2 Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom and Beyond

Some one ought to invent a day that is twice as long and a night that is half as short. As it is, I am quite dissatisfied with the world and its time habits (including my own). Now that I have registered my protest, here is what I was able to accomplish within the confines of night and day division!

I have returned to the beginning and I enclose herewith the first two chapters of Part I.[2]

New aspects constantly evolve and I now feel the need for some “character sketches”; Proudhon and Lassalle [3] are included; Stalin I will do later. For the time being I am including the first two under some heading as a Theoretic Interlude which would precede the analysis of Capital itself.

What I will do next I do not know—perhaps rest a few days. In any case, the enclosed plus the two sections you already have on The Great Divide in Marxism and State Capitalism should give you a pretty good idea of the book as a whole. Since you are kind enough to want it in draft form, you might also be good enough to let me know your views. There is no doubt in my mind that sometime between the draft and the final writing we will need to spend more than two hours together. Do you suppose that in early summer you would have a whole weekend to spare?

April 18, 1956

No doubt I should by now be used to your long silences. But I have good reason to be anxious since this is the month you told me that Beacon Press would have its new director and be in a position to consider publishing my book. Please do let me know how matters stand.

I enclose the drafts of two other chapters. Again they are not consecutive although they consecutively follow what you have, one as part of Part III on Marx’s Capital, and the other, “Toward A New Unity of Theory and Practice” as a sort of conclusion to the book. As soon as I receive word of encouragement from you I’ll brave the one on Hegel.

You did not reply to my query about summer. I would like to spend a day or two with you (say middle of June or July) before I settle down to the final rewriting. If I can complete it all this summer then perhaps I could have a late fall publisher.

Warmest regards,

In case you wish to check the quotations from Capital, I happen to be [using the] Dona Torr (I.P.) edition because that separates the parts Marx added to the French edition into a separate section where it is easy to follow. There are 40 pages difference between this and the Kerr edition.[4]

I have no excuse for my silence—except that the thing is still out of my hands. It has been with Beacon Press for quite some time; the first general reaction was favorable i.e. they are definitely interested in publishing “such a book.” As you undoubtedly know: this means that they send it to their readers. Since I do not know the new director, I cannot exert any influence, nor even expedite the process. In a couple of days I shall inquire again. I myself like your approach and the development of the theory very much and am anxious to see the whole book, but I just could not sit down and send you my comments: this is a full time job for me and I don’t see how I can manage.

May 1, 1956

Dear R.D.

As for the summer: I am leaving for Europe (lectures) end of June but hope to get to New York at least for a couple of days end of May. What are your plans?

Mail reaches me better at Brandeis University. With best wishes and regards,

Thank you very much for your kind letter. 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. I will now even settle down to write the chapter on Hegel and have it with me by the time you get to New York the end of May.

I’m hurrying this note because I do not want you to “escape” to Europe before I have had a few hours undisturbed conference on the book. Therefore please write me immediately the exact days you will be in New York and where I can reach you and I will be there with Russian bells or maybe the Old Man Hegel will accept me and let me enter accompanied by the more melodic German music.

If the worst comes to the worst and Beacon Press refuses, please bring with you the original outline and I will begin a new campaign either with Oxford University Press or Praeger. Norman Mailer [5] suggested the Grove press; do you know anything of that. If this book doesn’t get out of my system by the end of this summer and unto the press I’m liable to burst from all these decades of pregnancy. How long will you remain overseas? It has hurt me to see what they have done to poor Marx’s grave instead of that simple stone that marked his grave to which I did not feel out of place to bring a single red rose in 1947. I could go with you over every hill in Hempstead Heath too and show you just where he played with his children every Sunday and when they recited Shakespeare to each other. Oh, you don’t think I was there!

Your Eros and Civilization has broken down my adamant refusal lasting two decades “to have a position on sex.” Because your work is of such an original character it of necessity invalidated the self-defensive gesture of an old politico who feels it necessary not to get embroiled in every question “intellectuals” feel called upon to thrust into a political argument to deflect from the main point.

In the use of the word, original, to describe the character of your book I do not mean to limit it to the contribution of your own philosophic thought (though it is natural that my favorite chapter is the “Philosophical Interlude”). I mean that in the reinterpretation of Freud you rescued him not only from the epigones but from himself, so that anyone can see where he is genius and original and where lie the elements which gave rise to quackery. Although in no fundamental sense is Freud responsible for that, the ambivalence of his theory has of necessity obscured the great critical contribution. You know, I am sure, that there are radicals who consider a reinterpretation of an original doctrine as if it were mere repetition, a carbon copy of the original. I knew one radical who held that Lenin’s State and Revolution was a “rewrite” of Marx’s Paris Commune (Civil War in France)! 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 without in any way deflecting from the specific field. Quite the contrary. You thereby illuminated the field of psychoanalysis. That is what I meant by the statement that you separated what was genius and original from that which became transformed into revisionism, if not outright quackery. Fromm’s answer to you is a good example of the meaning here. Here is a man who dares 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.[6]

Belatedly I congratulate you and will see what I can do to get the book in the hands of friends, workers as well as intellectuals; I may try to quote some “easy” parts on alienation in News and Letters,[7] which will reappear soon.

How was your European trip and are you back? I had only one month off for concentrated work but I worked like a Trojan (Did they work 7:30 a.m. to midnight daily?) and finished the draft of the book. I enclose the three chapters you have not yet seen and the new contents page. You will note that I also changed the Appendix, substituting for the section on Crises from the Theories of Surplus Value [8] 2 of the early Essays, Private Property and Communism, and Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic.[9] In a month I will get down to the final revision or writing of text. I have no publisher’s signature on the dotted line, yet, but I do have a promise from Praeger that if no publisher will dare undertake this he will “though unwilling as it is a complex and worrisome book and will bring a lot of criticism down my head.” If Praeger does publish, the publication would be simultaneously American and English; I understand he also has a publishing house in Frankfurt but he said nothing of any German translation. Instead he asked me to keep submitting the outline to other publishers. I wondered whether you knew anyone at Harvard University Press (Russian Research Center) to whom I might submit it.

When do you think you will be ready to write your introduction? Would you require the completely retyped MSS before you do? Do let me hear from you. Since I’m not sure you are back, I’ll register this.

I found your letter and manuscript after my return from Europe later than I expected and therefore again too late for a stay and meeting in NY. I did not know that Beacon had rejected the book and I do hope that Praeger sticks to his promise.

Of the three sections you sent me, I liked most the last chapter of Part I [10] —splendid! The chapter on the Second International[11] is too sketchy and does not justice to the historical problem. You accept—as far as I can see, in toto—Lenin’s theory of the corrupted labor aristocracy—a theory which, in my view, is utterly inadequate. Whereas you handle the dialectic so consistently and refuse so valiantly to treat Marxian concepts as dogmas, you do not take this position with regard to the notion (and to the reality) of the proletariat. In the development of late industrial society in the advanced countries, this class qua class has changed its position, structure, consciousness, etc. The full force of a Marxian economic and political analysis has to be applied in the examination of this process—the aristocracy business wouldn’t do!

As to the last part [12] : I disagree with your assumption of a complete break between Leninism and Stalinism. I have recently reread Lenin’s writings and speeches of 1921-22 and was amazed at the degree of continuity and consistency in basic questions and policies—even formulations! But all these things have to be discussed orally. I expect to be in NY after Christmas, for the meeting of the Philosophical Association—should I get to NY prior to this date, I shall let you know immediately when I know. My study of “Soviet Marxism,” in which I try to discuss some of the problems indicated above, is before completion and will be published by Columbia University Press early in 1957. I shall send you the typescript for your comments and your critique before it goes to the printer’s.

Thanks, and with very best wishes,

Thanks for your letter and chapter. Again you did an admirable job—perhaps a little too admirable. It is so condensed that it is hard for me, who has read volumes 2 and 3 [13]—wouldn’t it be still harder for many others? Much of what Marx tried to demonstrate appears in your chapter only as thesis or statement. But don’t do anything now—first let the publisher have his word.

As to our meeting here . . . Friday Nov. 15th is better: I shall be through at 1. Sorry, but life is not all rosy even for an intellectual!

I still hope that we get together.

To allow me to complete the entire manuscript and give you a few days to read it as a totality I have decided to change date of arrival by a week, using the fact that Friday is a better day for you as the date of my arrival. Please try also to be free Saturday as I simply must arrive at some concrete conclusions by then or there will be no point to the trip to the publisher in New York afterward.

I will arrive in Boston, Friday, November 23rd and stay there through Saturday November 24th so that I hope I can see you both days. I can meet you anywhere you say or you will be able to meet me at my hotel, which ever is more convenient. I will send in for reservations the minute I hear that this meets your approval and we can meet without watching the minute handle on the clock. I’m sorry to be so presumptuous and insistent but without a few solid hours of work together the project could fall through. It is not that I am not sympathetic to the woes of intellectuals and know how hard they labor and that their time too is not their own, (Think how Marx even looked at some of the meetings of the International as time away from Capital) but I’m sure you also see that Marxism and Freedom gets published and will help me do that. So, holding my breath until I hear from you,

I am, gratefully,

P.S. What has happened to your typescript?[14] I am looking forward to reading your book before it reaches the public. I will create time for a careful criticism. One day I will succeed in creating a day longer than 24 hours minus 6.

Carr said Macmillan is a “slow” house, but most distinguished if they actually took the MSS which evidently he doubted; he said the atmosphere as to Marxist works was a “little better” than here, but not too much. They will all be waiting for my letter on the meeting with the publishers almost as much as you will.

Nov. 27, 1956

Dear John [15] :

It is 9 p.m. and this is the first I get to write to you since Marcuse left just this minute. We talked for hours on my book. He was so anxious to reemphasize that he will do everything possible to get it published and to write the introduction that he would not even begin criticizing it, until he made the positive feature of wanting to see it published clear all over again. The introduction will not be written until I actually do have a contract, but it will be done promptly then. It will stress the contribution I make and the dialectical approach—until I reach the “notion” of the proletariat. It will then make 3 criticisms: 1) first that I romanticize the workers instead of seeing that “it” too changed along with capitalism, that is to say, is satisfied instead of revolutionary, 2) it will take some exception to state capitalism as a designation of Russia stemming from Marx’s foresight,[16] and 3) question my optimistic perspectives. I told him he could criticize it to his heart’s content, I certainly don’t want agreement, but he kept saying “You are so excellent in handling the dialectic except when you deal with the proletariat” and “Why do you so berate the intellectual? I do not see the relationship of theory to practice that you do; I think theory should be the guide, what you call the prescription instead of you just waiting on the proletariat.” These professors—but he is really remarkable for a professor. We had a magnificent seafood dinner, cocktails and all and I fear he was set back some $10 or more. Still I have another appointment scheduled with him tomorrow. He promised to go over paragraph for paragraph my translation[17] since I did it from the Russian rather than German and let me know how I stand scholastically on that.

Now on the publisher—he agrees it is worth waiting to see if London [18] will accept it, even if it means a couple of months delay, and that I should stall P[19] meanwhile. O, yes, he also proposed that I go to Germany in his stead to be present at some conference on Marxism this winter. I said I would love to but doubt that I would be quite as acceptable. He already began discussing my next book with me, as he feels he will not write again after the publication of his next, and I should carry on, although he disagrees with me. He also told me one interesting point for Saul[20] (I’ll send him a copy of this) since he met Rieff [21] and told him, O, I’m in a hurry to make an appointment with RD, whereupon Rieff said, O, yes, her lit. agt. sent me a letter asking us to reconsider and told us she would be in town. Period. Paragraph. End of conversation. Or, as M [Marcuse] put it “No implications in this at all.”

His favorite chapter remains “A New Humanism,” to which he also added that although he disagrees with my Automation chapter,[22] my interpretation of the Absolute Idea in that form rather than in the letters is “clearest.” He kept saying “What would Father Marx say if he lived now” and his eyes lit up as to the paragraph where Marx stopped in the Philosophy of Mind and where my analysis began.[23] If only he could be around some workers—Am now ready to storm NY.

Today I was down at Brandeis University where Marcuse arranged a luncheon to which he invited E. H. Carr. Professor Carr is about the only non-Marxist Englishman (I was very surprised to find him in America and just as surprised that one of the reasons was the fact that the Russian material in this country covering the period of the 1920s is superior to that in England) who has specialized in non-factional, objective history of the period of the Russian Revolution and throughout the 1920s. We have his “The Bolshevik Revolution,” both the 1917 and 1923 volumes, and you should glance at them to get a concept of the distinguished scholar. He was acquainted with “the value controversy,” which shows you how far that little article in AER carried me all these years,[24] and was as surprised to find me there as I him. I don’t know exactly Marcuse’s point, but I liked the results very much indeed. Carr was not only interested in reading my MSS but I gave Marcuse “permission” to turn the book and address over to him, he said he would write his comments to me. This is a find.

These professors who spend all their lives in books do make me laugh. When they cannot “break a category,” to use a Hegelian phrase, they just lapse into the most vulgar political explanation of an event. For example, they see none of what we see in the 1920-1 trade union debate [25] —Carr practically said that Lenin’s position was merely that of middleman between Trotsky and Shlyapnikov, that is mediating to bring peace between warring factions! When I opened my mouth with “You intellectuals . . .” Marcuse interrupted to say “You need not say it—I know what you will call me. But you are a bloody intellectual yourself and you have 12 hours a day to write—or how could you have produced so much in so little time; I would have been dead attempting it—while we with classes, administrative work,” etc. etc.

Incidentally 2 tables in that faculty room were filled with ex-Trotskyists led by Howe,[26] whom I disdainfully disregarded; one, however, a woman whose name slips my mind but she led the attack on Reva Craine back in 1944[27] and we were anything but friends—came up to greet “Freddie”[28] very warmly. I took it as a good sign, although I did no more than smile and turned back to my own guests. No doubt the university will be buzzing for the following week from this visit of mine and all the “theories” on the reason would make a funny drama indeed.

Tomorrow morning I am off for NY, but will see no one till Fri.

St. Martin’s Press retained the copy of my book that they have so that Mr. MacKenzie could read it and also for any other purpose, should Macmillan insist on reading the entire text before committing itself. I doubt that, however, because surely Professor Carr’s name is good enough, and MacKenzie felt that if he sends them the outline and other material and then gets the approval that he would forward his copy to Carr. I did not tell him that Carr would in any case have a copy since that arrangement between us three was made as interested friends, not in any other sense, and I did not feel free to speak for Mr. Carr. Incidentally, St. Martin’s Press is located at 103 Park Avenue, New York 17, N.Y.

The good news is that Ian MacKenzie of St. Martin’s Press [29] remains interested in both the English and American publication of the work, Marxism and Freedom. Furthermore, when he heard that E. H. Carr was in this country, he was willing to write to Macmillan’s of London and suggest that Professor Carr be the reader for the book instead of needing first to mail the whole book there and get a reader, etc. etc., (all that which Professor Carr no doubt had in mind when he said Macmillan’s was “slow”). In that case they would be ready to give me an answer before the end of December. Would you please undertake to speak to Mr. Carr and see whether we can thus speed up the work? Yesterday, before I had spoken to Mr. Mackenzie I had sent Mr. Carr the Philosophic Notebooks[30] for him to insert in the copy of the book you would give him to read so that the text and appendices would be complete, except for my preface and your introduction, and, of course, the index and bibliography.

At the same time there has been another good development—Beacon’s has written to Mr. Blackman [31] saying they would be interested in reading the text after all. Since even them I would prefer to Praeger, do you suppose your copy would hold for them too? Would it be possible, for example, for Mr. Carr to read it between now and December 6th and have this then turned over to Beacon? As I said before, if Macmillan approves MacKenzie’s plan, then Mr. Carr will get the St. Martin’s Press copy. Please write to me to Detroit where I will be Tuesday re both Carr and Beacon.

Praeger will not see me before Tuesday morning—I do not expect much from him. Saw Buttinger [32] who will do all he can to help (he is leaving for Europe tomorrow) but also preferred Macmillan. In fact, everybody does; the point is will Macmillan?

It was a pleasure to spend the two days in Boston in your company—disagreements never disturb me when the mind is actively functioning.

December 10, 1956

I do not know whether you did or did not turn over your copy of Marxism and Freedom to Mr. Rieff of Beacon Press. Please answer this point for I know not how to write them otherwise.

Upon my return to Detroit last week, I found that, while my outline of Capital,[33] was sent you to the university, the brief abstract I made of the Questions of Philosophy Article[34] was not sent you as it was not found. I herewith enclose it. Should you wish it translated in full, I’ll be glad to do so.

The only point of the NY trip that I have not yet reported to you is the meeting with Praeger. He was a wee bit more polite now that I had the manuscript complete in my hands. I informed him that you would not write the introduction until the contract is actually signed. He said he would first have to read the work and it would take him 3 weeks. It was clear enough what bothered him was the criticisms I made of the American system for while I was in his office he turned quickly to the last chapter on Automation. I laughed: “If you must read the climax of this novel and see how it all comes out first, why turn to page 365.” He then closed the book and said well, nothing is definite yet, and I was still free to submit it to other publishers. I said it was precisely what I was doing and he would not get his copy for a couple of weeks since I wished to proofread and edit the copy. I took the publisher’s copy back with me rather than leaving it with him. As I told you in my previous note, if the one with St. Martin’s Press in NY and Macmillan in London falls through, then I would prefer Beacon to Praeger.

Will you also be kind enough to tell me whether Mr. Carr has read the manuscript and what were his reactions to the idea of his reading it for Macmillan? Has he heard from them directly? I doubt it since there would have been insufficient time between my meeting with MacKenzie [35] and his writing to London. Understandably, no one is in quite the hurry I am in trying to get the book published, but I do have more hope now than ever before.

As ever,

Yes! [Carr has read the manuscript].

December 12, 1956 [36]

Just got it back from Carr. I’ll give it to Rieff [37] tomorrow.

I don’t know about Macmillan.

Sorry, I am in a terrible rush! Shall do what I can to impress Beacon, but must wait for their reading the ms. Carr’s reaction was quite favorable. Good luck to you.

As ever,

April 29, 1957

Finally I have completed the editing and the book was this day sent to the printer. I believe I’ll now be in favor of a new law forbidding authors to do their own editing—I can’t look at anything I write without wanting to rewrite, and then begins the footnoting. Although I had made up my mind to have very few because of the working class audience I aim at they now number nearly 300. Just the letters alone for permission to quote has taken nearly a week. The Bibliography, although quite selective, is another 4 pages. The text now is 400 pages; appendices another 95. With your preface it will be over 500 so I suppose the hard-headed businessmen who run the publishing firms were right when they refused to commit themselves to a price until they actually had the manuscript ready for printer in hand.

I am glad you insisted that I see Humanities Press although I had already signed with Bookman Associates. They were so interested in Marxism and Freedom that they volunteered to do all sorts of work for it, although they were not its publisher. (Mr. Silverman was out of town; I spoke to Richard Huett instead.)[38] For one thing, I had reserved exclusive foreign rights and hence have authority to look for other publishers in other lands, and Humanities promptly offered to see whether they couldn’t get Routledge, Kegan and Paul to publish it in Britain; the MS will go forward there this week. For another, the catalogue that they send out to their readers will definitely list my book—I believe their circulation is 20,000—and listings are not to be sneezed at in promotional work. A friend of mine is going to Germany and will try to get me a publisher in Hamburg and I have had inquiries both from Italy and France as to translations and publication there. I knew that I could have gotten a bigger publisher in England but I refused to capitulate on the question of needing to go first to England steal back to the US by the backdoor. Bookman Associates are interested and will see that the book does get a good promotional. Naturally they are pleased you will preface the book. We will strike a blow at both poles of world capital—US and Russia—that they will not soon forget.

I wrote Bookman that your Preface will be sent in all typed and ready for printer (I assume you will send it to me in whatever condition you please—I am expert in reading my handwriting, so I can read anyone’s—and I will make copies before I send to him) in a couple of weeks, but that he should not delay going to press since your Preface will be numbered differently—I intend to suggest Roman numerals for it to distinguish it from my introduction and text. The reason I did so is that he had told me from the start that if I want October publishing date it must be at printer in June.

I just heard from Humanities Press that the first reaction of Routledge, Kegan and Paul was quite favorable. “It certainly looks like a possible” they wrote of Marxism and Freedom before turning it over to readers. Having had the experience with Macmillan, who had practically signed the contract before they turned and ran, I will not believe Routledge’s reaction until that contract is signed.

Would you do me a favor? In writing the Preface, I want to recapitulate the gist of your book as adequately as possible in such a small space. Could you send me a brief statement on what you consider to be the main thesis (or theses) and the basic trend of thought in your book? This would greatly expedite matters. Sorry to bother you with additional work at this important juncture.

June 7, 1957

Dear R.D.

Greetings,

June 11, 1957

It was good to hear from you. I’m sure that you are well acquainted with the fact that it is much easier to write 100, if not 500, pages than it is to summarize the gist of a book on which one has worked for some 15 years, in a page or two. But I will try.

1. 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.’”[39]

This runs like a red thread throughout the book. Thus Part I begins with the French Revolution and Hegel and ends with Marx’s Early Economic-Philosophic Essays: A New Humanism. It constitutes his answer to classical political economy as well as to the utopian socialists and vulgar Communists of his day and establishes a new world outlook, Marxian philosophy, which is distinguished from the Hegelian dialectic and closely knit with it. What is established as the thesis of the young Marx then reappears in Part III, Marxism: the Unity of Theory and Practice, where, in The Dialectical Humanism of [Capital] Volume I, 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 Marx put it, the mere question, when does my day begin and when does it end, was on a higher philosophic level than “the pompous catalogue of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.”[40] What is true of Volume I of Capital is true of the Logic and Scope of Volumes II and III, including Theories of Surplus Value, where I show that all of history to Marx was the struggle for freedom, which, as its basis, is the shortening of the working day, and only from there do we go from the realm of necessity to that of freedom.

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. The chapter, A Mind in Action, then traces what the philosophic foundations meant to Lenin and the Russian Revolution and ends with the thought that just as Marxism without its philosophic foundation is meaningless, so is Leninism. Neither is an “economist.” Finally when we come to our own age, which I call Automation and the New Humanism, I show the methodology of Marxism and the compulsion of our own age for a total outlook.

II. Subordinate to this main theme of the book, and running parallel with it, is the division between the radical intellectual like Proudhon [41] and the Marxist intellectual. I contend that Marxism is not only the theoretical expression of the working-class striving to establish a new society on socialist beginnings, but it is that which gave intellectuals a new dimension. That new dimension arose precisely because he did not divide theory from history, including the current class struggles. The relationship of theory to history is seen as a live element that changes the very structure of Marx’s greatest theoretical work. In 1863 and 1866 when he fundamentally revised that structure and 1872-75 when he wrote the French edition of Capital—the period from the Civil War in the United States through the Paris Commune—is proof of this relationship of theory to history and at the same time shows that what the young Marx established in the Early Essays [of 1844] when he held that never again must society be counter-posed to the individual[42] and which in 1848 he emblazoned on his Communist Manifesto as the thesis that the development of the individual is the condition for the development of all[43] reappears in his “most economic” work which is preferred by the academic economists—Volume III of Capital.[44]

Again, when I move from Marx’s time to that of Lenin’s time I show that the contribution of the Second International—Organization—was taken over by Lenin in his concept of the so-called Vanguard Theory in 1902–03, but as the actual Russian Revolutions occurred, he threw it overboard—or at least radically revised his theory no less than 6 times so that in 1917 he says the workers on the outside are more revolutionary than the vanguard party [M&F, p. 190] and by 1923 says that unless the party work is checked by the non-party masses the bureaucracy will yet bring the workers state down and they will retrogress to capitalism [M&F, p. 40]. In any case, our problem is certainly not will there be a revolution: but what will happen after: are we always to be confronted with a Napoleon or a Stalin? In a word, without relating the spontaneous self-organization of the proletariat and its quest for universality [45] in the manner in which Marx did it for his time, we can expect nothing but totalitarianist results.

III. In my introductory note I state that the 3 main strands of thought in the book are: 1) Classical Political Economy, Hegelian Philosophy, and the French Revolutionary doctrines in relationship to the actual social and economic conditions of its time, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and up to the first capitalist crisis. 2) Marxism in relationship to the class struggles of his day, the period of his maturity, 1843–1883, as well as Marxism in the period from 1889–1923; and 3) The methodology of Marxism to our era which I call the period of state capitalism and workers revolt,[46] the analysis of the Five Year Plans of Russia[47] and the revolts in East Germany, and Vorkuta[48] following Stalin’s death; finally the analysis of Automation[49] but this is a comparatively free and easy essay. I think this too in a way can be summed up in the introductory note where I explain the method in which this book is written—that research began in 1939 when I broke with Trotsky over the “Russian Question”[50] but that it did not assume the form of Marxism and Freedom until 1950–53 when the miner’s strike on automation[51] and the revolts in Eastern Europe[52] from their separate vantage points led me to present all my ideas to groups of workers who checked and discussed the material. “No theoretician, today more than ever before, can write out of his own head. Theory requires constant shaping and reshaping of ideas on the basis of what the workers themselves are doing and thinking” [M&F, p. 23]. I return to Hegel (page 73 ftn in the Science of Logic) where he shows that those who took Kant’s results without the process did so as a “pillow for intellectual sloth” [SLM, p. 62; SL1, p. 73] and that if the intellectual sloth which has accumulated in the Marxist movement concerned only Marxists then we wouldn’t be confronting the H-bomb threat without ideological backwardness showing. The need is for a new unity of theory and practice which must begin with the new impulses coming from the working-class, that this, far from being intellectual abdication, would mark the actual fructification of theory. Once the theoretician gets that, his work does not end, but first begins.

In a word, I have no prescriptions of rhetorical conclusions. I show a method at work and appeal to the intellectuals to use that dialectic method as a basis to view the contemporary scene, to get out from under domination of either the Russian totalitarian or the American “democratic” bomb threats in their thinking. The workers by themselves can do a lot but they too have not achieved a new social order, but if the movement from practice to theory met the movement from theory to practice, then a serious start could be made.

There are naturally other points in the work—from the American roots of Marxism to the Communist perversions both of Marx’s Early Works and Capital—since it tries to deal with our machine age since the Industrial Revolution to Automation, but I do not believe anything germane to the book is lost once one grasps the central point, the philosophic foundation.

I know the effect that your Reason and Revolution had in 1941. They could neither treat Hegel as an “old dog” nor Marx’s Early Writings as mere humanitarian adjuncts to “the great scientific economic theories.” But then it was a philosopher speaking and not “a solid economist” like me. When the two were combined, glory, hallelujah—there was havoc. But the academicians need not think themselves any smarter—they all fell into the “Popular Front”;[53] it is not possible to fight Russian totalitarianism or any other kind without some solid theoretic foundation and social vision.

I naturally cannot say whether I succeeded in doing what I aimed at but if intentions were indeed achievement then I could say that what was new in Marxism and Freedom was 1) the re-establishment of the philosophic foundation of Marxism in Hegel in so concrete a way that the origins of our machine age as well as the latest period of automation came alive; 2) the summation of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital in a manner that the reader knows Marxism both as theory and as methodology; and 3) the new dimension Marxism endows the intellectual with became so real to him that he could indeed discern the movement from practice to theory and as eagerly long for the unity of the two as does the worker.

I hope this in some way answers what you wanted me to do in recapitulating the gist of the work. I also enclose the introductory note to the bibliography so that you can see all my problems there.

Looking forward to your Preface very eagerly,

I’m certainly glad I live other than an academic life—think of a factory worker forgetting the time clock. It certainly was a discipline for me—now I’ll have to be as ingenious in keeping that publisher-wolf from my door with demands for your Preface. He has 400 pages of type to set so I don’t know what he is complaining about, and I will insist your professorial word is as good as mine and that the brochure on the book with you listed as writer of preface go out on schedule in July, even if there should be an overlapping of the week it goes out and you send yours in.

June 27, 1957

Dear H.M.

I expanded the contents pages to include sub-heads so as to help make the index brief and also because I believe it gives a view of the scope of the book before you delve into it. In any case I include it for you to glance at.

Did I tell you that Professor Carr, when he read the MSS, was gracious enough to write me that it is a contribution to contemporary thought and that especially my work on The Great Divide in Marxism—not its political aspects which he knew, but the philosophic impact of Hegel on Lenin—would compel a reorganization of many previously cherished views, evidently including his own? I wrote the publishers of Hegel—Allen & Unwin—that I believe my work will open a new audience for the works of Hegel and that I certainly would, in turn, like to be in “that publisher’s stable”. Don’t know that that will help—but I did receive an inquire about Marxism and Freedom from Japan!

Your Preface certainly points up some fundamental questions in dispute as well as in illumination. I wouldn’t think of discarding it. By pointing directly at what I have called the forever-beating heart of Marxism—the workers who in their everyday life and struggles have given it a new life and dimension—you will certainly have stirred a polemic that should be going at full blast as soon as the book is published. Sharp disagreements have never disturbed me; monolithis[m] has.

One thing, however, did surprise me in your Preface and that is that your last sentence focuses on the writer of the preface rather than the book. In your place I would have continued with one more sentence along some such line as this: Whether you agree or disagree with Dunayevskaya, her book creates a solid serious foundation on a vast scope for the re-examination of Marxism from its roots in Hegelian philosophy until its post-Marxist development of our own day.

It may appear to you that you have said something similar in its proper context but as a reader who will next turn to some 400 pages of RD I felt the need of such a link between preface and body of work. Please let me know at once whether you agree to such an addition, and how you would phrase it so I can hurry it on to the publisher in whatever you state you approve it. The decision is yours.[54]

The enclosed brochure has been sent out to 5000 asking advance orders of the book. I hope the fires of dispute have been stirred up and we will not again just lapse into intellectual sloth. Many, many thanks for your contribution and encouragement.

To tell you the truth, I am getting a little uneasy about the publicity with the “American roots of Marxism” and the statement that Marx “completely recreated the structure” of Capital under the impact of the American civil war. I do not remember whether your book actually justifies these formulations—when I read it, I did not have this impression; but then my memory may be at fault. The little and very unsystematic checking I did recently has not been very successful: I did not find any evidence which would corroborate such statement. My friends bombard me with questions, and I myself am naturally rather sensitive about the Americanization of Marx!

October 9, 1957

Dear R.D.

You would do me a great favor if you would sum up very briefly your evidence or just jot down the main references—either in Marx’ correspondence or elsewhere.

Sorry to bother you—but since you are through with the page proofs and with the index, this may not be too much of an imposition. If it is, please forget about it.

Thank you very much for your letter of the 9th which gives me the opportunity to trace briefly the American roots of Marxism. Heretofore I have concentrated on the warp and woof of the book—the philosophy, dialectics, Humanism of Marxism. As publication date approaches, it is time to indicate the complementary thesis. I use the structure of Capital to illustrate this. The changes in the structure of this work meant nothing to the Second International, reformist and revolutionary wings alike. Until Rosa Luxemburg, in 1913,[55] began to question what Engels “had made out” of the material left him by Marx, all Marxists treated the changes in the structure as a “literary question.” The Communists continued this tradition (cf. Leontiev in Bolshaya Sovetskaya Encyclopaedia[56]). The battle of quotations with which Rosa Luxemburg was attacked, both by the Second and Third Internationals, never went into the structure of Capital until Henryk Grossman, in 1929.[57] His was the first serious analysis of the changes in the structure. However, his interest was primarily economic; it was directed against Luxemburg’s underconsumptionism[58] and the reestablishment of the decline in the rate of profit as central to the theory of accumulation in its Marxist form.

Now let us look at these changes in structure during the late 1850s when he worked on the Grundrisse and Critique [59] and in the 1860s when Capital took final shape:

1) As you know, both in his letter to Engels (4/2/58) [MECW 40, p. 296] and in the Preface to Critique, he shows that the first draft of Capital was to have 6 volumes, thus: I. Capital; II. Landed Property; III. Wage labor; IV. State; V. International Trade; VI, World Market.

As he shows in Introduction to the Critique which he did not allow to be published, even here the United States played its role as the illumination for the category of labor: “This state of affairs has found its highest development in the most modern of bourgeois societies, the United States. It is only here that the abstraction of the category ‘labor,’ ‘labor in general,’ labor sans phrase, the starting point of modern political economy, becomes realized in practice.”[60]

2) My Chapter V, The Impact of the Civil War on the Structure of Capital shows that the decade of the 1860’s was decisive for the structure of Capital. It was the period of the Civil War in the United States, the great mobilizations of English workers on the side of the North, the Polish insurrection, the unrest in France, and the creation of the First International. Marx himself best describes the newness of this decade when on January 11, 1860 he writes to Engels: “In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown and, on the other, the movement of the serfs in Russia” [MECW 41, p. 3]. Two years later (7/30/62) he argues with Lassalle as to the contribution of the “Yankees” [MECW 41, p. 388]. This is climaxed by his letter to Engels on August 15, 1863 where he directly involves the structure of Capital: “when I look at this compilation and see how I have had to turn everything around and how I had to make even the historical part out of material of which some was quite unknown, then he (Lassalle) does seem funny with ‘his’ economy already in his pocket” [MECW 41, P. 488].

I show what “turning everything around” was by contrasting the structure of Critique with Capital. I base myself on the letters and the listing of the materials by Engels in the Preface to Capital. There is also in the Archives II (VII),[61] besides the first ending of Capital, the outline of his changes; Leontiev on Capital also lists Notebooks and changes.[62] Also not to be left out is Marx’s reporting of the Civil War for the Vienna Press[63] where he reproduces the speeches of the Abolitionists, especially Wendell Phillips, upon whom he comments “In the present state of affairs Wendell Phillips’ speech is of greater importance than a battle bulletin.”[64] (This, along with his letter to Abraham Lincoln, and other letters are reproduced in his Civil War in the United States, Int. Pub.)[65] As you know, in contrast to some emigre Marxists in America who avoided any involvement in the Civil War under the abstraction that they were “opposed to all slavery, wage and chattel” [M&F, p. 84], he participated actively in the mass movement abroad. This contrasts to the 1850s when he kept away from the emigre circles and their type of activity. As I show at the beginning of that chapter dealing with the impact of the Civil War on structure of Capital, “No one is more blind to the greatness of Marx’s contribution than those who praise him to the skies for his genius as if that genius matured outside of the actual struggles of the period in which he lived. As if he gained the impulses from the sheer development of his own thoughts instead of from living workers changing living reality by their action . . . He who glorifies theory and genius but fails to recognize the limits of theoretical work, fails likewise to recognize the indispensability of the theoretician” [M&F, p. 89].

3) After three intensive years—1863–66—of reworking Capital, Marx is still not satisfied. On February 10, 1866, we hear why: “Historically I developed a part about the working day which did not enter into my first plan” [M&F, p. 88; MECW 42, p. 224]. After he has finished working out the immense section on Working Day he writes again to Engels and shows how happy he is that the American workers “by correct instinct” came to the same formulation on the eight hour day that he had worked out for the Geneva Congress of the First International.[66] This he brings directly into Capital (end of Ch. X [on “The Working Day”]) when he quotes that Baltimore Resolution, ties it in with the First International “Thus the movement of the working class on both sides of the Atlantic . . .” and further ties in white and black labor “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hour agitation . . .” [67]

4) Finally the American roots are not only in the finished (by himself) Volume I but in the unfinished Volumes II and III.[68] In the [chapter on the] Logic and Scope of those volumes I quote from his letter to Danielson where he asks him not to wait for Volume II before translating Volume I because of the mass of material he received from Russia and the United States: “The United States at present have overtaken England . . . the masses are quicker and have greater political means in their hands to resent the form of a progress that is accomplished at their expense.”[69] I then say that it is clear that Russia and America were to play roles in Volumes II and III that England played in Volume I, that Lenin filled out Volume II for Russia and that I believe American worker are concretizing it for America in their attitude to Automation [M&F, p. 148]. In the final chapter on Automation and the New Humanism where I deal with the 1929 crash and the division between Planners and rank and file workers building their own organization—CIO[70] —and in the 1940s when they turn against their labor leaders who have become the bureaucracy that oppresses them even as the managers in the shops—I approach the final section called “Toward A New Unity of Theory and Practice in the Abolitionist and Marxist Tradition.”

As I wrote you once before I have neither blueprints nor banners which scream “Follow me,” but that I sketch out only where to gather new impulses—from the workers: “The American working class has long been a mystery to the European, worker and intellectual. Until the formation of the CIO, Europeans used to “prove the backwardness of the American worker by virtue of the fact that he had not built industrial unions… Because the American worker has built no mass party, he seems apolitical. Because he is largely unacquainted with the doctrines of Karl Marx, he seems non-socialist [up to here, M&F, pp. 276–77] . . . It is not Marxists who have compelled society at last to face with sober senses the conditions of workers and relations of men with each other. . . . The seal of bankruptcy of contemporary civilization, including the so-called Vanguard Parties, is the bankruptcy of its thought. The void in the Marxist movement since Lenin’s death would have a significance only for Marxists except that Marxism is in the daily lives and aspirations of working people. Marxism is neither in the pathetic little theses gathering dust in small radical organizations, nor in impressively big tomes gathering dust on the shelves of large conservative universities” [M&F, p. 282]. For my part I explain the method used to write Marxism and Freedom and I call the American workers and student youth who collaborated on it its true co-authors.

Now, if I may, I would like to add a personal note since although the book has not yet been published the attack on me has already begun. Your friends bombard you on the American roots of Marxism [71] while the Communists are bombarding publisher and distributor with “true stories,” that I supposedly escaped from Russia in 1917 because I had “white blood running in her veins.”[72] I hope I will not have to return to the cloak and dagger days when I was Trotsky’s secretary and had to carry a gun and learn how to shoot it.[73] The American Economic Review had its own kind of experience in 1944 when they published my translation of the Russian revision of Marxism with my commentary.[74] Between the Soviet Embassy accusing me of being a fascist and the State Department telling the review that Russia and America were “allies” and publication would not help, the editors needed all the intellectual integrity and courage to proceed with the work. As a good general—philosophers these days must be good strategists—I trust nothing that comes with the publication will surprise you. Your Preface speaks for itself, and I trust my book does well for itself.

Thanks for your prompt reply. It seems to me that your references do not corroborate the statement that the structure of Capital was completely recreated under the impact of the American Civil War. It is certainly true that the original plan or plans were thoroughly revised between 1857 and 1866, but I found no evidence that this change was decisively influenced by American developments. In point of fact, going through Marx’s letters written during this period, I am struck by the rather casual references to the United States. Or, if you deny the “casual”: such references seem to me in no way different from others to contemporary European events. Sorry!

A personal remark on your personal remark: there is no rational ground on which you can associate the questions of my friends with the recollection of attacks on your life and on your carrying a gun! They took your announcement as that of a scholarly (sit venia verbo!)[75] interpretation of Marx, subject to intelligent critique. Believe me, they wanted information, not attack and counterattack. You should be the last to resent this or to obliterate the difference between their attitude and the other.

Greetings!

Jan. 28, 1958

I assume you received M&F: I’m surprised that you did not ask for more than the 3 copies I sent.

The reviews have not yet appeared and I naturally do not know when they will appear, but already I’m thinking of a “supplement.” You know that I had many more rough Ideas than those that I developed on Hegel’s Absolute Idea ever since 1953 when I first broke through the “sound barrier” of Hegelian terminology.[76] For obvious and not so obvious reasons it was not necessary to develop those for the book itself. However, I cannot seem to part either from Hegel or a few American workers and student youth who have been writing me on Chapter 1 of M&F[77] and have shown a much greater grasp than they are ever being credited with—they certainly create sufficient ground for me to want to take off from. I’m starting on a lecture tour in March and I thought that that might give me a chance for a serious and rather lengthy essay that I would either submit to a periodical or actually try to publish as a booklet. Naturally I would still love to “depend” on you and wondered whether you would care to read any drafts that I would write.[78] I am anxious to read your book, so please keep me informed when its official publication date is.

I’ll be glad to read what you may write on Hegel—if you don’t press me and give me time!

And I could indeed use two more copies of “Marxism and Freedom!”

Good Luck!

April 18, 1958

It was impossible after all to develop the ideas I had in mind relative to Hegel’s Absolute Idea while on tour. It was just too hectic—I spoke nearly every day for 30 days sometimes for 2-3 hours a day. It seems if you are scheduled to give a lecture on a university campus, you therefore “belong” to the Administration before and after and on any subject that comes into their head. The range of subjects in my case extended all the way from “Adventures in the Hegelian Dialectic”[79] to “Khrushchev’s ‘Point 4’ Program,”[80] with Marxism and Freedom being the center of all. The turnout was also quite different than anticipated—I’d be scheduled for a small seminar of 25 and 150[81] would turn up or I would be scheduled for a double class of 100 and 500 would turn out, as they did in the University of California at Berkeley when I spoke on the American Roots of Marxism. In addition there was a radio appearance and one on TV’s “Cavalcade of Books” where suddenly I found my work counterposed to J. Edgar Hoover’s “Masters of Deceit.”[82] That got me so angry that I exploded that “Hoover’s work was at best a negative approach. You get nowhere by jailing people or passing laws against thinking. You certainly cannot win the global struggle for the mind of man by imitating Russian Communist totalitarianism. Mine is a positive approach, giving people a theory of liberation—Marxist Humanism—ideas people live by and die for.” That got the panelists so worried that I had criticized their “hero” that they quickly moved me away from the TV screen and mike and stated that of course I was “a very controversial figure, a Marxist” and they invited, “all to write in on having had me on when they discussed Hoover’s book.” They said they expected an avalanche of people. At least I got them to laugh when they handed me the guest book to sign. As it happened to be March 5th, I wrote “On the 5th happy anniversary of Stalin’s death.” I do not believe I’ll ever get invited again. Yet I wish I had gotten that distance in breaking the conspiracy of silence that surrounds Marxism and Freedom on the East Coast.

May 1st I’ll be off one short lapse—to Pittsburgh and West Virginia—and so I do not know whether I’ll get a chance to write what I wish to. At least let me indicate the two problems that are preoccupying me now. Ever since Mao Tse-Tung’s speech on the “100 flowers” to bloom,[83] I have, instead of having a straight economic state capitalist approach, a phenomenological one for I feel that Hegel’s “Spirit in Self-Estrangement—the Discipline of Culture”[84] very apropos. (Do you recall that Marx points precisely to the “noble type of consciousness” as one of the areas in Hegel where the dialectic far outstrips his own use of it?)[85] And while working on that I had returned also to the AI[86], again in relation to a concrete stage now—the something new which made the backward Vietnamese recognize these “haughty vassals”[87] like Mao and Ho-chi-Minh[88] and suddenly stop the onward rush of Russian Communism throughout Asia. There are some very new impulses at work, and I’m dying to get down to work them out, but it might have to wait.

I noted the announcement that your book [89] is finally off the press—congratulations!

I will begin with what will not be contested, I believe: the dialectical relationship of subject and object in the process of history as the center of Hegel’s Absolute Method. Or, to put it differently, the conception of reality as totality, the unity of inner and outer; the relationship between the whole and the parts which constitutes the passage from existence to reality. But the real world, even when Hegel is the Prussian philosopher glorifying the state as the combination of the ideal and the real, is not Plato’s republic with its “philosopher-kings”; to Hegel not even kings can substitute for philosophers and thus, just as the Christian Hegel lets “Revealed Religion” play second fiddle to philosophy, so the state philosopher Hegel leaves the state as “Objective Mind” remain[ing] on the doorsteps, not in the inner sanctum, of “Absolute Mind.”[91]

July 15, 1958

Dear HM,

The absoluteness of my silence is not to be construed as proof of the fact that the Absolute Idea has lost its grip on me, but only that the practical everyday life of an author whose publisher is so small as almost to unite with the politicos to silence the work and thus burdening her with all the “promotional” work as well. But, outside of an appearance on TV next week for University of Detroit, I have nearly nothing to do till fall when I appear at Cooper Union.[90] In any case I grasp what momentary lull there is in my tours and lectures to resume where I left off when publication of Marxism and Freedom ended our correspondence.

Now Marx criticized Hegel for not having really surmounted the duality of thought and being, of theory and practice, of subject and object; that his dialectic, no more than Kant’s, could in its mystical shell be the actual, interior dialectic of the historic process, but was just froth appearance, “the origin” not the actual history of man. He insisted that under the circumstance Absolute Spirit was mere appearance so that, even when he had “people” as content, the expression was restricted to that alien man, the philosopher, and that in fact, it is always after the fact that absolute spirit makes history, so that it is not only Nature which is “unconscious” and does, through necessity, what Logic accomplishes freely, but Absolute Spirit as well accomplishes the real movement unconsciously: “For in effect the absolute spirit does not become conscious of itself as creator of the world until after the event and its making of history only exists in the consciousness, in the opinion and representation of the philosophers, in the speculative imagination.”[92] But when “corporeal Man”[93] standing on his own feet, the maker of his own history and his own thoughts, then first will self-knowledge and knowledge coincide, the proletariat being both subject and object of knowledge and maker of history.

There is no argument with Marx’s materialism, nor did the mature Marx separate his dialectics from his materialism, but the young Marx, when the need of the hour was to free oneself and the whole generation from mysticism, did underplay (because he did not know the early works?) Hegel’s insights to “peoples” and not just consciousness and self-consciousness, who receive the heritage of history as “natural principles” and “have mission of applying it.”[94] In any case, I am not here interested in what Marx did or did not see (to that we will come later) but what our age can and must see and to which it has a contribution to make.

To return to Hegel, first as Absolute Knowledge appears in Phenomenology, where he sums up [95] the movement from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” through Spinoza’s abstract unity in Substance to Leibniz’s recoil from this abstraction to the Individuality of—may I add?—commercial, pre-1789 capitalism which Kant anticipated and developed further after the French Revolution as abstract freedom, or Individual Will: all good men get together and work out contradictions according to a general will. Hegel continues with his rejection of the Absolutes of other philosophies when the millennium did not follow the French Revolution and we had Fichte’s analysis of reality as Ego, Schelling’s “intellectual intuition” (of which Hegel says, “Substance by itself would be void and empty intuition”) [PhGB, p. 803; PhGM, p. 489] and Jacobi’s “reactionary” (my emphasis) reestablishment of Absolute as faith alone [EL, ¶76].[96] To this Hegel adds “However, Spirit has shown itself to be neither mere withdrawal of self-consciousness into pure inwardness, nor mere absorption of self-consciousness into Substance . . . Spirit is the movement of the self which empties (externalizes itself) and qua subject . . . ” [PhGB, pp. 803–04; PhGM, p. 490]. Well, what does it accomplish “qua Subject”? (1) it “wound up process of embodiment” [PhGB, p. 804; PhGM, p. 490]; (2) History was born anew to combine with science of the ways in which knowledge appears and ended up as absolute spirit; but (3) “the process of releasing itself from the form of its self” which is supposed to be “the highest freedom and security of its knowledge of itself” [PhGB, p. 806; PhGM, p. 491] does not make it as happy as the ending of the Phenomenology would have it appear for it will reappear as Absolute Idea in Logic and Absolute Mind in the Encyclopedia and there we will see, not the work of art with its “double-tongued equivocal character of what they gave out as certainty” [PhGB, p. 740; PhGM, p. 446], but (1) “Individuality purified of all that interferes with its universalism, i.e., freedom itself” [PM, ¶481]; (2) freedom not as a possession but as a dimension of being; in a word (3) Absolute Mind as the actuality of freedom. The philosopher doth protest too much when he keeps repeating knowledge is the Olympus when all the time he comes down to earth and its freedoms and lack of them. That is why I said, in Marxism and Freedom, that “Translated materialistically, the fact that Nature has gone through the same dialectical development as Idea shows there is a movement from practice to theory as well as v.v. [vice versa]” [M&F, p. 42].

With your indulgence, therefore, I wish to look at the real world of ours and spell out this movement from practice to theory (for it is only there where we’ll get the new insights, “the new impulses” emerging from the objective movement and the maturity of our age which will compel us to make concrete what was only general to Marx): 1) The period of the 1930’s—not of Hitler for I am consider[ing] not the development of counter-revolution but of revolution—the French Sit-Down Strikes, the American CIO, the Spanish Revolution[,] all adding up to new forms of workers’ control of production. That is to say, the climax in the Spanish Revolution and occupation of factories by workers showed the workers were moving from Soviets or political control to actual management of production by themselves. (2) The period of the 1940’s; National Resistance Movement, including Negro demonstrations, wartime and post-war general strikes, including GI movements for return home, ending in the flocking by the millions into the Communist Parties. All this signified, not ‘backwardness’ of workers, but search for new political form to work out both freedom from occupation and economic slavery. The fact that that “double-tongued” enemy—Communism in Western Europe—won the allegiance is only one more manifestation that this is an age of absolutes, and that the counter-revolution is not only in the innards of the revolution but v.v. [vice-versa]. And because the two are so tightly linked we had stalemate. (3) But with the period of 1950’s and Automation new grounds were laid for overcoming this total contradiction. Where state capitalism posed, but only in general, and only for theoreticians or those where Communism actually ruled over production, the question of the new type of workers’ revolts and the return to Marx’s theories of alienation, Automation made it concrete, evoking the question: what Kind of Labor Should Man Perform? If that was a cry in the wilderness during the miners’ strike against [the] continuous miner [in 1949-50],[97] it began to be heard three years later during recession, and, above all, that year it was united with the cry for political freedom [from] out of totalitarianism in the East German Revolt.[98]

From then on there should have been no rest for the theoreticians until they had broken through on that Absolute Idea and absolute freedom in the manner in which Marx broke through the mystical shell, and in the concrete manner Lenin, confronted with “transformation into opposite” [LCW 38, p. 109] made his own re-transformation with “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war” [LCW 21, p. 39]. But, no, the Kantian ought remained exactly as abstract as Kant had it—and no Marxist would move to make the abolition of division of mental and manual as concrete for our age as Marx had made “the general absolute law” of capitalism [99] concretely mean for the movement the mobilization of “the new passions and new forces” for the establishment of the new society.[100] The greatest deterrent to the indispensability of the theoretician is the theoretician himself who flocks to anything from Existentialism to Zen-Buddhism and from “war guilt”[101] to psychoanalysis—anything, anything at all to avoid the responsibility of the Marxist theoretician to be where the workers are.

For anyone bound for “adventures of the Hegelian dialectic,”[102] 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. Now, I admit that the humanism of Hegel is not the most obvious element in the Hegelian philosophy, although I maintain that today we should see it as its innermost essence. Naturally, the academic tradition that operates on Prof. Windelband’s assumption that the generation that could understand Hegel’s Phenomenology has died[103] cannot help the youth of our epoch grasp the grandeur of the vision of the most encyclopedic mind of Europe who wrote: “Within the short span of man’s own life, an individual must learn the whole long journey of mankind. This is possible only because the universal mind is operative in every individual mind and is the very substance of it.”[104] It is true that Hegel himself did throw a mystical veil over his philosophy by treating it as a closed ontological system, but he also warned against those who become the self-styled “representatives” of a philosophical work who, he wrote, “are like the dead burying the dead” [PhGB, p. 130; PhGM, pp. 44–45]. He put his own faith in the public instead, not alone because of its modesty, but because “it is the nature of truth to force its way to recognition when the time comes” [PhGB, p. 129; PhGM, p. 44].

You once told me that what I wrote in the first letters in 1953 on the Absolute Idea and what appeared in Marxism and Freedom were miles apart and, in a sense, it is. No public work, popular or unpopular, can contain the intricacies of thought as they develop in their abstract form before they become filled with more concrete content. And no doubt also part of the reason of leaving it in its undeveloped state was finding none but “dumb workers” agreeing while the theoreticians were shying away. But I do mean to follow up the book with further development and I certainly would love to have your help, no matter how sharply critical, in breaking through those murky categories. At least you shouldn’t merely keep silent. I will await to hear from you before I go any further.