3.99 - Markovic, Mihailo - Raya Dunayevskaya. Great Socialist Humanist Who Lived Her Philosophy All Her Life (en)

7/30/2019 3.99 - Markovic, Mihailo - Raya Dunayevskaya. Great Socialist Humanist Who Lived Her Philosophy All Her Life (en)

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Raya Dunayevskaya: Great Socialist Humanist Who Lived Her Philosophy AllHer Life

Raya Dunayevskaya: Great Socialist Humanist Who Lived Her Philosophy All Her Life

by Mihailo Markovi

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3 / 1988, pages: 372-374, on www.ceeol.com.
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Mihailo MarkovicWhen I last saw Raya, during a brief visit to Chicago on March 22, 1987, shewas so full of life, lucid, witty, sharp - her usual self. We discussed the crisisin Yugoslavia, the American scene, her next book on the dialectics of organiza

tion. She inquired about her Yugoslav friends, about Praxis International, made,some critical comments on a recent article of mine about Gyorgy Lukacs, whomshe obviously despised for his repeated self-criticism. Raya had the right to demanda full unity of theory and practice from others since that is how she lived all herlife. Near the end ofmy visit she wanted to show me he r archives. All her paperswere carefully classified and put into large boxes; I never saw such a perfect order.A thought struck me: she seems to be ready to leave any moment. But it wasimmediately rejected: with all her immense life energy, with her vitality, herexpanding interests and projects Raya will stay with us for many more years. Withsuch a meaningful existence, with such a strong motivation to create and struggleone would not easily give in to much superior force.

Three months later, when I came home, a letter was waiting for me fromKevin Anderson. The moment I saw the black and white picture of Marx I feltthat something terrible happened. It was the news that we lost Raya . . .I had the privilege of knowing her for twenty two years. In 1965 Erich Frommpublished an international collection of essays under the title Socialist Humanism.Her essay on Marx's Humanism Today was next to mine on Humanism andDialectic. We discovered an extraordinary similarty of ideas and commitmentsand started corresponding. We met in Detroit and New York. My friends fromPraxis and I tried several times to attract he r to the Korchula Summer School inYugoslavia but she did not quite trust the leaders who rejected and destroyed somany of their comrades as "trotskyists" . However she published two articles inPraxis, the last one (on "Marx's "New Humanism" and the Dialectics ofWomen'sLiberation in Primitive and Modem Societies" in Praxis International, vol. 3 No. 4of January 1984). In all those years when we from Praxis were under heavy politicalpressure - suspended from teaching, fired from the University, blacklisted inYugoslav mass media, banned from travel abroad, younger colleagues arrested,Raya protested vigorously. No other progressive journal or newspaper has engagedto help us as much as News and Letters.Raya is a unique contemporary radical activist who spelled out in a most concreteway the humanist substance of any true contemporary radicalism, who preserveda complete independance of her mind and took the freedom of criticizing allPraxis International 8: October 1988 02060-8448 $2.00


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Praxis International 373authoritarian, oppressive, exploitative regimes or tendencies both on the right andon a quasi-left; furthermore, while after the break with Trotsky she never belongedto a Party that fought for power, she nevertheless took part in active politicalstruggles and in running an emancipatory newspaper and political movement untilthe last day of he r life.As to Raya's philosophical humanism she understood better than many academicMarxist philosophers that it was not a stage in the development of Marx' s thoughtbut its very theoretical ground. The fundamental, universal and most urgent problemto be solved both theoretically and practically was the fact that under presenthistorical conditions human beings are alienated, oppressed and exploited evenin the most developed societies of our epoch. Therefore human liberation is thebasic issue, not just abolition of private property or of the bourgeois state. Thatis why Raya constantly emphasized that Marxism was either a theory of liberationor nothing. And liberation did not mean seizing power for one party or the other,even less it meant substitution of the bureaucratic state for the bourgeois government.Itmeant free and full development of each individual and it had to be the achievementof associated producers themselves.What followed from such basic humanist premises was a resolute consistentcritique of all existing oppressive and exploitative social systems, whether theylabelled themselves' 'capitalist" or "socialist" . In this respect Raya was extremelyindependant and honest. Most leftist intellectuals and politicians, even when theyare not openly opportunistic, feel uneasy in the absence of some powerful allyand tend to develop a will to believe that one or the other of contemporary statesfinds itself on a true road to socialism. For a long time the leftists all over theworld cultivated an almost religious faith that the Soviet Union was the fatherlandof socialism. Those who got disillusioned shifted the object of their absolute loyaltyto Mao's China, then to Castro's Cuba and Titc's Yugoslavia, let alone those whocling to Kim 11 Sung's Northern Korea or Enver Hoxha's Albania as the onlyremaining citadels of true Marxism-Leninism. Raya had no need for the emotionalcomfort of this kind. She was sufficiently strong to fight her battles without any suchsymbolic ally. Her basic attitude was ethical and not pragmatical: she had to strugglebecause she could not live in peace and comfort with all the surrounding misery,injustice and insanity; she has not aspired to power and had no need for politicalgames of any kind. A society in which many private capitalists were replaced bya big collective one - the state - was for Raya state-capitalism, not socialismof any kind. She did not believe that socialism could be brought to life by bigauthoritarian, hierarchical vanguard parties led by established Party bureaucracies.But she believed in grassroots movements: of workers, blacks, women, youth.She supported them, analyzed them, participated in them. She was one o f the firstMarxist scholars who fully understood the role played in our societies by newemancipatory social forces and new social movements. But she wa s too seriousand too deeply committed to the cause of human liberation to regard those newmovements as a new and fashionable phenomena and to write off the labor movement as so many intellectuals in the left have done since the upheavals of the Sixties.Raya knew well that, in spite of all improvements in their living conditions, workerswere still the most exploited, repressed and alienated social group in contemporarysociety, and especially young blacks, women and ethnic minority workers. Instead

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374 Praxis Internationalof going from one one-sided position to the other, she built an ever more complexand comprehensive theoretical position, a synthesis in which all partial truths foundtheir proper place. But inspite of the complexity and sophistication of her theoreticalviews she expressed herself clearly, lucidly, vividly: she wrote and spoke for thepeople, directly to the people, and was understood.That is why Raya's books will be read and will stay alive. Scholars will studyher writings and her archives in order to understand better the turbulent eventsof the Twentieth Century and the history of socialist humanist thought. Peoplewho followed her regular column in News and Letters and all those who heardher lecturing all over America will remember the tiny, fragile lady with a tremendousmind and extraordinary power of her convictions, a truly relentless critic of allexisting injustices, a true friend of all oppressed people. Raya will keep her uniqueplace in the hearts of all of us who had the privilege of knowing her personally.And she will also keep a lasting place of honour in the history of humanist theoryand praxis. .

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3.99 - Markovic, Mihailo - Raya Dunayevskaya. Great Socialist Humanist Who Lived Her Philosophy All Her Life (en)