Now largely forgotten, Bell was once an influential intellectual and sociologist from the milieu of those who have come to be known as the New York Intellectuals. He edited The New Leader, the organ of the right-wing of American  social democracy, during World War II and went on to receive a PhD in sociology from Columbia University. He taught for many years at Harvard. Raya Dunayevskaya often cited his The End of Ideology (1960) as the quintessence of the false intellectual representation of the official capitalist society of the age of state capitalism, while the revolts of the time, among them Hungary and the colonial world, represented the negation of that falsification of reality. Bell contributed to  the development of the school of thought of neoconservatism, so-called, (he helped launch the journal Public Interest with William Kristol), although he did not move as far to right as many of his cohort.

• • •

Lana Peters (also known as Svetlana Alliluyeva), 1926-2011

An almost ghost-like figure from another time, Stalin’s daughter lived a peripatetic life after defecting from the USSR during the early years of the Brezhnev era. She authored several memoirs, including Twenty Letters to a Friend and Only One Year. Alliluyeva’s mother was Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Aliluyeva, who committed suicide in 1932. Svetlana Alliluyeva married a member of the Frank Lloyd Wright-Olgivanna Wright circle, William Peters, and had a daughter with him. Although Alliluyeva had harshly criticized the USSR after her emigration, she returned there briefly in the 1980s, but once again left it behind for England and the United States. She died in Wisconsin. The New York Times obituary features several photographs, including one of her as a child in her Young Pioneers uniform.

Marxism and Freedom, Russian-language edition

News and Letters has released an announcement that Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom (first published in 1958) has been translated into Russian and published by the Praxis Research and Educational Center in Moscow. The Victor Serge Foundation assisted. This classic of revolutionary and humanist Marxism has now been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, German, and Spanish.

See Also: Marxism and Freedom available in Arabic

Dunayevskaya had just visited Italy to attend an international conference of tendencies adhering to a state-capitalist (regarding the USSR) position, which was organized by Onorato Damen. The text of speeches she delivered to workers in Genoa and Milan on this occasion can be found in the microfilmed Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (see #9470 and #9474). Dunayevskaya also visited the UK on this trip, meeting with Peter Cadogan, who was instrumental in publishing her Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions in Britain in 1960, and the Scottish Marxist-Humanist Harry McShane.

The text is a stirring indictment of the theory and practice of what can be called the high era of automated production. This piece is notable for Dunayevskaya’s discussion of such figures as sociologist C. Wright Mills, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Norbert Weiner, the father of now largely forgotten school of cybernetics. Note that in this piece she cites her 1947 manuscript, Marxism and State Capitalism (see The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #472-#504). This was the text that was to be developed into Marxism and Freedom, published in 1958.

The British-English spelling of the article as published has been retained here.

Scott McLemee has been a literary champion of James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency period since the early 1990s and has edited two valuable collections of his writings, C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism (with Paul LeBlanc, 1994) and C.L.R. James and the ‘Negro Question’ (1996). This new one appears to be of James’s writings on economics from the JFT-Correspondence period. Criticism &c. awaits this volume with great anticipation both for the texts themselves and because McLemee has been consistently—we’ll say, uncharitable—towards Raya Dunayevskaya’s contributions to Marxism, going as far as accusing her of intellectual larceny in a footnote (that’s right, a footnote) to the 1994 collection. The charge he levels there is without merit—Dunayevskaya was the sole author of two extensive drafts of what was to become Marxism and Freedom before the 1955 split with James and Grace Lee (see The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, microfilm numbers #472-503 and #1735-1796 for the texts, from 1947 and 1952). In McLemee’s 1994 footnote, he expressed an aspiration to “publish a study of her career that will include an account of the financial dispute which was the real basis of the 1955 split.” The study hasn’t appeared.

• • •

History of Pan-African Revolt
Introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley
PM Press, July 2012

PM Press is reissuing the 1995 Charles H. Kerr edition of James’s work, originally published in 1938 in Britain. Let’s hope PM takes better care with the text than they did with A New Notion (2010), which combined The Invading Socialist Society (1947) and Every Cook Can Govern (1956). A New Notion was rife with serious editing errors. In the interest of textual integrity (such things are important), Criticism &c. provides some of them below.

Textual Errors in the PM Press title, A New Notion (2010) by C.L.R. James:

Page 22:    ”after early document” (sentence is unintelligible as printed)

Page 59:    Engels’s quote contains at least two extraneous punctuation marks

Page 83:    ”The Fascist?” should be “fascists”

Page: 100:    ”Germain’s revolution” (missing punctuation)

Page 102:    ”new even boasting” should read “now”

Page 107:    missing punctuation “different Whoever” should read “different. Whoever”

Page 116:    ” an derail plan” should read “a detailed plan”

Page 119:    ”If loses itself” should read “It loses itself”

Page 149:    ”pre-1914″ should read “pre-1941″

Page 227:    ”minions” should read “millions”

See Also:

Criticism &c.’s review of Frank Rosengarten’s biography of James, Urbane Revolutionary.

Buhle has a forthcoming book from Verso titled It Started In Wisconsin.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Translated by Rodney Livingstone)

Verso, 2011

Verso has released a text of a 1956 dialogue between Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno which was intended to result in a philosophical updating of the Communist Manifesto. The project is a worthy one, but neither thinker a) was stylistically well suited for the literary genre of the manifesto nor b) thought social revolution was objectively possible by this point in history.

Google Books has a preview excerpt available.

• • •

The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory (Forthcoming)

Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell

Lexington Books, 2012

Raya Dunayevskaya engaged in a long and productive correspondence with two other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm (the latter much more loosely associated than the former). Dunayevskaya held Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (original edition 1941) in high esteem and Marcuse contributed an interesting introduction to her Marxism and Freedom, one that is still worth reading today. Fromm invited Dunayevskaya to submit a chapter for his collection Socialist Humanism and wrote a preface to the German edition of her Philosophy and Revolution. Although the title of this book might mistakenly lead the reader to think Dunayevskaya was herself a Critical Theorist, having the texts of this correspondence widely available will contribute toward raising her intellectual profile closer to the one she deserves.

Several of  Dunayevskaya’s letters to Marcuse are available in The Power of Negativity. Douglas Kellner, editor of the Marcuse’s collected papers also included a selection of the correspondence in Towards a Critical Theory of Society (2001), the second volume of a still-ongoing series.

(Amazon lists a release date of February 16)

Dunayevskaya maintained relations with Natalia Trotsky after she returned to the U.S. and broke with the orthodox Trotskyist position on defense of the Soviet Union. The two corresponded and Dunayevskaya traveled to Mexico City for in-person discussions on several occasions.

The subject of the 1947 letter is Dunayevskaya’s analysis of the Russian economy, published in several installments between 1942 and 1947 in New International, the theoretical journal of the Workers Party. Dunayevskaya defends her thesis against criticisms Natalia Sedova Trotsky expressed in a letter to Sara Weber, an American SWP member who also served as secretary in Coyoacan. She also attacks the official WP theory of bureaucratic collectivism (the Johnson-Forest Tendency was to leave the WP later that year).

Dunayevskaya’s letter—written in January—contains some concise formulations of her theory, including this paragraph:

My contention was that it was not these two phenomena ["inequality and bureaucratic willfulness"] that brought about state capitalism. But that this inequality of distribution was merely the reflection and the natural result of the existing production relations and subordination to the law of value, which is a law of the world market. That, furthermore, it would have been impossible for a Marxist of Trotsky’s stature to have left us so false a position of Russia as degenerated workers statism had he based himself on what economic laws and production relations were characteristic of Russia. Instead, despite parenthetical (parenthetical not in the sense that they were merely incidental but in the sense that they were not the basis of his position) remarks as to the capitalist elements that pervaded the Russian economy, he in actuality remained on the superstructural level of property forms and historical origin of Soviet Russia. It was this which made him dismiss the concept that Russia might be state capitalist, although, theoretically, he maintained that such a development was conceivable. It is this position of workers statism which is keeping the Fourth International so hemmed in the present indefensible position of defensism.

She also identifies the period that the definitive transition to state-capitalism occurred: 1935-1937.

Although Natalia Trotsky at this point was still committed to the orthodox workers state position, she soon moved away from it. She collaborated with Grandizo Munis and the Surrealist Benjamin Péret on criticisms of the Fourth International’s position (both lived in Mexico City at the time). In 1951, she broke openly with the SWP in a sharply-worded statement. She wrote, “Obsessed by old and outlived formulas, you continue to regard the Stalinist state as a workers state. I cannot and will not follow you in this.”

Natalia Trotsky became ill during a trip to Paris and passed away in 1962. Shortly before her death she granted a French newspaper an interview, the resulting in an account in which the reporter took liberties with her words, making it sound as if she believed that Mao was a legitimate successor to Trotsky. She quickly delivered a written rebuttal to the published interview, which appeared in the pages of the paper. Along with making it clear that Mao was the direct heir of Stalin, not Trotsky, her rebuttal closed with these unequivocal words,

“Any de-Stalinization will turn out to be a confidence trick if it does not lead to the seizure of power by the proletariat and the dissolution of the police, political, military and economic institutions, the basis of the counter-revolution, which established the Stalinist state capitalist regime.”

• • •

The Marxists Internet Archive contains several texts by Natalia Sedova Trotsky, including her 1951 resignation from the Fourth International and her rebuttal to the France-Soir article.