Philosophy and Revolution
From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao
By Raya Dunayevskaya
New fourth edition for 2003, on the 30th anniversary of its first appearance. New index.
Includes Forewords by Louis Dupré and Erich Fromm as well as author’s introductions, including “New Thoughts on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.”
Lexington Books, 2003. 424 pp.
$35.95 + $4 postage
Few thought systems have been as distorted and sometimes misconstrued as those of Marx and Hegel. Philosophy and Revolution, presented here in a new edition, attempts to save Marx from interpretations which restrict the revolutionary significance of the philosophy behind his theory. Developing her breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolute Idea, Raya Dunayevskaya, who died in the June of 1987, aims at a total liberation of the human person—not only from the ills of a capitalist society, but also from the equally oppressive state capitalism of established communist governments. She assumes within her theory of class struggle issues as diverse as feminism, Black liberation, and even the new nationalism of Third World countries. Moreover, Dunayevskaya combines within herself an incorruptible objectivity with a passionate political attitude, making this work a vibrant and concrete discussion of the vicissitudes of society, justice, equality, and existence.
Contents
Part I • Why Hegel? Why Now?
Absolute Negativity as New Beginning
A New Continent of Thought: Marx’s Historical Materialism and Its Inseparability from the Hegelian Dialectic
The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin
Part II • Alternatives
Leon Trotsky as Theoretician
The Thought of Mao Tse-tung
Jean-Paul Sartre
Part III • Economic Reality and the Dialectics of Liberation
The African Revolutions and the World Economy
State Capitalism and the East European Revolts
New Passions and New Forces
“For everyone who is seriously interested in the forces which form and deform the present and the future, this book is to be most warmly recommended.” —Erich Fromm, from the Preface to the German Edition
“An arresting chapter of a new book by the unorthodox revolutionary Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya is entitled ‘Why Hegel? Why Now?’ … To the question I have raised about the contemporaneity of Hegel, she answers with a resounding affirmative: ‘What makes Hegel a contemporary is what made him so alive to Marx: the cogency of the dialectic of negativity for a period of proletarian revolution, as well as for the “birth-time” of history in which Hegel lived.'” —George Armstrong Kelly, Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis