Raya Dunayevskaya established a new interpretation of Marx’s works that centers on the humanism that is established in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 but is built upon and threaded throughout his entire body of work, including Capital. In Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya’s first major work, she articulates Marx’s dialectical method and positions the workers (and their movement) as Revolutionary Subjects without whom the intellectual grasps only an abstract concept of revolution.

In Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya begins with Hegel’s dialectic: “His LOGIC moves. Each of the previously inseparable divisions between opposites – between thought and reality – is in constant process of change, disappearance and reappearance, coming into head-on collision with its opposite and developing thereby. It is thus, and thus alone, that man finally achieves true freedom, not as a possession, but as a dimension of his being…”

Unlike the often-made assumption that Marx stood Hegel upright, and planted him on the ground, transplanting Hegel’s idealism with materialism, Raya points out that “Marx did not reject idealism. ‘Thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism’ as the young Marx designated his own philosophic outlook, “distinguishes itself from both idealism and materialism and is at the same time the truth uniting both.”

She points out, “To develop the dialectical movement further it was necessary to turn to the real world and its labor process.”

Dunayevskaya points out that Hegel was unable to see and could not have seen the positive that emerges from alienated labor because the workers’ revolutionary activity was not yet revealed. It is during Marx’s time that alienated labor reveals its human nature – its agentic activity toward liberation.

She writes: “…the workers have been acting out Hegel’s Absolute Idea and have thus concretized and deepened the movement from practice to theory. On the other hand, the movement from theory is nearly at a standstill because it blinds itself to the movement from practice.”

She continues: “The crying inequality of distribution, arising from this method of production, could not but arouse the sympathy of the intellectual for the proletariat. Being outside of production the intellectual could not see that the working class had power to overthrow the contradictory conditions of production. For the intellectual the proletariat existed only as a suffering class.“

It is thus the dialectic that makes Marx’s work a humanist philosophy. The dialectic insists on the unity of theory and practice or praxis and on the recognition of the worker as human Subject. Without the recognition of their humanity – their concrete activity for change (which involves both movement in consciousness and reality), the intellectual’s theorizing remains disconnected from the actual concrete conditions and desires of those who are actually moving.

Marx recognized the dialectical relationship between theory and practice and its corresponding relationship between the intellectual who theorizes and the actual working-class people who struggle. As Raya points out Marx did not only keep his eyes glued to the movements but participated in them.

Dunayevskaya writes: “It was no accident that his Communist Manifesto was published on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. He could do this because of his idea of theory as the generalization of the instinctive striving of the proletariat for a new social order, a truly human society – a striving that arises out of the dialectic of the economic process which, at each stage, produces what Marx called the ‘new passions and forces’ for the next social order. Although no one can see the concrete form of the new society until it actually appears, Marx’s vision did anticipate the future society. He was not ‘left behind,’ not because of his individual genius, but because of his dialectical method of uniting theory and practice. He thereby gave the intellectuals who aligned themselves with the proletariat as a ‘political tendency’ that new human dimension to enable each to become as tall as the proletariat straightened up to its full height in the creation of the new society.”

Dunayevskaya points out, following Marx, that the intellectuals are often separated from the working class “as widely as heaven from earth” and that “they are consequently driven theoretically to the same tasks and solutions to which material interests and social position practically drive [the petty bourgeoisie].”

Furthermore, their lack of faith in the working classes often results in “radical intellectuals [who are] forever planning to do something for the worker, substituting their activity or at least planning for the self-activity of the working class.”

As Raya writes of Ferdinand Lassalle, a figure of scientific socialism, “he could not rid himself of the concept of the backwardness of labor.” He believed “science is classless and thus that he could represent both science (or the intellectual) and the worker. Lassalle was the anticipation of the state socialist administrator of our day.”

Clearly then, this undialectical treatment of worker as mere concrete activity and the intellectual as scholarly theoretician is hugely problematic. A dialectical treatment recognizes that the workers are both actively engaged in struggle and theorize about their activity and that the so-called intellectual must be grounded in struggle through active participation.

As Dunayevskaya points out, Marx was fully attentive to the struggles of his day and he was especially engaged with the Civil War in the U.S. and the struggle for the abolition of slavery, which he perceived as “a major world upheaval.”

He recognized American slavery as particularly atrocious and did not lump it together, as other socialists of the time, with “all slavery – wage and chattel” but instead recognized the racial dimension as inexcusable under any form of class struggle.

Marx writes: “In the United States of America every independent movement of workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic.  Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life arose. “The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours agitation, that ran with the seven leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.”

Thus, Marx recognized the significance that the Civil War (once the Black masses were allowed to fight) had on labor more generally – regarding it as foundational to the struggle to shorten the working day.

According to Dunayevskaya, it is at this time that Marx begins to recognize the relationship between history (activity over time) and theory, a relationship that leads her to call the Black masses the vanguard of the revolution, invoking their long history of struggle for freedom.

Marx’s participation was of course indirect, following news sources, given that he was in England at the time.  The way we interpret participation or how we ground our political work in people’s movements is a crucial question but one that must be answered with specificity to specific movements – with the goal being the greatest grounding that we can achieve given particular limitations.

One such grounding is the inclusion of working-class people in our organization – those who are the most directly affected and among whom the forces of production create contexts that invoke both opportunity and impetus to organize.

In this time and place, it is the continued struggles for Abolition and Black civil rights and the struggles for Immigrant rights – struggles commandeered and engaged by peoples of color – that seem to be in constant motion. Indeed, these are the most affected working-class communities who (generally speaking) experience the worst working conditions. Thus, it behooves a Marxist-Humanist organization to engage these movements as the ground from which our theories develop and upon whose realities they are continually interrogated, deepened, and sharpened – so that our theories too can move in sync with the people and their activity. It also behooves us to attempt – as part of a reciprocal dialogue – to share with them the theoretical fruits of the six decades of Marxist-Humanism, beginning with Marxism and Freedom.