Raya Dunayevskaya: 60 years of Marxism and Freedom

 

On Wednesday 7th November we were invited to say some words by the International Marxist Humanist Organisation at Hausman Books in that there London about Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom in its 60th Anniversary year- Here is what we said:

 

The first time I realised Hegel was a boom boom doctor (an explosive thinker) was reading his that his students found his lectures an impossible amount of gobbledegook. It was then I realised Hegel was a Surrealist. It is only through the irrational that the rational may emerge, it in this vein the Psychedelic Bolsheviks live.

 

In 1930 Glasgow punk Harry McShane (he’s the dude who wrote the second preface to Marxism and Freedom after some German bum) went to Alaska to fix massive ice breaking drills in the wilderness surrounded by bacon stealing bears. The PBs are currently in their wilderness with the Bears phase. In his biography McShane admits he could have stayed in the Alaska ambience for the rest of his days. We relate to this, on a recent exhibition to Wales when running at the mountain Arenig naked we realised too we could have done a Hugo Ball and lost our psyche’s to rural roundabouts. But McShane did not give in to the overwhelming temptation and neither did we because we both believe in discovering humanity inspired by Raya our sweet warty king.

 

We first met each other in the SWP whirlpool, Rob found his way to the SWP after 18 months in the CPB, Ben was an SWP veteran of 5 years with the cuts and bruises to prove it. Ollie’s first romp was with Ben on a SWP’s fresher stall. Kaff joined just for the faction fight. It was abundantly clear that the SWP had severe downfalls, a low level of theory and obsession with primitive accumulation, we held a teenage delusionary sense that its more positive elements could be brought to the forefront.

 

The SWP’s cheap wooden mask was peeled away and now you wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night in a cobblestone ally way as its worst elements were revealed and strangled anything positive to death. We are of course talking about the years 2012/2013 in which a rape crisis occurred in the party, where genuine concerns were voiced by its membership and were put down by the Stalinist bureaucracy that put the SWP politics above any concrete politics and ultimately a human being. Socialism that treats individuals as contingent is no socialism at all

 

Towards the end of our dance we rediscovered elements of the IS tradition that had been swept under the Persian rug. Peter Sedgewick, Jim Higgins, Duncan Hallas and Ian Land. This at least seemed worth engaging with as it seemed more real than the shit the party had become. Still though our minds had not cracked so deep and still had to be forced to leave this decaying sock puppet. The years of indoctrination that there is nothing on the outside ran through our bloody thoughts leaving us stiff and scared. In a head spin we went along with Seymour’s vanity project but quickly realised it was a chewy false specimen with no real taste. We did though meet members of the Association of Musical Marxists and Dave Black at Plan C event slowly led us to more liberating ride on the backs of Guy Debord, Theodor Adorno and Raya Dunayevskaya. These became an affirmation of our desire to engage with the totality of everything rather than the slither of society identified as being political.

 

One of the things that exploded the narrow Berlin walls of our minds was Marxism and Freedom. This is was we took from it….

 

1. Hegel as essential to Marx- State Capitalism cannot be justified when applying Hegel to Marx. Through Hegel’s dialectic it is only understanding that a thing can be itself and not itself at the same time does it become obvious that the only way to liberate Communism is through Communism.
2. Against the separation of Mental and Manual Labour- What we experienced in the SWP was an exaggeration of the objective capitalist relations by the separation of those who were allowed to think and those who were not permitted to do so. Raya makes us realise that self-activity is the process of thinking and doing at the same time. Not reading Callinicos then selling his paper.
3. Marxism being developed from the spontaneity of the French Masses/Chartists- What Dunayevskaya makes you realise is a far more dialectical emergence of Marxism. Rather then Marx thinking up Marxism it was the activity of the masses that could a bring a higher unity to his thinking.
4. Communism as a process of discovering truth and humanness rather than a structure to be erected- a popular understanding of communism is that it reaches its realization in workers councils or a socio-economic system but truly what Raya gets is it being a process to find out what being human is.
5. Negation of the Negation- The point of the proletariat is to destroy itself in the process of finding freedom. It is not something to be fetishized being a terrible form of oppression even though it is the negation of capital it has to be negated
6. The Role of the Intellectual in the Struggle- What we admire in Raya is that she didn’t treat workers as people who could not deal with complex ideas like the majority of the trad left. We love she went to teach Japanese workers Hegel and we that John Maclean taught capital by Marx to Glasgow Workers.

It is from this pond that the PBs spring believing we have the power to develop our own theory and fromm we would like to offer a short critique of our hosts the International Marxist Humanist Organisation (IMHO). How can IMHO who believe in the totality of capitalism not comment on some of the most ruthless critiques of capital in the concrete outputs of John Coltrane, Edgar Varese and Frank Zappa. Although this might not be true of the full membership as we see in the Doctor Magic the Hobgoblin (Dave Black) who gives creditable cultural critique in the activity of the AMM.  Despite this criticism we would probably still like to join, and we would like to sing you this song as a peace offering.

 

 

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