The Self-Thinking Idea Does Not Mean You Thinking: A contribution to our ongoing effort to work out, in theory and practice, how to renew Marxist-Humanism organizationally

A new statement by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative, followed here by two writings by Raya Dunayevskaya from her last period of work on the relationship between philosophy and organization.  Read the rest of this entry »

The concreteness of Marxist-Humanism

The author examines Dunayevskaya’s method of concretizing Marx and suggests that Hegel and Marx together spell out the material, conceptual ground for developing an alternative to capitalism today.
Read the rest of this entry »

Brief Comments on the Relationship between Marxism and the Hegelian Dialectic

This article originally appeared in May of 2008 in Marxist-Humanism Today, the online publication of the now-defunct Marxist-Humanist Committee.

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!”

                                                                –V. I. Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic [1]

Marx says in his Postface to the second edition of Volume 1 of Capital [2] that his method is none other than the dialectic. It is not, however, a direct application of the Hegelian dialectic. On the contrary, Marx tells us that the dialectic in Hegel–based on the journey and self-development of the Idea, of which the world is a result or “external appearance”–is exactly the opposite of his own. With Marx we have a materialist dialectic wherein the Idea is a “reflection” of the real world rather than its creator [3]. And yet Marx also goes on to call himself a “pupil of that mighty thinker [Hegel],” and says that the “mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner,” calling the “rational kernel” inherent in Hegel’s dialectic “critical and revolutionary” [4].

Read the rest of this entry »