Abstract
In this chapter, Rockwell argues that the Raya Dunayevskaya–Herbert Marcuse correspondence, primarily from its initiation in late 1954 through 1960, when studied together with Dunayevskaya’s and Marcuse’s key publications in this period (including Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, for which Marcuse wrote a preface), suggests that Dunayevskaya’s theoretic work influenced Marcuse’s theory development in ways that he may never have acknowledged, and certainly, heretofore, have not been widely recognized. For example, for the first time in his already substantial body of work on Hegel and Marx, Marcuse in his preface to Marxism and Freedom quoted and discussed Marx’s Grundrisse (a work that only recently had become widely available) in response to Dunayevskaya’s analysis of that text in the body of Marxism and Freedom.
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Notes
- 1.
The newspaper Dunayevskaya referred to was Correspondence, published for a couple of years (1953–1955) by Committees of Correspondence, the revolutionary organization led by Dunayevskaya (along with C.L.R. James [1901–1989] and Grace Lee Boggs [1915–]) from 1951–1955. The group is usually referred to as the Johnson–Forest Tendency (James used the pseudonym J.R. Johnson and Dunayevskaya the pseudonym Freddie Forest), although Dunayevskaya favored the term State–Capitalist Tendency.
- 2.
The two letters Dunayevskaya refers to here, which she passed to Marcuse at their first meeting, were written in May 1953 to Grace Lee, a philosopher who was active along with Dunayevskaya in the Johnson–Forest Tendency. The letters analyze Hegel’s Absolutes , the first in his Science of Logic (1812/1976), the second in his Philosophy of Mind (1817/1973). These letters are collected in Hudis and Anderson (Eds.) (2002).
- 3.
Here Marcuse writes that, “[T]he element of reconciliation with the established state of affairs, so strong in [Hegel’s] work… Freedom is relegated to the realm of pure thought, to the Absolute Idea … Idealism by default: Hegel shares this fate with the main philosophical tradition” (Marcuse, 1960, ix).
- 4.
It is clear from the final paragraph of Marcuse’s (1960, xiv) new Preface to Reason and Revolution that the by then five-year-long dialogue with Dunayevskaya had no effect on the position Marcuse had taken in the 1954 Epilogue to that work, written just prior to the beginning of the correspondence with Dunayevskaya, concerning the integration of the proletariat in late industrial society (discussed in the text above). Remarkably, in this final paragraph of the 1960 Preface, Marcuse announces that he had omitted this (1954) Epilogue from the current (1960) edition of Reason and Revolution because “[I]t treated in a much too condensed form developments which I discuss more fully in my forthcoming book, study of advanced industrial society” (Marcuse, 1960, xiv), clearly a reference to the development of his argument on the non-oppositional position of the proletariat which he published a few years later (Marcuse, 1966).
- 5.
See page 30.
- 6.
- 7.
John Dwyer (1912–1989) was Dunayevskaya’s husband and political associate.
- 8.
Dunayevskaya (2002, 25) at least implied this link when she mentioned that she was reading the third part of Capital, vol. 3 (where Marx discusses the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom) at the time she was studying Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind.
- 9.
Dunayevskaya quotes from the earlier Charles H. Kerr edition; I have included the citation for the later Penguin edition in brackets.
- 10.
Dunayevskaya translates from the first German edition of the Grundrisse (1939–1941). I have included the citation for the Penguin edition in brackets.
- 11.
Marcuse quotes from the second (1953) version of the original German edition. The full passage in the German original is: Die freie Zeit, die sowohl Mußezeit als Zeit für höhre Tätigkeit ist—hat ihren Besitzer natürlichin ein andres Subjekt verwandelt, und als dies andre Subjekt tritt er dann auch in den unmittelbaren Produktionsprozeß.
- 12.
An article written for the 150th anniversary of the Grundrisse (Fetscher, 2010) clearly indicates that the relationship between the two principal works of Marx’s mature critical theory, Grundrisse and Capital, remains, to this day, an open and vital question. Fetscher states that Marx developed a “different kind of connection between labor and free time” in the Grundrisse contrasted with Capital. In the “often quoted formulation” in Capital, vol. 3, on the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, Fetscher suggests that “necessity and external expediency”, terms Marx used to characterize pre-capitalist and capitalist labor, extended to his concept of post-capitalist labor as well. Fetscher attempts to reinforce this interpretation by implying that the opening sentences of the passage of the Grundrisse cited by Marcuse, in which Marx writes of a post -capitalist society, “direct labor time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy”, conflict with Marx’s concept of labor and free time in Capital, vol. 3. However, similarly, in the latter text, the concept of the “different subject” emerging from “free time” Marx describes (and Marcuse had also cited) in the Grundrisse (and that Fetscher now quotes) is central to labor and free time in regard to post-capitalist society’s “realm of necessity”, which Marx describes in the passage in Capital, vol. 3. This suggests, rather than a different connection of labor and free time in Capital versus the Grundrisse, a process of mutual illumination between the two works.
- 13.
It is worth noting that even prior to Dunayevskaya’s initiation of the correspondence with him, Marcuse recorded his appreciation of the importance of Marx’s Grundrisse. In “A Supplement to the Bibliography”, he added to the 1954 edition of Reason and Revolution, he wrote under the heading, “Marx”: “Most important is the first publication of Marx’s manuscript ‘Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie’ written in 1857–1858. This is actually the first version, previously unknown, of Das Kapital. It is far more ‘philosophical’ than the final version and shows how Marx’ mature economic theory grows out of his philosophical conceptions” (Marcuse, 1941/1999).
- 14.
Marcuse was referring to research for the book that would be published as One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Marcuse, 1966).
- 15.
Dunayevskaya’s review first appeared in The Activist, Oberlin, No. 11 (January 1965), pp. 32–34.
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Rockwell, R. (2018). Inside the Development of Marxist Humanism and Critical Theory: The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse Correspondence. In: Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75611-0_2
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