Abstract
What Gogol Says
In this publication of the Studies in Critical Social Sciences series, Gogol (2012) takes up a number of critical issues in Marxist theory. Basing himself on the work of Dunayevskaya (1958, 1973, 1981, 2002), and the organization (News & Letters) and other Marxist humanists she inspired, he presents their collective reading of Marx and Hegel in an effort to develop a theory of socialist and working-class struggle and its thrust towards building a new world, with an emphasis upon the forms and responsibilities that revolutionary organization should take.
His philosophical basis for this is a deep and insightful interpretation of Hegel’s Absolutes, starting with Absolute Knowledge (in Phenomenology of Spirit), then Absolute Idea (Science of Logic), and Absolute Spirit (Philosophy of Spirit [Mind]). He then discusses Marx’s concepts of organization and how they develop in interaction with working-class actions and organizations from his youth through the International Workingman’s Association, the Paris Commune, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx, 1938). After this, he reviews working-class and socialist history in the Second International. He discusses the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the period after 1917, with excellent presentations on the soviets, factory committees and other forms of organization from below – together with discussions of their interpretations by Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Pannekoek.
He ends this historical overview with a brief presentation of the Spanish revolution of 1936–7, the East German revolt of 1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and (very briefly) Solidarnosc in Poland. In discussing Spain, East Germany, Hungary and Poland, he emphasizes the creativity of the masses as a form of theory. Nevertheless, in spite of quoting Dunayevskaya (2002: 7) later in the book (p. 293), where she highlights the theoreticians of groups like News & Letters in such movements (‘What happens to a small group “like us” who know that nothing can be done without the masses, and are with them, but [such small groups of] theoreticians always seem to be around too’), Gogol gives short shrift to the theorists who were present in Spain, East Germany, Hungary and Poland at these times.
He then turns to a more philosophical discussion of Marx’s critiques of Hegel and of the Gotha Programme (with a focus on its approach to how to break with value-production and on the organizational and philosophical issues involved in doing this). Next, he writes a chapter on Hegel and Lenin, including Raya Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of Lenin’s reading of Hegel (in Dunayevskaya, 2002: 10, 11), in which she argued (Gogol, p. 278):
Lenin … never raised philosophy directly in relationship to organization. It was at most a phrase, like the famous reference in the Trade Union Debate, where he brings in, in a general way only, dialectics and eclecticism. … Lenin did return to Marx’s roots in Hegel, and did see that the Critique of the Gotha Programme had never really been concretized as the smashing of the bourgeois state, without which you could not have a revolution. In a word, he certainly worked out the dialectics of revolution, and made it be in Russia. But, but, but – he too didn’t touch the question of the party. On the contrary, it didn’t even go as far as his own varied critiques of What Is to Be Done?, once the Bolsheviks gained power.
He then discusses Hegel’s critique of the third attitude to objectivity, concluding that it implies the need for an organization based around (p. 299) seeing ‘the treatment of principles and organization as inseparables, as transcending the particular manifestation Hegel was taking up in the Third Attitude, and reaching toward the problematic [Dunayevskaya] was exploring: the inseparability of revolutionary philosophy and revolutionary organization, organizational responsibility for a body of ideas, a dialectics of organization of philosophy’. Here, I would add, it is important to flesh this out in terms of another aspect of Gogol’s (and Dunayevskaya’s) philosophy: unlike groups such as the Spartacist League (which might agree with the words I just quoted), Gogol emphasizes the need for such an organization to re-create the Marxist dialectic in an ongoing fashion – by which he does not mean just applying it to a changing world, but recognizing and acting on how historical change creates the need to re-think the dialectic root and branch.
In Part Four, Gogol discusses the history of Dunayevskaya’s thought and of her organization, News & Letters. This discussion culminates in Dunayevskaya’s challenge to News & Letters (shortly before she died) to develop a philosophy of organization. This challenge and the thought behind it, as well as Dunayevskaya’s notes for this project, formed a major motivation for Gogol’s book.
In Gogol’s ‘Conclusion’, he discusses and critiques ‘recent challenges to Hegel’s dialectics of negativity’ in the works of John Holloway, Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, and Istvan Mészáros; he also takes up the ideas of Michael Lebowitz and of Moishe Postone. His discussions of these thinkers is imaginative and insightful, but they do not seem central to either his major thrust or my critiques of what Gogol says, so I will not spend time on them. Gogol does not discuss why he chose not to discuss what he would call ‘vanguardist’ theorists writing in the traditions of Hal Draper or Tony Cliff.
Finally, Gogol presents the humanism of Marx’s Capital, including both a humanist critique of what capital does to people and to culture and a humanist perspective on opposition movements within capitalism. Neither Gogol nor Marx recognizes that this humanism is limited by its focus on capital and its dialectic rather than on the dialectic of the workers’ movement once we disperse capital’s power (Friedman, 2008a). Gogol then returns to discuss Hegel’s Absolutes, Marx’s dialectics of organization, and a restatement of the dialectics of philosophy and organization ‘as Absolute Negativity as New Beginning and as Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy in the Hands of Dunayevskaya’ (p. 382).
Critique
Unlike what Gogol seems to imply in this book, I think an adequate philosophy of revolution and of revolutionary organization needs to consider those parts of Hegel’s writings on ‘non-Absolutes’ as deeply as Hegel’s writings on Absolutes. Dunayevskaya and Lenin (and perhaps Gogol) might agree with me on this. Lenin famously wrote: ‘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’ (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch03.htm). Dunayevskaya wrote in her ‘Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy’: ‘So whatever it was that was driving me in 1953 to write those letters of May 12 and May 20, it suddenly became the whole of Hegel’s work’ (2002: 7; also cited in Gogol, p. 323.) Nonetheless, Dunayevskaya did write far more about Hegel’s absolutes than about other portions of his works.
For Gogol and Dunayevskaya, the Absolutes are the period of maximum contradiction and struggle – and I would agree with them that they are critical in helping us understand the moments of maximum struggle and maximum possibility, and how revolutionaries can relate to such periods. Nevertheless, such periods are rare, and organizations, whether the Second International, News & Letters, or a ‘party to lead’, spend most of their existence in other periods. Gogol’s failure to consider this – and, for example, what Being and Essence mean in the lives of working-class struggles and organizations – means that his explanations of the willingness of the Eisenachers to accept the Gotha Programme, and Marx’s failure to make public his critique of it, were simply that they had a fetishism for organization rather than a philosophy of organization based on the dialectic (by which he seems to mean the Absolutes). Much better would be to use the non-Absolute portions of Hegel to understand the dialectics of bureaucratization (and of struggles against it) in working-class organizations.
Gogol, Dunayevskaya, and Anderson (1995) build their related analysis of why most Second International parties supported ‘their’ government’s side in the First World War on Lenin’s related error. All of them argue that imperialism provided money that let capitalism create a reformist ‘labor aristocracy’ that supported it. As I (Friedman, 1983, 1986, 1996) and Post (2006a, 2006b) have shown, this ‘labor aristocracy’ was at the core of the revolutionary movement in Russia and elsewhere at the end of the First World War. Here again, a theory of philosophy and organization needs to consider bureaucratization and struggles to fight the bosses and capital despite it (Friedman, 1982; Michels, 1962; Schorske, 1955) – and then root these in the dialectic.
Lenin’s theoretical failure to grasp the dialectics of bureaucratization during the First World War, and his rooting his analysis of reformism in a stratification theory instead, may have disarmed him for the difficulties the Russian Revolution faced during the Civil War and after. Here, I am speculating that had he grappled with the dialectics of bureaucratization during the wartime pre-revolutionary period, he might have been quicker to understand the dangers posed by the civil war’s bureaucratization of the Bolshevik Party. This bureaucratization, fed by both the disintegration of much workplace-based organization and by the top-down nature of military struggle (and the stern repression of some political tendencies) during and after the Civil War, meant that the soviets were no longer controlled by an organized working class and that few Party members were any longer working at workplaces. In these conditions, and in the absence of a broader international revolution, this opened up the unanticipated possibility that the bureaucracy would become a ruling class and re-establish capitalist forms of exploited and alienated production. Lenin did not see this – even under the impetus of Kronstadt – but might have done so had he understood the roots of reformism in the bureaucratization of the Second International. With such an understanding, he might have found ways to respond to Kronstadt that incorporated that movement’s anti-bureaucratic and democratic thrust rather than reducing democracy in an effort to maintain Bolshevik control (which he conceptualized as still being a voice of working-class revolution, although a distorted one.)
Gogol barely mentions Kronstadt. Yet Gogol’s book made me realize that Kronstadt can legitimately be interpreted as ‘Masses as Reason’ in the sense that Dunayevskaya and Gogol use that term. One Hegelian Marxist interpretation might view the Revolution, and the Bolshevik Party as the leaders of that Revolution, as having succeeded in the First Negation of the struggle – the abolition of capitalist rule of both (many) workplaces and the State – but in doing this as having established the Party as a new State and (potentially) new ruling class. From this perspective, Kronstadt was an attempt at Second Negation – that is, an attempt to re-create soviets as democratic organs of the working class and to de-throne the Bolsheviks. This attempt was doomed to fail – perhaps because there was not enough of an organized working class at that time to take up the struggle and recreate the soviets or, alternatively, that what organized working class there was did not believe such an effort would succeed. (Had there been a working class ready to struggle, this would have been signaled by broad worker uprisings in support of Kronstadt.)
Gogol seems to assume that a ‘party to lead’ is a bad thing. He learned politics within Marxist humanism, which in turn grew out of the American Trotskyist movement – which indeed made a fetish out of leadership and the Party as the leader (at times, in spite of itself, seeming almost as top-down as Stalinist or Maoist conceptions of the party). I say Gogol assumes this because he nowhere takes up the argument on what a ‘party to lead’ is or why it is a bad thing. Here, I want to mention a point of obscure history. Early in the 1970s, when Gogol was in News & Letters in Los Angeles and I was in or around the International Socialists branch there, the two organizations agreed to let a young man be simultaneously a member of both groups. The groups also worked together (along with other tendencies) to put out a working-class rank-and-file oriented newspaper, Picket Line (see Friedman, 1974). Yet the International Socialists had a weak form of what Gogol would call a ‘party to lead’ orientation.
Why is this important? Because Hegel’s dialectics is based on a series of related contradictions and surmounting of those contradictions. When Gogol (p. 261) quotes Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic (citing Hegel, 1873:
Specifically, Gogol fails to confront an awkward truth: of all the workers’ movements that he quite rightly considers, in only one, the Russian Revolution, did workers succeed in taking over many workplaces, disintegrating the capitalist state, and preventing the existing capitalists from taking back control for even so long as a year. And in that case, as opposed to the others Gogol discusses, the movement was led by a truly revolutionary workers’ party of the kind Gogol would oppose. To me, as I have argued elsewhere (Friedman, 2010), this suggests both that one or more revolutionary parties are needed and that creating socialism is likely to require (or perhaps requires) the later overthrow of that party. I am not sure that this interpretation of Hegel or of political possibilities is correct, but I think that Gogol and Marxist humanism – and indeed the entire Left – need to discuss this more seriously than they have done (at least since the fall of the USSR).
Gogol concludes by laying out the need for revolutionary organization that will take responsibility for bringing Marx’s revolutionary vision to the fore, which includes taking responsibility for developing new visions of the dialectic that are responsive to changing times and possibilities. He argues that this requires understanding and propounding concrete universals to guide the struggle. Examples of such concrete universals seem to be ‘a dialectic of philosophy and organization’ and ‘Absolute Negativity as New Beginning’ (p. 378). The problem is that these concrete universals are anything but concrete. 3 As I have argued elsewhere (Friedman, 2004, 2008a, 2014), Gogol, Marxist humanism, other political currents, and indeed Marx himself have all failed to pose the question of ‘after the revolution’ in concrete terms.
Taking a Hegelian Marxist approach to this issue requires asking what the problems and struggles will be, and thus what the general contours of the dialectic will be. These problems will include cleaning up the ecological mess capitalism has produced; creating a use-value oriented human society instead of an exchange-value driven economy – which also involves a total re-orientation of how we think about and act out time; resolving the various forms of oppression and inequality that exist such as the oppressions of women, ‘minority’ racial and ethnic groups, and the oppressions and economic inequalities between nations and among occupations; and how to make decisions about economics and about social directions generally. On these issues, struggles will have to be fought out – and we will have to do so in ways that develop freedom and self-development for all (I do not have space here to elaborate my thoughts on these questions, but see Friedman, 2004, 2008a, 2008b: Introduction).
In Conclusion
Gogol has written an honest, intelligent and useful book filled with moments of sharp insight. It clarified aspects of Marxist humanist thought for me, and presented useful historical interpretations of important events while doing so. Its arguments, however, seem self-limiting and inadequate as a basis for a theory of either revolution or revolutionary organization. The Hegelian dialectic is not limited to Hegel’s sections on Absolutes. Organizational theory for revolutionaries has to confront the reality that most of our time is and has been spent in non-‘Absolute’ historical periods, and thus has to confront processes of bureaucratization and struggles against it as essential parts of politics and of dialectics. Finally, calls for concrete universals have to be concrete. We need to think about, and publicly discuss and debate, the specific problems a working-class revolution will face in the years after dispersing both the capitalist state and capitalist control of workplaces and humanity’s interface with nature. To put it bluntly: as Marx said, we will have to clean up the muck of ages, including both the giant ecological mess that capitalism has created and the social/ideological muck like racism, international inequalities, poverty, sexual oppression and pre-suppositions about power, value and how we spend our time.
To develop a philosophy of organization, then, we need to ask what these concrete problems mean for how we should organize now and in the future? And what does this imply for our actions, philosophy and organization now and as we and others struggle to make the world anew?