Reading Altizer’s apocalyptic theology

November 18, 2021

Finzel and Kelch review “Satan and Apocalypse,” the latest work by the “Death of God” theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, which explores the intersection between William Blake’s revolutionary vision and Hegel’s dialectic of Manifest Religion. What makes Hegel so contemporary, the reviewers argue, is that his absolute Idea as new beginning never bows to any given reality but holds fast to the positive in the ongoing creative power of the negative.

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Philosophic Dialogue: Dialectic of the party or dialectic of philosophy and organization?

July 5, 2016

Eugene Gogol explores the point that the radical heart of Hegelian dialectics is the negation of the negation–the positive within the negative that constructs the new society. He traces this idea in Marx and Lenin and then how Raya Dunayevskaya saw this dialectic expressed in her breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes, where she ascertained a dual movement: a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory and the movement from theory to philosophy.

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Essay: Revolutionary feminism and Hegel’s notion of Life

March 15, 2016

Olga Domanski delves into G.W.F. Hegel’s section on “Life” in his Science of Logic to show its meaning for the women’s movement today, facing lethal attacks on abortion rights and an alarming increase in rapes, battering, poverty and unemployment as well as an ever-widening gap between feminist theory and the lives of Black and working women.

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Philosophic Dialogue: On the 1953 letters

March 8, 2015

In Hegel we witness subjectivity coming out of objectivity, and the opposite movement. Dunayevskaya’s May 20, 1953, Letter interprets the Hegelian dialectic in a revolutionary way. What philosophical-political conclusions can be made?

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Dialectics of revolution: American roots and world Humanist concepts, Part II

September 14, 2014

From the November-December 2010 News & Letters

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya

Editor’s note: For the centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya’s birth, we present excerpts from her March 21, 1985, lecture at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, at the opening of a three-month exhibition of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (RDC). The [=>]

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The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism

September 9, 2014

From the May 2003 issue of News & Letters.

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives

Editor’s note: Raya Dunayevskaya’s “Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes” were a philosophic breakthrough that led to the birth of Marxist-Humanism. We are reprinting this 1987 commentary by her where she reexamined them in light of her effort to work [=>]

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Hegel’s Absolute Idea is for workers

May 5, 2013

Although we, as a state capitalist tendency, had been saying for years that we live in an age of absolutes, that the task of the theoreticians was the working out materialistically of Hegel’s last chapter on The Absolute Idea, we were unable to relate the daily struggles of the workers to this total conception. The maturity of the age, on the other hand, disclosed itself in the fact that, with automation, the worker began to question the very mode of labor. Thus the workers began to make concrete, and thereby extended, Marx’s profoundest conceptions, for the innermost core of the Marxian dialectic, around which everything turns, is that the transformation of society must begin with the material life of the worker, the producer.

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The 200th anniversary of Hegel’s absolute method

November 29, 2012

Essay
by Ron Kelch

All revolutions, in the sciences no less than in general history, originate only in this, that the spirit of man, for the understanding and comprehension of himself, for the possessing of himself, has now altered his categories, uniting himself in a truer, deeper, more intrinsic relation with himself.

–Hegel

Today’s global search for a new [=>]

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November-December 2012 issue of News & Letters is now available on the web

November 24, 2012

Lead
Obama’s re-election doesn’t end clash of two worlds

The two worlds of the rulers and the ruled shone through the suffocating blanket of propaganda surrounding the election in which Barack Obama won a second term. A pronounced gender gap and long lines at the polls in African-American and Latino areas reflected the determination to defeat the [=>]

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István Mészáros and the Dialectic

March 19, 2012

Essay
by Eugene Walker

István Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Volume I, The Social Determination of Method. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.

Global depression conditions have once again brought to the fore capitalism’s grave contradictions, and with it, new interest in the work of Karl Marx. This is not alone a theoretical question. The massive protests in [=>]

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