Editor’s note: As we embark on a series of discussions on dialectics of organization and philosophy, we present the first half of a May 1987 manuscript that Raya Dunayevskaya titled in handwriting “Crucial on Book, yet 1953 as Concept vs. Experience,” above a typed heading of “Talking to Myself.” It is an important document from her work on an unfinished book she had tentatively titled, “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: ‘The party’ and forms of organization born out of spontaneity,” and it is one of the last she wrote. The words that Dunayevskaya underlined by hand are in italic and those she circled are in bold. All capitals and underlines were in the original. The original can be found in the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #10923-41, and the second half was excerpted here.

May 13, 1987

Talking to Myself

In a quite disorganized way, on several very different points that I somehow see as connected:

• is the question of the 3/23/87 Resident Editorial Board Meeting where I was very disturbed and raised the question about the projection of Marxist-Humanism and the dialectics of organization where there seemed to be a lack of clarity on the very wide gulf between the word Concept as notion, as philosophy, as the universal, as if that was the question of the particular of the paper as biweekly.
• the May 12th discussion where the question of “the book”[1] and its relationship to both the objective situation and the paper as well as the organization as a whole,[2] was suddenly referred to as if that, as crucial as it is for next year, would be a Particular, even though the very same individual gave a creatively new interpretation of ’53[3] as a philosophic “experience” on a different level than the philosophic experience that Lenin had directly related to revolution and not extended to sharing that experience at that very time with the Bolshevik cadre.[4]
• The question of organization not only as organizational growth we’re so in need of, but the concept of organization as is projected for “the book,” where it is inseparable from and dialectically integral with the dialectics of philosophy. This organization of thought is altogether so new and so totally an untrodden ground that it is impossible to foresee a conclusion. In truth, the first so-called shock (of recognition?) was when I began getting a lot of contributions of the aspects that we’re all so concerned with—spontaneity of the masses at specific historic turning points which produced new forms of organization—and saw that though the form of the party and spontaneity were opposites, THEY WERE NOT ABSOLUTE OPPOSITES.

What happened at that point was that I re-read the 3/23/87 REB Minutes and found that on page 2, the top paragraph, there is a serious error on the quotation because I was using two different translations on a single sentence (Baillie and Miller)[5] so that it turned out that, instead of clarifying that relationship of organization as concept, i.e., philosophy, and as form, managed to shroud it. Specifically I am referring to the 6th line, where the quotation begins “the two together…”—the reference is to intellectually comprehended history and the form it takes in what Hegel considers a contingent way.

In any case, let me read you not what is on the page, which is Miller, but the Baillie translation from which all the other quotations are from, though they also give you the reference to the Miller translation. “Both together, or History (intellectually) comprehended (begriffen), form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless, solitary, and alone.”*[6]

(*Erinnerung, it is true, means both inwardizing and recollection, but it is not true and indeed kills the consistency that Hegel was expressing when in the same paragraph the word is translated as recollection and then just for stylistic purposes not to repeat the same word or whatever motivated Miller, used the word inwardizing without telling the reader that Hegel used the very same word in the very same paragraph as recollection.)

At this point it would be good also if we pointed out that because History to Hegel was contingency, he had to add “intellectually comprehended,” that is, begriffen, in order to show that he is talking about History not as contingency but Notion-ally, i.e., as Concept.

Absolute Knowledge in Baillie is pp. 789-808; Absolute knowing in Miller is 479-493.

When I referred in the Notes on Phenomenology[7] to the last three pages, I was referring to the last half paragraph on p. 805 (“While in the Phenomenology each moment…”) which goes to p. 806, with its stress on “simple mediating activity as thinking,” then the question is of releasing—a very important category in Hegel: “This process of releasing itself from the form of itself is the highest freedom and security of its knowledge of itself” (p. 806, Baillie). And being Hegel, you immediately get the negative side of the same so that on p. 807, the penultimate page 807, is when we get introduced to History as the process of becoming and the words of both Erinnerung and Insichgehen.

In a word, there is no doubt about his stressing inwardizing of the various stages of consciousness and self-consciousness, Reason, Morality, Religion, Art; nevertheless, nothing is absolute until you get to Absolute, the consummation; so what happens to History? Though it is Spirit “externalized and emptied into Time”… the negative, a “way of becoming presents a slow procession and succession of spiritual shapes (Geistern), a gallery of pictures, each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of Spirit…”

It is at that point that we get into recollection (Erinnerung) and see on the final page, which is also the final paragraph, that the goal is the Absolute Notion. Hegel however is actually trying to say two things at the same time, 1) that History is just contingency, but when it becomes an intellectually comprehended organization, “it is the Science…” Whether or not Hegel at that time got worried over the fact that History is thus not just contingency, the point is that he suddenly qualified the word Science by adding “of the ways in which knowledge appears,” which Miller, p. 493, translated as “in the sphere of appearance.” But both Miller and Baillie then footnoted the expression regarding experience as Phenomenology, so that both Science and recollection (or inwardizing) undergo the Calvary (the Golgotha).

Heretofore the expression “the two together” or both together, was taken to mean practice as well as philosophy. IN FACT it isn’t practice, it is Science as well as philosophy, recollection as well as consummation [that] must undergo the Crucifixion and be “born” anew. This is absolutely phenomenal, and I don’t mean phenomena.

Marx certainly must have had something like this in mind when he wrote Freiligrath about organization in the historic as well as the ephemeral sense.[8]

Now then, to get back to organization as it was expressed in the May 1953 Letters, on Absolute: first when I refer to the Absolute Method as it relates to other philosophies, I put in parenthesis “parties to us,” rather than theoretical tendencies, so that “the new philosophy or party and this new has been enriched ‘concentrating itself upon itself’…” All of this refers to pp. 480-82, and 483 [of Hegel’s Science of Logic, vol. 2 (George Allen & Unwin, 1966)]; in a word, it is the place that leads me to the beginning of differences with Lenin in the Idea of Cognition but I do use the page number rather than the subtitle, “The Idea of Cognition,”[9] because I immediately go to that last half paragraph in the Absolute Idea when I first contrasted our problem with Stalinism to Lenin’s problem with the Second International; I further very cautiously refer to U-P-I[10] because of seeing that the syllogism is not only in the fetishism of commodities, but in the Accumulation of Capital, where Marx uses the Hegelian expression ‘general absolute law,’ and where I say it is based on Hegel’s Absolute Idea.[11]

From there I go to Philosophy of Mind.[12]

Actually, in the very first page [of the May 12, 1953, letter], indeed the first paragraph, I announce that “I brazenly shout that in the dialectic of the Absolute Idea is the dialectic of the party and that I have just worked it out.” And the second paragraph specifies “I am not touching upon the mass party, the workers will do what they will do. And until they do, we can have only the faintest intimation of the great leap… I am not concerned with spontaneity vs. organization… I am concerned only with the dialectic of the vanguard party of that type of grouping like ours, be it large or small, and its relationship to the mass.”

The next page, referring to p. 477 in Science of Logic, I deal with the concept of Other: “Where Other turns out to be, not the proletariat outside, but the party itself.”

My historic references in the development of party, are 1903 and 1920-23, which is exactly the final paragraph we’ve been talking about today, p. 808 of Phenomenology, which evidently makes me see a connection at that point to Logic, pp. 466 and 467, but, where in the Letters I go to Absolute Method and in that way see a relationship to forms of party and tendencies within party, this time there is no doubt of seeing that if Science itself and not just the relation of form to content must undergo Golgotha, the correct conclusion I make in 1953 about “the self-determination therefore in which alone the Idea is, is to hear itself speak…” is correct but, the emphasis is on “determined to appear” rather than Golgotha first. I think now that’s because I still was looking very closely to Lenin and a little bit of CLRJ and his Nevada Document.[13]

At the same time I seem to be chafing at the bit in so far as CLRJ is concerned and the fact that he evidently had said that Philosophy of Mind has nothing for us: “(Please, Hauser, can you get a hold of a copy of Philosophy of Spirit or is it Mind? I am brazen enough to want to swim there too. I have an instinct that we couldn’t get very far there when we tried it before because we equated Mind to party, but now that I believe the dialectic of the Absolute Idea is the dialectic of the party, I feel that Mind is the new society gestating in the old, and I feel sure we could get a lot of very valuable dialectical developments there, and what is so significant about that also is the building of the new within the old makes it possible to stop jumping from high point to high point but rather to follow concretely since this new is in the daily struggle.”)

So it is Philosophy of Mind, i.e., the May 20 rather than the May 12 Letter, that completely frees me from CLR and from concern with party, as with the final three paragraphs of Mind, I end not with the form of organization, but instead say, “we have entered the new society.”

[1] “The book” is Dunayevskaya’s work in progress, “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.”

[2] The paper is the newspaper News & Letters, published by the Marxist-Humanist organization News and Letters Committees.

[3] This refers to Dunayevskaya’s May 1953 letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, which around the time of writing this she made a category of as the philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism.

[4] See “The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin,” chapter 2 of Philosophy and Revolution.

[5] This refers to two English translations of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J.B. Baillie (Allen & Unwin, 1931) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977).

[6] The quotation from the Miller translation as recorded in the 3/23/1987 REB minutes is: “the two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.” The German word Erinnerung was translated as “recollection” and as “inwardizing.” As Dunayevskaya discusses in the following paragraphs, “the two together” refer to History and Science as Hegel takes them up in the final chapter of his Phenomenology, titled “Absolute Knowledge” or “Absolute Knowing.” The asterisked paragraph is hers.

[7] Dunayevskaya’s December 1960 “Notes on Hegel’s Phenomenology” can be found in the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #2806, and were reprinted in The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lexington Books, 2002).

[8] Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, pp. 155, 161, 192, takes up Marx’s Feb. 29, 1860, letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, in which Marx wrote, “…the party, therefore, in this wholly ephemeral sense, ceased to exist for me 8 years ago….Since 1852, then, I have known nothing of ‘party’ in the sense implied in your letter….The [Communist League], like the société des saisons in Paris and a hundred other societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society….I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’ I meant a ‘League’ that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago.’ By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.” (Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 41 (Progress Publishers, 1985), pp. 80-88)

[9] The last two chapters in Hegel’s Science of Logic are “The Idea of Cognition” and “The Absolute Idea.”

[10] The categories Universal, Particular, and Individual.

[11] Dunayevskaya developed this in her Philosophy and Revolution, pp. 92-94.

[12] Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, 1971; also translated as Philosophy of Spirit) is the final book of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and is the focus of Dunayevskaya’s May 20, 1953 letter.

[13] The Nevada Document was the working name of what C.L.R. James wrote in 1948 and later published as Notes on Dialectics (Allison & Busby, 1980).