Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, The

Capital & Class, Spring 2003 by Bell, Franklin

Raya Dunayevskaya

The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel-and Marx

Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002, pp. 386 xlii

ISBN 0-7391-0267-2 $24.95 paperback ISBN 0-7391-0266-4 $100.00 hardback

Reviewed by Franklin Bell

The view of virtually all Marxists and Marx scholars, however they rank Hegel as an influence on Marx, is that the dimension of Hegel least compatible with liberatory politics is his concept of `the absolute'. The absolute is equated to abstraction from nature, mysticism, a closed ontology, the end of history. This new collection of writings by the late Raya Dunayevskaya, originator of the philosophy she called Marxist-- Humanism, offers an alternative to standard views, by showing how one Marxist thinker developed a new and creative version of Marxism through an enga ement with Hee's absolute.

A range of pieces illuminate this, including detailed summaries and extensive commentaries on what she considered Hegel's most philosophically important works: the Phenomenology of Mind, the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia Logic, and the Philosophy of Mind. The Power of Negativity contains several expositions of Dunayevskaya's unique interpretation of Hegel, and her consequent analysis of `Marx's transformation of Hegel's revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of "revolution in permanence"', including her views on what is fundamental to a Marxist concept of a new society, from the breakdown of the division between mental and physical labour to the transformation of relationships between women and men.

Included in the book are philosophic critiques and commentaries on major theoreticians such as Lukacs, Korsch, Lenin, and Adorno, as well as expositions of her own distinctive Marxist-- Humanist philosophic standpoint.

Besides essays, the book contains lectures to audiences as varied as Hegel scholars, African-American workers, and Japanese student radicals, and correspondence with such scholars as Erich Fromm, Louis Dupre and C.L.R. James, as well as worker-thinkers Charles Denby and Harry McShane. Particularly significant is Dunayevskaya's response to Herbert Marcuse's question of why Hegel's Absolutes are needed to express the subjectivity of self-- liberation. Here she traces the final chapter of Hegel's Science of Logic, `The Absolute Idea', relating it to ongoing Third World freedom struggles and to critiques of Nikolai Bukharin and other Marxists. Subsequent correspondence opposes Marcuse's view in One-Dimensional Man of workers being assimilated into automated production, by asserting that in Absolute Method subject absorbs object, rather than object absorbing subject, and insisting on `the overpowering urge to freedom' as a motive force.

Especially, given their often abstract character, another surprising aspect of Dunayevskaya's writings on Hegel is that some of them were addressed to workers and others not formally schooled in philosophy. Of particular interest is her letter on Merleau-Ponty to autoworker Charles Denby, himself the author of Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's journal (1978). She relates Merleau-Ponty's `Marxism and Philosophy' to the need `to face the specific, concrete, daily experiences AND thoughts of workers on the job' (p. 112). Her letter to Glasgow labour activist Harry McShane takes up the difference between theory and philosophy and the need to distinguish Marx from Engels and all other Marxists.

A number of the pieces are less than polished, as they were not originally intended for publication. While this can require extra effort from the reader, the informal presentation from lectures to students, workers, and activists is often engaging and accessible in a way that more formal theoretical texts are not. They also reveal aspects of the process of Dunayevskaya's thinking that may be less evident in the books she published during her lifetime, thus providing access to the mind of a thinker who really should get more attention.

Her thesis that Marxism can only be re-created for today through a philosophic appropriation of Hegel's absolutes, is a controversial one. Dunayevskaya came of age in the period when Stalin's counter-revolution, coming from within the revolutionary movement, succeeded in transforming what grew out of the Russian Revolution into totalitarianism. She recognized this transformation as a fundamental challenge to revolutionary Marxism, and set about using Marx's economic categories and Russia's `five-year plan' statistics to prove that Russia had become a state-- capitalist society. But she also concluded that an economic/political answer was insufficient and a re-creation of Marx's philosophy of revolution was required to meet the challenge of the age. This led to her founding the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, rooted in an 'unchained' version of Hegel's dialectic of absolute negativity. As the author puts it in `Hegel's Absolute as New Beginning':

...because Absolute Negativity signifies transformation of reality, the dialectic of contradiction and totality of crises, the dialectic of liberation, Hegel's thought comes to life at critical points of history, called by him `birth-times of history' (p. 187).