We present here for the first time the correspondence during the years 1954 to 1978 between the Marxist-Humanist[1] and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987) and two other noted thinkers, the Hegelian Marxist philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) and the psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm (1900–1980), both of the latter members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.[2] In this introduction we will describe the intellectual trajectory of each correspondent and focus on their theoretical dialogues in these letters, which cover topics such as dialectical social theory, socialist humanism, the structure and contradictions of modern capitalism, and feminism and revolution. Since most of the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence transpired during the years 1954–1961, before the Dunayevskaya-Fromm correspondence really got underway, we begin with the former.
THE EARLY TRAJECTORIES OF MARCUSE AND DUNAYEVSKAYA
Marcuse was a Marxist from his youth who had also studied with the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. Of Jewish origin, he subsequently joined the Frankfurt School and left Germany after 1933. In Germany, he had penned Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932a [1987]), a study that is widely thought to have retained a degree of Heideggerian influence.[3] Probably more relevant to his subsequent correspondence with Dunayevskaya on Hegel, Marx, and modern capitalism was the pathbreaking article on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts he published a few months later, in which he was among the first to place this work of the young Marx solidly within the overall Marxian corpus. Marcuse’s article concluded with a ringing declaration of the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic to Marx’s work as a whole: “Marx has expressed in all clarity the inner connection between revolutionary theory and Hegel’s philosophy. . . . His examination of political economy is itself a continuous confrontation with Hegel” (Marcuse [1932b] 2005, p. 121).[4]
Neither of these two 1932 studies was known to Dunayevskaya during the 1940s. She and many others on the Left in the U.S. first became aware of Marcuse in 1941, with the publication of Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. At the time of this publication, Marcuse was a core member of the Frankfurt School, now in exile in the U.S., whose overall intellectual leader remained Max Horkheimer, under whom Marcuse worked as a specialist in dialectical philosophy. But Marcuse had also written on other themes associated with the Frankfurt School’s distinctive form of Marxist sociology, which it dubbed “Critical Theory”: the social psychology of fascism, Freudian Marxism, the critique of technology and instrumental reason, and the critique of the culture industry.
The first comprehensive analysis of Hegel’s major works from a Marxist perspective in any language, Reason and Revolution also offered the first treatment in English of the whole of Marx’s body of work, from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital, stressing the fetishism of commodities in the latter work. Marcuse’s book contained in addition an explicit critique of positivism, which earned him an ill-tempered response from the American Marxist and pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook.[5] Reason and Revolution also included an implicit critique of pragmatism, then very influential in the U.S.: “Knowledge begins when philosophy destroys the experience of daily life,” Marcuse wrote. The latter is only “the starting point of the search for truth,” which is ultimately based on a critique of commonsense notions of reality (1941, p. 103).[6] Marcuse’s stress throughout the book on Hegel’s concept of negativity was new and original, a position that was based on a close reading of Marx’s 1844 “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic.” Marcuse argues that “the origins of the Marxian dialectic” can be found in this unpublished 1844 text (1941, p. 282). Summing this up, he writes: “For Marx, as for Hegel, the dialectic takes note of the fact that the negation inherent in reality is ‘the moving and creative principle.’ The dialectic is the dialectic of negativity.” Negativity is important to Marx in part because: “Economic realities exhibit their own inherent negativity” (Marcuse 1941, p. 282).[7] In this book, Marcuse also cited Lenin on Hegel and dialectics favorably, and did not, as in his subsequent writings, argue for a basic continuity between Lenin and Stalin.
From 1942 to 1951, Marcuse worked first for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, later reconstituted as the CIA) and then for the State Department. He concentrated on propaganda and later, on U.S. occupation policies for Germany, while also continuing to carry out studies of war and fascism (Marcuse 1998). During these years, he also published one of the first Marxist critiques of Sartrean existentialism (Marcuse [1948] 1973). Marcuse also elaborated Marxist perspectives aimed at reconstituting the Frankfurt School after the war in “33 Theses,” a private memorandum sent to Horkheimer in 1947. As Douglas Kellner writes, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who had replaced Marcuse as the philosophy specialist of a much-reduced Frankfurt School in exile, were probably “put off by the aggressively Marxian-revolutionary tone of Marcuse’s ‘theses’” (Kellner 1998, p. 34). On the one hand, referring to the emergent Western and Soviet blocs, Marcuse wrote: “Under these circumstances there is only one alternative for revolutionary theory: to ruthlessly and openly criticize both systems and to uphold without compromise orthodox Marxist theory against both” (1998, p. 218). This would have brought Marcuse close to the positions of Dunayevskaya and the anti-Stalinist Left more generally. On the other hand, however, Marcuse concluded by advocating that Marxists work with the Stalinist Communist parties of the West by “reconstituting revolutionary theory within the communist parties and working for the praxis appropriate to it” (1998, p, 227). This was a position at odds with that of much of the anti-Stalinist Left, especially those tendencies with which Dunayevskaya was associated. These kinds of differences—over the USSR and Cuba—would eventually emerge in acrimonious fashion in the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence.
By 1954, at the time Dunayevskaya first wrote to him, Marcuse was about to become a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. He was completing Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud ([1955a] 1966), his subsequently famous study of the revolutionary implications of Freud’s analysis of sexual repression. One particular connection to his future correspondence with Dunayevskaya, which hardly ever addressed Freud, was Eros and Civilization’s chapter entitled “Philosophical Interlude.” This chapter took up the closing paragraphs of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind [Spirit].[8] The Philosophy of Mind formed the last volume of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which contained volumes on logic, nature, and mind or spirit. Taken as a whole, the Encyclopedia is often termed Hegel’s “system,” giving this last chapter of the last book of the Encyclopedia a particular importance.
Focusing on those last paragraphs of the Philosophy of Mind, Marcuse writes: “Hegel’s presentation of his system in his Encyclopedia ends on the word ‘enjoys.’ The philosophy of Western civilization culminates in the idea that the truth lies in the negation of the principle that governs this civilization—negation in the two-fold sense that freedom appears as real only in the idea, and that the endlessly projecting and transcending productivity of being comes to fruition in the perpetual peace of self-conscious receptivity” ([1955a] 1966, p. 116). As will be discussed below, the concluding paragraphs of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind were a central preoccupation of Dunayevskaya for over four decades.
Before turning to Dunayevskaya’s early development, it should be noted that there was very little correspondence between Marcuse and Fromm during the period covered by the present volume, 1954–78. Fromm had been pushed out of the Frankfurt School by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1939,[9] while Marcuse had retained close ties to his other Frankfurt School colleagues, especially Horkheimer. In 1955, Marcuse launched a public attack on Fromm in his Eros and Civilization and in the pages of the democratic socialist journal Dissent. In his Dissent article, “The Social Implications of Freudian ‘Revisionism,’” Marcuse argued that the form of neo-Freudianism Fromm was espousing since Escape from Freedom (1941) offered little in the way of a really critical social theory. Marcuse wrote that in works like Man for Himself (1947), Fromm had de-emphasized the concept of sexual repression that lay at the core of Freudian theory, thus jettisoning Freud’s notion of the fundamental unhappiness of the civilized human being. This led Fromm to notions of happiness that “become compatible with the prevailing values” (Marcuse 1955b, p. 224). Fromm responded equally sharply, maintaining that Marcuse admired Freud’s theory because its sexual core was materialist, but Fromm then argued that in fact Freud’s theory was similar to “nineteenth-century bourgeois materialism,” which had been “overcome by Marx’s historical materialism” (Fromm 1955b, p. 344). Fromm further accused Marcuse of “a callousness towards moral qualities in political figures, which was so apparent in Lenin’s attitude,” which was “one of the reasons for the victory of Stalinism” (1955b, p. 349). In his rejoinder, Marcuse castigated Fromm for his espousal of management schemes to humanize factory work and argued that his recent writings were “a perfect example of how proposals for a smoother functioning of the established society can be confused with the notions that transcend this society” (1956, p. 81). In his “Counter-Rebuttal,” Fromm wrote that Marcuse refused to concede that a degree of sexual repression was necessary for any kind of orderly society (Fromm 1956).
Overall, Marcuse was charging Fromm with having subsumed his earlier systemic critiques of modern capitalist society under liberal notions of healthy love, caring, and meaningful work, goals that Fromm now held could be achieved, at least on occasion, under the existing social arrangements. While this may not have been a completely accurate portrayal of Fromm’s position, it illustrated Marcuse’s lifelong quest for a total uprooting of the social structures and culture of modern capitalism.[10]
Given the enthusiastic embrace of Freud in American intellectual life in the 1950s and the 1960s, with Dunayevskaya a rare exception, the impact of the Marcuse-Fromm debate was enormous. Although most leftist intellectuals have tended subsequently to side with Marcuse against the supposedly more “conformist” Fromm in this dispute, others, among them some of the most astute interpreters of Marcuse, have argued convincingly that such a reading of their 1955–1956 dispute does not do Fromm justice (Rickert 1986; see also Kovel 1994, Bronner 1994, Kellner 1991).
In addition, we would argue that the disagreements between Marcuse and Fromm have been overblown, while Marcuse’s differences with Horkheimer and Adorno after the 1940s have been underplayed. Only five years after their Freud dispute, Fromm prominently and favorably cited Marcuse’s writings on Marxism (albeit not Eros and Civilization) in his Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). To take another key example, it is often forgotten that Fromm invited Marcuse—an invitation Marcuse accepted—to contribute an essay to his widely circulated collection, Socialist Humanism (1965). During that same period, Marcuse asked Fromm to review his One-Dimensional Man (1964) and while Fromm politely declined, as we will see below, in 1968 he wrote to Dunayevskaya of the need to come to Marcuse’s defense after he had received death threats from the far Right. At the same time, however, Fromm continued to criticize Marcuse. As will also be discussed below, this can be seen in his Revolution of Hope (1968), in which he argued that Marcuse’s revolutionary intransigence during the 1960s masked an attitude of utter despair about the future of humanity.
Moreover, it is surely no accident that Marcuse and Fromm were the only two members of the Frankfurt School who engaged in dialogue with Dunayevskaya, a lifelong Marxist-Humanist revolutionary thinker and activist. Despite their differences, both Marcuse and Fromm generally supported the radical movements of the 1960s, from which Horkheimer and Adorno recoiled. At the same time, Marcuse’s correspondence with Horkheimer and Adorno shows a persistent attempt to remain in their good graces, especially during the 1950s after their return to Frankfurt, as can be readily seen in the selections from their correspondence published by Douglas Kellner in Marcuse (2001). In this sense, Marcuse may have been worried that Horkheimer and Adorno would link him to Fromm, who had also remained in the U.S.
The German philosopher Bertolt Fessen has made an interesting observation on this in an article on Fromm: “As against Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse like Fromm held to the hope for a radical transcendence [Aufheben] of domination and alienation, and Marcuse thereby exerted himself to bring out clearly his differences with Fromm—not least for Horkheimer and Adorno—in order not to be lumped together with Fromm” (1993, p. 114). Be that as it may, the extensive correspondence of both Marcuse and Fromm with Dunayevskaya, who certainly saw the transcendence of domination and alienation as a concrete historical possibility in the postwar capitalist order, is also suggestive of some important affinities between these two Frankfurt School thinkers, and of differences with the less politically radical version of the Frankfurt School that had been re-established in the 1950s in Germany under the direction of Horkheimer and Adorno. Moreover, on a more theoretical level, it should be noted that Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts were central to the major published work of Marcuse, Fromm, and Dunayevskaya, something that could not be said of Adorno and Horkheimer.
Dunayevskaya, who immigrated to Chicago from Russia as a child, became active as a teenager in the Communist Party, and later, the Trotskyist movement. A self-educated intellectual from a working class background and without a university education, she served as Leon Trotsky’s Russian secretary in 1937–1938 during his exile in Mexico. A year later, she was among those who broke with Trotsky over the implications of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. This break in Trotskyism transpired after Trotsky had called for defense of the Soviet Union as a “workers’ state, though degenerate” and had endorsed Stalin’s occupation of the Baltic countries and of eastern Poland as a necessary defense against Hitler. By 1941, Dunayevskaya had joined forces with the noted Afro-Caribbean Marxist and cultural theorist C. L. R. James, who had independently come to a state-capitalist position. The two formed what became known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency (officially the State-Capitalist Tendency) within the American Trotskyist movement. (James wrote under the pseudonym J. R. Johnson and Dunayevskaya under that of Freddie Forest.) A third key member of the group was the Chinese-American philosopher Grace Lee (Boggs). James, Lee, and Dunayevskaya debated Hegelian dialectics intensely in the 1940s, as part of an effort to write a joint book on Marxism and dialectics, never completed. Among the texts they discussed was Dunayevskaya’s translation of Lenin’s 1914–15 Hegel Notebooks.[11] During this period, they also corresponded about contacting Marcuse in an attempt to engage him in a dialogue about dialectics after having read and admired his Reason and Revolution. They never did so, apparently because as members of a Marxist revolutionary tendency that opposed World War II as an imperialist war (although they did support the ant-fascist resistance movements), they were wary about contacting him while he was working for the OSS.[12]
Dunayevskaya’s first theoretical publications took up Stalin’s Soviet Union as a state-capitalist society, occasionally referring to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in the process. This work on state capitalism began to gain her recognition outside the circles of Trotskyism in 1944, after she translated and critiqued in the American Economic Review an article from a leading Soviet theoretical journal describing a new program of teaching political economy. Most strikingly, the Soviet article argued that although the USSR was socialist, Marx’s law of value and surplus value nonetheless continued to operate there, and that the teaching of political economy would have to be altered in light of this fact. In her commentary accompanying the translation, Dunayevskaya held that this was actually an admission of the reality that the Soviet Union had become a state-capitalist society: “There is incontrovertible evidence that there exists in Russia at present a sharp class differentiation based upon a division of function between the workers, on the one hand, and the managers of industry, millionaire kolkhozniki, political leaders and the intelligentsia in general, on the other” (1944, p. 532). Dunayevskaya’s translation and commentary, which also criticized the Stalinist theoreticians’ downgrading of the first chapter of Capital, provoked strong responses from several pro-Soviet economists, among them Paul Baran and Oscar Lange, also reaching the front page of The New York Times.
Dunayevskaya and James went their separate ways in 1955. Two years prior to this, Dunayevskaya had penned her “Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes” of May 12 and May 20, 1953. Originally addressed to Grace Lee as part of their three-way correspondence on dialectics with C. L. R. James, these 1953 Letters showed that her thinking had already taken an independent direction as a philosopher in her own right. Where many saw Hegel’s concluding chapter on the “absolute idea” in the Science of Logic as an airy flight into religious abstraction or a closed totality, in her May 12, 1953 Letter, Dunayevskaya perceived connections to social reality and deep contradictions. Picking up a thread from Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks, she quotes the opening sentence of the Hegel’s absolute idea chapter, noting that it refers to practice as well as theory: “The Absolute Idea has now turned out to be the identity of the Theoretical and Practical Idea” (Dunayevskaya 2002, p.16). She also notes that the absolute idea was hardly a synthesis, quoting Hegel to the effect that “the Absolute Idea contains the highest opposition with itself” (Dunayevskaya 2002, p. 16). Dunayevskaya connects all of this to the critique of totalitarian state capitalism, which she sees as a sort of absolute development of the capitalist system: “Now everyone looks at the totalitarian one-party state, that is the new that must be overcome by a totally new revolt in which everyone experiences ‘absolute liberation’” (Dunayevskaya 2002, p. 22).
Dunayevskaya elaborates the notion of absolute liberation in her May 20, 1953 Letter through a discussion of the “absolute mind” chapter of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, which she saw as most relevant for working out the dialectic of post-capitalist society. In so doing, she focuses on the same passage as Marcuse in Eros and Civilization: “The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind” (Hegel 1971, p. 315). Marcuse connected this to a more generalized idea of happiness, holding as we have seen that for Hegel “freedom appears as real only in the idea.” For her part, Dunayevskaya—and it is important to emphasize this was before the publication of Eros and Civilization—saw Hegel’s conclusion as connected to the envisioning of a new society in Marxian terms: “We have entered the new society” (Dunayevskaya 2002, p. 30). Earlier in her discussion of absolute mind, Dunayevskaya stressed, contra Marcuse, that far from embarking upon a flight into religious abstraction at the stage of the absolute, “Hegel cannot avoid history, the concrete development” (2002, p. 27).
Thus, on the eve of their correspondence, Dunayevskaya and Marcuse shared as Hegelian Marxists a profound grasp of the interrelationship of the Hegelian and Marxian forms of dialectic. They also shared a commitment to the unity of the philosophical with the political dimension.[13] At the same time, Marcuse tended to see Hegel’s absolutes as not terribly relevant to a Marxian critique of capitalism or to the elaboration of a vision of a new society, while Dunayevskaya saw Hegel’s absolutes as the point of departure for a new dialectic adequate to the era of totalitarianism and to the new postwar social movements of rank and file workers, Blacks, and women. Later on, Dunayevskaya would regard her 1953 Letters as the place where she first articulated her Marxist-Humanist version of dialectics. However, she did not yet use the term Marxist-Humanism in 1953. That term emerged publicly in her writings only with Marxism and Freedom in 1958. In this sense, Dunayevskaya’s early and most extensive correspondence with Marcuse takes place during the period when she was making the transition from left-wing Trotskyist to Marxist-Humanist.
THE DUNAYEVSKAYA-MARCUSE CORRESPONDENCE BEGINS
Dunayevskaya initiated the correspondence with Marcuse with a letter of December 7, 1954, at a time when her break with C. L. R. James was already in the offing. As mentioned above, and seen in the correspondence among James, Lee, and Dunayevskaya, contacting Marcuse had long been a goal of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Moreover, he was no longer working with the OSS. An additional motivation to contact Marcuse at this time probably lay in the fact that with the breakup of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Dunayevskaya no longer had among her own close colleagues a real philosophical interlocutor with even a basic knowledge of Hegel and dialectics. From Marcuse’s side, although the correspondence probably did not loom as large on his intellectual agenda, it should be noted that with Horkheimer and Adorno now back in Germany and McCarthyism raging in the U.S., he too was more isolated, at least in terms of others with whom to engage in serious dialogues on Hegelian and Marxist theory. During the early and most fruitful years of their correspondence, 1955–1960, Marcuse was to be sure somewhat interested, as was Dunayevskaya primarily, in dialogue about dialectics, but by 1960 he was also raising issues with her like the sociology of work and more broadly, the new features of postwar U. S. capitalist society, this as part of the preparation for his study of “advanced industrial society,” One-Dimensional Man (1964).
This first letter of Dunayevskaya to Marcuse began, “Although I do not know you in person, you are of course familiar to me for your ‘Reason and Revolution.’ I was so impressed with the work at the time it was published I intended to write…[or] visit you. . . . You might have read my translation of ‘Teaching economics in the Soviet Union’ that appeared in . . . American Economic Review.” Marcuse and Dunayevskaya met personally for the first time in February or March 1955, when she apparently gave him copies of her 1953 Letters. In an April 3, 1955 letter to Marcuse, she referred to rank-and-file workers fighting against what she saw as the heightened alienation resulting from automation, which she viewed as a new stage of capitalist production. She commented on her plans for the book she was writing, later published as Marxism and Freedom: “The twin poles to me of any fundamental work . . . must have automation at one end, and the absolute idea or freedom at the other end.” Several other letters demonstrate Dunayevskaya’s interest in further developing Hegelian categories, especially around the concept of absolute negativity.
Marcuse’s responses suggest considerable interest, but also include sharp criticisms. First, although he too was a Hegelian Marxist, he expressed some reservations about her appropriation of dialectic for contemporary Marxist analysis: “I have now read the notes on Hegel [the 1953 Letters] which you lent me. This is fascinating, and I admire your way of concretizing the most abstract philosophical notions. However, I still cannot get along with the direct translation of idealistic philosophy into politics: I think you somehow minimize the ‘negation’ which the application of the Hegelian dialectic to political phenomena presupposes. I would like to discuss these things with you” (letter of April 14, 1955).
Second, Marcuse took issue with what he termed Dunayevskaya’s “glorification of the ‘common people’” in her discussions of Detroit workers, which he termed “abstract and undialectical” (letter of January 8, 1955). These critiques prompted a lengthy response by Dunayevskaya:
Now that the school season is drawing to a close perhaps you will take that trip to Detroit, and thus see that it is not a question of “my” direct translation of idealistic philosophy into politics, but the dialectical development of proletarian politics itself as it struggles to rid itself of its specifically class character in its movement to a classless society. That is why I “translated” Absolute Mind as the new society. You seem to think that I thus minimize the “negation” which the application of the Hegelian dialectic to political phenomena presupposes. But surely Hegel’s Absolute Idea has nothing in common with Schelling’s conception of the Absolute as the synthesis or identity in which all differences are absorbed by the “One.” (letter of May 5, 1955)
These two points of difference would mark their correspondence during the next few years, but this would not stop Dunayevskaya from continuing to share her reflections on Hegel and dialectics with Marcuse, since their correspondence in this period was based on strong intellectual affinities as well as differences. These affinities are illustrated by Marcuse’s remark upon reading some draft material for Marxism and Freedom: “Your ideas are a real oasis in the desert of Marxist thought” (letter of December 2, 1955). In a letter of May 3, 1956, Dunayevskaya also expressed enthusiasm over their correspondence: “You have no idea how your encouraging words help me proceed with my work. As you no doubt know, my entry into the ‘intellectual world’ was thru very unorthodox ways and you are the first not to make me feel like a fish out of water.”
During 1955–1956, Marcuse critiqued subsequent drafts of Marxism and Freedom, attempted unsuccessfully to interest his publisher Beacon Press in the book, and agreed to write the preface. In general, he lent great encouragement to Dunayevskaya as she finished the manuscript. Dunayevskaya also commented briefly on Eros and Civilization during this period: “Your original contribution lies in your extraction of ‘Eros’ from being in a field by itself and placing it within the historical context of Western civilization. . . . You thereby illuminated the field of psychoanalysis” (letter of September 6, 1956). She suggested further that she found Marcuse’s critique of Fromm convincing, commissioning a review of Eros and Civilization in News & Letters, the paper she had founded in 1955, after the break with James, and continued to edit until her death in 1987.
Dunayevskaya and Marcuse’s second meeting, for nearly two full days in November 1956, was to finalize Dunayevskaya’s manuscript. In a letter to her husband John Dwyer, Dunayevskaya described the meeting with Marcuse in Boston, part of which also involved the historian of the Russian Revolution E. H. Carr. She outlined the theoretical differences between Marcuse and herself, and how Marcuse proposed to present these in his preface. As before, these differences continued to center on Hegel’s absolutes and on the contemporary working classes. But a third element of difference also came to the fore at this juncture, the relationship between Lenin and Stalin, which by this time Marcuse had come to view as basically a continuity. In this sense, he strongly opposed her theory of state capitalism and its implications. Although not openly expressed in their correspondence, or in his preface to Marxism and Freedom, Marcuse was also leery of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, whose workers’ councils Dunayevskaya ardently supported.
It is important to note that in this early period of their correspondence Marcuse published two books, Eros and Civilization ([1955a] 1966) and Soviet Marxism ([1958a] 1985). Although Marcuse volunteered that he intended to have Dunayevskaya review the manuscript of the latter before publication, this never happened. In this sense, their interactions were somewhat one-sided.
To assist in his writing of the preface, Marcuse asked Dunayevskaya for a summary of the main theses of Marxism and Freedom, which she provided in a letter of June 11, 1957. Above all, she singled out the themes of dialectics and humanism in Marx’s work as a whole, from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital. As noted earlier, Marxism and Freedom was the first publication in which she proclaimed herself a Marxist-Humanist, a term never used by the Johnson-Forest Tendency. She writes, citing Marx’s “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” from the 1844 Manuscripts: “The central point, the pivot around which everything else in Marxism and Freedom revolves, is of course, the philosophic foundation of Marxism. As I put it in my introductory note, ‘The aim of this book is to re-establish the original form of Marxism which Marx called ‘thoroughgoing Naturalism or Humanism.’” She adds that in her discussion of Capital, “I show that not only are Marx’s economic categories social categories but they are thoroughly permeated with the humanism that came out of the working-class struggles for the shortening of the working day.” As to the next generation, “Lenin learned the critical importance of the philosophic foundations the hard way—when the Second International actually collapsed and, to reconstitute his own reason, had to return to Hegel’s Science of Logic.” A second and “subordinate” theme was “the division between the radical intellectual like Proudhon and the Marxist intellectual,” because Marx “did not divide theory from history, including the current class struggles.” Key here was the question of “what will happen after: are we always to be confronted with a Napoleon or a Stalin?” A third element was how her theory of state capitalism was rooted in dialectical methodology. She also suggests that her standing as a Marxist economist—and by implication, her combining of economics and dialectics in a new way in this book—would open up further the debate over Hegel, Marx, and dialectics launched by Marcuse over a decade earlier. In addition to its treatment of Marx, of Lenin, of the Russian revolution and its aftermath, and of contemporary U.S. capitalism, Marxism and Freedom also carried in its appendix Dunayevskaya’s translations of Lenin’s 1914–1915 Hegel Notebooks and of two of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, “Private Property and Communism” and “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic.” None of these texts had previously appeared in English in a widely available form.
Marcuse’s preface to Marxism and Freedom, reprinted in the appendix to this volume, stands as a theoretical text in its own right. He begins with the need to rethink Marxism in light of the failure of revolution in the West and the unhappy results of revolution in Russia. Marcuse locates Dunayevskaya’s contribution at the center of a process in which twentieth century Marxism, beginning with Georg Lukács, slowly retrieved and then assimilated ever expanding numbers of Marx’s manuscripts and notebooks previously buried in oblivion and neglect, most notably the 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse. Marcuse argues that Marxist theorists had since the 1920s focused on how Marx’s long-neglected early philosophical writings prepared the ground for the economic and political stages of his later writings. Marcuse suggests, however, that Dunayevskaya’s analysis, in taking account of the Grundrisse as well, “goes beyond the previous interpretations,” and thus for the first time adequately elucidates the “inner identity of the philosophical with the economic and political ‘stage’ of Marxian theory” (Marcuse [1958b] 2000, p. xxi).
But Marcuse also expresses his differences with Dunayevskaya, both explicitly and implicitly. At an explicit level, Marcuse differs only with Dunayevskaya’s treatment in the second half of the book of theoretical and political events after Marx:
While the author of this preface agrees in all essentials with the interpretation of the Marxian oeuvre in the first parts, he disagrees with some decisive parts of the analysis of post-Marxian developments, especially with that of the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism, of the recent upheavals in Eastern Europe, and, perhaps most important, with the analysis of the contemporary position, structure and consciousness of the laboring classes. (Marcuse [1958b] 2000, p. xxv; see also the Appendix in this volume)
This critique bore upon Dunayevskaya’s treatment of Lenin and the Russian revolution, of Stalinist state capitalism and the revolts against it, including the Hungarian revolution, and the contemporary struggles in the U.S. of rank-and-file workers against automation and of the nascent Civil Rights movement as seen in the Montgomery bus boycott.
At a second, implicit level, however, Marcuse also expresses some disagreements with Dunayevskaya’s treatment of Marx, particularly concerning the Grundrisse. One disagreement revolves around Dunayevskaya’s conclusions that for Marx in both Capital and Grundrisse, (a) “the creative role of labor is the key to all else” and (b) “the conception of freedom that the young Marx had when he broke from bourgeois society as a revolutionary Hegelian remained with him throughout his life” (Dunayevskaya [1958] 2000, p. 145). With respect to (a), here in this preface Marcuse interprets creativity outside of labor as central to post-capitalist society. In contrast, Dunayevskaya’s interpretation posits the creativity of labor itself as central in the realization of a post-capitalist society. Marcuse writes with respect to this: “a truly rational societal organization of labor…is ‘only’ a political problem. For Marx, it is to be solved by a revolution which brings the productive process under the collective control of the ‘immediate producers’. But this is not freedom. Freedom is living without toil, without anxiety: the play of human faculties” (see the Appendix in this volume). With respect to (b), Marcuse’s preface suggests that the Grundrisse actually represents a substantial, perhaps qualitative development of Marx’s idea of freedom compared to how he had articulated it in the 1844 Manuscripts.
As publication neared, Marcuse questioned another point in Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya’s stress on the “American roots of Marxism,” something that had been picked up in the publisher’s press releases. This led to an exchange in which Dunayevskaya outlined her argument, not only concerning Marx’s support for slave uprisings in the U.S. and for the radical abolitionists in the North during the Civil War era, but also her view that these events had impacted the structure of Capital, Vol. I. This, she argued, was especially true of the chapter on the “Working Day,” where Marx wrote concerning the Civil War that “labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” This chapter on the working day had not entered into the “first plan” of Capital (letter of October 11, 1957). Marcuse was not convinced, however, calling Marx’s references to the U.S. “rather casual” (letter of October 15, 1957).
Soon after the publication of Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya wrote to Marcuse that she was thinking of a “supplement” in which she would develop her ideas on Hegel, partly in response to “a few American workers and student youth who have been writing me on Chapter 1 of M&F and have shown a much greater grasp than they are ever being credited with.” She concluded: “Naturally I would still love to ‘depend’ on you and wondered whether you would care to read any drafts that I would write” (letter of January 28, 1958). In a letter of February 10, Marcuse agreed to read “what you write on Hegel,” but he did not respond to a 2000-word letter of July 15, 1958, in which Dunayevskaya outlined her post-Marxism and Freedom thoughts on Hegel’s dialectic. Her emphasis in this long letter returns to the category of absolute mind: “For anyone bound for ‘adventures of the Hegelian dialectic,’ the Absolute Mind lies beckoning, but, no, we go back to repeating the old about the de-humanization of ideas that Hegel is reproached with, although I maintain that today we should see it as its innermost essence.”[14]
While Dunayevskaya congratulated Marcuse that Soviet Marxism had finally come off the press, there were no direct remarks in her last two letters of the 1950s indicating that she had yet read the work. Along with Dunayevskaya’s eventual polemical response to Soviet Marxism (see Appendix, “Intellectuals in the Age of State-Capitalism”), Marcuse’s new preface to the 1960 edition of Reason and Revolution, “A Note on the Dialectic,” was also to become a point of difference. In that 1960 preface, he wrote: “I believe that it is the idea of Reason itself which is the undialectical element in Hegel’s philosophy. . . . It may even be justifiable, logically as well as historically, to define Reason in terms which include slavery, the Inquisition, child labor, concentration camps, gas chambers, and nuclear preparedness” (p. xiii). Dunayevskaya, who appears to have first read this preface in the late 1960s, came to believe that it represented a major shift from the earlier perspective of 1941, when Marcuse had written: “The revolution requires the maturity of many forces, but the greatest among them is the subjective force, namely the revolutionary class itself. The realization of freedom requires the free rationality of those who achieve it” (1941, p. 319). Marcuse’s new perspective of 1960 on dialectics was probably rooted in the Nietzschean approach found in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which itself marked a turn away from the Hegelian Marxism of the prewar Frankfurt School.[15] The sharp differences reflected in Marcuse’s preface to the 1960 edition of Reason and Revolution and Dunayevskaya’s subsequent review of Soviet Marxism were to underlie the next major phase of their correspondence, which was to end with a burst of polemics.
HEGELIAN DIALECTIC AND SOCIAL THEORY
This next phase in the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence began more than two years later, with Marcuse’s letter of August 8, 1960 asking for Dunayevskaya’s response to his work on what was to become his best-known book, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964). Marcuse writes that “my new book with the tentative title Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is some sort of western counterpart of Soviet Marxism.” Seemingly picking up directly from where he left off in his preface to Marxism and Freedom, Marcuse poses “a question of a changing…more affirmative attitude of the laborer not only to the system as a whole but even to the organization of work in the more highly organized plants.” Marcuse asks for Dunayevskaya’s “considered evaluation” of this issue in the U.S., as well as references to “American literature on this pro and con.”
Dunayevskaya’s response to Marcuse’s request—in a letter of August 16—included a description of the current issue of News & Letters, particularly a section entitled “Workers Battle Automation,” which contained articles with “workers speaking for themselves on the conditions of labor and alleged high standard of living.” Dunayevskaya’s letter also included an extensive bibliography of works (mostly sociological) on labor, automation, class, and community, as well as Dunayevskaya’s own views, “which differ very radically from your views,” she informs Marcuse. Dunayevskaya directs Marcuse’s attention specifically to a debate between two worker activists on automation. Angela Terrano, a factory worker who had been quoted in Marxism and Freedom to the effect that work in a new society would have to be “something completely new, not just work to get money to buy food and things. . . . It will have to be completely tied up with life” (Dunayevskaya [1958] 2000, p. 275), rejects automation altogether. Charles Denby, a Black autoworker and editor of News & Letters, held that workers’ control of production and a shorter work-day, in the context of the abolition of capitalism, would be needed to realize the potentials of automation. In the section of this letter offering her own views, Dunayevskaya also takes up where the discussion between them left off with the completion of Marxism and Freedom. She questions whether Marcuse, with his views on “the transformation of the laboring classes,” had not “fallen into the trap of viewing Marxian socialism as if it were a distributive philosophy.”
Marcuse’s response, in a letter of August 24, 1960, essentially restates his earlier points on automation, complete with references to the Grundrisse and to Capital, similarly to his argument in the preface to Marxism and Freedom. However, a notable addition to his 1958 argument includes explicit reference to a convergence of “interests” between capitalists and workers in “advanced industrial society.” He writes that “genuine automation” (instead of the current restricted, partial mode), which would “explode” the capitalist system, was being “held back by the capitalists as well as the workers.” They did so on different grounds: for the capitalists, “decline in the rate of profit, need for sweeping government controls, etc.; on the part of the workers, technological unemployment.” He concludes: “Re Angela T.: you should really tell her about all that humanization of labor, its connection with life, etc.—that this is possible only through complete automation, because such humanization is correctly relegated by Marx to the realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity, i.e., beyond the entire realm of socially necessary labor in the material production. Total de-humanization of the latter is the prerequisite.”[16]
On October 16, 1960 Dunayevskaya sent a long letter to Marcuse on Hegel’s absolute idea and the Hungarian and African Revolutions. This letter began with an implicit response to Marcuse’s previous letter, as she characterized the sociologists he was studying as “mechanical materialists” in the tradition of the Bolshevik theoretician Nikolai Bukharin, a topic to which she was to return in the coming weeks. In this October 16 letter Dunayevskaya addresses what she sees as some limitations to Lenin’s concept of dialectic, at the point where he skipped over the last paragraph of Hegel’s Science of Logic in his Philosophical Notebooks:
But the materialist in Lenin so overwhelmed him at this point of historic revelation that, you will recall, he wanted to stop where “Hegel stretched his hand to materialism” as he “ended” with Nature. Since that was so in the Smaller Logic, but there was another very important paragraph to go in the Science of Logic, the dividing point for our epoch is precisely on this free, individual, total liberation who show, both in thought and struggles, what they are aiming us and thus compelling me in any case to read and reread that Absolute Knowledge, Absolute Idea, Absolute Mind as each developing struggle on the world scene deepens.
She had addressed these issues in the 1953 Letters, but not in Marxism and Freedom. The letter ends with the statement that she is “dying to go to Africa.” Dunayevskaya traveled to West Africa two years later, after which she published a series of articles in Africa Today and other journals on African Socialism as a form of socialist humanism.
In another letter of November 22, 1960, Dunayevskaya links her critiques of automation and empirical sociology to her earlier critiques of Bukharin. Following Lenin, she had been attacking Bukharin ever since the 1940s for failing to appreciate national liberation movements as the dialectical opposition to imperialism. She had also been attacking his mechanical materialism, something she linked to Lenin’s characterization of Bukharin in his Will as a theoretician who had failed to grasp the dialectic. In this letter, she emphasized the latter point, centered on a critique of Bukharin’s classic Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (1921):
In place of self-activity, Bukharin, as all good determinists, looks for states of equilibrium; “laws” of development, uniformity. . . . Having defined science as objective content in and for itself, [Bukharin] can classify “bourgeois” science and “proletarian” science according to the abstract universal of usefulness or what would nowadays be called “neutrality.” His choice of “proletarian” science is therefore quantitative—it is more “far-sighted.” Even as[17] today’s Soviet as well as American sciences, Bukharin keeps using categories of a lower order, particularly mathematical categories which preclude self-movement and transformation into opposite for he seems not very oppressively aware of the fact that specific contents have specific forms of movement, and man’s self-activity cannot be subsumed under science, whether that is “near sighted” or “far sighted.”[18]
Marcuse does not respond to this effort on Dunayevskaya’s part to link her critique of science, technology, and mechanical materialism to some of his own concerns.
Sometime in the fall of 1960, Dunayevskaya sends Marcuse an excerpt of an early draft of her Philosophy and Revolution. Marcuse writes to Dunayevskaya once more on Hegel’s absolutes in a letter of December 22, 1960, responding both to her letters and to the draft material, on which he writes a handwritten critique. His letter states:
To me, the most important passages are those in which you stress the need for a reformulation of the relation between theory and practice, and the notion of the new Subject. This is indeed the key, and I fully agree with your statement that the solution lies in the link between the first and second negation. Perhaps I would say: in the self-transcendence of materialism, or in the technological Aufhebung of the reified technical apparatus.
Marcuse shifts back to his longstanding differences with Dunayevskaya over Hegel and the dialectic, however: “But again, although I am trying hard, I cannot see why you need the Absolute Idea in order to demonstrate the Marxian content of self-determination of the Subject, etc. (The very concept of the Absolute Idea is altogether tied to and justifies the separation of material and intellectual productivity at the pre-technological stage.) Certainly you can ‘translate’ also this part of Hegel—but why translate if you can speak the original language?” The concept of the absolute idea as “pre-technological thought” was to figure prominently in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. There, Marcuse was to argue that ancient “pre-technological” Greek philosophy contained an element of social critique that had been dropped by modern Western philosophy once the positivist stress on scientific objectivity as a standard for philosophy had come to the fore. While Marcuse’s formulation placed Hegel’s absolute idea within the realm of critical philosophy, as against the anti-Hegelians who tended to regard it as a closed totality that swallowed up all critique, it also suggested that the absolute idea was a holdover from premodern times with little relevance to contemporary capitalist society.
But contemporary relevance was at the heart of Dunayevskaya’s response. She answers him at great length in a 3000-word letter dated January 12, 1961, in which she writes:
If I must further justify myself, I would say that, frankly during the 1940s, when I first became enamored with the Absolute Idea, it was just out of loyalty to Marx and Lenin; Hegel was still hardly more than gibberish, although by now the music of his language got to me even if I couldn’t read the notes. But once the new technological period of Automation got to the miners and they started asking questions about what kind of labor, the return to the early Marx also meant the late Hegel. As I said, I do not agree with you that the Absolute Idea relates to a pre-technological stage. (So long as classes still exist, the dialectic will, and A. I. will forever show new facets.) What I do agree with is that once on the world scale, we have reached the ultimate in technological development, then the responses of the masses in the pre-technological under-developed economies are the spur to seeing something new in the Absolute Idea. Be it backward Ireland in 1916 or backward Russia in 1917, or backward Africa in 1960, somehow that absolute negativity of Hegel comes into play.
Marcuse does not answer her further on dialectics. Instead he takes issue with how Dunayevskaya had called his friend Isaac Deutscher a near-Stalinist. Marcuse attacks her as somehow in league with the U.S. government because of her sharp criticisms of Deutscher, Castro, etc. (letter of March 6, 1961). Here is where the correspondence breaks off for several years, as Dunayevskaya answers him equally sharply.
Later in 1961, Dunayevskaya published a stinging critique of Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism, which had just been reprinted in a paperback edition. This book, first published only two years after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which it ignored, was surprisingly uncritical of the Soviet Union. Douglas Kellner holds that “Marcuse’s discussion of the Soviet bureaucracy . . . is really not as critical as one might expect,” and he concludes that “it is probably Marcuse’s most problematical work” (1984, pp. 201, 207). In her review, reprinted in the appendix to this volume, Dunayevskaya portrayed the book as a definite step backward in relation to Marcuse’s earlier “profound study, Reason and Revolution,” with its stress on human self-emancipation in Hegel and Marx. She suggests that the absence of a concept of state capitalism leads Marcuse into “a method of blaming everybody—Marx, Lenin, the proletariat, above all the proletariat—in order to avoid facing the reality of the new stage of world capitalism—state capitalism—which manifested itself first on the historical stage in the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia.” The chapter on dialectics, she holds, does “shine forth with some fine Hegelian-Marxian perspectives,” but even these lead to flawed conclusions. Finally, she writes that where “even a Sartre had to separate himself from Russia’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolutionaries and hail the Hungarian Freedom Fighters,” Marcuse’s focus is not on the self-liberation movements from within, as seen in his statement that “the ruled tend not only to submit to their rulers but also to reproduce in themselves their subordination.”
MARCUSE’S ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN AND AFTER
After a hiatus of more than three years, Dunayevskaya writes to Marcuse in August 1964. While this reopens their dialogue briefly, and they begin to meet occasionally again in the 1970s, their correspondence never resumes anything like the intensity or warmth of the period 1954–1960. In this letter of 1964, she mentions her recent critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation of an existential Marxism[19] and encloses some of her writings on Africa. She also tells him that she will be reviewing One-Dimensional Man, which has just appeared. Marcuse responds, in a letter of October 7, 1964, that he “found particularly interesting your critique of Sartre,” but seemed to disagree with it, writing that Sartre was “one of the few who knows and says what is going on.”[20] Marcuse concludes by expressing his deep ambivalence toward Dunayevskaya’s work, writing that he had “rarely come across a case with such a large area of agreement and large area of disagreement.”
One-Dimensional Man begins with the notion that modern capitalist society has become “one-dimensional” in the sense that the deep contradictions between labor and capital of Marx’s time were no longer operative. Marcuse writes that in this relatively affluent society, where automated production, the labor bureaucracy that dominates the trade unions, and the culture industry have channeled class consciousness into directions harmless to the system, the “working class... no longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society” (Marcuse 1964, p. 31). Instead, opposition takes the form of the “Great Refusal—the protest against that which is” (1964, p. 63), but this is felt only by artists and other marginalized groups, not by any of the major social classes.
In the second part of the book, “One-Dimensional Thought,” Marcuse skewers analytical philosophy and positivist social science. In its flattening of concepts into a “false concreteness,” analytical philosophy is “destructive of philosophic thought, and of critical thought as such” (1964, pp. 174, 176). Positivist social science operationalizes concepts like alienation that once had a critical character, reducing them to a series of empirically based specifics shorn of any real social critique: “The methodological translation of the universal into the operational concept then becomes repressive reduction of thought” (Marcuse 1964, p. 108). In the concluding section on alternatives Marcuse focuses again on the “Great Refusal” as the only remaining source of oppositional consciousness, to “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable” (1964, p. 256).
Marcuse’s introduction to One-Dimensional Man acknowledges, among other sources on labor, Dunayevskaya’s newspaper News & Letters. He cites her colleague Charles Denby’s Workers Battle Automation, but disagrees with its conclusions. Dunayevskaya’s critical review of One-Dimensional Man, published in The Activist and reprinted in the appendix to this volume, stresses the second half of Marcuse’s book, with its sections on “One-Dimensional Thought” and “The Chance of the Alternatives.” Despite her major disagreements, especially concerning the first half of the book, Dunayevskaya praises One-Dimensional Man as “a ringing challenge to thought to live up to a historical commitment to transform ‘technological rationality’ into a truly real, rational, free society,” particularly in its critique of positivist thought. She writes presciently that “the conformists” would attempt to “bury One-Dimensional Man without ever getting a serious dialogue around it started in the academic world.” After which she adds: “I trust the youth will not let this happen,” thus foreshadowing Marcuse’s subsequent popularity among radical youth. He responds to her review in a letter of January 12, 1965: “Your review of my book . . . is probably the most intelligent one so far—as I expected it would be.”
In her one substantial philosophical letter to Marcuse during this period, written on October 27, 1964, Dunayevskaya outlines the structure of her Philosophy and Revolution, also taking up once again Hegel’s absolutes and stressing: “I do not take your position on technology. I am so Hegelian that I still consider that subject absorbs object, and not object subject which then becomes its extension.” Again, she justifies her recourse directly to Hegel as part of her effort to concretize Marxism for the 1960s.
She sends Marcuse some draft material for Philosophy and Revolution as well. On the absolute idea he responds: “I read it once, I read it twice, and am afraid that my old criticism still holds” (letter of November 2, 1964). While this is the extent of their philosophical dialogue during this period, a few months later Marcuse agrees to write a letter in support of Dunayevskaya’s ultimately unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship for Philosophy and Revolution.
After over a decade without much interaction, during which time Marcuse achieved world fame as a philosopher of the New Left, their correspondence resumes in 1976 around their respective Freedom of Information Act files from the FBI.[21] During this period, Marcuse writes to Dunayevskaya, suggesting that she would consider his latest project a bit frivolous: “You will laugh when you hear that I am working on Marxist aesthetics: ‘doesn’t he have other worries?’ But perhaps we do meet again some time somewhere for a good discussion and disagreement” (letter of November 1, 1976). Marcuse died within a year of the publication of his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978).[22] Dunayevskaya’s 1979 memorial article to Marcuse, reprinted in the appendix to this volume, stresses the originality of Reason and Revolution and her critique of One-Dimensional Man. He had, she writes, responded to that critique by calling her a “romantic,” but she adds: “Those gentle eyes of his had a way of smiling even when he was theoretically shouting at you—as if he were saying: ‘It is really good to have one who still believes, for without revolution, what is there?’” She recalls their last conversation in 1978 when Marcuse engaged her in a discussion of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, on the point where Marx had written that in a non-alienated society “labor . . . has become the prime necessity of life.” She writes that at issue was not “what Marx meant”: “No, what he was saying was: since we ‘cannot know’ when labor will become creative as united mental/physical, any more than we can know when the state will ‘wither away’—and we are surely living in a ‘repressive monolith,’ be it the U.S. or Russia—what can we, ‘a very tiny minority,’ do? If you think it is more than the Great Refusal—well!”
Dunayevskaya’s correspondence with Erich Fromm began in 1959, but really developed in 1961, just as that with Marcuse was trailing off. Initially, Dunayevskaya seemed wary of Fromm. Recall that in 1956, she had commented on Eros and Civilization in a letter to Marcuse, seeming to side with Marcuse in his debate with Fromm around the issue of neo-Freudian revisionism and social criticism. In that letter of September 6, 1956 to Marcuse, Dunayevskaya wrote: “You separated what was genius and original [in Freud] from that which became transformed into revisionism. . . . Fromm’s answer to you is a good example. . . . Here is a man who dares to speak in highly moral tones about ‘the callousness towards moral qualities in political figures, which was so apparent in Lenin’s attitude’ while his own moral standards do not stop the man from dragging in Nazism in the hope that its stench will keep readers away from Freud and you.” However, it is unclear whether or not Dunayevskaya had also read Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955a), a work in which, as we discuss below, Fromm favorably assessed Lenin to some extent, and apparently began a process of rethinking Marx’s theories, an important shift from his prior two decades-long focus on revising Freud’s theories.
Fromm was a founding member of the Frankfurt School and an important colleague of Max Horkheimer for nearly a decade, during which time he also interacted with Marcuse. Fromm was the only trained psychoanalyst[23] among the Frankfurt School’s leading members and as Martin Jay has noted, “it was primarily through Fromm’s work that the Institute [Frankfurt School] first attempted to reconcile Freud and Marx” (1973, p. 88). It should be emphasized, however, that this turn to psychoanalytical Marxism was strongly supported by Max Horkheimer, who began to serve as the Frankfurt School’s Director from 1930 onward.[24] Fromm’s major article, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism,” appeared in 1932 in the first volume of the Institute’s journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and later in English in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970).[25] In it, he wrote that the goal of the Frankfurt School’s ongoing study of the psychology of fascism was the development of a theory, rooted in Marx and Freud, capable of “explaining how ideologies arise from the interaction of the psychic apparatus and the socioeconomic conditions” (1970, p. 162).[26] As the 1930s progressed, Fromm revised or rejected key Freudian concepts while retaining and developing others. He argued that as the socio-economic base of society changed so did the function of psychological structures. He revised Freud’s instinct theory, emphasizing, for example, that the Oedipus complex was specific to “patriarchal” societies, while in Freud’s theory it was extended to all human development. By 1936, Fromm was arguing, “The problem within psychology and sociology is the dialectic intertwining of natural and historical factors. Freud has wrongly based psychology totally on natural factors” (cited in Funk 2000, p. 94). As Fromm developed these revisions he remained committed to psychoanalytic theory and practice, but his moves away from Freudian orthodoxy resulted in increasing tensions with Horkheimer and polemics with Theodor Adorno, who formally joined the Institute in 1938. The following year, Fromm was pushed out of the Frankfurt School altogether. With the publication of Escape from Freedom (1941), a study of the psychological appeal of Nazism, Fromm became an internationally celebrated social critic, albeit one often wrongly dismissed in academic circles as a mere popularizer (McLaughlin 1998; see also Bronner 1994).
Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, with its analysis of the “authoritarian personality” susceptible to the appeals of fascism, and Man for Himself (1947) develop the character structures of contemporary individuals, and the ethics, norms, and values of modern societies (Timbreza 2001). To an extent, these writings were grounded in Marxian categories like alienation, even when Fromm did not mention Marx explicitly, something Marcuse had not done in Eros and Civilization either. In The Sane Society, Fromm again offers an interpretation of Marx’s thought, this time as a form of humanism, one of the major “answers” to the “decay and dehumanization behind the glamour and wealth and political power of Western society” (1955a, p. 205). At the same time, as will be discussed below, Fromm criticized Lenin for having helped to lay the ground for Stalinism. On the one hand, he recognized Lenin’s early embrace of the grassroots soviets, “where decision making was rooted in the smallest and most concrete level of decentralized groups” (1955a, p. 227), which Fromm also depicted as a sharp divide from Stalinism. On the other hand, he attacked Lenin for having “no faith in man. . . . Faith in mankind without faith in man is either insincere, or if sincere, leads to the very results which we see in . . . Lenin’s dictatorship” (1955a, pp. 209–10).
At first glance, Fromm appeared to be a far less radical thinker than was Marcuse. That was certainly the verdict of the New Left of the 1960s, which usually sided with Marcuse.[27] But Fromm’s increasing interest in Marxist thought by the late 1950s calls this simplistic judgment into question, as does his 1958 unpublished but very sympathetic article on Trotsky. The latter was a review of Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, issued in 1958 by Harvard University Press, which Fromm may have intended to publish in the mass-circulation Saturday Review, for which he often wrote during this period. In his unpublished review, Fromm deplores the “general habit of considering Stalinism and present-day Communism as identical with, or at least a continuation of revolutionary Marxism,” especially the attempt to link “Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky” to “the vengeful killer Stalin, and to the opportunistic conservative Khrushchev.” Concerning Lenin and Trotsky, he adds: “They were men with an uncompromising sense of truth, penetrating to the very essence of reality, and never taken in by the deceptive surface; of an unquenchable courage and integrity; of deep concern and devotion to man and his future; unselfish and with little vanity or lust for power” (Fromm in Anderson 2002, p. 271). Fromm concludes that “just as was the case with Marx, . . . the concern, understanding and sharing of a deeply loving man . . . shines through Trotsky’s diary” (Fromm in Anderson 2002, p. 272). It may also be worth noting that this review was written in 1958 or later, after the publication of Marxism and Freedom, which, as we have seen, had argued for a total separation between Lenin and Stalin, on both political and philosophical grounds.[28]
The radical psychologist Joel Kovel sums up Fromm’s turn to Marxism, especially Marx’s humanism, as a distinguishing feature of his perspective, as against both orthodox Freudians and some other Freudian Marxists like Wilhelm Reich: “What distinguishes Fromm is the introduction of Marx’s humanism—the humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts—in place of Freudian instinct theory. This emphasis also distinguishes him from the other psychoanalytic Marxists of the time. . . . Fromm, who had not been saddled with Stalinism, was free to develop a socialist-humanist psychoanalysis as part of what he called a democratic decentralizing socialism” (1994, p. xi). It was this socialist humanist thread above all, as well as Fromm’s sympathy for Lenin and Trotsky, which surely constituted the threads of affinity that sustained the Dunayevskaya-Fromm correspondence. These threads of affinity coexisted with some important differences of opinion and intellectual interests, however, although these were not usually expressed openly in their correspondence. At a political level, Dunayevskaya’s positions were much further to the left than were Fromm’s, whose socialist humanism was closer to reformist social democracy than her revolutionary version of Marxist-Humanism. In addition, although he frequently acknowledged the importance of Hegel and dialectics for Marxism, Fromm lacked a deep and sustained interest in this topic. For her part, Dunayevskaya had even less interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, on which she almost never commented in her work, except to acknowledge at a very general level Freud’s having made the field of sexuality an open topic of discussion for the first time.
On June 6, 1959, Fromm wrote to Dunayevskaya, requesting that she translate some of Marx’s early philosophical writings for the book that Fromm was planning to publish on the topic. Fromm concluded the short letter by adding: “I read your book on Marxism and Freedom some months ago, and consider it an exceedingly important and most needed contribution to the socialist literature.”[29] Dunayevskaya’s reply of June 17 offered strong support for Fromm’s planned book on Marx, although she declined to do the translations Fromm requested. She also made a point of referring to her correspondence with Marcuse, writing that he “was sufficiently free of the mores of the academic world to be willing to associate his name with mine, despite our violent disagreements of interpretation of the modern era.” Appealing to Fromm’s affinity to humanism and critiques of Stalinism, she added: “I am delighted to hear that you intend to publish Marx’s writings on philosophy and historical materialism, which, in my view, is more accurately described as humanistic materialism. . . . Since the publication of my book the Communists have redoubled their attacks on Humanism because it is the form of the actual movement against their totalitarian rule in Russia itself and in the Soviet zone. This much I can do for your work—keep you up to date on the latest in the Russian press on the philosophic writings of Marx.”
Fromm’s book, which appeared under the title Marx’s Concept of Man in 1961, probably did more than any other publication to introduce Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts to the wider American public. Marx’s Concept of Man featured a 90-page discussion by Fromm, Tom Bottomore’s translation of most of the 1844 Manuscripts, plus a few other texts by Marx, as well as several brief accounts of Marx by several of his contemporaries. Fromm’s stature as a public intellectual—he had published the best-selling The Art of Loving (1956) only a few years earlier—and his popular form of presentation helped to spark a wide discussion of the young Marx, not only among the broad intellectual public, but also in mass media outlets such as Newsweek.
In his introductory essay, Fromm attacks what he terms “the falsification of Marx’s concepts” in the mass media and even among intellectuals, adding that “this ignorance and distortion of Marx are to be found more in the United States than in any other Western country” ([1961] 1966, p. 1). Too often, he writes, Marx is portrayed as a crude materialist who “neglected the importance of the individual” ([1961] 1966, p. 2). Fromm refutes this, holding that “the very aim of Marx is to liberate man from the pressure of economic needs, so that he can be fully human” ([1961] 1966, p. 5). In so doing, he names some of those who fell into these errors and distortions, including the leading sociologist and Cold War liberal Daniel Bell. A second “falsification” of Marx, this one carried out by both Western intellectuals and Stalinist ideologues, was the forced identification of Marx with the single-party totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Fromm sharply differentiates “Marxist humanist socialism,” on the one hand, from “totalitarian socialism,” on the other ([1961] 1966, p. viii), with the latter in reality “a system of conservative state capitalism” ([1961] 1966, p. vii). Finally, after surveying the European scene (both East and West) for significant developments in Marxist humanism, Fromm assesses the U.S. scene: “In the United States, the most important work which has opened up an understanding of Marx’s humanism is Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution; Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, with a preface by H. Marcuse, is also a significant addition to Marxist-humanist thought” ([1961] 1966, p. 74).
Fromm sometimes imposes his own more eclectic form of humanism on Marx, however, when he writes that “Marx’s philosophy constitutes a spiritual existentialism in secular language” and that Marx’s concept of socialism is rooted in “prophetic Messianism” ([1961] 1966, p. 5). Cold War liberals—and some of those on the Left who had sided with the West in the Cold War—seized upon this eclecticism to attack Fromm, whom they already resented for his critiques of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. But their real target was the whole new view of Marx as a radical humanist that Fromm was presenting. Sidney Hook, to whom Bell had dedicated his book The End of Ideology (1960), and who as mentioned earlier had attacked Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, pontificated: “To seek what was distinctive and characteristic about Marx in a period when he was still in Hegelian swaddling clothes . . . is to violate every accepted and tested canon of historical scholarship” (New Leader, Dec. 11, 1961). Nonetheless, the ground was shifting toward a fuller appreciation of the whole of Marx and of the themes of dialectics, alienation, and humanism in his work.
Beyond Fromm’s explicit acknowledgement of Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom in Marx’s Concept of Man, additional and perhaps even more important indications about this influence—or at the least a shift in his thinking on Marx—emerge through another look at his treatment of Marxism in The Sane Society. In the latter, Fromm concluded that “for us in the middle of the twentieth century it is very easy to recognize Marx’s fallacy . . . we have seen the tragic illustration of this fallacy occurring in Russia” (1955a, p. 233); by contrast, in Marx’s Concept of Man Fromm wrote of the Soviet Union as “a system of a conservative state capitalism and not the realization of Marxian Socialism” ([1961] 1966, p. vii), adding that making this distinction clear was essential in “the battle for the minds of men” ([1961] 1966, p. viii). These arguments for the contemporary importance and relevance of Marx’s thought as a positive model—and in contrast to Soviet “state capitalism”—were precisely the central themes of Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom. And where The Sane Society had sharply attacked Lenin, Marx’s Concept of Man refrained from doing so.
Between Fromm’s publication of Marx’s Concept of Man in 1961 and that of his edited collection Socialist Humanism in 1965, to which Dunayevskaya and Marcuse both contributed essays, Dunayevskaya and Fromm corresponded occasionally. In terms of his engagement with Marx, these years also saw the publication of Fromm’s intellectual autobiography, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (1962), in which he acknowledged that Marx was for him the more important of the two thinkers. This early phase of the Dunayevskaya-Fromm correspondence included dialogue on Marx’s Concept of Man; Dunayevskaya’s attempts to engage Fromm in a discussion of the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind; exchanges on the Socialist Humanism volume, particularly Dunayevskaya’s contribution to it; and several critiques of Marcuse’s writings. Curiously, however, despite nearly two decades of friendly correspondence, Dunayevskaya and Fromm never met face to face.
In her letter to Fromm of October 11, 1961 that reopened their correspondence, Dunayevskaya criticizes Marx’s Concept of Man. First, she questions Fromm’s reference to “Marcuse’s brilliant and penetrating book, Reason and Revolution, and the same author’s discussion of Marx’s theories vs. Soviet Marxism in Soviet Marxism,” seeing both of them as sources “for the philosophical basis of Marx’s thought” ([1961] 1966, p. 3). Offering a harsh verdict on Soviet Marxism, she adds: “In reading your ‘Marx’s Concept of Man’ I noted that you referred to the works of Herbert Marcuse as if there were no difference between the period when he wrote his wonderful ‘Reason and Revolution’ and that in which he wrote his whitewash of Communist perversions in his ‘Soviet Marxism.’ I will not go into my views on the latter since I wrote about them extensively, and enclose herewith my review. The reason I mention it is that it illuminates the pitfalls awaiting one if the Humanism of Marxism is treated abstractly—and the dialectic of the present development is analyzed on a totally different basis.”
Second, Dunayevskaya criticizes Fromm’s essay itself for dealing with Marx’s early essays “in too general terms.” She contrasts Fromm’s approach with how Marxism and Freedom, in linking Marx’s humanism with all three volumes of Capital, had shown its “urgency for our day” in “the concrete terms of Russia, on the one extreme, and independent Marxism on the other end . . . [while] Marcuse goes to Russia which he most certainly knows is not the Humanism of Marxism which he has proclaimed to be the true Marxism.” Having stated these criticisms, Dunayevskaya’s letter nonetheless concludes with a plea to Fromm to “exert [his] influence to bring these serious discussions into the open, and invite me to participate in them,” this versus what she calls the “‘bourgeois conspiracy of silence’ against works like my Marxism and Freedom.” All this suggested—despite her criticisms—a substantial core of agreement with Fromm. Evidently, Dunayevskaya believed that publication of Marx’s Concept of Man had the potential to shake up the discussion of Marxism in the U.S., affecting a wide range of intellectuals, from Marcuse, whom she considers to be too uncritical of the USSR, to Bell, whom she characterizes as a supporter of “American capital.” Fromm responded politely to Dunayevskaya’s criticisms, but the correspondence did not go very much further at this point.
Dunayevskaya reopened the correspondence again two years later, in a letter of November 21, 1963 in which she writes that the “central reason for this correspondence is a sort of an appeal to you for a dialogue on Hegel between us. I believe I once told you that I had for a long time carried on such a written discussion with Herbert Marcuse, especially relating to the ‘Absolute Idea.’ With his publication of Soviet Marxism, this became impossible because, whereas we had never seen eye to eye, until his rationale for Communism, the difference in viewpoints only helped the development of ideas, but the gulf widened too much afterward.” The bulk of Dunayevskaya’s letter constitutes an analysis of “Spirit in Self-Estrangement—The Discipline of Culture,” a chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. She connects this chapter of the Phenomenology, with its discussion of “the inversion of reality and thought,” to the section on “fetishism of commodities” in Capital:
Now this inversion of thought to reality is exactly what Marx deals with in “The Fetishism of Commodities,” and it is the reason for his confidence in the proletariat as Reason as against the bourgeois “false consciousness,” or the fall of philosophy to ideology. Marx insists that a commodity, far from being something as simple as it appears, is a “fetish” which makes the conditions of capitalist production appear as self-evident truths of social production. All who look at the appearance, therefore, the duality of the commodity, of the labor incorporated in it, of the whole society based on commodity “culture.” It is true that the greater part of his famous section is concerned with showing that the fantastic form of appearance of the relations between men as if it were an exchange of things is the truth of relations in the factory itself where the worker has been transformed into an appendage to a machine. But the very crucial footnotes all relate to the fact that even the discoverers of labor as the source of value, Smith and Ricardo, could not escape becoming prisoners of this fetishism because therein they met their historic barrier.
Dunayevskaya notes that she had reread Hegel’s “Spirit in Self-Estrangement” as she worked on writing a critical review of Sartre’s work Search for a Method, in which he had included a critique of Marx’s theory of fetishism while also declaring himself a Marxist. Again, Fromm does not respond substantially, probably because he lacked a deep knowledge of Hegel.
But Dunayevskaya’s letter, which must have impressed Fromm, resulted in something else, a major breakthrough for her in terms of finding a larger audience for her work. A few months later, in a letter of February 14, 1964, he invites her to contribute to his new edited book, “a symposium on socialist humanism which is to be published by Doubleday,” one of the largest publishers in the U.S. The next eight letters between them discuss issues related to this collection, including Dunayevskaya’s own contribution to it, “Marx’s Humanism Today.”
It was in this period, soon after Dunayevskaya had completed her “Marx’s Humanism Today” for Socialist Humanism—and never having received a reply from Fromm to her long letter on Hegel’s Phenomenology—that, as we have seen, she attempted to reopen her correspondence with Marcuse in her letter of October 1964. In another 1964 letter to Fromm, which has apparently not been preserved, Dunayevskaya seems to have discussed her correspondence with Marcuse. In his letter to Dunayevskaya of July 15, 1964, Fromm writes, “I hope I will get around soon to answering you re your correspondence with Marcuse. Have you read his latest book [One-Dimensional Man]? I began, but am somewhat puzzled.” Dunayevskaya’s response to Fromm, in a letter of July 21, makes several critical observations on One-Dimensional Man that are a bit sharper in tone than her published review. These are exemplified by her observation that although Marcuse “attacks the status quo, he himself has very nearly given in to technology by attributing to it truly phenomenal powers.” Dunayevskaya also rejects the idea, which she had already discerned in Marcuse’s “previous discussions,” that Hegel’s absolute idea “was no more than the proof of the separation of mental and manual labor in the pre-technological stage of history.” Dunayevskaya concludes that “the objective compulsion to [Hegel’s] thought came from the French Revolution, not from pre-technology or post-technology.”
While it contained little overt discussion of Hegel, Dunayevskaya’s contribution to Socialist Humanism, “Marx’s Humanism Today,” focused nonetheless on the idea that there were indeed philosophical requirements for overcoming a capitalism that had assumed both “private” and “state” forms. Here we can mention only a few key points: Dunayevskaya draws attention to (1) the 1872–75 French edition of Capital, Vol. I, where Marx wrote for the first time of the “law of concentration and centralization of capital ‘in the hands of one single capitalist, or those of one single corporation’” (Fromm [1965] 1966, p. 69); (2) the fact that “‘Western philosophy’ . . . never saw the philosophical implications” in her 1943–44 debate with the Russian Stalinists over the law of value, including how they “had to deny the dialectic structure of Capital” in teaching that work by skipping the first chapter (Fromm [1965] 1966, p. 71); and (3) Capital, Volume III, where Marx’s analysis of the realm of freedom—“the development of human power, which is its own end”—is seen to be thoroughly consistent with his humanist writings of 1844 (Fromm 1966, p. 78).
Marcuse’s contribution—entitled “Socialist Humanism?”—questioned the general thrust of Fromm’s volume. Again, as with Dunayevskaya’s contribution, we can do no more than introduce a few key points in Marcuse’s piece: (1) that existing capitalist and socialist societies shared key characteristics, such as the centrality of a technological apparatus; (2) that the trajectory of existing “state socialist” societies was nonetheless positive in that the barriers to socialist humanism were not fundamentally internal but rather external in the sense of the costs entailed by competition with the West; (3) that both the “young Marx’s” concept of the “all-round individual,” and the mature Marx’s “realm of freedom” currently appeared to be “idealistic and optimistic” in view of the “technological management of freedom and self-realization . . . the assimilation of freedom and necessity, of satisfaction and repression, and the aspirations of politics, business, and the individual” (Fromm [1965] 1966, p. 112); (4) that the reconstruction of the technical apparatus of production, distribution and consumption, the mechanization of labor, not its emancipation, defines the possibility of a new post-capitalist humanism (Fromm [1965] 1966, p. 111). The overall tone of Marcuse’s essay is imbued with the notion of a one-dimensional society that experiences “technical progress as political progress in domination” in a situation where, “if suppression is compatible with individual autonomy and operates through individual autonomy, then the Nomos (norm) which the individual gives himself is that of servitude” (Fromm [1965] 1966, 116). In this sense, Marcuse questions the relevance of socialist humanism to contemporary society.
In Fromm’s own essay for Socialist Humanism, “The Application of Humanist Psychoanalysis to Marx’s Theory,” he treats six concepts where he maintains that humanist psychoanalysis, usually as specific revisions of Freud’s theories, can contribute to the realization of Marx’s theory: character (as social character); the unconscious (as social unconscious); repression (as fear of social isolation); the essence and nature of the human being; determinism; and alienation. By far, Fromm devotes the most space to “social character,” citing his previous work and discussing how the concept could help answer questions that had been ignored by Marx and later Marxists. Of the remaining five concepts, for all but the last—alienation—Fromm indicates the Freudian interpretation as well as the specific revisions that a humanist psychoanalysis would require. Fromm intimates that the concept of alienation is perhaps the one Freud dealt with the least. Fromm holds that the concept needs to be examined in its relationship to typically Freudian concepts, such as narcissism, depression, idolatry, etc., and that “psychoanalysis has all the tools to accomplish this” (Fromm [1965] 1966, p. 244). Fromm’s essay also touches upon themes like state-capitalism, revolution, Marx’s concept of a post-capitalist society, and the Frankfurt School.
THE LATER DUNAYEVSKAYA-FROMM CORRESPONDENCE
Two important themes of Dunayevskaya and Fromm’s post-Socialist Humanism correspondence were (1) intellectual ferment and revolt in Eastern Europe and (2) critical assessment of other members of Marcuse, Adorno, and the Frankfurt School. Dunayevskaya and Fromm demonstrated great interest in and developed personal contacts with Eastern European dissidents in the period leading up to the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Their letters also document Fromm’s help in securing Spanish and German editions of Dunayevskaya’s books. Others discuss the need to defend Marcuse against right-wing attacks.
Several letters comment on Sartre as well as Marcuse. In one dated September 13, 1965, Fromm writes: “I personally believe that Sartre represents the quintessence of the mood of a decaying bourgeoisie, renouncing however all religious and idealistic ideology and claiming wrongly to be the philosophy of the future by making an alleged synthesis with Marxism. The essence of his philosophy is an extreme form of egocentric ‘individualism’ . . . . The basic contrast to Marx lies in its profound hopelessness and despair about man, not to speak of his theory of absolute freedom.” Dunayevskaya, in her response of September 23, is not completely convinced by this explanation, which does not account for Sartre’s popularity among radicals: “You are, of course, right about his egocentricity and his thoroughly bourgeois nature. But that, too, does not explain the pull he exercised over many who thought themselves revolutionary [and it] shows the decadence of our so-called revolutionaries as well as of the bourgeoisie.” This exchange continues with another letter by Fromm.
Later correspondence returns to Marcuse. This includes an exchange in the summer of 1968 about the need to defend Marcuse in the face of the death threats he had received after having become a prominent intellectual supporter of the global student uprisings of that year. In a letter of August 10, 1968 to Dunayevskaya, Fromm writes that in light of the attacks on Marcuse, he has removed a critical chapter on him from a forthcoming book. Dunayevskaya responds in a letter of August 10 that they should defend Marcuse against the Right but urges him “not to discard your criticism” (while also expressing doubt that she would agree with the specifics of Fromm’s criticisms) because “I feel very strongly on the historic blunders made when revolutionaries feel that martyrs must never be criticized.” Fromm’s Revolution of Hope, a collection of essays offering a socio-psychological critique of U.S. society during that tumultuous year, came off the press in fall 1968. Near the beginning was a long footnote criticizing Marcuse as a philosopher of “hopelessness” who “presents his personal despair as a theory of radicalism” that lacked any real concern with politics and the needed “steps between the present and the future” (Fromm 1968, pp. 8–9).[30] It should be noted at this point that while Marcuse and Dunayevskaya generally supported (with varying degrees of critical distance) the revolutionary side of the New Left, Fromm supported the antiwar liberal Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Fromm did not cut his ties to the radical student movement, however, as seen in the fact that he agreed to appear as a speaker at the June 1968 counter-commencement at Columbia University, which had just suppressed a major student uprising in which Marcuse’s ideas figured prominently.
Three years later, in a letter of July 25, 1971, Dunayevskaya notes the publication of Fromm’s new book, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis, which included a lengthy critique of Marcuse’s interpretations of Freud. She sends Fromm the completed draft of Philosophy and Revolution, and asks him for help in finding a publisher. She also criticizes Marcuse again in light of his recent writings, especially An Essay on Liberation, in which he had written of the radical youth movement in the face of war and state repression as a venue where, “prior to all political strategy and organization, liberation becomes a ‘biological’ need,” something that was “a far cry from the ideal humanism and humanitas; it is a struggle for life, not as masters and slaves, but as men and women” (1969, pp. 51, 52). In this letter of July 25, 1971, Dunayevskaya argues in this letter: “Every time Marcuse tries to bridge the divisions within himself—between the desire for instant revolution to the point of depending on ‘biological solidarity’ and the deep down pessimism about mankind having become one-dimensional in thought, in body (eroticism included?) and, above all, in labor becoming thing [sic!][31]—it is as if he willed the death of the dialectic!”
The later letters between Dunayevskaya and Fromm feature discussion of Fromm’s never-published review of Philosophy and Revolution, which appeared posthumously as the introduction to the German edition of 1981, an edition he had helped to arrange. In a letter of March 6, 1973, a few months before it first appeared in English, Fromm tells Dunayevskaya that Philosophy and Revolution represented a “great contribution to the theoretical and political situation re socialism.” There is also some discussion of Fromm’s books-in-progress—Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) and To Have or To Be? (1976), as well as of Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, published in 1982, two years after Fromm’s death.
Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution came off the press in the fall of 1973, during the same period that a number of noted works in dialectical thought were being translated into English for the first time, among them Marx’s Grundrisse (1973), Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1971), and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1973). Philosophy and Revolution began with a chapter on “Absolute Negativity as New Beginning” that traced her concept of Hegel’s absolutes as a source of revolutionary dialectics through his major works. Although Dunayevskaya noted that Hegel’s philosophy was rooted in history and thus contained aspects of materialism, she saw not this but what Marx termed the power of abstraction as the key to Hegel and the revolutionary dialectic: “Precisely where Hegel sounds most abstract, seems to close the shutters tight against the whole movement of history, there he lets the lifeblood of the dialectic—absolute negativity—pour in” (Dunayevskaya [1973] 1989, p. 32). Thus, a plunge into Hegel’s abstract absolutes could offer new beginnings for revolutionary thought. This was followed by a chapter on Marx that stressed the birth of the Marxian dialectic in 1844, the creativity and the limitations of the Grundrisse, and the fetishism section of Capital. In discussing the Grundrisse on machinery, she noted that it was an unfinished work and argued that it did not re-create the dialectic anew in the way that Marx was able to do a decade later in Capital. She also took issue with those like Marcuse who, she writes, “regard technology as if it ‘absorbed’ the proletariat,” in part on the basis of the discussion of machinery in the Grundrisse, here referring to One-Dimensional Man ([1973] 1989, pp. 70–71). A much-discussed chapter on Lenin focused on his 1914–1915 Hegel Notebooks as a new departure, while also noting his ambivalent stance toward Hegel as a major limitation of his thought. Long critical chapters addressed other thinkers whom Dunayevskaya regarded as far more limited and problematic—Trotsky, Mao, and Sartre. The last three chapters took up various forms of contemporary revolutionary ferment, both in ideas and in action: Africa’s anti-colonial liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s and their socialist humanist dimension; the Eastern European revolts of 1953, 1956, and 1968 and their relationship to the philosophy of socialist humanism; the Black, student and worker revolts in the 1960s in the U.S., France, and other Western capitalist lands and the ideas that motivated them. The chapter on Eastern Europe built on the essays in Fromm’s Socialist Humanism by Ivan Svitak, Bronislaw Bazcko, and especially Karel Kosík, author of The Dialectics of the Concrete, whom she termed a “rigorous” philosopher.
Fromm expressed particular interest in the chapter on Sartre. There, Dunayevskaya credits Sartre with opening up the question of the absolute in postwar philosophy, this versus the easygoing moderation of prewar liberalism and social democracy, which could not meet the test of fascism. But her basic thrust is toward a sharp critique. Where Marcuse had seen a form of bourgeois individualism lurking behind Sartre’s “nihilistic” preoccupations with nothingness, with absurdity, and with the difficulty of human solidarity (“hell is other people”), Dunayevskaya countered: “The real tragedy is that ‘behind’ Sartre’s nihilistic language lurks—nothing” ([1973] 1989, p. 196). This led, she held, to a voluntaristic form of subjectivity, an abstract universalism that sought to overcome objective reality through the will or through a radical concept of choice. Sartre’s attempts to unite his form of existentialism with Marxism fell far short, not only for this reason, but also because of the fact that the Marxism he took up was more often orthodox Stalinism or Maoism, rather than the critical, dialectical, or humanist versions of Marxism. This resulted in a sort of “metaphysic of Stalinism,” in which Sartre in too many cases justified the rule of the party over the worker ([1973] 1989, p. 208).
In a letter of December 1, 1974, Dunayevskaya recounts her participation at a meeting of the Hegel Society of America, where she discussed the themes of Philosophy and Revolution: “The Hegelians, orthodox, have actually been more serious about my work than the so-called Left. I have just returned from the conference where I read my paper on Hegel’s Absolutes as New Beginnings and almost got a standing ovation; they were falling asleep over their own learned theses, and here I was not only dealing with dialectics of liberation—Hegel as well as Marx tho the former was, by his own design, limited to thought—but ranging in critique of all modern works [including] Adorno’s Negative Dialectics . . . On the other end, they were amazed that 200 came out to hear me—to them that was ‘endless mass.’”
This phase of the correspondence includes an expanding criticism of Marcuse’s theories and of the Frankfurt School more generally, as well as other discussion of Marxist thinkers, most notably Nikolai Bukharin and Rosa Luxemburg. In a letter of February 13, 1975, Fromm mentions Cohen’s noted study of Bukharin: “I am reading right now a book by Stephen F. Cohen, entitled Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. I find the book very interesting and actually written with great sympathy for Bukharin and Lenin. . . . The author stresses . . . that the whole change into centralism, terror etc. was entirely brought about by civil war, and quite in contrast to all intentions of Lenin and Bukharin before.” Dunayevskaya responds at some length in a letter of February 19, which begins by recapitulating some of her earlier critiques of Bukharin: “I naturally was glad to read an objective study that helps right the record on terror in general and Bukharin in particular. Since the dialectic is the center of my attention, and that is exactly where Bukharin went amiss, I do not have as high a view as [Cohen] does of Bukharin. . . . Regarding the economic plan, that is even more proof of the mechanical rather than dialectical form of development than Bukharin’s mechanical Historical Materialism . . . And Bukharin’s Economics of the Transition Period . . . led Lenin to write that sharp summation of Bukharin as being ‘major theoretician’ and ‘not understanding dialectic.’” In this sense, Dunayevskaya held to her old criticism of Bukharin’s mechanical materialism, which she linked to positivism, as discussed above in her correspondence with Marcuse.
But she also showed a greater appreciation than in her previous writings for Bukharin’s attempt to stand up to Stalin at a crucial moment. This occurred at the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923, where an infirm and dying Lenin had wanted Stalin to be attacked for trampling the national rights of the Georgians: “The one thing that I loved most of all of Bukharin is both his audacity and ‘correctness’ in daring the damned Congress where Trotsky who was empowered by Lenin to act in his behalf on the Georgian question ‘conciliated.’ Moreover, it is not only the bravery, it is the depth of his understanding the National Question, the very question which he hadn’t previously understood. . . . But, suddenly, once Bolsheviks were involved, and still Stalin displayed ‘Great Russian chauvinism,’ Bukharin caught it as both principle and national life and culture and revolutionary—all three together.” In a letter of June 9, 1975, Fromm responds, after apologizing for the delay: “As far as Bukharin is concerned, the only one of his writings which I have read was the ABC of Communism . . . and that was fifty years ago. I was then more negatively impressed by the narrowness and the mechanistic outlook of his writing and I guess for this reason later on never cared to read more by him, and Cohen’s book struck me and impressed me because he shows a much richer personality than I had really expected.”
The last years of the Dunayevskaya-Fromm correspondence, 1975–1978, continue with more exchanges about Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, as well as indications of continued efforts to find common ground in their different approaches to Marxist humanism. There is some discussion of Philosophy and Revolution, including: Dunayevskaya asks Fromm to write a preface to the German translation; Fromm dialogues with Dunayevskaya concerning sources in Marx for his last major work, To Have or To Be? (1976); and Fromm lends strong encouragement to Dunayevskaya’s development of her ideas on Rosa Luxemburg and gender, which culminated in the publication of her Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982).
As with Sartre, Fromm’s critical remarks on Marcuse are often “characterological.” A new round of discussion on Marcuse began in June 1975, after Fromm “half-jokingly” referred to him as a “friend” of Dunayevskaya. In a letter of June 30, 1975, Dunayevskaya writes that “ever since he had introduced Marxism and Freedom, he has felt so very uncomfortable in my ‘extreme’ ‘anti-Russian’ attitudes that by the time of the mid-1960s and his espousal of ‘biological solidarity’. . . there has hardly been any contact. Angela Davis, even when she was freed and yet totally refused to sign against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and all East European revolts is his new heroine. I attribute it to his impatience of wanting any revolution before his days are over, or so he fears.” Fromm responds in a letter of July 8: “I think your comment on his political attitude is very well taken; it refers to his great egotism and it is only another aspect of this that, as far as I can see, he is terribly concerned with his ‘image’ and much of what he says and, I guess, thinks, is determined by the wish to keep it shining, not to lose customers.” Fromm also expresses interest in Dunayevskaya’s new writings on “women’s liberation.”[32]
In addition, he asks her for advice on writings by Marx relevant for To Have or to Be? She discusses a number of Marx references in a letter of July 16, 1975. The theme being vs. having, with the latter characteristic of capitalism, is already prominent in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. It had long been a topic of interest for both Fromm and Dunayevskaya.
In this same letter of July 16, Dunayevskaya emphasizes again that while she had always “been at odds” with Marcuse, her “total parting of the ways” with him came in the 1960s. In a letter of July 28, Fromm criticizes Marcuse’s “romantic thinking in his vision of the ideal that the new man would live a completely eroticist life, enjoy the perversions of sadism and coprophilia and live the life actually of the playful child.” As to the Frankfurt School, Fromm makes some very acerbic comments: “These people, particularly Horkheimer, became so frightened after they had come to America of being considered radicals that they began first to suppress all words which sounded radical, and Horkheimer eventually ended as a pillar of society in Frankfurt, praising religion and the virtues of capitalism.”[33] In a subsequent letter to Dunayevskaya of October 2, 1976, Fromm expanded this attack to include Adorno.
Fromm returned to these issues again in a letter of November 25, 1976, criticizing Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, and dismissing its whole notion of Critical Theory as a subterfuge in order to avoid any explicit mention of Marxism:
Incidentally there is quite a bit of renewed interest in the Frankfurt School. I get quite a few questions from various people who study the history of the School. It is really a funny story; Horkheimer is now quoted as the creator of the Critical Theory and people write about the Critical Theory as if it were a new concept discovered by Horkheimer. As far as I know, the whole thing is a hoax because Horkheimer was frightened even before Hitler of speaking about Marxist theory. He used in general Aesopian language and spoke of Critical Theory in order not to say Marxist theory. I believe that is all, behind this great discovery of Critical Theory by Horkheimer and Adorno.
In her response of November 30, 1976, Dunayevskaya defends Marcuse to a point:
He surely is no coward, and his Reason and Revolution surely did not hide his Marxism, as he understands it. . . . What was strange in . . . the 1950s, is that our fights were over my “optimism” and “romanticism” over proletariat and Black; he used to argue that they only want a “piece of the American pie,” and while he doesn’t oppose that, it couldn’t be called “revolutionary,” as I insisted. He also opposed my view of the East German Revolt of 1953 as revolution from under totalitarianism, saying it was only because Germans couldn’t stand Russians, etc. And I got nowhere with him when I tried to convince him that he shouldn’t use “Marxism” when he was speaking of Russian communism.
But she does not delve into Horkheimer and the rest of the Frankfurt School, beyond recalling that she had run into hostility at the Hegel Society after criticizing Adorno: “Yes, when last year I talked to the Hegel Society of America, and I dared criticize Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, it appeared as if the whole Frankfurt School was there in person sharpening their knives at my expense.”
In that paper, Dunayevskaya had attacked Adorno’s identification of absolute negativity with Auschwitz in his Negative Dialectics (1969). She took issue with Adorno’s dismissal of the notion in Hegel and in Marx of the “negation of the negation,” which brings forth what Hegel termed the positive in its negative (Dunayevskaya 2002, p. 186). For Marx, this meant the new society, i.e., creative new beginnings after the destruction of the old. She contrasted what she considered to be Adorno’s retrogressive position in Negative Dialectics with his earlier writings like Aspects of the Hegelian Dialectic (1957), which she saw as still adhering to a version of Hegelian Marxism. The “real tragedy of Adorno (and the Frankfurt School),” she concluded, was “the tragedy of a one-dimensionality of thought which results when you give up Subject, when one does not listen to the voices from below—and they were loud, clear, and demanding between the mid-fifties and the mid-sixties” (Dunayevskaya 2002, p. 187).
Another topic taken up in a number of Dunayevskaya’s letters to Fromm during the 1970s was that of gender, in the wake of the burgeoning women’s liberation movement of the time. Among the points she addressed in these letters were the mythic Amazon warrior Penthesilea, feminism and the Portuguese Revolution, the polite sexism she experienced at the Hegel Society meeting, sexism in Maoist China, and new feminist writings in the U.S.
But it was with regard to the martyred Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg—whose revolutionary theory and antiwar stance had so impacted Fromm and his generation—that their dialogue on gender became the most substantive. In a May 1976 letter, Dunayevskaya raised the issue of Luxemburg and gender for the first time with Fromm, referring to changes in the conception of what was to become Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution: “I . . . decided, instead of writing only on Today’s Women Theorists . . . to combine Women’s Liberation Movement with Rosa. What do you think?” A few weeks later, in a letter of July 15, she posed the question with greater specificity:
Nothing has maddened me so much . . . as the complete disregard that today’s so-called theoreticians of the women’s movement display towards Rosa, as if only that woman who writes on Women (with a capital W) “as such” merits attention. I have also been feeling very strongly on the reason why there has been a lack of camaraderie between Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky in the period of the 1905 Revolution in which they were all participants, and after which they did collaborate on an amendment to the Resolution on war at the 1907 International Congress. Could there have been, if not outright male chauvinism, at least some looking down on her theoretical work, because she was woman?
Fromm did not respond to these points at the time.
The following year, Dunayevskaya raised the issue of Luxemburg and gender again, in a letter of October 20, 1977:
May I start right off by asking you whether I may engage in a dialogue with you on Rosa Luxemburg? There is a very specific field that I thought you would be most profound in—the difference between [Luxemburg’s] correspondence, especially with women, and the writings (very nearly non-existent) on that very subject, Women. I’m not referring to the fact that they were on flowers, cats, or other small talk. Rather I am referring to the very sharp attacks on their reformist husbands, their using many references to mythical or long-ago historical characters—Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons. . . . Now, my question is: what has all this to do with the Second International’s betrayal, 1914, and how does it happen that whereas she kept away from the “Woman Question” other than what all Marxists were for—equal wages, suffrage, etc.—would certainly go to mythology and the roles of women as greater than life? . . . There seems a great contradiction between her awareness that there is more to the “Woman Question” than economics in letters as contrasted to books, pamphlets, etc.
Fromm seems to have been very affected by these questions concerning Luxemburg, gender, and revolution.
In his response—written on October 26 when he was still hospitalized from a heart attack—Fromm also seems to take up themes from Dunayevskaya’s letter on Luxemburg from the year before:
I feel that the male Social Democrats never could understand Rosa Luxemburg, nor could she acquire the influence for which she had the potential because she was a woman; and the men could not become full revolutionaries because they did not emancipate themselves from their male, patriarchal, and hence dominating, character structure. After all, the original exploitation is that of women by men and there is no social liberation as long as there is no revolution in the sex war ending in full equality, which has never existed since pre-history. I believe she was one of the few fully developed human beings, one who showed what a human being can be in the future. . . . Unfortunately I have known nobody who still knows her personally. What a bad break between the generations.
This was the last substantive exchange between Dunayevskaya and Fromm.
This exchange would be an important one for Dunayevskaya’s development of her 1982 book, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. In contrast to almost all previous studies of Luxemburg, Dunayevskaya’s book uncovered a feminist dimension to Luxemburg, a theorist of Marxist economics and politics who wrote only a few brief essays on women. Dunayevskaya did so by reexamining not only these writings, but also Luxemburg’s correspondence and her interactions with her male colleagues, whether reformist or revolutionary.[34]
Marcuse died the year after this exchange on Luxemburg between Dunayevskaya and Fromm, in 1979, and Fromm the year after that. Dunayevskaya lived until 1987, during which time she completed the above-mentioned Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982), as well as Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution (1985), and made extensive notes for an unfinished book, “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: The ‘Party’ and Forms of Organization Born Out of Spontaneity.”[35]
Dunayevskaya’s correspondence with Marcuse and Fromm over the course of three decades records in fairly minute detail the intersection and crystallization of Marxist humanism and Critical Theory as these important tendencies of radical thought developed in the U.S. It shows the Marxist underpinnings of the thinking of Marcuse and Fromm in ways that are not always apparent in their published work. The correspondence illuminates the thinking behind Marcuse’s best-known work, One-Dimensional Man, not only in philosophy, but also in sociology. Moreover, it sheds important light on Fromm’s relation to Marxism, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, including with respect to gender. It additionally illuminates his thinking about the heritage of the Frankfurt School, with which he had broken in a bitter dispute several decades earlier. In addition, the correspondence documents in great detail Dunayevskaya’s early development as a dialectician, as well as later aspects of her work, especially her study of Rosa Luxemburg and gender.
Initially, Dunayevskaya’s correspondence with Marcuse seemed aimed at the mutual clarification and development of dialectical thinking, but as the correspondence continued over several years, it became increasingly evident that their viewpoints diverged on key issues, not only over Hegel’s relation to Marx and the contemporary relevance of these two thinkers, but also over issues with more directly political ramifications. The latter included automation and other changes in the technological structure of modern capitalist production, where Marcuse took a more affirmative stance toward the potential of automation. They also differed over the theorization of the Soviet Union and similar societies, among them Cuba, where Dunayevskaya’s sharply critical stance drew the ire of Marcuse. Overall, the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence offers a living documentation of the origins of a specific, U.S.-shaped Hegelian Marxism.
Dunayevskaya also attempted, with less success, to focus on clarifying the Hegelian and Marxian versions of the dialectic in her correspondence with Fromm. While Fromm did not directly take up the Hegelian threads Dunayevskaya introduced, they did engage in dialogue for over two decades around Marx’s humanism and around support for socialist dissidents in Eastern Europe. Their correspondence also offers some pungent critiques of Marcuse, Sartre, Adorno, and Horkheimer, and at the end, some notable reflections on Rosa Luxemburg and gender.
Overall, the letters and essays by Dunayevskaya, Marcuse, and Fromm published in this volume bring to light some important threads in the development of radical thought and activism in the United States. Remarkably free of dogma, ideological posturing, or sympathy for either Cold War liberalism or authoritarian strains of Marxism like Stalinism or Maoism, the correspondence shows Marxist intellectuals at their most creative, rethinking problems and issues for their times. In this sense, the writings published here are of more than historical interest, as they open up a window of tremendous heuristic value concerning how to rethink and redeploy the Marxist critique of philosophy, politics, and society in the twenty-first century.
1. When referring to Dunayevskaya’s work, we have hyphenated and capitalized the term “Marxist-Humanism,” in keeping with her own usage. We have used the terms “Marxist humanism” or “socialist humanism” to denote a broader current of thought that includes Erich Fromm, various Eastern European Marxist philosophers, as well as Dunayevskaya. Finally, we have used the term “Marx’s humanism” to denote the humanist themes within Marx’s own writings.
2. A few of the letters in the present volume have been published previously in Marcuse (2001) and Dunayevskaya (2002). The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse correspondence has been discussed previously in Kellner (1984, 1991, 2001), and Anderson (1989, 1990).
3. In a recent treatment of this question, however, John Abromeit concludes: “Hegel and Marx were far more important for Marcuse than Heidegger, particularly after the initial enthusiasm for Being and Time, which was expressed in Marcuse’s first two essays, and had largely worn off—by 1930 at the latest. . . . It is true that Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity begins with a deferential gesture to Heidegger . . . [but] Heidegger is not mentioned at all in the rest of [Hegel’s Ontology], which is devoted to a careful exposition of [Hegel’s] Science of Logic” (2004, pp. 151, 139; see also Kellner 1984, Abromeit 2010a). On Marcuse’s interpretations of Hegel’s Science of Logic in Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, see also Rockwell (2004).
4. We cite the newest English version of this essay, originally translated by Joris de Bres in the 1970s but here revised by Abromeit, who has restored Marcuse’s critical remark about Engels, among other things. The new collection in which this article appears bears the unfortunate title Heideggerian Marxism, which imposes a Heideggerian reading on this important Marcuse essay on the young Marx.
5. For discussions of the book’s context and reception, see Kellner (1984), Anderson (1993), Rockwell (2004), and Wheatland (2009).
6. A number of Marcuse’s earlier critiques of positivism and pragmatism have been published, some for the first time, in Marcuse (2011). The introduction to this volume by Douglas Kellner, Clayton Pierce, and Tyson Lewis offers a probing discussion of Marcuse’s critique of pragmatism. For her part, Dunayevskaya, who had emerged from the Trotskyist movement—in which John Dewey was revered for having helped to defend Trotsky during the Moscow Trials, and many were influenced by pragmatism, often through the combination of Marxism and pragmatism in the philosophical writings of Sidney Hook—had kept her distance from Hook and pragmatism as well.
7. By 1954, however, just before his correspondence with Dunayevskaya was to begin, Marcuse had offered a somewhat different picture, wherein changes during the twentieth century had “enabled late industrial civilization to absorb its negativity” (p. 437). At the time, Dunayevskaya does not seem to have been aware of this discussion, published in an epilogue to a second edition of Reason and Revolution.
8. The German term “Geist”—as here in Philosophie des Geistes—was for many years rendered as “mind” in Hegel translations, but more recently, translators have tended to use the less restrictive term “spirit.” Dunayevskaya, Marcuse, and Fromm all tended to use the term “mind,” however, in keeping with English usage at that time.
9. We discuss Fromm’s intellectual trajectory in its own terms in the second half of this introduction, since his correspondence with Dunayevskaya did not begin until 1959.
10. This is not the place for a more detailed discussion of the Marcuse-Fromm dispute over Freud, since it figured very little in the correspondence that makes up the present volume. Two recent studies should be mentioned, however, which have shed new light on these differences: (1) Abromeit’s 2011 book on Horkheimer traces Fromm’s argument over Freud in the late 1930s with Horkheimer (whose position Marcuse largely shared), making use of some recently unearthed texts. (2) The introduction by Kellner et al. and the papers collected in Marcuse (2011) give greater illumination to Marcuse’s engagement with Freud as part of his radical concept of the “Great Refusal,” contrasting his radical appropriation of Freud not only with that of Fromm, but also with more recent radical appropriations in the Lacanian and post-structuralist modes.
11. These substantial notes by Lenin on Hegel in 1914–1915 are often termed his “Philosophical Notebooks,” in keeping with the title given by the Moscow editors to Vol. 38 of Lenin’s Collected Works, which included some extraneous material not related to Hegel, much of it from before 1914, and thus prior to his “Hegelian” philosophical transformation. Therefore, we have used the more precise term Hegel Notebooks for these 1914–1915 notebooks, sometimes also referring more specifically to the most lengthy and important of them, the “Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic.” For a discussion of the Hegel Notebooks and their context, see Anderson (1995).
12. Recall also that a number of Trotskyist leaders, among them James Cannon, were prosecuted under the Smith Act for opposing World War II, and that the Stalinist Left had supported this law, but would subsequently feel its weight during McCarthyism.
13. Kellner, Pierce, and Lewis describe Marcuse as “one of the few contemporary thinkers to attempt a fusion of philosophy and politics” (2011, p. 7). This characterization could also be applied to Dunayevskaya, whose writings during the 1970s and 1980s included a series of Political-Philosophic Letters, many of them in response to the Iranian revolution.
14. Interestingly, a passage from Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941) suggests a more affirmative stance on his part—at least in that earlier period—toward Hegel’s absolute mind than was apparent in the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence during the 1950s. In Reason and Revolution, Marcuse follows his account of Hegel’s Logic with an examination of the Philosophy of Right. The latter contains the categories of objective mind, or the political, which followed the transitions from the Logic to Philosophy of Nature and from the latter to Philosophy of Mind. Not far into his analysis of Philosophy of Right Marcuse notes: “Some of the gravest misunderstandings that obscure the Philosophy of Right can be removed simply by considering the place of the work in Hegel’s system. It does not treat with the whole cultural world, for the realm of right is just part of the realm of mind, namely, that part which Hegel denotes as objective mind. It does not, in short, expound or deal with the cultural realities of art, religion and philosophy, which embody the ultimate truth for Hegel. . . . Even Hegel’s most emphatic deification of the state cannot cancel his definite subordination of the objective to the absolute mind, of the political to the philosophical truth” (Marcuse 1941, p. 178, emphasis added).
15. In terms of changes in Marcuse’s philosophical position, it is important to note that in his letters to Horkheimer during the 1940s, Marcuse never commented about Dialectic of Enlightenment, despite promising to do so. This suggests some hesitation on his part to accept this new turn in the thinking of Horkheimer and Adorno (Marcuse 1998). For a study of the slow evolution during the 1930s of Horkheimer’s positions toward those of Adorno, see Abromeit (forthcoming). However, by the mid-1950s in Eros and Civilization, Marcuse favorably cited Dialectic of Enlightenment. Eros and Civilization also contained a substantial analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy, in which Marcuse wrote in positive terms that “Nietzsche speaks in the name of a reality principle fundamentally antagonistic to that of Western civilization” ([1955a] 1966, p. 121). The argument that Marcuse’s position on dialectics by the 1960s differed radically from that of 1941 – and for the worse—is elaborated in Dunayevskaya (2002) and Anderson (1993). For a more affirmative view of these changes in Marcuse’s perspectives on dialectics, which stresses “the common ground underlying both rational dialectics and poetic language” in these two periods of his work, see Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy’s important study of Romanticism (2001, p. 222).
16. This exchange between Marcuse and Dunayevskaya over automation was first published in Marcuse (2001), along with other correspondence on this topic between Marcuse and the Frankfurt School economist Friedrich Pollock. Kellner (1991) discusses this correspondence as an important part of the background to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.
17. In this volume, we have preserved the occasionally ungrammatical form of these letters, very rarely adding editors’ interpolations in brackets for the sake of clarity.
18. For a discussion of Bukharin’s Historical Materialism and its critics, including Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Dunayevskaya, see Anderson (1987).
19. Dunayevskaya published this as a pamphlet with the polemical title, Sartre’s Search for a Method to Undermine Marxism (1963); many of its arguments were later incorporated into her Philosophy and Revolution (1973).
20. Perhaps Dunayevskaya had expected a more favorable response from Marcuse, given his own rather negative assessment of Sartre fifteen years earlier, when he had concluded: “Behind the nihilistic language of Existentialism lurks the ideology of free competition, free initiative, and equal opportunity. Everybody can ‘transcend’ his situation” (Marcuse [1948] 1973, p. 174).
21. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, they corresponded occasionally, but after Marcuse became a leading intellectual figure of the global New Left, Dunayevskaya encouraged one of her younger colleagues, Richard Greeman, to publish a lengthy essay critiquing Marcuse’s writings (Greeman 1968), also issued as a News and Letters pamphlet. During this period, Marcuse and Sartre were two figures on the Left whom Dunayevskaya regularly criticized, along with Mao, for what she considered to be their deleterious theoretical influence on the New Left.
22. In Marcuse (2007), Kellner has published a number of Marcuse’s shorter writings on art and revolution, which include dialogue with the Chicago surrealists around Franklin Rosemont, several of whom also interacted with Dunayevskaya.
23. Fromm was also a practicing psychoanalyst who saw patients throughout his career.
24. In his 1931 inaugural address as Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School), Horkheimer spoke of “the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychological development of its individuals and the changes within specific areas of culture to which belong not only the intellectual legacy of the sciences, art and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, entertainments, lifestyles, and so on” ([1931] 1989, p. 33).
25. This volume contains translations of much of Fromm’s early work on Freud and Marx. Other early Fromm texts on Freudian Marxism have been translated in Bronner and Kellner (1989) and in Anderson and Quinney (2000).
26. For an interesting historical analysis of the Frankfurt School’s studies of authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and fascism, which began during this period, see Kramer (forthcoming).
27. For a well-argued critique of this view, see Bronner (1994).
28. Burston (1991) explains Fromm’s sympathetic interest in Trotsky differently, as a psychological affinity on his part to someone who went against communist orthodoxy, as Fromm had done in relation to Freudian orthodoxy.
29. Here and elsewhere in our introduction, we quote from Fromm’s letters to Dunayevskaya. However, legal restrictions in Fromm’s Will concerning the publication of his letters have resulted in the fact that in the main text of the present volume, we have published Dunayevskaya’s letters to Fromm, accompanied by summaries rather than the actual texts of his letters to Dunayevskaya. We thank Fromm’s Literary Executor, Dr. Rainer Funk, for allowing us to quote from Fromm’s letters in our introduction.
30. See note 10 for more details on Fromm’s writings on and interactions with Marcuse in this period. In his introduction to a collection of Marcuse’s writings on the 1960s, Kellner argues that Fromm’s footnote contains a fundamental misinterpretation of the complexity of Marcuse’s view (Marcuse 2005). Kellner reprints an interview with Marcuse that appeared in the New York Times Magazine of October 27, 1968, in which he held: “I am optimistic, because I believe that never in the history of humanity have the resources necessary to create a free society existed to such a degree. I am pessimistic because I believe that the established societies—capitalist society in particular—are totally organized and mobilized against this possibility” (Marcuse 2005, p. 111). Still, it could be argued that Marcuse saw less of a real possibility of radical change than did either Dunayevskaya or Fromm. Dunayevskaya saw radical change as more of a possibility, not least because—unlike Marcuse—she held to a view of the modern working class as retaining an important measure of revolutionary consciousness. Fromm saw radical change as more of a possibility because, unlike Marcuse (and also unlike Dunayevskaya), he was more sanguine about the possibilities of radical change from within the established institutions of the Western democracies.
31. Parenthetical expression in the original.
32. These later appeared in Dunayevskaya ([1982] 1991, 1985). Fromm’s writings on gender have been collected in Fromm (1997) and have been discussed by Kellner (1992) and Wilde (2004).
33. Without acceding to Fromm’s extremely polemical language, it can nonetheless be stated unequivocally that Horkheimer had moved to the right by the 1960s, as had Adorno, albeit to a lesser extent. This has not been discussed widely in English. A detailed account of this history, including Horkheimer and Adorno having summoned the police to end the student occupation of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1968, can be found in Wiggershaus ([1986] 1994). As Kellner suggests in his introduction to Marcuse (2005), however, Wiggershaus downplays the differences at that time between Marcuse and his erstwhile colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer. There is also some discussion of the post-1960 theoretical evolution of Horkheimer and Adorno in Kellner (1991) and of Adorno in 1968 more recently in Holloway, Matamoros, and Tischler (2009) and in Abromeit (2010b).
34. While the theme of Luxemburg as feminist received some support in the 1980s, especially on the part of the poet Adrienne Rich, who contributed a foreword to the 1991 reprint of Dunayevskaya’s book, in an overall sense, Luxemburg’s work continued to be neglected by feminist scholars. This may have begun to change in 2011 with the publication of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, one of whose editors was Peter Hudis, a former colleague of Dunayevskaya. A greater acceptance of Luxemburg as feminist, or as having had a feminist dimension, could be seen in the reviews of a number of prominent feminist thinkers of the Letters of Rosa Luxemburg—among them Vivian Gornick, Sheila Rowbotham, and Jacqueline Rose.
35. Some texts related to the latter appear in Dunayevskaya (2002); others are discussed in Hudis (1989).
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