25 Years of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S
25 Years of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. Raya Dunayevskaya Prologue: New stage of production, New stage of cognition, New kind of organization Ever since I began preparing for the celebration of May 5 as the birth-time of history - Marx's new continent of thought - I have been rethinking the birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. There was no way to sum up 25 years of the birth and development of the News and Letters Committees as well as News & Letters as paper, without taking account of the philosophic breakthrough on the Absolute Idea as containing a movement from practice as well as from theory. That occurred in 1953. Once the split in the State- Capitalist Tendency, known as Johnson-Forest,1 was complete in 1955, our very first publication reproduced my May 12-20, 1953 Letters on the Absolute Idea along with the first English translation of Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks. In a word, while 1955 saw the birth of News and Letters, both as Committees and as our paper, 1953 saw at one and the same time, the emergence, in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, of open divergencies towards objective events (be it Stalin's death, the East German revolt, the Beria purge, or McCarthyism), as well as towards the subjective idea of what type of paper Correspondence was to be and what was its relationship to Marxism. * * * In reaching back to 1953, a new illumination disclosed that we were really talking, not about a, single year, but about the period 1949- 1954. After all, nothing short of the Second Industrial Revolution had emerged with the introduction of Automation in the mines.
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