Citing a lifelong engagement with Marxism, critic and writer Marshall Berman reveals the movement's positive points and suggests a new beginning for Marxism may be on the horizon with its recent 150th anniversary attention.

The restoration of humanism to the radical left

Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day, a selection of writings by the Marxist-Humanist philosopher and revolutionary Raya Dunayevskaya, brings out the contemporary urgency of Marx’s work as a philosophy of revolution in permanence. That dialectic permeates the totality of Marx’s body of ideas and activities. Major themes include Marx’s transformation of the Hegelian dialectic; the inseparability of Marx’s economics, humanism, and dialectic; the battle of ideas with post-Marx Marxism, beginning with Engels; Black liberation, internationalism, and women’s liberation; today’s burning question of the relationship between spontaneity, organization, and philosophy; the emergence of counter-revolution from within the revolution; and the problem of what happens after the revolution.

This book provides close readings of primary texts to analyze the linkage between G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy and Karl Marx’s critical social theory of necessity and freedom. This is important for three reasons: first, to understand the significance of the changing relationships of work, society, and critical social theory in the origins of Hegelian-Marxism in the US, as documented in the recently published correspondence between the Marxist-Humanist theoretician Raya Dunayevskaya and the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse; second, to identify the intersections of the Critical Theorists Jurgen Habermas’ and Marcuse’s influential reinterpretations of Marx’s “value theory” of economy and society that enables navigation of the changing relationships of the social and economic spheres in the last century, as developed in Marx’s Grundrisse; and, thirdly, to assess the potential of Moishe Postone’s renewal of Marx’s value theory, largely conceived by the notion of a necessity and freedom dialectic intrinsic to capitalism.

Marx the Humanist presents Marx’s writings in a different light. Instead of malicious demagnification, which makes him responsible for everything done in his name after his death, it is recognised that he was not a prophet and could not have foreseen the changes that have occurred since then. His early writings reflect his humanism, and represent his long-term revolutionary appeal. Although the focus is on Marx’s humanism, the first two parts initiate the reader and provide an introduction to basic Marxist ideas, both philosophical and economic. This provides the context for his condemnation of the dehumanising impact of capitalism on workers through exploitation.

In recent writings on Marx one finds an increasing interest in his humanism. This phenomenon began in the third decade of our century as a reaction against the mechanistic and stereotyped image of Marx 1 characteristic of the Second International and of Stalinism. Lukacs, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), was one of the first to discover this new Marx, and he did so even before the most important 2 of the humanistic writings of the young Marx had been discovered. With the publication ofthese writings in 1932 - namely, the Economic 3 and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 - this new outlook was given enormous impetus. In these Manuscripts, Marx makes the human being the creator and the goal of alI reality. The objectification of the human essence through labor transforms both society and nature. Labor transforms its wor1d into a place which mirrors, unfolds, and confirms the human being. This humanism is a complex and many-faceted issue. In this book we will be concerned only with a certain part of it, i.e., the epistemology, method, and doctrine of nature which it involves. Other aspects of it - Marx' concept of alienation and his theory of labor and the state -have 4 been dealt with elsewhere.

Today more than ever Marxism is profoundly in need of a full and precise modern reappraisal. In his belief that this may only be accomplished along with an examination of the "humanistic" young Marx, Adam Schaff presents in this volume an illumination of the thinker's early work and its relationship to the world-shaking economic philosophy that stemmed from it.