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128 Thesis Eleven (Number 82 2005)

something, not from nothing to something: the archaic pre-figurations


provide (at least in part) the interpretative context in which the move towards
philosophy and politics gathered momentum and the project of autonomy
was invented. It suggests a constant interplay between creative interpretation
and interpretative creation in the Greek trajectory. It invites us to rethink the
meaning of history not just as creation but as (creative) interpretation – for
it is only in interpreting history – interpreting the meaning of history – that
it becomes (is made-be) history for us.
In Ce Qui Fait la Grèce, Castoriadis elucidates the antecedents of the
ancient Greek world as they emerged in archaic Greece. He presents us with
a genealogical account of constellations of meaning that re-interpret inher-
ited traditions – including religious traditions – in transformative, creative
activity. In portraying the longer trajectory from which the project of
autonomy blossomed, Ce Qui Fait la Grèce illustrates the way in which the
ontological form of the ancient Greek world was created within and from
an interpretative context where interpretation itself is not considered as an
absence of the creative moment, but as intrinsic to it.

Reviewed by Suzi Adams


School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University
Email: s.adams@latrobe.edu.au

Eugene Gogol, Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-


Humanism (Resource Publications, 2004)

In the 1940s, members of Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Johnson-


Forest Tendency corresponded, the two groups sharing a trajectory from
dissident Trotskyism, by way of the critique of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet
Union, towards council communism. The recent English publication of works
by Cornelius Castoriadis (On Plato’s Statesman, The Rising Tide of Insignifi-
cance, and Figures of the Thinkable) is some signal of the growing interest
in, and recognition of, key figures in these groups – most notably, Castori-
adis, Claude Lefort, and C. L. R. James. The same cannot, though, be said
for Raya Dunayevskaya – ‘Forest’ to James’s ‘Johnson’. The present work by
Eugene Gogol seeks to addresses this relative neglect.
Dunayevskaya (born Rae Spiegel) was born in the Ukraine in 1910, and
her family came to America in 1922. Revolutionary, like Castoriadis, as a
teenager, Dunayevskaya was expelled from the communist movement,
worked in the offices of the American Negro Labour Congress, and had gone
over to Trotskyism, all before her 20th birthday. In 1937 she became Trotsky’s
Russian language secretary, but broke with him over the analysis of the
Soviet Union.
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To my utter shock and disbelief, I realized that with the outbreak of the war,
Trotsky, who had been fighting the Stalinist bureaucracy for over a decade,
would now turn to the workers and ask them to defend Russia, because it was
a ‘workers’ state though degenerate’ . . . Actually I lost my power of speech for
two days. (p. 8)
The analysis of the Soviet social order then became a major task for
Dunayevskaya who, like a host of other left communists, insisted that ‘the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a capitalist society’, forming the State-
Capitalist Tendency within the Workers’ Party. As Gogol points out,
Dunayevskaya’s analysis of the USSR was, unlike some theories of state capi-
talism, not limited to the economic dimension. She looked at the continuance
of labour power as a commodity and the ongoing functioning of the law of
value (criticizing Trotsky’s fetishization of stratified property), the preponder-
ance of the production of the means of production over the production of
the means of consumption, the domination of dead over living labour, and
the introduction of methods of intensification of labour. But, crucially,
Dunayevskaya also examined workers’ resistance to state capitalism, and
insisted on the importance of the world dimension of the phenomenon, as
the USSR, America, the fascist nations, and Japan converged towards an ‘age
of state capitalism’.
While it was most common for those holding to a state communist
analysis to eventually read this as dating from 1917 and as linked to Lenin’s
theoretical and organizational orientations, Dunayevskaya insistently held to
the achievements of the revolution and to much of Lenin’s legacy, dating
degeneration at 1928, the year of the first five year plan. One vital signal of
this is Dunayevskaya’s life-long wrestle with the results of Lenin’s turn to
Hegel, what she called ‘the break in Lenin’s thought’, as the Bolshevik leader
attempted to account for the SPD’s vote for war credits at the commence-
ment of World War I. Translating Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s Science of
Logic, Dunayevskaya, James, and Grace Lee Boggs sought philosophical
underpinnings for the new period of struggle. This is a period marked most
significantly for Dunayevskaya by the 1949–50 miners’ general strike in
Virginia and the revolt in East Germany, and thereafter by the 1955–6 Mont-
gomery bus boycott and the 1956 rebellion in Hungary. Dunayevskaya char-
acterizes this period as, ‘The emergence of a new movement from practice
that is itself a form of theory’, focussing on worker self-activity (‘There is
nothing in thought – not even in the thought of a genius – that has not previ-
ously been in the activity of the common man [sic]’), and on the ‘dialectics
of the party’. It is also the moment that begins her accent on humanism,
insisting on the continuity in Marx’s concerns between the 1844 Manuscripts
and Capital. Dunayevskaya’s major conclusion, at this point, was that ‘the
new society is evident everywhere, appears within the old’, the sort of notion
against which Castoriadis responded with, ‘if socialist society existed, people
would probably have noticed it’.
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130 Thesis Eleven (Number 82 2005)

The development of these concerns is important in the disintegration


of the State Capitalist Tendency. Amidst a number of upheavals, including
McCarthyism and the Korean War, Dunayevskaya read James and Boggs as
pushing towards organizational ‘depoliticization’ – she quotes James’s
announcement that, ‘our membership and their friends are the only audience
I have in mind for our paper’. James and Boggs also insisted on attaching
humanism exclusively to Christianity or existentialism; and there were, in
addition, significant disagreements over the interpretation of Hegel. Thus,
Dunayevskaya launched her new organization, News and Letters Committee,
and a new newspaper, News and Letters, in 1955. The aim of a unity of theory
and practice showed itself in the orientation of the new paper: writers
tackling the question of women’s liberation; a youth column; a ‘readers’ view’
section; important contributions from Charles Denby (author of Indignant
Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal) and other Afro-American workers; and
numerous accounts of struggles on the shop-floor, around, say, automation.
Her notion of theory flowing from the proletariat in struggle inclined
Dunayevskaya towards Rosa Luxemburg, but she was, despite criticizing his
vanguardism, still championing Lenin over Luxemburg, at a number of
points: organizationally, in his closeness to the masses in the period around
‘The April Theses’ and The State and Revolution (as well as in his debate
with Trotsky over the trade union question), as against Luxemburg’s reluc-
tance to break with the SPD. Dunayevskaya is also in disagreement with
Luxemburg’s analysis of imperialism and her position on the national
question, feeling the latter did not allow for the creativity of the colonized
masses, while still being deeply critical of, say, pan-Africanism and of the
‘communist’ revolution in China (which she read as ‘what Marx called prim-
itive accumulation of capital’).
Overall, the book makes clear, though this is obviously not the inten-
tion, why Dunayevskaya has not found the contemporary audience of, say,
a Castoriadis or a Lefort. While many of her emphases are close to positions
taken by these thinkers (for instance, on questions of organization), the prose
and the obsession with Hegel’s Absolutes now seem of another age. And the
refusal of a more thoroughgoing critique of and distancing from Lenin strikes
me as problematic. Some of the issues, here, are parallel to those I have with
the structure and content of the book. Gogol does important work in
bringing Dunayevskaya’s work and life into sight, and he does make sure
her voice is clearly audible, but there are a number of crucial problems, and
an intellectual biography, which was more politically distanced, might more
convincingly have brought to light her contribution and contemporary
relevance. For a start, the text is very repetitive, and a thematic, rather than
chronological, mode of presentation might have helped avoid this, especi-
ally as there is just not enough, in my opinion, to warrant the space devoted
to her reflections on Hegelian dialectics. Second, the contextualization of her
various interventions is too light. The reader is too often left in the dark in
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terms of fuller, and perhaps more balanced, accounts of, for example, her
correspondence with Marcuse (and others), her activities around strikes, her
international travels, and the background to, and competing interpretations
of, the break-up of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. There is certainly enough
to Dunayevskaya’s remarkable adventure to warrant such a treatment.

Reviewed by Chamsy el-Ojeili


School of Social and Cultural Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
Email: chamsy.el-ojeili@vuw.ac.nz

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