On Hegel, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School in the Period of Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution
January 8, 1973 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm refers to a Dunayevskaya’s New Year’s greeting (missing). Fromm assures Dunayevskaya that he is willing to write “a very warm appraisal” of the manuscript of Philosophy and Revolution as a blurb for the publisher’s use. Fromm explained that he is reading Dunayevskaya’s manuscript while also revising one of his own.[1] Fromm also alludes to the fact that Dunayevskaya had informed him some time ago that she had also asked Marcuse to do the same, which Marcuse had not done.][2]
February 10, 1973 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm encloses the note he had sent to Richard Huett, Editor-in-Chief of Dell Publishing Company.[3] He also mentions how much he enjoyed reading her manuscript, commenting that he admired Philosophy and Revolution whole-heartedly. Fromm suggests that Dunayevskaya consistently cite all the sources from which she quotes, as an aid to serious readers.]
March 6 1973 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm thanks Dunayevskaya for a letter (missing) he had received from her after he had written to her and to the publisher of Philosophy and Revolution. Fromm tells Dunayevskaya that he had not had time to add a more personal note and goes on to congratulate her and again express admiration for her work. Fromm adds, however, that the text could be improved in places, offering to assist in such editing if Dunayevskaya wished him to do so. Fromm concludes by noting that he had recently seen a book by Gajo Petrovic in German, also titled Philosophie und Revolution, but that it was quite different from Dunayevskaya’s work.[4]]
March 25 1973 Fromm telegram to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm offers a couple of further editing suggestions before Dunayevskaya’s manuscript went to press].
After returning from an exhausting lecture tour (one leaflet encl.) and plunging into page proofs of P&R and Index. (I never trust bourgeois publishers to know revolutionary philosophy sufficiently to be able to construct Index on their own), I’m ready to start worrying all over again.
The stench of Watergate reminded me all over again of McCarthyism and worse when Marxism & Freedom came out and I was given an American version of Russian unperson treatment. I do not believe they will succeed doing this with Philosophy and Revolution. Still—Do you suppose I could once again impose on you and ask you to review it? Will you be in Mexico in mid-Sept—book is due off press in mid-Oct., but review copies get sent out a month in advance and, of course, your copy should reach you then. What do you think?
Prof. Hiroshi Mizuta who was so anxious to get you to Nagoya University (the year you cancelled your trip to Japan) passed through on his way to Scotland for Adam Smith memorial—and asked to be remembered. He was proud of fact that he helped elect a left mayor who ran against Tanaka’s man[5] this year.
July 12, 1973 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm stresses his involvement in correcting the galleys for his own book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, due in two weeks, as well as his travel and lecture plans in Chile.[6] Nonetheless, he accedes to Dunayevskaya’s request that he write a review of Philosophy and Revolution. Fromm says that he could write such a review if the book could be sent to him by the middle of September. Even then, he writes, his review would have to be somewhat general, because time constraints would make going into much detail impossible. Fromm concludes the letter with a reference to the possibility of Dunayevskaya travelling to Mexico, and his wish that the two of them might have an opportunity to meet and talk.[7]]
You’re wonderful! No wonder you remain so young—you do not allow even real time problems to weigh you down enough to say No to nuisances like me.
Your name is way too big to consider that, not having any connections with newspaper and magazine publishers, any review-essay by you would not get into print. On the other hand, editors do not like to be told by publishers whom to invite to do the review. In a word, the very fact that you had read the book and been asked for advice ahead of publication and thus presented them with a review ahead of official publication date, October, will give them a double scoop. Either N.Y. Review of Books (Editors: Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein), 250 W. 57th St., NYC 10019, or NY Times Book Review, or, in magazines, The Nation, or Commentary (165 E. 56th St., NYC 10022; I’m sure you knew its editor, Norman Podhoretz when he wasn’t quite as rightwing as now) or nearly any magazine you like to read. I didn’t mention quarterlies because, for the impact I’m hoping for, they cannot exercise. Since the book will not be off the press before October by which time you’ll be off to Chile (Bon voyage!), I’ve sent air mail the uncorrected proofs in book form. Not many changes were introduced after the publisher experimented with that sloppy form of book for his trade purposes, price, ($8.95 hard cover, $2.95 ppb).
Do you happen to know Professor Louis Dupre, the author of Philosophic Foundations of Marx,[8] one of the early humanist religious interpretations of Marx? He is now the president of the Hegel Society of America and, to my surprise, quite friendly to me who wants to review the book for Journal of the History of Ideas, and, despite the society’s conservatism, he has invited me to their next conf. in 1974, and their very tiny publication, The Owl of Minerva carried a par. on it, encl. He wrote me that it is time the unperson status of myself were ended and “they” (I have no idea whom he meant by that except some other elite philosophers) consider my contributions on Hegel “significant.”
What will your seminars in Chile be on? Wish I were there with you. I had been very anxious to see as they appeared to me to start something very new but with P&R taking so many years out of my life and the rest of the year I’ll practically become a New Yorker all over again. I can see no time for traveling.
Yours, ever so gratefully,
August 31 1973 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm opens with an apology for not having responded sooner, having been travelling and ill with the flu. He writes that he plans to pick up reading Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution in order to review it. He warns that he is pressed for time, as he continues to work on a new book.[9] Moreover, Fromm expresses some doubt as to whether he could find an appropriate journal for which to submit a review of Dunayevskaya’s book. He rules out some possibilities, including Commentary, noting his bad relations with its editor, Norman Podhoretz. Fromm writes that he got into an argument with Podhoretz after he rejected one of Fromm’s articles because it contradicted the majority opinion of American Jews. Fromm suggests the Nation as a possibility and requests information. Fromm also responds positively to Dunayevskaya’s writing him about Louis Dupré’s appreciation of her work, terming it a break-through for her. Fromm concludes with a reference to the ongoing unrest in Chile, writing that at the request of the sponsors of his planned lectures in Chile he had postponed his trip there.[10]]
So Chile thinks its best to postpone your seminars just when I got you a Bon Voyage [card].
Well, I’m glad you do not endanger your health and if I weren’t such an ignoramus on psychology I would gladly offer to help with your book—[11]
Dropped a note to ed. of Dell—Huett. So you may hear some suggestions from him re for whom to write book review you so generously promised despite pressure from your own work—
Here is editor (whom you must certainly know from way back in the 1930s when he wrote Factories in the Field):
The Nation [gives address]
P.S. Thought you’d like to see what Black Christian chose to quote from P&R in advertising talk for this Sun.[12]
At long last P&R is off the press and while I believe the publisher sent you a hb [hardback], I do not have all their confidence—and so I enclose a pb [paperback].
Are you in Mexico? I’ve “lost” schedule, since I do not know what or where you were to be once Chile is in the throes of a counter-revolution.
Did you create time to review book? Where? I see your work[13] is getting full pr treatment. I haven’t yet gotten a copy but of course will—too few left with any memory of revolution.
P.S. The post office ordered me not to put into book (P&R) (though it was being sent via air mail) the brief note. So here it is separated.[14] Never knew that even in such small matters alienation enters. Do let me hear from you.
Thought the review Prof. Dupré had written would interest you, so here is section he sent me—I’ll get the journal when that appears.[15]
In any case, the Christians are more objective than either the “Jews” or “Radicals,” judging by your difficulty thus far to get a review published and the tardiness of the regular bourgeois press to concern themselves with P&R.
How are you? I keep thinking of Cuernavaca as is where LT’s [Leon Trotsky’s] household “escaped” after those horrid Frame-Up Trials—and it was at their conclusion in 1938 that, along the paths of bougainvilleas, began my series of doubts in purple![16]
Do you know the Spanish translator who translated Socialist Humanism? Would he be interested in P&R?
February 12 1974 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm responds to Dunayevskaya’s most recent correspondence concerning Dupré’s review of Philosophy and Revolution. Fromm was sending the review to Dr. Arnaldo Orfila, the director of what Fromm calls the best and also left-oriented publishing house in Spanish.[17] Fromm also agrees with the point Dunayevskaya had made that “it was easier to get an understanding and positive response from ‘bourgeois scholars’ than from Jews and Leftists.” Fromm asserts that these groups had become mired in dogma. Fromm mentions his new work, which he had tentatively titled To Have or To Be. Contrasting it with Gabriel Marcel’s book of the same title,[18] Fromm explains that although the two of them had written on similar concepts, their viewpoints differed, given Fromm’s Marxism and Marcel’s Catholicism. Fromm concludes by saying that To Have or To Be was stimulated by Marx’s frequent use of the dichotomy.]
You’re wonderful! Naturally I at once sent P&R to Dr. Orfila[19] and while I’m not as optimistic in analysis of “left-oriented publishing house” (not when it comes to my works who have too much concrete in the most abstract statements, especially “negation of the negation,” to attract money) as you are, still I hope your word and Dupre’s review help. In any case, many, many thanks.
One thing may especially interest you re Dupré and Marcel: The announcement of Marcel’s death[20] happened when I was in NY and Dupré was in Conn. (He teaches at Yale now). I felt moved and my memory was of 1947 when I was furious as all get out in Paris at Sartre whose fellow-travelling at the time was disorienting the youth and influencing, or trying to influence the Renault workers on their very first strike not under the leadership of CP [Communist Party] to return to CP leadership. Though I shared little with Marcel, not only not on Catholicism but Existentialism, I felt he was both more objective and whole. I never had any belief in death when it comes to ideas and I began to feel strongly that I wished death wouldn’t quite so sadden us, no matter how deep the pain, and that it wouldn’t if we could keep thinking of the continuity of ideas. So, like the nut I am, and also because I knew no one of my colleagues would care of Marcel’s death, I suddenly dropped Dupré a “note of condolence,” saying I’m sure the Humanism of Marcel would be carried through in his works and dialectics, and that I hoped he didn’t think it was presumptuous for an atheist to so address a man of religion but that man Hegel (who so far as I am concerned never died) has always succeeded in making strange bedfellows, and he was continuing it to this day. When Dupré forwarded me the copy of his review and its covering note to “Raya” signed “Louis,” he thanked me for that other note.
Now then, titles, of course aren’t copyrighted and To Have/To Be is older than Shakespeare (whose beautiful attack on gold in Troilus and Cressida Marx quoted directly in Capital[21]) who was older than Marcel etc. etc. Yet it took nearly a full century before what Marx wrote on the never-ending To Be to be recognized as the second negativity to come after vulgar communism. May I presume to send you the original translation I made of Marx’s Private Property and Communism—the passages on to have/to be—which I happened to have found from 1958 Marxism and Freedom[22] (you always find the opposite of what you’re looking for; I was looking for something on the Absolute I have to send to Hegel Society of America). It happens that that is when you first started a correspondence with me and you needed a translation for what you were writing on Marx’s Concept of Man. You may find it useful at the moment of writing.
I do hope you are well. Will you remain in Switzerland which is now all flutter with Solzhenitsyn[23] long? The reviews of P&R are hardly flooding the market, and I sure wish you still would review it. But then you are very much more productive than I; I couldn’t think of starting a new book so soon after your massive work has appeared, but I’m a slow and tortuous writer.
March 6, 1974 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm thanks Dunayevskaya for sending him her translation of “Private Property and Communism” from Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. Fromm also asks Dunayevskaya for information on the source for Marx’s use of Having and Being as central categories.]
Your question regarding “the sources for Marx’s use of Having and Being as central categories” has set me thinking: how does one single out sources or categories when the subject is that discoverer of a whole new continent of thought which was so plentiful, so multidimensional, so continuously developing both in relationship to the history of thought, the objective situation and the living reshapers of history—the masses in motion—that he never even stopped to give his discovery a name; as you know it was not Marx but first Engels and then Plekhanov who named that philosophy of liberation Historical Materialism, Dialectical Materialism?[24]
Nevertheless, though Marx wrote nothing on “categories,” the concept of To Be/To Have is so pivotal to his life’s work from the moment he broke with bourgeois society in 1843 until the day of his death in 1883 that it is a challenge to pin down, if not the sources “as such,” the historic moment when a turning point was reached by the developing subject-matter and Subject: (1) The by-now most famous first moment is 1844, and the obvious sources for the theory of alienated labor are Hegel’s theory of alienation, especially as developed in the Phenomenology of Mind, and Adam Smith’s concept of labor as source of all value. But when one says that, the most important thing they forget is that he was not only critical of the quantitative measurements of classical political economy, but criticized Hegel for standing on the same ground.[25] In a word,
Marx criticized Hegel, not for idealism so much as for dehumanizing ideas. The only bourgeois writer who caught the fact that Marx wasn’t under the impression that Hegel knew only mental labor, but was criticizing him for building the Phenomenology on that concept is Nicholas Lobkowicz: “In short, Marx does not accuse Hegel of having treated labor as if it was thought activity. Rather, he accuses him of having in the Phenomenology described human history in terms of a dialectic of consciousness, not in terms of dialectic of labor.” The quotation appears on p. 322 of his Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx,[26] which you will find indispensable not only because he traces back all the sources to very nearly everything Marx read, but because, being a Jesuit and hostile to Marx and trying to establish that the Middle Ages weren’t all that dark and both the appreciation of the being of man as an artisan and his thought was first recognized by religion and not by Marx, by Bacon[27] and not by Hegel, he develops the whole concept of Having and Being through the ages.
(2) Another facet of Having/Being that is not given due recognition is that Marx developed them not only re class struggle but that fundamental relationship of Man/Woman. I never have, I believe, written to you on the subject, and so I enclose an article by me to which is also appended the quotes from the 1844 Manuscripts which directly relates to the concept.[28]
(3) The 1850 period when Marx was supposed to have turned “economist” is when he summed up his whole philosophy as “the absolute movement of becoming.” That quotation that appears on the frontispiece of Philosophy and Revolution is from the Grundrisse which has finally appeared in English (Pelican Marx Library) and you’ll find it on p. 488. (If you prefer following the German edition, it’s from Notebook V, January 22 to February of 1858.) To me, the whole excitement of that whole section on the pre-capitalist formations of society is how the total concept of the Oriental society is directly tied to a new concept of man because he was reshaping history with the Taiping Revolution as against the view he had of the Oriental “vegetating in the teeth of barbarism” that was part of the Communist Manifesto when Marx’s sources were the written ones of Western thought as against the active Eastern masses that were so creative at the very moment when the European proletariat, having suffered the defeats of the 1848 revolutions, were pausing while the Orient was “making revolutions” “pour encourager les autres.”[29] (That’s the footnote to the section on commodity fetishism in Chapter I of Capital that the underconsumptionist translators of Capital left out from the English edition.) [MCIF, p. 164][30]
(4) In the 1860s, in Capital (Kerr edition [MCIK], p. 148 [MCIF, pp. 229-30]), there are two important footnotes, (1) Act IV, Scene 3, “Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold!” from Timon of Athens by Shakespeare. And of course that’s not the only reference to Shakespeare nor to the Greek tragedies, both of which Marx not only was constantly rereading in the original, but romping every Sunday with his children all through Hampstead Heath who had to listen and learn the recitation. (2) The other reference on that page is to history, “Henry III, most Christian king of France, robbed cloisters of their relics, and turned them into money. It is well known what part the despoiling of the Delphic Temple, by the Phoenicians, played in the history of Greece.... It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins, who, at the feast of the Goddess of Love, gave themselves up to strangers, should offer to the goddess the piece of money they received” [MCIK, p. 148; MCIF, p. 229–30.] But of course the history that most influenced him was not the erudite knowledge of all that has been written but history in the making. Which is why I seem not to be answering your question by listing sources.
May I also include a critique I wrote of that horrible Martin Nicolaus who finally translated the Grundrisse;[31] the translation is, however, excellent.
P.S. I never got an acknowledgement from the publisher you recommended in Mexico, to whom, of course, I sent a copy of P&R and a letter.[32] On second thought, I remember that this was the same one, wasn’t it, who not only refused translation and publication of M&F but was rather rude on the subject. My impression then was that he was somewhat Stalinist-tinged and while he was “loving” you because you weren’t as concrete as I in the attacks of the “socialist states,” he would have nothing to do with someone who was going in for “statistics.” Am I right?
March 26, 1974 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm indicates that he has ordered a copy of Nicholas Lobkowicz’s Theory and Practice, which Dunayevskaya had recommended for its discussion of “to have or to be.” Fromm refers to Dunayevskaya’s article on women’s liberation, affirming her view that the man/woman relationship was an important concept in Marx’s theory. Fromm also mentions Bachofen.[33] Fromm stresses that if the women’s liberation movement learned more about Marx, they would find their “greatest ally” in him. Fromm also responds to Dunayevskaya’s concern that Arnaldo Orfila, director of the Mexican publisher Siglo Veintiuno, may not have been favorably disposed to publishing Philosophy and Revolution in a Spanish translation because of his possible Stalinist tendencies. Fromm disagrees somewhat with the Stalinist characterization, saying that Orfila had definitely been anti-Stalinist—but that their relationship broke off after Fromm criticized Cuba.]
Thank you very much for the recommendation to 21st c. publishers [Siglo Veintiuno] and I must apologize for doubting Arnaldo Orfila Reynal’s interest in Philosophy and Revolution. I’ve just signed a contract with them.
How is your new work proceeding?
Just returned from a most exhausting national lecture tour . . . I literally hadn’t stopped talking from January 15–May 5! So I escaped for one week to rural route #3—Wallaceburg [Ontario] where there is nothing but River, unpaved roads, milk houses—and I know no one—
May I impose for one more favor? Could you tell me which German publishers might be interested in receiving a copy of the work (P&R) with request for possible publication? Naturally I would love nothing more than being published in the homeland of Marx and Hegel—and some living friends like you—
May 24, 1974 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm is glad to hear that Arnaldo Orfila of Siglo Veintiuno had given her a contract for a Spanish edition of Philosophy and Revolution. For a German edition, he recommends Suhrkamp Verlag, suggesting that she use his name in writing to its Director, Dr. Siegfried Unseld. Fromm also mentions Marx’s reference in the 1844 Manuscripts to “21 Bogen” [printer’s sheets] by Moses Hess[34] and asks her if she knows how to find that text.]
I’m not absolutely sure but I believe (since the original “21 Bogen by Moses Hess” were published in 1843 and would be impossible to get hold of) that where you’ll most of them is in A. Cornu and W. Mönke edition of Moses Hess’s Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837-50, which were issued in 1961 in East Berlin. Remember, also, that Cornu has written Moses Hess et la Gauche Hegelienne in 1934 which may not easily obtainable, but the 1958 edition of Les ‘Annales Franco-Allemandes’ 1843–44 should be easily obtainable in Paris and would likewise have included at least some of the material on “Have” by Hess that Marx was referring to. Also in the Hague, 1959, Hess’s Briefwechsel which is edited by E. Silberner. Quellen un Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Deutschen und Oesterr. Hope this helps as I do not have any of Hess’s writings or I would immediately forward it to you.
Thank you very much for the German publisher’s name; I will write at once, send Philosophy and Revolution, and inform you of results.
Did you receive the copy of my article for the Hegel Society of America on “Hegel’s Absolute Idea as New Beginning”[35] that I sent you while I was in Canada?
July 24, 1974 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[From expresses thanks for the suggestions about sources for the term “having.” With apologies for not acknowledging it earlier, he writes that he was overburdened but will take her article on Hegel with him on his vacation.]
In the attacks on me, you are being dragged in—in China Quarterly (review encl). For an Establishment quarterly to get such a Maoist-tinged scholar to take issue even with refugees I interviewed in Hong Kong is funny but not unexpected.[36]
Dr. Unseld of Suhrkamp Verlag never acknowledged my letter re any German edition but Feltrinelli in Italy[37] cabled me acceptance.
Did you get those “21 Bogen of Moses Hess” in the books I thought might have this?
So happy to hear from you finally; ever so often you “disappear” and I begin to worry; I don’t believe it is the July 24th letter you didn’t answer for you did drop me a note that you would write re my projected talk at Hegel Society of America, but I did not hear from you after that. In any case, let’s forget about Dr. Unseld whose secretary did say “No” to publishing P&R. I do hope you have the opportunity to write List Verlag and will let me know so I can send copy to them; a million thanks.
As usual, I’m in the midst of fighting; this time with the young “New Left” (Telos) who gave a 1950 work of Adorno on Occultism 50 pp. of their magazine,[38] but couldn’t find any space for reviewing Philosophy and Revolution. When I’m dead, I’m sure they will “discover” me—and pervert. 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 from “their” Maurer to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics which so erudite they didn’t quite dare attack until they found I was merciless in my critique.[39] On the other end, they were amazed that 200 came out to hear me—to them that was “endless mass.” Whereupon Sir T. M. Knox, on Aesthetics, who followed me, began with a remark that he would not try to compete with “so charming a lady.” He hardly expected this from me “I suppose Sir Knox thinks he complimented me, but, in fact, that is a typical male chauvinist escapism from dealing with The Idea.” (We did happen to end up as almost-friends.)[40] In any case, beside permitting me to deliver a paper (which Nijhoff will publish along with all papers of the HSA [Hegel Society of America] conference), reviewed the book (The copy of The Owl of Minerva enclosed);[41] also its president, Louis Dupré, included review of book in the survey of recent works on Marxism, in Journal of the History of Ideas (Oct.-Dec. 1974, excerpt included here).
How is your work coming? I met one more admirer of yours—Studs Terkel whose Working that has become a best seller[42] and has quite a bit, from interviews, on “Having/Being,” so if you wish a copy I’ll be glad to send to you—who has a radio program in Chicago and in his interview both brought in your [Marx’s] “Concept of Man” and related it both to my “Woman as Force and Reason” and to P&R.
I have not had a single word from the Mexican publisher after he signed contract and did send $300, which I thought meant surely he will publish, he must be translating and yet have not heard a word, tho I promised to collaborate with translator and help him find Spanish editions for any references I make in English.
Don’t keep yourself so distant for so long a time.
Sorry, the enclosed excerpts from my own talk are so messy, but I think you have the whole for I sent it long, long ago.
How are you? Somehow I always seem to expect a letter from you—or is it just that I imagine you “owe” me one because I do like to hear from you.
Did I tell you that it wasn’t a question of misfiling or the mail not arriving, but that Dr. Unseld,[43] or rather his secretary, refused and refused very categorically? In any case, Germany still remains absolutely closed to me, and Germany is the one country that I want most to be published in. I thought that now—since my talk to the HSA [Hegel Society of America]—and the fact that Nijhoff would publish the papers of that Conference—that P&R will be published both in Mexico and Italy, and parts of it in the Hague, that perhaps finally, with your help, get to the homeland of Marx and Hegel. You mentioned List Verlag, did you get a chance to drop them a note?
How is your work progressing? Were you interested in Studs Terkel’s Working? I had a most successful and very hefty lecture tour last year that led me to the South for the first time, so I ended up with an awful cold.
February 13, 1975 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm continues a discussion around possible German publishers for Philosophy and Revolution, assuring Dunayevskaya that he would alert her to any possibilities in Germany that might come to his attention. He also mentions reading with pleasure some parts of Studs Terkel’s Working. Fromm then turns to Stephen F. Cohen’s new book on Nikolai Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution.[44] He notes that the work is sympathetic to Bukharin and Lenin, and that Bukharin had developed a plan for guerrilla warfare against Germany during World War I. In addition to some other themes, Fromm cites Cohen’s conclusion that centralization of power in the Soviet Union, unintended by Lenin and Bukharin, was driven by the Russian civil war. Fromm concludes by asking for Dunayevskaya’s views on these issues.]
Thank you for yours of the 13th and also for showing your willingness to try once again to see whether a German publisher could be gotten for Philosophy and Revolution. I do not think that a smaller publisher is harder to convince, especially now that I have signed contracts both with Feltrinelli for Italian publication and El siglo veintiuno for Spanish-speaking audience plus the paper, “Hegel’s Absolute Idea as New Beginning”, that I read the Hegel Society of America[45] last November will be published by Nijhoff of The Hague who publishes all the papers of the Hegel conferences. Since each foreign publication helps the other, and Nijhoff’s has a very wide German audience, List Verlag may be impressed. Thank you very much.
Now, as to Stephen F. Cohen’s work on 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[46] is the center of my attention, and that is exactly where Bukharin went amiss, I do not have as high a view as [he] does of Bukharin and just in case you do not have P&R at hand, I enclose one of the versions of the chapter on Lenin where Bukharin figures.[47] As to the specific points you singled out, it is true that partisan warfare is not as new in Marxist thought as either Mao or Fidel [Castro] have made it out to be, but it isn’t only Bukharin who antedated them, that is to say, the specific dispute between Lenin (and then including Trotsky) and Bukharin on guerrilla warfare was not on principle—guerrilla vs. “regular” army. Rather, it was on the concrete WW I which, beside the Kaiser’s Army, Russia was attacked on many fronts, the Red Army could hardly be called “regular” but it had a chance precisely because it did unite the call for proletarian revolution and a whole body in a centralized place, etc, etc. Partisan warfare, whether Makhno’s army,[48] or whatever, (Incidentally, USA is credited as first, outside of Spain, with having developed guerrilla warfare as revolution vs. armed-to-the teeth imperial army and Churchill had his laughs against the “irregulars” in the trees they knew well killing with a slingshot the beautiful British red coats) is neither a substitute for social revolution, nor a way “to make revolution” for all times, leading to elitism and isolation from the masses. It is good to give Bukharin credit for “discussing”, but to substitute discussion for the concrete conditions where a truth is to be tested and lives won or lost is hardly the way to show that theory lives.
Regarding the economic plan, that is even more proof of the mechanical rather than dialectical form of development than Bukharin’s mechanical Historical Materialism. Yes, Bukharin thought economic even before Trotsky and Trotsky did long before Lenin. Lenin so feared planning as leading to bureaucratism that he wished, when finally convinced, not a national plan, but experimentation, “Soviets plus electrification.”[49] And Bukharin’s Economics of the Transition Period,[50] even more than Bukharin’s siding with Trotsky on trade union debate[51] led Lenin to write that sharp summation of Bukharin as being “major theoretician” and “not understanding dialectic.”[52] 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.”[53] 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, fought Lenin on the Irish question in 1916 when he didn’t think the Easter Revolt was any “bacillus” of proletarian revolution, and continued fighting Lenin on the right to self-determination after they got power.[54] 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.
Finally, if I may say something on where I’m really totally unknowledgeable, Cohen practices some “bad psychology”[55] when he cannot “answer” questions in dispute, then Lenin’s revolutionary intransigence becomes “cantankerousness.” Really! Here is the first world war in full holocaust with “Marxist” Second International in as many pieces; here are the Irish, the only ones braving British imperialism and showing the way to the proletarians who are shooting each other across national frontiers, and here is the most beloved Bolshevik reading lectures on the fact that “National” self-determination is “backward” as compared to internationalism, etc. etc. And it is at that point that Cohen finds gossip as to which factions Bukharin associated with that Lenin didn’t like. No, such “analysis” will not do.
Hope this reaches you on the day of your birth[56] —which every day is in your life, so I was most glad to year that your 75th one will be honored. Wish I was there with you—but capitalism likes greenbacks too much so that “measure” I cannot meet, so I embrace you from here.
March 27, 1975 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm thanks Dunayevskaya for her birthday note and apologizes that the organizers of his birthday party had—inadvertently—asked her to travel such a long distance to participate.]
Do you suppose that now that Nijhoff is going to publish my paper, “Hegel’s Absolute Idea a New Beginning,” in the Hegel Society of America Conference documents, 1974 meeting,[57] that you could get your friend in the German publishing field to be interested in Philosophy and Revolution?
How do you feel? I cannot see why any apology was needed for your friends asking me to come to your birthday gathering that they arranged. I only wish I could have gotten there. How is your new work coming along?
I’m still on tour as you can see from enclosed leaflet. Loyola University had invited me last week on Marxist-Christian dialogue. It was rather interesting. But if I don’t stop chasing the clock and losing that race with time—
Will be home in Detroit May 25th
Aren’t you magnificent personages! Still, it is good to be as active as I am, chasing time and new societies, so that such complimentary thoughts as yours cannot go to my head, but thank you ever so much. One of the greatest things that abound is having friends, and one at this moment is so anxious to see Philosophy and Revolution published in the birth-land of Marx that he thought I would stand a better chance of getting it published if it were translated into German, and he contributed $500 to see what I can do about that.
Do you, dear Fromm, know a translator who would “know” both Hegel and Marx and the “new passions and new forces” so that translating my work into German would appeal to him/her? I’m rather dumb on money matters (I’m supposed to be an economist but my husband insists I don’t even know the price of groceries!) and have no idea whether that $500 would be all or nothing at all, but once we would agree philosophically, I’m sure we could work out an agreement. It wouldn’t really matter whether it was from Germany or Switzerland or wherever, but I would want one in whom you’d have confidence. I also don’t know whether knowledge that Nijhoff will be publishing the proceedings of the Hegel Society of America, 1974, which includes my piece on “Hegel’s Absolute Idea as New Beginning,” would serve as an inducement either to translator or possible publisher. May I hope to hear from you on that matter soon?
Is Mihailo still in Switzerland? I was trying to convince him not to return to his homeland, but he says that I, being Russian, just see forced labor camps everywhere. Ah, well, perhaps I should have accepted the invitation, in 1970, to come to the Hegel conference in Yugoslavia, but I also know that Tito, like any Stalinist and that is way back from 1937 in Spain, was as proficient in shooting or ordering the shooting of Trotskyists first, and, perhaps, asking questions later.[59] In Mexico I was in constant fear over my being a poor shot and, instead of getting the GPU agents, would be “gotten,” not so much about me (though no one likes the prospect of death) as about the Old Man [Trotsky].[60] And yet I know that is not for “my children” but for me that I am working so determinedly for that humanist world.
June 9, 1975 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[Fromm cites a broken arm as the reason for not responding sooner to her February letter on Bukharin, and also mentions his recent meeting with Mihailo Markovic, referring to the postcard the two of them had jointly sent to her. Concerning Bukharin, Fromm noted he had read the ABC of Communism[61] fifty years earlier, and did not have a favorable opinion because of its narrow and mechanistic outlook; Cohen’s book,[62] however, showed Bukharin’s to be a much richer personality than he had expected. Fromm also mentions plans to meet with a representative from List Verlag about a German translation of Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution. Fromm concludes by expressing satisfaction that Dunayevskaya’s work will appear in Italian, as well as in Spanish, the latter in Mexico.]
June 20, 1975 Fromm letter to Dunayevskaya
[In response to Dunayevskaya’s query, Fromm doubts that the translator into German of his Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) would be knowledgeable enough about Hegel and Marx to do a good job with Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution (1973). He suggests consulting people who have written on these topics and who have been translated into German like “your friend Marcuse.” Fromm also wonders if it is good idea to commission a translation before finding a publisher. He mentions additionally that he is trying to speak to Mr. Reif[63] from List Verlag about publishing her book. Finally, he writes that he enjoyed the day he spent with Mihailo Markovic and that Markovic would have enjoyed reading Dunayevskaya’s letter addressed to both of them, but given what she said there about Tito, he did not think it a good idea to mail it to Yugoslavia.]
1. Probably Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973).
2. That earlier letter from Dunayevskaya to Fromm is missing, as is any Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence on Philosophy and Revolution in 1972 or 1973.
3. As mentioned above, Dunayevskaya had known Huett since the 1950s. As excerpted by Dell Publishers for the back cover of Philosophy and Revolution, Fromm’s blurb read: “an extraordinary work which I deeply admire . . . of great theoretical and political importance. The author combines originality, great scholarship, deep theoretical penetration of the subject, incorruptible critical thinking, absence of partisan clichés and a deep passion for the freedom and growth of man. I have learned much from the book and so, I believe, will most seriously interested readers.”
4. A reference to the Yugoslav Marxist humanist Gajo Petrovic’s Philosophie und Revolution (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowolt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1971).
5. Kakuei Tanaka, conservative prime minister of Japan in 1972–74.
6. This was during the last months of the government of Chilean President Salvador Allende (1908–1973), a democratically elected Marxist who was overthrown and murdered on September 11 of that year in a military coup that was led by General Augusto Pinochet and backed by the Nixon administration.
7. Fromm and Dunayevskaya never managed to meet in person.
8. Louis K. Dupré, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966). Dupré, who corresponded with Dunayevskaya in the 1970s and 1980s, later wrote the preface to the 1989 Columbia University Press posthumous reprint of her Philosophy and Revolution. Dupré is also the author of another work on Marx, Marx’s Social Critique of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and of a multivolume study of the intellectual foundations of Western modernity, still in progress.
9. Probably Fromm’s Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), a study of aggression, destructiveness, and Nazism.
10. This was less than two weeks before the September 11 coup that toppled Allende.
11. Probably a reference to her lack of competence to review Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
12. Dunayevskaya encloses the flyer for her lecture in Detroit on Sunday, September 9 on “The Black Movement as Philosophy and Revolution,” sponsored by the Michigan-Lowndes County, Alabama, Christian Movement, a civil rights organization in which News & Letters editor Charles Denby was a leading figure. The paragraph quoted from Philosophy and Revolution reads: “Black was the color that helped make the 1960s so exciting a decade. At one and same time, we became witness to both the African Revolutions and the Black Revolution in the U.S.A. By their self-activity, self-organization, self-development, the Black youth struck out against white supremacy in the quiescent South, and with unparalleled courage took everything that was dished out to them—from beatings, bombings and prisons to cattle prods, shootings and even death itself—and still, unarmed, continued fighting back. They initiated a new epoch of youth revolt, white as well as Black, throughout the land. There was not a single method of struggle, from sit-ins, teach-ins, dwell-ins, wade-ins, to Freedom Rides, Freedom Marches, Freedom Schools, and confrontations with the Establishment, the Bull Connors’ bulldogs and whips in Alabama, or the smartly uniformed soldiers on the steps of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. that did not have its origin in the Black movement. Moreover, this was so not only as strategy and tactic but also as underlying philosophy and perspectives for the future” (P&R, pp. 267–68).
13. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973).
14. This postscript was written on a postcard that carried a photograph of Leroy Foster’s mural featuring Frederick Douglass for the Detroit Public Library.
15. This letter is written underneath a photocopy of an undated note from Louis Dupré enclosing his discussion of Philosophy and Revolution from his larger review essay, “Recent Literature on Marx and Marxism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35:4 (Oct.–Dec., 1974), pp. 703–14. See note 8 for more on Dupré.
16. This refers to the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. Dunayevskaya broke with Trotsky the following year, at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
17. Siglo Veintiuno publishers, Mexico City.
18. The French Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), author of Being and Having, trans. by Katharine Farrer (Boston, Beacon Press, 1951, orig. 1935).
19. Arnaldo Orfila, Director of Siglo Veintiuno Publishers.
20. Gabriel Marcel died October 8, 1973.
21. Actually, Marx quotes Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens [MCIF, p. 229–30; MCIK, p. 148].
22. Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” 1844 Essays [M&F1958, pp. 296–7; MECW 3, pp. 299–300].
23. Dissident Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was deported from Russia on February 12, 1974. He was recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.
24. Friedrich Engels (1820–95), Marx’s closest collaborator, coined the term “historical materialism” nearly a decade after Marx’s death in his 1892 introduction to a new edition of his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (MECW 27, p. 283). Georgi Plekhanov (1857–1918), generally recognized as the founder of Russian Marxism, coined the term “dialectical materialism” in his article, “For the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel’s Death” (1891), which appeared in Neue Zeit, the leading Marxist journal of the time.
25. Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” (1844): “Hegel stands on the basis of modern political economy. . . . He sees only the positive side of labor and not its negative side” (M&F 1958, p. 310; MECW, 3, p. 333).
26. Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).
27. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), British philosopher and scientist.
28. Dunayevskaya, “The Women’s Liberation Movement as Reason and as Revolutionary Force,” first published, along with one page of excerpts on gender from Marx’s “Private Property and Communism” (1844) in Notes on Women’s Liberation: We Speak in Many Voices (Detroit: News and Letters, 1970); reprinted without the appended Marx passages in WLDR.
29. The peasant-based Taiping Rebellion in China lasted from 1850–64. With the phrase “vegetating in the teeth of barbarism,” Dunayevskaya merges two passages from Marx: In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to China as among the world’s “most barbarian nations,” which the expansion of capitalism was drawing “into civilization” (MECW 6, p. 488). In “The Opium Trade,” a September 20, 1858, article for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx wrote of China as a “semi-barbarian” land that was “vegetating in the teeth of time,” while at the same time defending Chinese resistance to British colonialism during the Second Opium War (MECW 16, p. 16). Marx’s footnote to the fetishism section of Capital reads: “One may recall that China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still—pour encourager les autres [to encourage the others]” (MCIF, p. 164). The “dance” of the tables is an allusion to the Taiping Rebellion.
30. See note 58 in Chapter 2.
31. Dunayevskaya’s unpublished “Dear Friends” letter, circulated within News & Letters, critiqued Martin Nicolaus’s Foreword to his translation of Marx’s Grundrisse (1973)—see RDC, p. 12435ff. Excerpts were published under the title, “The Dialectics of Marx’s Grundrisse,” News & Letters (Sep.–Oct. 2005).
32. Siglo Veintiuno, which published a Spanish transition of Philosophy and Revolution in 1977.
33. Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Swiss anthropologist who wrote of early “matriarchal” societies. See Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Fromm discussed Bachofen at several junctures, as can be seen in his Love, Sexuality, and Matriarchy: About Gender, ed. Rainer Funk (New York: Fromm International, 1997).
34. Moses Hess (1812–75) was an early German communist and advocate of “True Socialism,” a doctrine attacked by Marx and Engels for its nostalgia toward feudalism in the Communist Manifesto (1848). Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz [Twenty-One Printer’s Sheets from Switzerland] was the title of an 1843 collection in which Hess published three articles. In his “Private Property and Communism” (1844), Marx refers to Hess: “On the category of having, see Hess, Einundzwanzig Bogen” (MECW 3, p. 301; M&F1958, p. 297).
35. See note 71 in Chapter 4.
36. This review took strong exception to Dunayevskaya’s criticisms of Mao, especially concerning China’s rapprochement with the Nixon administration as Vietnam was being bombed, also linking Dunayevskaya to Fromm: “Like Erich Fromm, Raya Dunayevskaya comes across, for all her philosophical astuteness, as one of the elitist, Marxist-Humanist representatives of the anti-Nixon lobby in America.” See Phil Billingsley, review of Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution, China Quarterly 58 (April-June 1974), p. 398.
37. Feltrinelli, Italy’s large leftist publisher, later issued a translation: Dunayevskaya, Filosofia e rivoluzione, with a preface by Mariachiara Fugazza and Amedeo Vigorelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977).
38. See the Editor’s “Introduction to Adorno” (pp. 2–6); Theodor Adorno, “Theses Against Occultism” (pp. 5–12); Adorno, “Stars Down to Earth: A Critique of the Los Angeles Times Astrology Column” (pp. 13–90), all published in Telos No. 19 (Spring 1974). John O’Neill’s review of Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution appeared in Telos No. 22 (Winter 1974–75), pp. 163–71.
39. For more on Dunayevskaya’s paper and its critique of Adorno, see note 71 in Chapter 4. Reinhart Klemens Maurer is a German philosopher and the author of Hegel und das Ende der Geschichte: Interpretationen zur Phänomenologie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1965).
40. Sir T. M. Knox (1900–80), a noted British Hegel scholar, was the editor and translator of the following works by Hegel: Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), the Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), and the Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
41. Raymond Plant, review of Philosophy and Revolution, Owl of Minerva 5:4 (June 1974), pp. 5–6.
42. Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
43. Of Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt.
44. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution; A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Knopf, 1973).
45. Dunayevskaya note: This “gossip” may interest you regarding those conservatives who nevertheless did see their way to invite me where the “Left” still busy helping Stalinism-Trotskyism turn me into an unperson. But they remain conservative, so when Sir T. M. Knox [translator of several of Hegel’s works] followed me on the podium, he said he would not “compete” with the “charming lady.” I said that he may think he is complimenting me, but it is the most sexist remark I heard that day, and he cannot use such male chauvinism to evade arguing on the content, which is revolutionary. Since everyone was “shocked to death” that I so addressed the knight, I was allowed to get away with it.
46. Dunayevskaya note: Adam B. Ulam is another scholar trying a little to right the record, and again they go in for “psychology”; when it comes to the dialectic, so in his Stalin, (p. 218, ftn. 37) he “interpreted” Lenin’s Will on Bukharin not being a dialectician as “Read: not a politician.” That made me so mad that, though I seldom address bourgeois scholars, I did write him, and he “thanked” me, without taking any step to correct his interpretation. [See Adam B. Ulam, Stalin; The Man and His Era (New York: Viking Press, 1973). At issue here was Lenin’s statement in his Will to the effect that Bukharin did not fully understand the dialectic, quoted below in this letter. For more on Bukharin, see note 54 in Chapter 3.]
47. Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution (1973), Ch. 3, “The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin.”
48. Nestor Makhno (1888–1934), an anarchist who organized a peasant army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War of 1918–21, at times fighting against the Reds (Bolsheviks), at other times the Whites (conservatives).
49. In 1920, Lenin wrote, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” (LCW 31, p. 516).
50. Nikolai Bukharin, Economics of the Transformation Period. With Lenin’s critical remarks (New York, Bergman: 1971, orig. 1920).
51. In 1920–21, Bukharin sided with Trotsky’s view that since Soviet Russia was a workers’ state, the trade unions could be incorporated into the state, as discussed Marxism and Freedom, Ch. 12, “What Happens After”, pp. 196–201.
52. In Lenin’s Will, as discussed in note 54 in Chapter 3.
53. In Philosophy and Revolution, Dunayevskaya argued that Trotsky “conciliated” Stalin: “As Lenin lay dying, he entrusted the struggle against Stalin on the question of national minorities to the hands of Trotsky. But as was characteristic of Trotsky throughout his life, he once again went for ‘conciliationism.’” He failed to unfurl the banner of struggle against Stalin at the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Party as he promised Lenin he would do” (pp. 136–137). See also, Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York: Random House, 1968).
54. A reference to the Easter 1916 Uprising in Dublin, which paved the way for Irish independence, and about which Bukharin argued with Lenin. For more background, see note 54 in Chapter 3.
55. Dunayevskaya note: I’m using “bad psychology” not psychologically, but philosophically, that is, as Hegel used the expression “bad infinity” [SLI, p. 155; SLM, p. 142], someone like Schelling running to the absolute “like a shot out of the pistol” [PhGB, p. 89; PhGM, p. 16] instead of suffering though absolute negativity, “the patience, labor, suffering of the negative” [PhGB, p. 81; PhGM, p. 10].
56. March 23, 1975 was Fromm’s seventy-fifth birthday.
57. See note 7 in Chapter 4.
58. In response to a joint postcard (missing) sent to Dunayevskaya by Fromm and Mihailo Markovic, a Yugoslav Marxist humanist philosopher, later a Serbian nationalist. Markovic participated in a symposium organized around Fromm’s 75th birthday in May 1975. For more on Markovic, see note 54 in Chapter 4.
59. Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) was the Communist ruler of Yugoslavia from 1943-80. He distanced himself from Russia in 1948 and soon after helped to found the Non-Aligned Movement, but maintained an authoritarian one-party state at home.
60. A reference to the years 1937–38 when Dunayevskaya was Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary during his exile in Mexico.
61. Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, trans. by Eden and Cedar Paul (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969, orig. 1919).
62. Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1973).
63. Adelbert Reif, the editor for the German translation of Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution, which was issued by another, larger publisher: Algebra der Revolution: Philosophie der Befreiung von Hegel bis Sartre, trans. by Oskar Itzinger (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1981).