Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao

The Raya Dunayevskaya Series in Marxism and Humanism

by Raya Dunayevskaya

Book by Dunayevskaya, Raya

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Politics

372 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Andrew]

I'd heard about Dunayevskaya for years as a fellow traveler of C.L.R. James and an important theorist in her own right in the world of Marxist humanism, or humanist Marxism, or whatever granular form of left theory this is. So I checked out her book on the connection between philosophy and revolution.

Not gonna lie, it starts weak. I have real trouble buying Hegelian ideas other than as obscurantist scaffolding for reactionary politics, and methinks the only reason Marx was so heavily influenced by Hegel is that in mid-19th Century Germany, it was impossible not to be -- even Schopenhauer was in the negative. And so Dunayevskaya's case that the humanist dimensions of Marxist and Leninist thought are profoundly rooted in Hegel and that the major failings of Soviet ideology after the death of Lenin are rooted in an abandonment of Hegelianism and dialectical method seems both profoundly silly and also unempirical (because just like old G.W.F.H., Stalin was just looking for scaffolding for his reactionary politics, despite his claims to "dialectical materialism"). It's once she gets over her lady-boner for Hegel that the whole thing manages to come together, and her analyses of Stalin and Mao are lucid. She's cautiously optimistic about African revolutions (something that would come crashing down in the decades to follow, the occasional Sankara aside), and she is deeply suspicious of the Guevara fetish that was then sweeping the academy, she points out that the New Left had a whole lot of dumb in it (no idea that Sartre visited Andreas Baader in prison and said "quel con!" afterwards, or for that matter that French was a sexist enough language to make "con" masculine). I largely stay away from terminally online 16 year old tankies, but their talking points are a hell of a lot like the arguments she quite succinctly shits upon.

And so it's worth it for those last few chapters, which are a good example of Marxism Done Right.

[Ravi · Rating 4 out of 5]

After many years of sitting on my shelf, I read this book written during the Nixon Administration. It remains surprisingly relevant. I don't claim to be an expert on Hegel or his merits. One can easily skip the Hegel chapter without losing much context. It dates far better in 2024 than Sartre or Althusser, let alone Mao, and whatever its distinctive features, it was written by an author who sought human liberation.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dunayevskaya's family migrated to the US from present day Ukraine in 1922 when she was twelve, and was known for her foundational role in the American Marxist Humanist tendency. After reading this book I think it could be said that Dunayevskaya was also a very close reader of Hegel, and has left I think the best and most propulsive presentation of Hegel's "Absolute Method" (dialectic) I've ever encountered.

Dunayevskaya was a fierce anti-Stalinist and critic of the USSR, considering it a system of state capitalism and the opposite of communism. She was even Trotsky's secretary for a few years in Mexico City and, while an adherent to his theory of uneven and combined development, she eventually (and in my opinion reasonably) broke with him because he too was a proponent of state capitalism, as she saw it, and stubbornly would not change his mind.

Louis Dupré, former President of the Hegel Society of America and author of the introduction of the third edition of this book, accuses Dunayevskaya of "a somewhat selective reading of Marx's texts," and he may be correct. I would call her no slouch, but Dunayevskaya does seem to politically prioritize Marx's humanism over his communism in her interpretation. As an example:

[I]n the process of his struggle with Hegel's concepts on Hegel's ground, Marx has pointed to how different the problems would be when "actual corporeal Man, standing on firm and well-rounded earth, inhaling and exhaling all natural forces," becomes "subject," and the philosophy, Humanism, that has Man at its center, "capable of grasping the act of world history," finally moves to "positive Humanism, beginning from itself."

The very idea of taking up the birth of "positive Humanism" as the result of the second negation, after communism, in a defense of Hegel against Feuerbach, who at the beginning of the essay was credited with nothing short of having "transcended the old philosophy," is truly phenomenal.

But who needs to keep track?

With her clear and expansive insight into Hegel, Dunayevskaya shows without a shadow of a doubt that despite Marx's intense disagreement and criticism, Hegel's thought—and particularly his Science of Logic and it's "Absolute Method" the dialectic (as stated above), or movement of history which Dunayevskaya equated with revolution in Marx—remained central to his work to the end of his life. And it should be noted, the same is true of Lenin:

It was this discovery of the relationship between the ideal and the material in Hegel which led Lenin to see that the revolutionary spirit in the dialectic was not superimposed upon Hegel by Marx, but was in Hegel. While reading the Doctrine of Being, he had already stressed the identity of and the transformation into opposites: "Dialectic is the doctrine of the identity of opposites-how they can be and how they become-under which conditions they become identical, transforming one into the other . . ." While analyzing the Doctrine of Essence, the emphasis was first and foremost on the self-movement.

All of this is to say, as opposed to Feenberg in the The Philosophy Of Praxis: Marx, Lukács And The Frankfurt School, Dunayevskaya sees the dialectic as a tool for the unity of subject and object (or theory and practice) as a success.

Overall it was a great book; easy to read despite its density. At every turn Dunayevskaya's great love of her subject shines brightly through her clear and straightforward style of writing. I found Dunayevskaya's notion of Marxist Humanism to be standing on solid ground.

[Bill Weinberg]

Tore thru this over the past 24 hours, tho I confess I skimmed the opening exegesis on the contemporary relevance of Hegel. Sections on China, Africa, Eastern Europe and the American New Left more interesting to me. Fascinating tidbit from her discussion of the Cultural Revolution was the 1967 manifesto of the Hunan Great Alliance Committee or Sheng Wu-Lien, which assailed the "Red capitalist class" led by Chou en-Lai (Mao himself apparently being too sacrosanct even for these rebels). They were of course quickly repressed. Raya wrote (too optimistically, hindight reveals): "There is no way to know whether they are still alive, but Mao should know that ideas cannot be killed." One of the few online references to the group that I can find:

http://www.marxists.de/china/sheng/in...