Marxism and Freedom after Sixty Years, for Yesterday and Today KEVIN B. ANDERSON

T IS THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY of Raya and (2) contra the Hungarian Revolution’s IDunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, a liberal supporters, the emergence of work- work both of its time and ahead of its time. ers councils and of the Marxist intellectuals First published in 1958, at the height of of the Petofi circle showed that a third way the Cold War but not long after the Hungarian was possible—a socialist humanism that was Revolution of 1956, it was one of a number of entirely different from both Stalinism and writings in the period that put forth a demo- Western liberalism. As she wrote with respect cratic, humanist, and revolutionary Marxism, to the workers councils, “When all said that both against the Russian Stalinist system and everything was over, the Hungarian Workers against the “liberal democratic” capitalism of Councils sprung up. … They began to fi ght in the United States and Western Europe. This the factories, which they were using as their was the same period when E. P. Thompson places of refuge. … The workers evolved new broke away from the British Communist ways of fi ghting, both on the job and when Party over Hungary, and when Edgar Morin they walked out on strike” (256). and others formed the Arguments Group Another mass movement of the period, in France, both of them reacting against the the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955- brutal Russian intervention in Hungary. 1956 in Alabama, also figured prominently However, Dunayevskaya had broken with in Marxism and Freedom. In her treatment Stalinism some thirty years earlier and gone of what is now seen as an epochal event on in the 1940s to write economic analyses that launched the civil rights movement, of the USSR as a totalitarian state-capitalist Dunayevskaya stressed its grassroots charac- society. For her, therefore, the newness of ter, rather than the leadership of the newly Hungary 1956 lay not so much in any proof of prominent Martin Luther King Jr. She noted the reactionary, anti-worker character of the that the movement had no visible hierarchy, Russian and East European Stalinist regimes but was governed by mass meetings held as as in the proof it offered that (1) contra Or- often as three times per week. She also singled well and Arendt, totalitarianism could never out the fact that in boycotting the buses for extinguish the struggle for human liberation, over a year, the Black working class had to arrange its own informal transportation net- works in the face of threats and repression KEVIN B. ANDERSON teaches at the University of from the state and the Ku Klux Klan. California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-editor In declaring, “Clearly, the greatest thing (with Peter Hudis) of The Rosa Luxemburg of all in this … spontaneous organization was Reader (2004) and the author of Lenin, Hegel, its own working existence,” she was pointing and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (1995), to its revolutionary potential (281). For that and Marx at the Margins: Ethnicity, National- phrase, “its own working existence,” was the ism, and Non-Western Societies (2010).

Summer 2018 4 5 Marxism and Freedom same one that Marx had employed in The fi le workers feared and opposed automation Civil War in France, his seminal analysis of both because it was creating mass unemploy- the Paris Commune: “The great social mea- ment and because it was heightening the sure of the Commune was its own working alienated labor in their workplaces. Workers, existence” (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ Dunayevskaya held, were demanding noth- works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm). So ing less than the end of the division between too for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the mental and manual labor. She summed this movement that launched over a decade of up with a reference to the young Marx: “Thus, revolutionary activity on the part of Afri- the workers, the American workers, made concrete and thereby extended Marx’s most abstract theories of alienated labor and the quest for universality” (276). This “movement from practice To Dunayevskaya, these three move- to theory” was the underlying ments, the Hungarian workers councils, the theme of Marxism and Freedom. Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the stirrings of rank-and-fi le labor against both automa- It captured the spirit of an era tion and the labor bureaucracy, revealed a that was to see mass social new stage of opposition to the rule of capi- movements, many of them tal. This new opposition was emerging not from organized parties of the left or from marked by spontaneity, in the inspiration from leftist intellectuals, but 1960s and since. from the grassroots participants’ own life ex- perience, from practice. Implicitly referring not only to Stalinism, social democracy, and liberalism, but also to orthodox Trotskyism, can Americans and their allies, much of it Dunayevskaya concluded with regard to these based upon grassroots political activism and kinds of new social movements, “In truth, organizing rather than hierarchical forms of while the intellectual void today is so great organization. that the movement from theory to practice Dunayevskaya also singled out the new has nearly come to a standstill, the movement stage reached by the U.S. labor movement in from practice to theory, and with it, a new unity the period just before the book appeared. On of manual and mental labor in the worker, are the one hand, workers were increasingly dis- in evidence everywhere” (276; here and below, tancing themselves from the newly powerful emphasis in original). labor bureaucracy, which stifl ed union democ- This “movement from practice to theory” racy and had tied labor to the state ever since was the underlying theme of Marxism and World War II. On the other hand, at a time of Freedom. It captured the spirit of an era that Fordist high wages in some major industries, was to see mass social movements, many of the new stage of production represented by them marked by spontaneity, in the 1960s automation became a dividing line between and since. It was obviously a repudiation of rank-and-fi le workers and the political and the top-down politics of both social democ- economic establishment. And as she saw racy and what is usually termed the Leninist it, that establishment included not only the vanguard party. In this sense, it anticipated corporations, the government, and the liberal not only the 1960s, but also events like the social scientists who advised capital and the wave of revolutions and protests that have state from the universities, but also the labor impacted so many countries since the Arab bureaucracy itself. For their part, rank-and- revolutions of 2011, from the Indignados in

46 NEW POLITICS Marxism and Freedom

Spain to Occupy Wall Street in the United States, and from Gezi Park in Turkey to Nuit Debout in Paris. However, while Dunayevskaya believed fi rmly in the creativity of spontaneous, some- times leaderless movements, she did not, either in Marxism and Freedom or in her writ- ings afterwards, ever argue that the Marxist theoretician was therefore irrelevant or a mere bystander. It was, she held, a movement from practice to theory, not a spontaneous move- ment that had no need for Marxist theory. What she did argue was that the greatest revolutionary thinkers had absorbed into their philosophical perspectives the creativity of the movements from below of their times, while at the same time offering those move- ments some theoretical and political direction. Raya Dunayevskaya And this had organizational implications as well. It differentiated Dunayevskaya from her erstwhile U.S. colleague, the great Afro- Democracy, thus, was not invented by Caribbean Marxist C.L.R. James. Despite philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois many commonalities with Dunayevskaya, leadership. It was discovered by the masses James hewed to a more spontaneist position, in their method of action. There is a double as did other contemporary groups with posi- rhythm in destroying the old and creating tions similar to Dunayevskaya’s, like Socialisme the new which bears the unmistakable ou Barbarie, and later, the Italian operaïstes. stamp of the self-activity which is the truly . This, in fact, As Frédéric Monferrand notes in his well- working class way of knowing was the greatest of all the achievements researched new preface to the 2016 French of the great French Revolution—the edition, “Thus, where C.L.R. James called workers’ discovery of their own way of after 1955 for the abolition of ‘the distinction knowing. (30-31) between party and mass,’ the author of Marx- In her brief account of Hegel, a real gem ism and Freedom never seems to have really of compression that illuminates the truly renounced the need to form a revolutionary revolutionary aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, organization relatively autonomous from the Dunayevskaya stresses the impact of the social movements” (22). French Revolution—and its aftermath—on With those kinds of questions in mind, the German inventor of the modern form let us look briefl y at some of the key theoreti- of dialectics. She also notes how the young cal junctures in Marxism and Freedom. Hegel singled out the alienated condition The chapter on Hegel and the French of the modern factory worker but could not revolution that begins the book is heavily in- yet discern—because it was too early—the debted to the anarchist thinker Daniel Guérin yearning for a creative and non-exploitative for its account of the sans-culottes as part of a form of labor that was to imbue the modern creative movement from below, to the left of working-class movement in its most revolu- the Jacobins, that conceptualized and fought tionary moments. That would have to wait for a popular democracy: for Marx. What Hegel did discern in his

Summer 2018 4 7 Marxism and Freedom published work—and here the infl uence of of the German idealist on Marx. Finally, the the French Revolution was obvious—was discussion of Hegel turns toward the Stalin- that the quest for freedom and emancipation ist rejection of Hegel, especially his concept marked the entire course of human history. of negativity. Additionally, in seeing the social world not With Marx, Dunayevskaya stresses the only as substance, but also as subject, Hegel fundamental continuity of the young Marx of paved the way for the Marxian concept of the 1844 with Capital, not only in Volume 1, but collective revolutionary subject. also in Volumes 2 and 3. I know of no other According to Dunayevskaya, Hegel also serious analyst of Marx who swam so easily in elaborated, above all in his Absolute Idea, both the humanist/dialectical aspect—alien- which he saw as the unity of theory and ation, fetishism, dialectic, and so on—and in practice, the dialectical relationship between concepts like the tendential decline in the rate the social and the individual: of profi t as the foundation of Marx’s theory For in Hegel’s Absolute there is embed- of crises and depressions. ded, though in abstract form, the full In its original 1958 edition, Marxism development of the social individual, and Freedom contained as an appendix the or what Hegel would call individuality “purifi ed of all that interferes with its universalism, i.e., freedom itself.” Here are the objective and subjective means Marx not only differed with whereby a new society is going to be Engels on the potentially born. That new society, struggling to be born, is the concern of our age. (39) revolutionary character of the For Dunayevskaya, the key here was not Civil War, but he also strongly so much the rather banal notion that indi- attacked the non-revolutionary viduals must become social to fully realize Lincoln’s reluctance to issue an themselves as individuals. Her point centered emancipation proclamation. on something slightly different: how the quest for individual self-development and freedom could link up with broader epochal move- ments for human emancipation in such a way fi rst published English translations of two of that both were deepened, in a truly dialectical the most important of Marx’s 1844 Essays, relationship. Thus, when Rosa Parks sat down “Private Property and Communism” and on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic.” The defi ed the system of racial segregation, her theme of Marx’s revolutionary humanism quest for individual emancipation managed to continues through one of Dunayevskaya’s four link up with the universal in such a way that it chapters devoted to his magnum opus, “The helped touch off a whole era of revolutionary Humanism and Dialectic of Capital, Vol. I.” radicalism. In the 1844 Essays, Dunayevskaya sees Marx Dunayevskaya noted as well that Marx as having put forth his own version of the drew his concept of the negation of the nega- dialectic, as having not only “stood [Hegel] tion from Hegel, whom he praised in 1844 for on his feet,” but also as having separated him- having uncovered “the dialectic of negativity self from “vulgar communism” (85), which as the moving and creative principle” (34). At Dunayevskaya traces back to some of the the same time, Dunayevskaya critiques the communist sects of Marx’s own time, albeit retrogression into statism in the later Hegel, with a clear contemporary target, the vulgate while also maintaining the enduring infl uence of Soviet Marxist-Leninism. Here she con-

48 NEW POLITICS Marxism and Freedom nects philosophy and economics, in the sense the British establishment took the opposite that vulgar communism sought to change position. In a remarkable display of proletarian property relations but not production rela- internationalism, those workers kept up their tions, not the actual daily life of the worker: support even when told that a British interven- Marx was strongly “opposed to anyone who tion on the side of the South might quickly thinks that the ills of capitalism can be over- end the war and the cotton blockade that had come by changes in the sphere of distribution” led to mass layoffs in the textile industry. She (59). As for the Russian Stalinist ideologists, also notes how language about race, class, and they focused on the merits of state property the fi ght for the eight-hour day found its way and they “spend incredible time and energy into Marx’s text, as in this often-overlooked and vigilance to imprison Marx within the passage from Capital: bounds of the private property versus state In the United States of America, every property concept” (63). This was also an im- independent movement of the workers plicit critique of classical Trotskyism, with its was paralyzed as long as slavery disfi g- focus on nationalized property as the dividing ured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot line between capitalism and a workers’ state. emancipate itself in the white skin where Throughout, Marx is presented as a in the Black it is branded. But out of the revolutionary activist as well as a thinker, death of slavery a new life again arose. The fi rst fruit of the Civil War was the even during his supposedly cloistered British eight hours agitation, that ran with the Museum years when he immersed himself in seven-leagued boots of the locomotive political economy. Not only was he an activist from the Atlantic to the Pacifi c, from as well as a thinker, but world events and his New York to California. (84) engagement with them decisively shaped his Thus, the dialectics of race and class was greatest theoretical work, Capital. Here the no mere sideshow, but a crucial aspect of the kinds of themes alluded to at the beginning struggle for the emancipation of labor. of this essay—the new forms of emancipa- But there were other theoretical stakes tory struggle found during the 1950s in the here as well. Dunayevskaya also makes the Hungarian revolutionaries, Alabama Black argument that the very structure of Capital activists, and rank-and-fi le workers—emerge changed as a result of Marx’s engagement as central to the book’s underlying theoretical with the U.S. Civil War. Based upon a study premises. of the early drafts of Capital, she concludes Thus, the decisive impact of the U.S. that it was only after he became engaged Civil War on Capital Volume 1 is elaborated with the Civil War that Marx added an entire not just as political background, but as hav- chapter on “The Working Day,” apparently ing had a decisive theoretical importance. completed as late as 1866. This chapter is Dunayevskaya’s chapter covering these issues one of the book’s most crucial, not because it begins with Marx’s applauding from afar the exposes the oppression of the worker, which incipient slave insurrection he was hoping for many had done before, but because it shows in the wake of John Brown’s attack on Harper’s how the lengthening of the working day con- Ferry. Marx not only differed with Engels on stituted the breaking point that produced the the potentially revolutionary character of the modern labor movement. Capital’s chapter on Civil War, but he also strongly attacked the the working day contains the most detailed non-revolutionary Lincoln’s reluctance to issue treatment of working-class resistance to an emancipation proclamation. In addition, capital of the entire book, as it chronicles the Dunayevskaya stresses Marx’s strong support, struggle for a shorter working day, fi rst in in his letters and journalism, for the British Britain, and then in France, and then in the workers who sided with the North even as

Summer 2018 4 9 Marxism and Freedom

United States, where it became intertwined Most importantly, the fi rst chapter did not with the dialectics of race and class. exist in its present form. Only after the Paris But Marx is not only describing, but Commune did Marx reorganize the book, also prescribing. For he is suggesting in this creating for the fi rst time a separate fi rst chapter that, short of actual proletarian revo- chapter ending with a discussion of com- lution, the fi ght for a reduced working day modity fetishism. Some of the material on challenges capital in a fundamental way, more fetishism was already there in 1867, but some than that for higher wages. Moreover, this was added after the Paris Commune. This was something that Marx put forward in the was because the Commune had illustrated First International, helping to place it on the in concrete form what Marx for years had agenda of the working class across Western been referring to as free and associated labor. Europe and North America. Turning to our Dunayevskaya argues that after 1867 Marx own times, I would like to note that in recent moves the focus in the discussion of com- decades, the French working classes have been modity fetishism from “the fantastic form of carrying out the fi ght for a shorter working appearance,” wherein human relations took day, but in isolation from other highly devel- the form of relations between things, toward oped economies like Britain or the United “the necessity of that form of appearance,” States, where the issue has lain dormant, or given that the reifi cation of human relations worse. As a result, French workers have been was “in truth,” the form taken under capital- sometimes forced to retreat. ism of “what relations between people are at Dunayevskaya conceptualizes a similar the point of production” (100). process concerning the relationship of the This is not only an example of revolution- Paris Commune to Capital. Following the ary events infl uencing and deepening Marx’s framework of Marx’s Civil War in France, she theorization of capitalism, but it is also an ex- outlines what he saw as the Commune’s revo- ample of Marx carrying out some of his most lutionary features: its grassroots democratic original theoretical labor under the impact of character, its destruction of a modern bureau- the Commune. In carrying out this work, he cratic state, its development of worker self- developed further a book that aimed not only rule in some of the factories. Dunayevskaya to refl ect, but also to shape the consciousness added a point not stated explicitly by Marx of the working class, in order for it to carry out concerning the leading role of female workers, the struggle for its self-emancipation more milkmaids, in touching off the insurrection effectively. And it was not Marx’s fault that early in the morning of March 18, 1871: “As post-Marx Marxists, beginning with Engels, in every real people’s revolution, new strata of virtually ignored the crucial section on com- the population were awakened” (95). modity fetishism until the 1920s. Next, Dunayevskaya argues that several Dunayevskaya’s discussion of V.I. Lenin important formulations in Capital were added as thinker and as revolutionary takes a similar only after the Commune. The last version of form. The early Lenin’s notion of the van- Capital Volume 1 that Marx personally vetted guard party as elaborated in 1902, in What Is before it was published was the French edi- to Be Done?, is seen as undergoing modifi ca- tion, issued in serial form from 1872 to 1875. tions under the impact of the creativity and Although it was translated by Joseph Roy, self-organization displayed by the working Marx’s correspondence shows that he went class in 1905 and 1917. Moreover, in antici- over every page and reworked many parts of pation of many recent discussions by Lars T. the text. Few except specialist scholars are Lih and others, that early form of vanguard- aware that the 1867 version of Capital was ism is shown to have been not that different quite different from the text we know today. from the prevailing concept of organization

50 NEW POLITICS Marxism and Freedom in the Second International. Thus, Lenin in in the 1940s. (I discuss Lefebvre, Althusser, 1902 “merely brought to its logical conclusion James, Dunayevskaya, Lukács, and other Karl Kautsky’s formulation” to the effect that commentators on Lenin’s relation to Hegel workers on their own could achieve trade in my 1995 book, Lenin, Hegel, and Western union but not socialist consciousness, with Marxism.) the latter having to be brought to them by As Dunayevskaya saw it, Lenin took up radical intellectuals (179). the development of the capitalist economy World War I undermines Lenin’s support into its monopoly stage, and the concomitant for Kautsky and the other chief theoreticians emergence of imperialism, soon after his of the Second International, leading him to embark upon, for the fi rst time, the elabora- tion of general and global, rather than only Russian, Marxist perspectives. Was this a Dunayevskaya also makes result of a steadfast adherence to earlier the argument that the very revolutionary principles or a new departure structure of Capital changed as for Lenin? Dunayevskaya holds more to the second possibility, underlining Lenin’s in- a result of Marx’s engagement depth study of issues he had largely avoided with the U.S. Civil War up until then: Hegel and dialectics, imperial- ism, and the state and revolution. One major departure, still controversial even today, is Dunayevskaya’s elaboration study of Hegel, in part on the basis of the of a philosophical break in Lenin’s thought new dialectical insights he gained there. At as a result of his 1914-1915 notebooks on this point, Lenin became dissatisfi ed with Hegel’s Science of Logic. This meant an im- Rudolf Hilferding’s non-dialectical presen- plicit repudiation of his crudely materialist tation of monopoly capital, fi rst because it and reductionist 1908 treatise on Marxist underplayed how competitive capitalism was philosophy, Materialism and Empirio-Crit- transformed. Dunayevskaya writes that for icism. Singling out revolutionary Hegelian Lenin, it was the result of a “development concepts like self-movement and contradic- through contradiction, through transforma- tion, Lenin also embraces aspects of Hegel’s tion into opposite” (208). philosophical idealism as superior to crude Second, Lenin taxed Hilferding, and materialism, writing, “Intelligent idealism is even some of his Bolshevik comrades like nearer to intelligent materialism than is stupid Nikolai Bukharin, for not addressing changes materialism” (207). Moreover, in an implicit brought about by imperialism at the subjective self-critique, Lenin holds that one cannot level, that of the working people in both the understand Capital without having studied imperialist lands and the colonies. In terms Hegel’s Logic and that “consequently, none of the working class at home, imperialism led of the Marxists for the past half-century have to a deep internal contradiction, with a small understood Marx!” (171). Henri Lefebvre part transforming into an aristocracy of labor translated Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel and that benefi ted from colonial exploitation. As introduced them to the French public over Lenin saw it, that stratum also formed the two decades earlier, but he did not, until 1959, core of those elements of the working class acknowledge a break in Lenin’s philosophical that supported World War I. It is a concept thought after 1914. Dunayevskaya, on the that Dunayevskaya connected to racial seg- other hand, had developed her concept of mentation within the U.S. working class. such a break in a dialogue with C.L.R. James In terms of the colonies, imperialism

Summer 2018 5 1 Marxism and Freedom unleashed modern, progressive nationalist across the colonial and semi-colonial world. movements. Here Lenin singled out the Lenin’s great sensitivity, as well, to national Easter Uprising in Ireland of 1916, in the and ethnic oppression inside large countries middle of the war and up to that point the like Russia was an important and related most serious blow against imperialism and insight that he was to develop in terms of the war anywhere in the world. Ireland was groups like African Americans in the years the harbinger of a new form of consciousness following his Hegel notebooks and his book and struggle that came to be called national on imperialism. liberation movements. In supporting the Dunayevskaya took from Hegel, Marx, Irish uprising, and in polemicizing with less and Lenin two conceptual threads: on the one supportive or even hostile class-reductionist hand, a certain type of dialectics of revolution, perspectives from Karl Radek and Leon and on the other hand, a sensitivity to new Trotsky, Lenin underlined the dialectical social forces and movements with revolution- underpinnings of his position, referring to ary potential. These two threads of analysis the Irish events as part of the “dialectics of enabled her to conceptualize a new form of history,” wherein colonized nations fi ghting capitalism, automated state capitalism, in for their national emancipation can take the which workers faced the state, capital, and lead, moving ahead of the international work- their own union bureaucracy, and where new ing class in the struggle against imperialism, social movements like the Black movement in and ultimately, capitalism itself. the United States were emerging. At the same Here again, Lenin’s originality lay not time, events like Hungary 1956 showed not only in grasping new subjective developments only the bankruptcy of the Stalinist regimes, like the development of the labor aristocracy but also that the working people and youth and of the national liberation movements, under those regimes shared similar aspira- but also in conceptualizing the relationship tions with those in radical social movements of those forces to the overall working-class across the world. movement. He incorporated the peasantry While Marxism and Freedom was pub- as well, especially in his discussions of major lished six decades ago, it still speaks to us countries in the Global South like colonial today, when grassroots social movements for India and semi-colonial China. radical change have covered the globe in a way Whatever his fl aws as a Marxist thinker not seen since the 1960s, and yet at the same and revolutionary leader, which have been time, the economic and political contradic- pointed out by other revolutionary thinkers tions of capitalism are more glaring—and ever since Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin’s two ominous—than at any time since the 1930s. major insights—on Hegel and dialectics, and This unprecedented situation compels Marx- on imperialism and national liberation—are ists of the twenty-fi rst century to rethink our still fruitful theoretical resources today. For old categories, especially those inherited from Dunayevskaya, Lenin’s Hegelian Marxism either social democracy or Stalinism. was more attractive than that of Lukács or Marcuse because he reached political and This article is based on a presentation given economic conclusions on the basis of his in Paris on the occasion of the reissue of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom by Éditions dialectical investigations. He was therefore Syllepse; it was published in French, in Entre les able to elaborate a dialectical theory of the lignes entre les mots, on January 19, 2018, entreles- emergence of imperialism and of the contra- lignesentrelesmots.wordpress.com/2018/01/19/ dictions within it, most prominently its giving marxisme-et-liberte-60-ans-apres-pour-hier-et- aujourdhui/. the impetus to national liberation movements

52 NEW POLITICS