Raya Dunayevskaya on the Crisis in Independent Marxism, circa 1960

Raya Dunayevskaya’s “The World Crisis and the Theoretical Void“, a 1960 article that first appeared in Prometeo, a journal edited by the Italian independent revolutionary Onorato Damen, has just been made available by the Marxists Internet Archive. Dunayevskaya travelled to Europe in late 1959 to attend an international conference in Milan of tendencies adhereing to a state-capitalist analysis of the U.S.S.R. The intent of the conference was to launch a coordinating committee called the Center for International Correspondence. Although the effort at a regroupment of tendencies was in vain, a section of Damen’s journal was set aside for publishing material arising from the project. Several contributions by Dunayevskaya were to appear.

In her 25 Years of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.: a History of Worldwide Revolutionary Developments, she had this to say about the 1959 conference and her relationship with Damen:

Before we had even reached our first Convention [of News and Letters Committees—C&c.], the report of the split in the State-Capitalist Tendency in the U.S. was noted among Marxist groups. The Italian State-Capitalist Tendency of Onorato Damen published my report to our first Conference, in the Spring 1956 issue of its theoretical journal, Prometeo, under the title of “An American Experience”. It was the beginning of the international relations which would result in the international confernce of state-capitalist tendencies in West Europe in 1959, prompted by the need to fight neo-fascism, signified by the 1958 rise of de Gaulle to power.

Damen died in 1979. A memorial tribute by Dunayevskaya appears in the March 1980 News & Letters.

The content of this piece reflects her major focus of this period: the subjective impulses from proletarian revolts such as the Hugararian revolution of 1956 and the anti-colonial revolts taking place in Africa and elsewhere were not being met by adequate theoretical responses on the part of independent Marxists. Lenin, always a touchstone for Dunayevskaya, figures prominantly here. Not however, the Lenin of the pedantic What Is To Be Done?, but instead the Lenin of the Hegel Notebooks and the anti-bureaucratic struggle of the period of last years of his life (a narrowly-focused struggle, admittedly, and one carried out exclusively at the top of the party).

The document referred to as Lenin’s Will was always an important once for Dunayevskaya, for the importance it placed on the apprehension of dialectics by revolutionaries. This text was kept secret by all of the concerned parties, Trotsky included, until Max Eastman made it known in the English-speaking world in 1925 in his book, Since Lenin Died. Eastman was, at that time, a one-man publicist for the international Left Opposition. His translations of Trotsky’s major works, including History of the Russian Revolution, are still read today. The full text of Eastman’s book is available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. See Chapter III (“The Testament of Lenin”) for quotes from the Will.

Rosa Luxemburg in the HathiTrust Digital Library

The HathiTrust Digital Library contains full-text scans of three Rosa Luxemburg classics. Two U.S. editions of the Junius pamphlet are available, as well as the first U.S. edition of her critique of the Russian revolution. The latter was translated by Bertram Wolfe and published in 1940 by Workers Age, the Lovestoneite publishing house. In addition, a beautiful 1921 English-language edition (published in Berlin) of a selection of her prison letters to Sophie Liebknecht is available.

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The Crisis in the German Social Democracy (also known as the Junius Pamphlet)

1918 edition, misattributed to Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Franz Mehring
(Scan from the collection of University of Michigan)

1919 edition, with correct attribution
(Scan from the collection of the University of California)

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The Russian Revolution
(Scan from the collection of University of Michigan)

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Letters from Prison

Although the title pages mentions a portrait, the book as scanned does not seem to contain one.
(Scan from the collection of the University of California)

All four titles are in the public domain. Those affiliated with one of the HathiTrust participating institutions can download the full PDF scan. Everyone else can view the full content, page by page.

Fredy Perlman on Worker-Student Solidarity, France 1968

The HathiTrust Digital Library has made available a scan of the best English-language account of the 1968 revolt in France, Worker-Student Action Committees: France, May ’68, by two participants in the event, Fredy Perlman and Roger Gregoire. Perlman, founder of the journal and publishing cooperative Black & Red, was in Europe to teach a course at a school in Turin at the time and was able to make his way to Paris as the occupations got under way. He participated in an occupation of Censier, a unit  of the Sorbonne, and in the Citroën Action Committee, a student-led effort to establish contacts with the workers of the giant firm’s automobile factories.

Perlman’s account of the action committee’s experience is fascinating. Of Citroën’s 40,000 workers, only 1,500 were members of unions (principally the Communist Party-dominated CGT). Sixty percent of the workers were temporary employees from other countries, despised by the union bureaucracy as a drag on wages. Perlman, who spoke French and Serbo-Croatian (from the three years he spent in Yugoslavia as a PhD student), was actively involved in bridging the gap between the organized workers and the foreign workers.

The final section of the book is a critique of the May phenomenon written in early 1969 by Perlman and Gregoire during a visit by the latter to Perlman’s home Kalamazoo, Michigan.

For a critique of the 1968 events by Raya Dunayevskaya, see her “Who Arrested the French Revolution?,” which appeared in News & Letters. Dunayevskaya and Perlman unsuccessfully attempted to collaborate on a project which would become her Philosophy and Revolution, published in 1973.

The scan available in HathiTrust is designated public domain. Anyone should be able to download a full PDF version. The bibliographic information says that this is the 1991 reissue, but it appears to be instead a scan of the original 1969 version.

Department of Needed Translations: Jacques Camatte

While Criticism &c. categorically and definitively rejects the position that capital is the self-developing subject of history, the French revolutionary thinker Jacques Camatte—the former Bordigist who developed ideas along this line—deserves a higher profile than the one he currently enjoys. As Loren Goldner pointed out in a review of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination (New Politics, Summer 2006), Camatte developed in the 1970s some aspects of the ideas that Postone (who suffers from no similar lack of attention) is acclaimed for today.

Camatte’s work has not been extensively translated into English. He was introduced to American readers by Fredy Perlman in 1975 with the publication of The Wandering of Humanity. Note that Perlman leaves the German Gemeinwesen untranslated in the text—in translations of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts it is typically translated as species being.

A year later, a group called New Space (one of the many under-chronicled small U.S. libertarian left groups of the 1960s and 1970s) published an essay by Camatte and a co-thinker called On Organization.

Autonomedia published a valuable collection of Camatte’s work with an introduction by Alex Trotter in 1995 (Trotter problematically translates Gemeinwesen as “human essence”) titled This World We Must Leave. This edition was described as the first of a series of three, but unfortunately, nothing else has appeared. An excellent review of the book by David Black (“Has Capital Autonomized Itself From Humanity?“) appeared in the British Marxist-Humanist journal Hobgoblin in 1999, which provoked a brief response from Camatte (“Comment From Jacques Camatte“) from France.

Community and Communism in Russia, another important work by Camatte was translated and published in by David Brown in Britain in 1978. This pamphlet is mentioned in passing in Marcel van der Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union.

Camatte maintains a web site with an abundance of writings from his journal, Invariance, that call out for translation into English. Who will undertake this important task?

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The HathiTrust Digital Library contains scans of On Organization and Community and Communism in Russia. Both are classified with an Open Access copyright status, so anyone should be able to download the full PDFs.

Both the Marxists Internet Archive and Libcom.org feature some writings by Camatte.

Missing Pages Added to Dunayevskaya Pamphlet on Arab-Israeli War

The HathiTrust Digital Library contacted Criticism &c. to report that the missing pages from the News & Letters pamphlet  Two Articles on New Emerging Forces have been added to the scanned image (see message below). Readers can now view the entire Political-Philosophic Letter on the Six Day War by Raya Dunayevskaya, a particularly important document by her regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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Hello and thanks for your post on these HathiTrust materials. We noticed you reported some missing pages in Two Articles on New Emerging Forces (1969), available at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071598232. The first four pages of the text are now intact. The cover image is still missing, but we are in the process of fixing it and it will be there soon.

Regards,

HathiTrust User Support team

Scanned Issues of Radical America and Cultural Correspondence

Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives hosts a collection of scanned images of two important U.S. New Left/post-New Left journals, Radical America and Cultural Correspondence. The two journals, closely connected with the prolific historian of the left and left culture Paul Buhle, were among the more interesting intellectual by-products of Students for a Democratic Society.

It can be said that Buhle is in large measure responsible for the rediscovery of C.L.R. James in the U.S., beginning with the content of Radical America Vol IV, No. 4 (May 1970), an issue devoted to documents by James. It should be noted, however, that Raya Dunayevskaya was sharply critical of Buhle’s interpretation of the history and significance of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (Johnson was James’s party name) and issued a 1972 statement, “Radical America Starts its Marxist Path by Rewriting History”, included in a pamphlet titled “For the Record: the Johnson-Forest Tendency, or the Theory of State Capitalism, 1941-51; its Vicissitudes and Ramifications, 1972.”

Present here are all the issues through 1987. The journal ceased appearing in 1999.

Cultural Correspondence existed for a decade concurrently with Radical America. Its contents reflect more even closely than Radical America‘s Buhle’s interpretation of U.S. society, one heavily oriented to the oppositional possibilities contained in manifestations of popular culture. The title of the journal paid homage to Correspondence, the internal circular and subsequent newspaper of Correspondence Committees, launched after the Johnson-Forest Tendency departed from Trotskyism in 1951.

The complete run of the journal (1975-1985) is available here.

Buhle has most recently pursued collaborations on cartoon art histories of the U.S. left, including Jews and American Comics: an Illustrated History of an American Art Form and Students for a Democratic Society: a Graphic History.

HathiTrust Introduces Full PDF Downloads

Along with the release of a new viewing interface, the HathiTrust Digital Library has just introduced the option to download a full PDF version of public domain and other freely-available texts. You will see the terms under which the text is available in the record. There is a wealth of valuable material available in the library and I have provided a few selected links below.

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The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx
(Charles H. Kerr & Company edition, translated by H. Quelch)

The Paris Commune by Karl Marx
(New York Labor News Company, includes “The Civil War in France”)

The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism by Louis Boudin
(Charles H. Kerr & Company edition of an important study of Marx by a leader of the pre-WW I U.S. socialist movement. This work was cited favorably by Isaak Rubin in his important Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value)

The Workers Opposition in Russia by Alexandra Kollontai
(I don’t completely agree with the position, but this is a beautiful scan of an IWW edition of the platform of the Workers Opposition)

Community and Communism in Russia by Jacques Camatte
(Unfortunately, there is not a great deal of work by Camatte translated into English. This document dates from his Bordigist period.)

Theses on the Commune by Guy Debord, et al
(A Situationist text. The quality of the scan is poor.)

Scanned Collection of Marxist-Humanist Pamphlets

The HathiTrust Digital Library has made available full-text scans of sixteen pamphlets published by News & Letters between the years 1960 and 1984. Among them are several classics which have never received the audience they deserve, including Workers Battle Automation (1960) by Black autoworker Charles Denby and American Civilization on Trial (1963), published as an organizational statement, but written by Raya Dunayevskaya. Links are provided below.

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Workers Battle Automation (1960)

American Civilization on Trial: the Negro as Touchstone of History (1963)

The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution (1965)

·Includes texts by Mario Savio and Robert Moses

Black Mass Revolt (1967)

China, Russia, USA—State Capitalism and Marx’s Humanism or Philosophy and Revolution (1967)

·A major text which originally appeared in the December 1966 issue of News & Letters as Dunayevskaya’s contribution to a debate on state capitalism with Japanese Marxist Tadayuki Tsushima

Czechoslovakia: Revolution and Counter Revolution (1968)

·Joint statement issued with the Marxist-Humanist Group of Scotland on the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Czechoslovakia

France, Spring 1968: Masses in Motion, Ideas in Free Flow (1968)

Mao’s China and the “Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1968)

A Report on the Black-Red Conference: Detroit, Michigan, Jan. 12, 1969 (1969)

Two Articles on New Emerging Forces (1969)

·Unfortunately, the scanned image is missing the first four pages of “The Arab-Israeli Collision, the World Powers, and the Struggle for the Minds of Men”, Dunayevskaya’s analysis of the 1967 war

Maryland Freedom Union: Workers Doing and Thinking (1970)

Notes on Women’s Liberation: We Speak in Many Voices (1970)

Black, Brown and Red: the Movement for Freedom Among Black, Chicano, and Indian (1972)

Working Women for Freedom (1976)

The Fetish of High Tech and Karl Marx’s Unknown Mathematical Manuscripts (1984)

Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions (1984 edition, originally published in 1959)

·A major text from 1959, reissued in Britain 1961 by the Left Group in Cambridge with an introduction by Peter Cadogan

Department of Needed Translations: Ernst Bloch, Again

The HathiTrust Digital Library has made available a scan of a copy of Ernst Bloch’s, Thomas Munzer, Theologian of Revolution. This book, which has not been translated into English, was first published in 1921—between the Kapp Putsch and the onset of the Ruhr Crisis.

With the recent publication by Verso of a new edition of Atheism in Christianity, it seems like a good time to pursue Bloch translations. Among his other untranslated works (aside from Subjekt-Objekt, previously discussed on this blog) is Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, from the period of his return to Germany after World War II.

It seems incredible that, in a time of heightened interest in an encounter between Islamic and Western thought, this book has not yet appeared in English.

‘Ascent to the heights’: Ernst Bloch’s A Philosophy of the Future

The Internet Archive has made available A Philosophy of the Future by Ernst Bloch. This volume was an early part of the Bloch series published by Herder and Herder in the 1970s. John Cumming is the translator. These lectures represent a glimpse of Bloch’s Tübingen period (after persevering through years of political persecution in the GDR).

The Archive’s browser reader has been upgraded recently. As with other titles in the IA, the full content is available for download in a variety of file formats.

Below I have reproduced the Theses on progress which close the book.

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1. Progress is one of our most important and cherished concepts.

2. Any consideration and analysis of the concept of progress must bear on its social function—its why and its wherefore; for progress is a notion that can be misused and abused for the ends of a colonialist ideology.

3. The concept of progress can be applied validly to the forces of production and the economic basis; it can be relatively invalid in the case of the superstructure — or at least only faintly valid in comparison; and vice versa. The same is true of superstructures which succeed one another chronologically (cultures, civilizations) : especially in the case of the category of progress in art.

4. The concept of progress will not tolerate any “cultural spheres” which require a reactionary nailing down of time to space. It requires not unilinearity but a broad, flexible and thoroughly dynamic “multiverse” : the voices of history joined in perpetual and often intricate counterpoint. A unilinear model must be found obsolete if justice is to be done to the considerable amount of non-European material. It is no longer possible to work without curves in the series; without a new and complex time-manifold (the problem of “Riemannian time”).

5. The objective that is the concern and requirement of true progress must be seen as so rich and deep in content that the diverse nations, societies and civilizations of the Earth (in all the stages of their economic and social development, and the dialectical laws governing these stages) have their place in it, and in striving towards it. Therefore the existing non-European cultures must be interpreted in the light of the philosophy of history, without the distortion of a predominantly European perspective, and without any reduction of their specific witness to the richness of human nature.

6. This objective has a human content that is not yet clearly defined, not yet manifest: a concrete-Utopian human content. The diverse processes of history find their proper order in bearing on the deep relationship of the movement forward: a profundity so profound that all events of the entire world that are in the process of becoming find place and space in it. All earthly cultures and their inherited infrastructures are experiments, ventures and variously significant testimonies to the ultimate humanum: the content that must be processed out, the final and most important reference point of progress. Therefore these cultures do not converge in any one culture already existing in any one place — in one that might be thought to be “predominant,” supremely “classical,” or already “canonical” in its particular mode (itself only experimental). The unique point of convergence of past, present and future cultures is a human content that is nowhere as yet adequately manifest, but can certainly be appropriately anticipated.

7. Similarly with regard to the well-established existential question of a “meaning” of history, in relation to a “meaning” of the world. Here the unifying human content — the eschaton in the goal of progress — is least identical with the result already manifest in terms of men’s actual lives and their cosmic environment. It is on the line of elongation of even the most distant projection to date of any goal of men or Nature. It lies in the remotest immanence of the actual possibility of men and Nature; an immanence that, despite its distance, is not closed to anticipation by the intelligence and science of mankind.