In this classic exposition of Marxist thought, Raya Dunayevskaya, with clarity and great insight, traces the development and explains the essential features of Marx's analysis of history. Using as her point of departure the Industrial and French Revolutions, the European upheavals of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Paris Commune of 1871, Dunayevskaya shows how Marx, inspired by these events, adapted Hegel's philosophy to analyse the course of history as a dialectical process that moves 'from practice to theory'. The essence of Marx's philosophy, as Dunayevskaya points out, is the human struggle for freedom, which entails the gradual emergence of a proletarian revolutionary consciousness and the discovery through conflict of the means for realising complete human freedom. But freedom for Marx meant freedom not only from capitalist economic exploitation but also from all political restraints. Continuing her historical analysis, Dunayevskaya reveals how completely Marx's original conception of freedom was perverted through its adaptations by Stalin in Russia and Mao in China, and the subsequent erection of totalitarian states. The exploitation of the masses persisted under these regimes in the form of a new 'state capitalism'. Yet despite the profound derailment of Marxist political philosophy in the twentieth century, Dunayevskaya points to developments such as the Hungarian revolt of 1956, and the Civil Rights struggles in the United States as signs that the indomitable quest for freedom on the part of the downtrodden cannot be forever repressed. The Hegelian dialectic of events propelled by the spirit of the masses thus moves on inexorably with the hope for the future achievement of political, economic, and social freedom and equality for all.
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..". extraordinarily timely and necessary ... essential to anyone wishing to analyse capitalism today."
About the Author
Raya Dunayevskaya, who died in 1987, was a highly respected and influential philosopher, political activist, and femenist. She was the founder of Marxist Humanism in the United States.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential for understanding Marxism,
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This review is from: Marxism and Freedom (Paperback)
This is the founding document of Marxist-Humanism, written in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and before the great upheavals of the 1960's. Reading it is essential in understanding that time and why the revolutions of the masses failed during that period. What was missing from the intellectual movements influencing the masses at that point was not the "right plan", but the right philosophy of revolution which posits the masses as the agents in their own struggle for freedom. The structure of the book is chronological, as the title states. Beginning from the period of the bourgeois revolutions, it leads up to the 1950's tracing how "post-Marx Marxism" lost its way in fetishizing vanguards, bureaucratic structures, and other un-dialectical constructs that they placed before the masses of oppressed people fighting for liberation. The main lesson of the book is not that intellectuals and Marxists need to come up with a means to create socialsim, but that the movement of the masses for liberation is socialism, and that one cannot substitute the actions of individuals from some vague collective determined from the top down. In this age of capitalist crisis, this book needs to be seriously contemplated so that a new philosophy of liberation can lead humankind to cast off the shackles of capitalism.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Our modern machine age was born of three eighteenth century revolutions-the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Communist Party, United States, Cultural Revolution, French Revolution, Red Guards, Mao Tse-tung, German Social Democracy, Central Committee, Great Leap Forward, Soviet Union, First Five Year Plan, State Plan, One-Party State, Science of Logic, Where Marx, Chinese Revolution, East German, Karl Kautsky, Peking Review, Russian Communism, Chiang Kai-shek, Communist Manifesto, Mao's China, New Deal, Philosophic Notebooks New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Our modern machine age was born of three eighteenth century revolutions-the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Communist Party, United States, Cultural Revolution, French Revolution, Red Guards, Mao Tse-tung, German Social Democracy, Central Committee, Great Leap Forward, Soviet Union, First Five Year Plan, State Plan, One-Party State, Science of Logic, Where Marx, Chinese Revolution, East German, Karl Kautsky, Peking Review, Russian Communism, Chiang Kai-shek, Communist Manifesto, Mao's China, New Deal, Philosophic Notebooks New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 92
books:
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17
books
cite this book:
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- Hegel's Science of Logic by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on 13 pages
- Selected Works. by Vladimir Ilich Lenin on 8 pages
- The Communist Manifesto (Signet Classics) by Karl Marx on 7 pages
- The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings: Marx, Marat, Paine, Mao Tse-Tung, Gandhi and Others (Dover Thrift Editions) by Robert Blaisdell on 7 pages
- The State and Revolution (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on 7 pages
See all 92 books this book cites
- Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought by Kenneth Morrison on page 78, and Back Matter
- Sociological Theory by Bert N. Adams on page 164, and page 447
- Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society (Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics) by Bertell Ollman in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- A Dictionary of Marxist Thought by Tom Bottomore on page 173, and Back Matter
- The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition (Revolutionary Studies) by John Rees on page 108, and page 199
See all 17 books citing this book
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