89, 91, 93, 95–101, 103, 157, 170, 179, 214, 215, 219, 221, 229, 236, 242–253, 271, 317, 318, 379 German Social Democracy 89, 91, 93, 95–101, 112, 119, 157, 179, 317 Origin of the Family 95, 98, 317 Peasant Wars in Germany 54 Second International 89, 91, 93–97, 99, 317 Socialism in Germany 97 Erfurt program 6, 100, 119, 179. See also German Social Democracy Feuerbach, Ludwig 48, 51, 214–216, 219, 254, 268 Forest, Freddy 6, 7, 255, 277, 294, 295, 297, 300, 306, 309. See also Dunayevskaya, Raya German Social Democracy 89–101, 112, 119, 157, 177–180, 317 Gogol, Eugene 7–9, 54, 299, 310, 341 Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist–Humanism 3, 8 Hardt, Michael 10, 238, 335, 340–349 Empire 67, 83, 86, 174, 207, 335, 340, 345, 348 Multitude 2, 72, 107, 335, 340–342, 346–349 Commonwealth 348

Hegel, G.W.F. 2–4, 6–31, 33–40, 44–46, 48–50, 94, 99, 100, 135, 152, 153, 155, 171, 183, 211–225, 232, 249–289, 294–308, 310–312, 316, 317, 321–323, 325, 335–337, 340, 343, 345, 348–364, 366, 367, 373–379, 382 Absolutes 3, 4, 6–9, 12, 16, 19, 28, 39, 256, 272, 274, 275, 277, 286, 297, 299, 301, 302, 304, 307, 308, 310–312, 321–323, 325, 336, 337, 356, 357, 360, 374–376, 378, 382 Absolute idea 3, 7, 12, 13, 19, 26–28, 30–32, 34, 39, 221, 250, 251, 256, 259, 260, 266, 268–276, 286, 294, 296, 299–307, 317, 318, 323, 350, 356–362, 375, 377 Absolute knowing (absolute knowledge) 9, 12, 13, 15, 211, 213, 220, 222–226, 376 Absolute mind 3, 7, 12, 13, 15, 36, 38, 275, 302, 306–309, 378 Absolute spirit 12, 19, 23, 25, 26, 31, 33, 35–39, 211, 220–226, 303, 376, 378 Dialectic of negativity 10–13, 16, 18, 212, 215, 217, 218, 349, 352, 353, 355, 373–376, 378, 379, 382 Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences 27, 212 Idea of cognition 34, 251, 256, 259–261, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269, 272, 273, 275, 276, 304, 305, 375 Intuitionism 6, 274, 279, 283, 285 Jacobi, Friedrich 72, 263, 279, 283–285, 287 Negation of the negation 9, 12, 16, 18, 19, 28–31, 40, 212, 214, 215, 218, 220, 222, 224, 232, 233, 250, 269, 270, 335–337, 352, 355–360, 362, 368, 373 Otherness 14–16, 20, 21, 25–28, 31–38, 265, 268, 269 Phenomenology of Spirit 12, 14, 15, 19, 27, 28, 34, 38, 223, 280, 300, 301, 340, 360, 375 Philosophy of Mind (Spirit) 7, 34, 375, 377 Science of Logic 3, 6, 7, 11–13, 19, 20, 26–28, 34, 37, 94, 134, 152, 183, 212, 219, 222, 225, 249–251, 255, 256, 259–261, 266, 268, 271–275, 278–280, 283, 286, 295–297, 299, 300, 303, 304, 307, 311, 312, 323, 350, 357–360, 362–364, 366, 373, 375–377 Smaller (Encyclopedia) Logic 6, 273, 274, 279, 280, 283, 284, 286, 377, 378

index Spinoza, B 263, 347–349, 356–358, 361 Holloway, John 10, 335–340 Change the World Without Taking Power 335, 336, 339 Crack Capitalism 337 Hungarian Revolution (1956) 6, 9, 198, 225, 238, 312, 314 Imre Nagy 199, 200, 202, 203 Workers’ councils 6, 181–183, 197, 199, 201, 203, 205, 207 Hyppolite, Jean 27, 212 Immaterial Labor 340–346 International Working Men’s committee 61 Ireland 63 James, C.L.R. 7, 46, 47, 61, 236, 255, 289, 294–298, 300, 308, 310–312, 323, 327, 373 Johnson, J.R. 7, 274, 289, 295, 296, 301. See also James, CLR Kautsky, Karl 89, 90, 92–94, 99, 100, 118, 119, 128, 132, 157, 177, 180, 317 Kronstadt 6, 170, 171 Lassalle, Ferdinand 9, 44, 81, 89–92, 94, 99, 103, 118, 119, 228–230, 232, 240, 321 German General Workers Association 118 Lassalleanism 89, 90, 92, 94, 228 Lebowitz, Michael 10, 363–365, 373 Beyond Capital—Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class 1, 230, 335, 350–353, 363 dialectic of Marx’s Capital 363–367 Following Marx—Method, Critique, and Crisis 363, 364 Lenin, V.I. 6, 8, 9, 11, 90, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104, 111–113, 115–128, 130–132, 134–136, 139, 141, 149–157, 160, 163–171, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 201, 211, 219, 228, 247, 249–260, 266–279, 288, 289, 295–298, 300, 304–308, 311, 312, 316, 317, 325, 327, 339, 361, 362, 364, 377 Absolute idea 250, 251, 256, 259, 260, 266, 268–276, 298, 300, 304–307, 317, 323, 361, 362, 377 “April Thesis” 141, 149, 153–155 Attitude Toward the Peasantry 114, 126, 127, 132 Bolshevik Party 6, 11, 141, 149, 152, 153, 156, 158, 166–168, 171, 178, 180, 185, 250, 276, 289

391

Concept of revolutionary organization (vanguard party) 93, 117, 136, 185, 250 Development of Capitalism in Russia 118 Hegelian dialectic 9, 11, 12, 171, 211, 219, 249, 254, 267, 278–280, 287–289, 295, 297, 298, 316 Idea of cognition 251, 256, 259–261, 266, 267, 269, 272, 273, 275, 276, 304, 305 Materialism and Empirio–Criticism 183, 250, 259 Philosophic ambivalence 152, 250, 251, 256, 257,–259, 272, 273, 275 Philosophic Notebooks 6, 183, 251, 275, 295, 298, 300, 304, 364 Russian Revolution, (1905) 93, 103, 104, 114, 116, 118, 122, 127–130, 132–134 Russian Revolution, (1917) 6, 9, 93, 140, 142, 143, 148, 149, 157, 166, 171, 174, 176, 177, 185, 257, 278 Separation of philosophy and organization 278 Soviets 6, 9, 93, 108, 110, 112, 123, 140–144, 147, 149–151, 154–157, 159, 160, 164–166, 168, 181, 302 State and Revolution 141, 153, 156, 157, 228, 258, 259, 276, 277 Trade Union Debate 6, 158, 161, 167, 169, 258, 278 What Is To Be Done? 90, 94, 99, 100, 104, 117–121, 249, 250, 277, 278, 304 Lukacs, G., 9, 211, 214, 350 Hegelian dialectics 9, 211, 214, 350 Young Hegel 44, 45, 48–50, 213–215, 219, 221, 222 Luxemburg, Rosa 6, 7, 9, 66, 90, 94, 97, 99, 100, 103, 111, 112, 115, 128–136, 152, 173–181, 183, 185, 228, 249, 257, 259, 295, 311, 316–318, 339, 341, 363 Accumulation of Capital 134, 341, 363 Attitude toward party 2 Attitude toward peasantry 114, 126, 127, 132 German Communist Party 173, 177, 178 German Revolution 54, 94, 135, 166, 173, 176–179, 181 German Social Democracy 89, 93, 97, 99, 100, 112, 178–180, 317 Kautsky 90, 94, 99, 100, 132, 177, 180, 317 Lenin 90, 94, 99, 100, 103, 111, 112, 115, 128, 130–132, 134–136, 139, 152, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183, 185, 228, 249, 257, 259, 295, 311, 316, 317, 339 Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions 128

392

index

Poland 112, 128–130, 207, 208, 316 Russian Revolution,( 1905) 93, 103, 127–130, 132–134 Russian Revolution, (1917) 6, 9, 134, 139, 173, 174, 176, 177, 181, 185, 257 Spontaneity 4, 103, 129–136 Mao Ze dong 6, 279, 284, 316–318, 338 Marx, Karl 1, 3, 4, 6–11, 18, 19, 39, 43–69, 71, 73–83, 85, 87, 89–101, 103, 104, 112, 113, 115–121, 123, 130, 132–137, 139, 147, 152, 153, 157, 158, 167, 172–174, 179, 185, 206–209, 211, 213–222, 224, 227–245, 249–251, 253, 254, 256–259, 268, 272, 273, 275–278, 286, 288, 289, 293–301, 303, 305–327, 329, 331, 335–337, 339–346, 348–356, 359, 360, 362–373, 376–382 Bakunin 44, 61, 81, 380 Capital 1–3, 6, 11, 18, 19, 43, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 59, 62, 63, 65, 68, 72, 75, 77, 78, 82, 85, 87, 89, 91–93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 111, 118, 133, 134, 140, 150–154, 156, 158, 160, 163, 171, 174, 177, 180–184, 186, 187, 190, 194, 195, 198, 200, 202, 206–208, 214, 218, 227–230, 232–245, 250, 251, 254, 258, 277, 278, 288, 293–300, 305, 306, 310–313, 319, 321, 322, 327, 329, 331, 335–337, 339–346, 350–353, 355–373, 378, 380, 382 Civil War in France 66, 68, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 157, 228, 277 Class Struggles in France, (1848–50) 54, 57, 96, 179 Communist League 43, 49, 52–58, 60, 61, 321, 379, 380 League of the Just 43, 47, 49, 52 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” 44, 214 “Critical Marginal Notes” 47, 236 Critique of the Gotha Program 9, 19, 44, 75, 82, 89, 91, 93, 96, 99, 100, 157, 227, 228, 241, 244, 259, 276–278, 321, 379, 380 Economic–Philosophic Manuscripts of (1844) 48, 207, 310 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 55 Ethnological Notebooks 75, 82, 98, 100, 234 Feuerbach, Ludwig 48, 51, 214–216, 219, 254, 268 Thesis on 51, 268 Freedom and necessity 243, 244, 263, 280, 282, 376, 379, 381

German Ideology 50 Grundrisse 218, 239, 351, 365, 368, 369 Hegel 2–4, 6–40, 44–46, 48–50, 94, 99, 100, 134, 152, 153, 155, 171, 183, 209, 211–225, 232, 247, 249–289, 294–308, 310–312, 316, 317, 321–323, 325, 335–337, 340, 343, 345, 348–364, 366, 367, 373–379, 382 Holy Family 48 Humanism 4, 7, 8, 18, 19, 48, 198, 206–208, 214, 215, 218–221, 224, 233, 256, 277, 289, 291, 295–297, 299, 301, 303, 305, 307–313, 315–327, 329, 331, 343, 353, 355, 359, 362–364, 366, 369, 374–375, 380 International Working Men’s Association 43, 60, 61, 63, 132 Ireland 63 Lassalle 9, 44, 81, 89–92, 94, 99, 103, 118, 119, 228–230, 232, 240, Lassalleanism 89, 90, 92, 94, 228 Mill, James 46, 47, 61, 94, 104, 143, 148, 163, 178, 190, 192, 208, 224, 236, 274 Neue Rheinische Zeitung 53, 54, 380 Politisch–okonomische Revue 54 Organization 1–12, 26, 33, 39–41, 43–47, 49–57, 59–72, 74, 78–85, 89, 91–97, 99–101, 103, 104, 106–112, 115–132, 134–137, 139–142, 145–152, 154, 156, 159–165, 167–169, 174, 177–191, 193–206, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221–229, 232, 233, 235, 240, 242, 245, 249–251, 258, 259, 272, 274, 276–280, 285–289, 291, 293, 294, 297–304, 307–313, 318–324, 326–327, 330, 335, 337, 339–341, 343, 345, 347–349, 351, 353, 355, 357, 359, 361, 363, 365, 367, 369, 371–383 concept of 7, 9, 44, 81, 82, 94, 97, 112, 130, 179–181, 185, 186, 250, 287, 321, 379 Paris Commune 9, 43, 44, 56, 60, 63–66, 75, 77, 78, 80, 100, 103, 157, 225, 228, 241, 277, 302, 321, 340, 347, 365, 367, 369, 379, 380 post–Marx 6, 91, 96–98, 211, 228, 249, 317, 344, 363, 381 Poverty of Philosophy 49, 50, 242 Private Property and Communism 214, 215, 356 Proletariat 11, 44–47, 49–51, 54–57, 59, 65, 80, 85, 86, 90, 95, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 111–114, 116–118, 121, 123–127, 129–131, 133–136, 140, 149–151, 153–155, 157–159, 161, 165, 167, 169–171, 174–176,

index 178, 180–186, 214, 215, 236, 240, 241, 277, 295, 299–301, 308, 318, 346, 360, 362, 365, 367, 368, 370–372, 380 Revolution 1–4, 6, 7, 9–12, 17, 19, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49–51, 53–61, 63–69, 71–76, 79–83, 86, 87, 90–101, 103, 104, 106, 108–122, 124–137, 139–163, 165–167, 169–171, 173–185, 187–200, 202–208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218–220, 224–228, 231–234, 236–238, 240–242, 245, 249, 250, 256–259, 264, 276–278, 282, 287–289, 293–298, 300–304, 307, 311, 312, 314–319, 322, 324–327, 329, 335–337, 339, 341, 347, 349, 350, 352–354, 356, 359–365, 369, 370, 372–376, 378–382 in permanence 39, 53, 58, 227, 231, 233, 277, 317, 324, 325, 373, 375, 378, 382 Marxist–Humanism 4, 7, 8, 277, 289, 293, 295–299, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309–313, 315–329, 331 Mensheviks 106, 108, 109, 112, 115, 116, 121, 132, 136, 144, 148, 150, 153, 156, 157. See also Russian Revolution, 1905; Russian Revolution, 1917 Mészáros, Istvan 10, 335, 350–360 Beyond Capital 335, 350–353, 363 Hegelian dialectic 350–356, 358–360 Social Determination of Method 350, 354, 356 Miners’ General Strike of 1949–50 6, 295–297, 300, 314, 319, 327, 329. See also Dunayevskaya, Raya; Philips, Andy Negri, Tony 10, 238, 335, 340–349 Commonwealth 348 Empire 335, 340, 345, 348 Multitude 335, 340–342, 346–349 News and Letters Committees 4, 7–9, 294, 299, 307, 309–314, 316–327, 329–331 constitution 7, 312–314, 329 News & Letters 7, 8, 238, 259, 310–314, 316, 318, 319, 324, 325, 329–331 Pannekoek, Anton 6, 173, 175, 177, 180–184 Attitude toward Russian Revolution 181 Council communism (workers councils) 6, 180, 181 Kautsky 177, 180 Lenin as Philosopher 182 Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils 6 Paris Commune, (1871) 9, 43, 44, 56, 60, 63–66, 75, 77, 78, 80, 100, 103, 157, 225,

393

228, 241, 277, 302, 321, 340, 347, 365, 367, 369, 379, 380 Party 1–4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 43, 46, 50, 52–55, 57, 59, 60, 89–92, 94–96, 98–100, 109, 112, 114, 116–125, 127, 128, 130–132, 135–137, 140–143, 145, 148, 149, 152–156, 158, 159, 161, 166–171, 173–180, 182–186, 192–194, 196–208, 221, 224, 228, 229, 239–241, 245, 249–251, 255, 257, 275–278, 289, 294, 298, 300–302, 304–306, 308, 313, 323, 327, 331, 338, 347, 348, 374, 379, 382, 383. See also Bolsheviks; German Social Democracy Plehanov 157 Poland 112, 128–130, 207, 208, 316 Kuron, Jacek 208 KOR 208 Solidarity (Solidarność) 32, 36, 37, 192, 206–208 Postone, Mosha 10, 363, 366–369, 373 dialectic of Marx’s Capital 363, 366 Time, Labor, and Social Domination 366 Philips, Andy 6, 327. See also Miners’ General Strike “Dunayevskaya in 1949–50 Miners’ General Strike” 6, 295–297, 300, 314, 319, 327, 329 The Coal Miners General Strike of 1949–50 and the Birth of Marxist–Humanism (co–author with Dunayevskaya), 297, 327, 329 Praxis 3, 8, 10, 43, 53, 72, 75, 139, 195, 241, 278, 301, 309, 310, 322, 324, 325, 336–338, 365, 373–375, 383 Proudhon, Pierre 46, 49, 61, 78, 81, 103 Philosophy of Poverty 49 Ruge, Arnold 45, 46, 236 Russian Revolution, (1905) 94, 103, 104, 114, 116, 118, 122, 127–130, 132–134 Bolsheviks 116, 122, 132, 133 Father Georgii Gapon 104 Lenin 103, 104, 116, 118, 122, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134 Luxemburg 94, 103, 128–130, 132–134 Mensheviks 116, 132 Petersburg workers 104, 117 Trotsky 103, 104, 114, 116, 127, 134 Russian Revolution 1917, 6, 9, 93, 139, 141, 142, 147, 148, 157, 166, 171, 174, 176, 177, 185, 257, 278. See also Lenin Bolsheviks 93, 141, 142, 147, 148, 174 Factory committees 9, 140–142, 148 Mensheviks 148, 157 Soviets 141, 142, 147, 157, 166

394

index

Trade Union Debate 6, 278 Trade unions 142, 147, 150 Workers Opposition 171 Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) 112, 121–123, 126, 131–133 Second (Workingmen’s) International 89–94, 97, 99, 152, 153, 181, 256, 258, 270, 288, 296, 317 Shliapnikov 155, 168. See also Russian Revolution, 1917, Workers Opposition, Trade Union Debate Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) 6, 229 Soviets 6, 9, 93, 108, 110, 112, 123, 140–144, 147, 149–151, 154–157, 159, 160, 164–166, 168, 181, 302. See also Russian Revolution, 1905, 1917 Spanish Civil War 187, 189, 195, 196, 225, 293 Spanish Revolution 6, 9, 187–189, 191, 193–196, 293 Anarchists 193 Communist Party 193, 194 Peasants 187, 191 Popular front government 187, 189, 192, 193, 195 Workers 6, 187–189, 191, 193–196 Spontaneous Forms of Organization 6, 9, 41, 118. See also Russian Revolutions, 1905, 1917; Paris Commune 1871; Hungarian Revolution; East German Revolt; Spanish Revolution State–capitalism 208, 230, 293, 295–297, 299, 310, 329. See also Dunayevskaya, theory of state–capitalism Stalin 134, 136, 141, 154, 187, 192, 193, 195, 197–199, 201, 202, 206, 221, 230, 238, 249, 250, 257, 275, 289, 293–296, 298–300 Thomas, Edith 66, 67, 73 Trotsky, Leon 6, 7, 9, 11, 103, 104, 108, 110–117, 127, 134–136, 139, 140, 147–153, 156, 167–171, 173–175, 177, 179, 181, 183–185, 196, 258, 284, 289, 293–295, 298, 306, 310, 316

Attitude toward peasantry 114, 127 Results and Prospects 113, 114, 136 Revolutionary Organization 9, 111, 112, 116, 117, 135, 136, 177, 183, 184, 289 Russian Revolution, (1905) 103, 104, 114, 116, 127, 134 Russian Revolution, (1917) 6, 9, 139, 147, 148, 171, 174, 177, 185 The Russian Revolution 116, 139, 140, 147, 174 Soviets 6, 9, 110, 112, 140, 147, 149–151, 156, 168, 181 Theory of permanent revolution 112, 113, 115, 117, 135, 136, 184, 185 “Transitional Program from 1938” 185 1905, 9, 103, 104, 108, 110–117, 127, 134–136, 139, 140, 147, 148, 150, 177, 181, 185 Vanguard Party 2, 4, 11, 94, 99, 117, 118, 135–137, 142, 177, 183, 185, 186, 196, 249, 251, 277, 294, 298, 300, 301, 306, 348 Women 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 65–74, 77–80, 92, 97, 100, 106, 139, 140, 143, 146, 185, 206, 241, 249, 257, 259, 277, 301, 311, 313, 315–319, 324, 330, 331, 339, 343, 353 Paris Commune 65, 66, 77, 78, 80, 100, 241, 277 Workers 2, 6, 11, 43, 44, 46–50, 52, 54–61, 63–65, 68–70, 72, 78, 80, 81, 87, 89–91, 94, 95, 99–101, 103–113, 117–125, 128, 131, 132, 134, 136, 139–151, 153–171, 173, 177–179, 181–191, 193–208, 228–231, 234–240, 242, 243, 250, 255, 276, 294, 295, 298–301, 308, 311, 313, 314, 316, 318, 327, 330, 331, 345, 347, 370–372, 381. See also Hungarian revolution; Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917; First International, Poland’s Solidarność; Spanish Revolution; Miners’ General Strike; Paris Commune; Marx and 1848 Revolutions Workers’ Councils 6, 181–183, 197, 199, 201, 203, 205. See also Hungarian Revolution Zazulish, Vera 82