He was not ‘left behind,’ not because of his individual genius, but because of his dialectical method of uniting theory and practice. Although no one can see the concrete form of the new society until it actually appears, Marx’s vision did anticipate the future society. He could do this because of his idea of theory as the generalization of the instinctive striving of the proletariat for a new social order, a truly human society – a striving that arises out of the dialectic of the economic process which, at each stage, produces what Marx called the ‘new passions and forces’ for the next social order. As Raya points out Marx did not only keep his eyes glued to the movements but participated in them.ĭunayevskaya writes: “It was no accident that his Communist Manifesto was published on the eve of the 1848 revolutions.
Marx recognized the dialectical relationship between theory and practice and its corresponding relationship between the intellectual who theorizes and the actual working-class people who struggle. Without the recognition of their humanity – their concrete activity for change (which involves both movement in consciousness and reality), the intellectual’s theorizing remains disconnected from the actual concrete conditions and desires of those who are actually moving. The dialectic insists on the unity of theory and practice or praxis and on the recognition of the worker as human Subject. It is thus the dialectic that makes Marx’s work a humanist philosophy. For the intellectual the proletariat existed only as a suffering class.“ Being outside of production the intellectual could not see that the working class had power to overthrow the contradictory conditions of production. She continues: “The crying inequality of distribution, arising from this method of production, could not but arouse the sympathy of the intellectual for the proletariat. On the other hand, the movement from theory is nearly at a standstill because it blinds itself to the movement from practice.” She writes: “…the workers have been acting out Hegel’s Absolute Idea and have thus concretized and deepened the movement from practice to theory. It is during Marx’s time that alienated labor reveals its human nature – its agentic activity toward liberation. She points out, “To develop the dialectical movement further it was necessary to turn to the real world and its labor process.”ĭunayevskaya points out that Hegel was unable to see and could not have seen the positive that emerges from alienated labor because the workers’ revolutionary activity was not yet revealed. ‘Thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism’ as the young Marx designated his own philosophic outlook, “distinguishes itself from both idealism and materialism and is at the same time the truth uniting both.” Unlike the often-made assumption that Marx stood Hegel upright, and planted him on the ground, transplanting Hegel’s idealism with materialism, Raya points out that “Marx did not reject idealism. It is thus, and thus alone, that man finally achieves true freedom, not as a possession, but as a dimension of his being…” Each of the previously inseparable divisions between opposites – between thought and reality – is in constant process of change, disappearance and reappearance, coming into head-on collision with its opposite and developing thereby.
In Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya begins with Hegel’s dialectic: “His LOGIC moves. In Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya’s first major work, she articulates Marx’s dialectical method and positions the workers (and their movement) as Revolutionary Subjects without whom the intellectual grasps only an abstract concept of revolution. Raya Dunayevskaya established a new interpretation of Marx’s works that centers on the humanism that is established in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 but is built upon and threaded throughout his entire body of work, including Capital.
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