Marcuse’s and Fromm’s Correspondence with the Socialist Feminist Raya Dunayevskaya
During the years 1954 to 1978, the Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya corresponded separately but intensively with two noted members of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. The correspondence covered dialectical social theory, socialist humanism, the structure and contradictions of modern capitalism, and feminism and revolution. As a whole, these exchanges illustrate the deeply Marxist and humanist concerns of all three of these thinkers. The correspondence also highlights their significant differences as they discussed the degree to which the ideas of Marx and Hegel could continue to underpin an analysis of capitalist modernity and its forces of opposition.
Marcuse and Fromm were the only two members of the Frankfurt School who engaged in dialogue with Dunayevskaya, a lifelong revolutionary thinker and activist. A self-educated movement intellectual without any university training, Dunayevskaya was born in Ukraine and grew up in the Maxwell Street Jewish ghetto, later torn down and replaced by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to her correspondence with Marcuse, which began in 1954, Dunayevskaya had served as a secretary to Trotsky in Mexico. She was known as a critic from the left of the USSR, and had worked closely with the noted Afro-Caribbean Marxist C.L.R. James. During the period of her most intensive correspondence with Marcuse, she completed her first book, Marxism and Freedom (1958), a study of Marxism from a humanistic standpoint in which her first English translations of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts and of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel appeared as the appendix. Marcuse contributed the preface to this book, in which, while agreeing with Dunayevskaya’s dialectical and humanist reading of Marx, he argues against her interpretation of the modern working class as a site of resistance based upon rank and file and Black workers. In this preface, he articulates perhaps for the first time in published form, his one-dimensionality thesis concerning the modern working class.
Despite their differences, which erupted in an acrimonious debate over Freud and radical change in 1955, both Marcuse and Fromm generally supported the radical movements of the 1960s, from which their erstwhile Frankfurt School colleagues Horkheimer and Adorno recoiled. The extensive correspondence of both Marcuse and Fromm with Dunayevskaya, who certainly saw the transcendence of domination and alienation as a concrete historical possibility in the postwar capitalist order, is also suggestive of some important affinities between these two Frankfurt School thinkers, and of differences with the less politically radical version of the Frankfurt School that had been re-established in the 1950s in Germany under the direction of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Moreover, on a more theoretical level, it should be noted that Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts were central to the major published work of Marcuse, Fromm, and Dunayevskaya, something that could not be said of Adorno or Horkheimer.. Read more: http://logosjournal.com/2012/winter_anderson/
