The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978


Book Description

This book presents for the first time the correspondence during the years 1954 to 1978 between the Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87) and two other noted thinkers, the Hegelian Marxist philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and the psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm (1900-80), both of the latter members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. In their introduction, editors Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell focus on the theoretical and political dialogues in these letters, which cover topics such as dialectical social theory, Marxist economics, socialist humanism, the structure and contradictions of modern capitalism, the history of Marxism and of the Frankfurt School, feminism and revolution, developments in the USSR, Cuba, and China, and emergence of the New Left of the 1960s. The editors' extensive explanatory notes offer helpful background information, definitions of theoretical concepts, and source references. Among the thinkers discussed in the correspondence - some of them quite critically-- are Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Luk cs, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset. As a whole, this volume shows the deeply Marxist and humanist concerns of these thinkers, each of whom had a lifelong concern with rethinking Marx and Hegel as the foundation for an analysis of capitalist modernity and its forces of opposition.




Specters of Revolt


Book Description

In 1848, Karl Marx declared that a communist specter was haunting Europe. In 1994, Jacques Derrida considered how the spectre of Marx would haunt the post-Cold War world. In Specters of Revolt, Gilman-Opalsky argues that the world is haunted by revolt, by the possibility of events that interrupt and disrupt the world, that throw its reality and justice into question. But recent revolt is neither decisively communist nor decisively Marxist. Gilman-Opalsky develops a theory of revolt that accounts for its diverse critical content about autonomy, everyday life, anxiety, experience, knowledge, and possibility. The 1994 uprising of the Mexican Zapatistas set the stage for new forms of revolt against a newly expanded power of capital. In the 20 years since, including the recent phase of global uprisings that began in 2008 with the Greek revolts, insurrection has spoken in the "Arab Spring" in Spain, Turkey, Brazil, and in the U.S. in Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, and Baltimore, among other places. In light of recent global uprisings, Gilman-Opalsky aims to move beyond the critical theory of revolt to an understanding of revolt as theory itself. Making use of diverse sources from Raoul Vaneigem and Félix Guattari to Julia Kristeva and Raya Dunayevskaya, Spectres of Revolt explores upheaval as thinking, the intellect of insurrection, and philosophy from below.




Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic


Book Description

This book provides close readings of primary texts to analyze the linkage between G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy and Karl Marx’s critical social theory of necessity and freedom. This is important for three reasons: first, to understand the significance of the changing relationships of work, society, and critical social theory in the origins of Hegelian-Marxism in the US, as documented in the recently published correspondence between the Marxist-Humanist theoretician Raya Dunayevskaya and the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse; second, to identify the intersections of the Critical Theorists Jurgen Habermas’ and Marcuse’s influential reinterpretations of Marx’s “value theory” of economy and society that enables navigation of the changing relationships of the social and economic spheres in the last century, as developed in Marx’s Grundrisse; and, thirdly, to assess the potential of Moishe Postone’s renewal of Marx’s value theory, largely conceived by the notion of a necessity and freedom dialectic intrinsic to capitalism.




Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm


Book Description

Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm explores the relations between Erich Fromm’s theory and practice in politics and the psychoanalytic clinic – their points of continuity and contradiction. Drawing on a systematic reading of Fromm's published output, as well as extensive research in the Fromm archives, Matheus Romanetto extracts the fragments of ontology, logic, and ethics implicit in his writings, leading to a re-evaluation of Fromm's place in 20th century intellectual history. Interpolated with the theoretical argument are three historical excursi thematizing Fromm’s practice in political life, religious life, and the psychoanalytic clinic, setting the grounds for a new political sociology of radical humanism and critical theory. Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to scholars of psychoanalytic studies, sociology, contemporary philosophy, political theory, and critical theory.




Raya Dunayevskaya's Intersectional Marxism


Book Description

Raya Dunayevskaya is one of the twentieth century’s great but underappreciated Marxist and feminist thinkers. Her unique philosophy and practice of Marxist-Humanism—as well as her grasp of Hegelian dialectics and the deep humanism that informs Marx’s thought—has much to teach us today. From her account of state capitalism (part of her socio-economic critique of Stalinism, fascism, and the welfare state), to her writings on Rosa Luxemburg, Black and women’s liberation, and labor, we are offered indispensable resources for navigating the perils of sexism, racism, capitalism, and authoritarianism. This collection of essays, from a diverse group of writers, brings to life Dunayevskaya’s important contributions. Revisiting her rich legacy, the contributors to this volume engage with her resolute Marxist-Humanist focus and her penetrating dialectics of liberation that is connected to Black, labor, and women’s liberation and to struggles over alienation and exploitation the world over. Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism is recovered for the twenty-first century and turned, as it was with Dunayevskaya herself, to face the multiple alienations and de-humanizations of social life.




Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day


Book Description

Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day, a selection of writings by the Marxist-Humanist philosopher and revolutionary Raya Dunayevskaya, brings out the contemporary urgency of Marx’s work as a philosophy of revolution in permanence. That dialectic permeates the totality of Marx’s body of ideas and activities. Major themes include Marx’s transformation of the Hegelian dialectic; the inseparability of Marx’s economics, humanism, and dialectic; the battle of ideas with post-Marx Marxism, beginning with Engels; Black liberation, internationalism, and women’s liberation; today’s burning question of the relationship between spontaneity, organization, and philosophy; the emergence of counter-revolution from within the revolution; and the problem of what happens after the revolution.




Democracy, Dialectics, and Difference


Book Description

It has been nearly two centuries since Marx famously turned Hegel on his head in order to repurpose dialectics as a revolutionary way of thinking about the internal contradictions of our social relations. Despite critiques from post-structuralists, post-colonialists, and others, there has been a resurgence of dialectical thought among political theorists as of late. This resurgence has coincided with a rise in the mention of words like class warfare, socialism, and communism among the general public on the streets of Seattle in 1999, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in the actions of the Greek anarchists and the Spanish indignados, and in the rallying cry of "we are the 99%" of the Occupy Movement, and in academia. This book explores how it is that dialectical thought might respond to the critiques brought forth by those on the left who are critical of Marxism’s universalizing and authoritarian legacy. Brian C. Lovato singles out Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as the key interlocutors in this ongoing conversation between Marxism and post-structuralism. Laclau and Mouffe argue that Marxist theory is inherently authoritarian, cannot escape a class-reductionist theory of revolutionary subjectivity, and is bound by a closed Hegelian ontology. Lovato argues the opposite by turning to two heterodox Marxist thinkers, Raya Dunayevskaya and C. L. R. James, in order to construct a radically democratic, dynamic, and open conceptualization of dialectical thought. In doing so, he advances a vision of Marxist theory that might serve as a resource to scholars and activists committed not only to combatting capitalism, but also to fighting against colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity. The writings of Dunayevskaya and James allow for Marxism to become relevant again in these tumultuous early years of the 21st century.




Marxism, Revolution and Utopia


Book Description

This collection assembles some of Herbert Marcuse’s most important work and presents for the first time his responses to and development of classic Marxist approaches to revolution and utopia, as well as his own theoretical and political perspectives. This sixth and final volume of Marcuse's collected papers shows Marcuse’s rejection of the prevailing twentieth-century Marxist theory and socialist practice - which he saw as inadequate for a thorough critique of Western and Soviet bureaucracy - and the development of his revolutionary thought towards a critique of the consumer society. Marcuse's later philosophical perspectives on technology, ecology, and human emancipation sat at odds with many of the classic tenets of Marx’s materialist dialectic which placed the working class as the central agent of change in capitalist societies. As the material from this volume shows, Marcuse was not only a theorist of Marxist thought and practice in the twentieth century, but also proves to be an essential thinker for understanding the neoliberal phase of capitalism and resistance in the twenty-first century. A comprehensive introduction by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce places Marcuse’s philosophy in the context of his engagement with the main currents of twentieth century philosophy while also providing important analyses of his anticipatory theorization of capitalist development through a neoliberal restructuring of society. The volume concludes with an afterword by Peter Marcuse.




Immanent Critiques


Book Description

The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, these essays seek to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world.




Erich Fromm’s Revolutionary Hope


Book Description

“Socialism ... is essentially prophetic Messianism ...” So Erich Fromm writes in his 1961 classic Marx’s Concept of Man. World-renowned Critical Theorist, activist, psychoanalyst, and public Marxist intellectual, Erich Fromm (1900-1980) played a pivotal role in the early Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and influenced emancipatory projects in multiple disciplines. While he remains popularly well known as author of such best-selling books as Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving, Fromm’s contribution to Critical Theory is now being rediscovered. Fromm’s work on messianism in the 1950s-1970s responded to earlier debates among early twentieth century German Jewish thinkers and radicals, including Hermann Cohen, Rosa Luxemburg, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Georg Lukács. The return to Fromm, as well as growing interest in Jewish messianism’s influence on the Frankfurt School, makes this book timely. Fromm’s bold defense of radical hope and trenchant critique of political catastrophism are more relevant than ever. “Joan Braune’s work on Erich Fromm is indispensable for students of Frankfurt School critical theory ... Braune reveals the central role that Fromm played in the early development of Frankfurt School critical theory. She also discloses the role that Fromm played in shaping some of the most important debates in critical theory. One of the most interesting issues that informed the debates among early critical theorists was messianism and its political implications. There is no better book on this issue. Those of us who are interested in the development of Frankfurt School critical theory owe Dr. Braune a great deal of gratitude.” – Arnold L. Farr, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, President, International Herbert Marcuse Society “Joan Braune's work on Fromm brings this important figure in critical theory back into the conversation at a needed time. It also appears at a time when we must recapture prophetic messianism – the hope in humanity for a better future.” Jeffery Nicholas, Providence College, author of Reason, Tradition, and the Good: MacIntyre’s Tradition-Constituted Reason and Frankfurt School Critical Theory