TThis book is a survey of working-class politics from the Silesian Weavers' uprising of 1844 to the Hungarian revolt of 1956. Though this may seem like a mere exercise in history, Eugene Gogol is looking from a special place. The second half is an exposition of Raya Dunayevskaya's "Marxist-Humanism". Gogol springs from the News and Letters group set up in Detroit by Dunayevskaya in 1955. He develops the argument she was working on when she died in 1987, a critique of her own organisation with fissiporous results: four splits over the next ten years. Her working title was Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy. Gogol includes the plan for her book — typed on one side of a foolscap sheet (p. 5) — and uses it as a "primary source" (p. 6). The concision is typical of Dunayevskaya, able to follow Hegel right up to the sublime of the Absolute Spirit, yet keen to summarise what she finds under pithy new headings. Indeed, for sheer concept-crunching force of intellect, it's hard to find anyone to equal Dunayevskaya since Rosa Luxemburg, making one wonder if the obscurity of these thinkers in the contemporary market of ideas has to do with the fact that, as female Marxists, they do not fit into the bourgeois romance/adultery/divorce drama between Stalinist hard-boys (doing "politics") and Feminist bleeding-hearts (doing "personal") which Broadsheet commentators love to dwell on. And probably live too, Dunayevskaya would add, forever rooting abstract ideas in the Man/Woman question (where, according to her, Marx started, by writing scathingly about the role of marriage and prostitution in the bourgeois Paris of the 1840s), and thus interrogating the thinker's particular niche in a capitalist system which separates mental from manual labour and exchange value from reproductive chores. Yet, despite having solved issues still causing friction between Feminists and Socialists, Dunayevskaya's return to Hegel has been viewed as cranky and eccentric. Continental philosophers have no problem with the opening of Adorno's Negative Dialectics ("Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed."), but Dunayevskaya's proposition that car-workers, nurses and fast-food chefs should wrestle with the Absolute Idea is greeted with raised eyebrows. Adorno, of course, has been massively misinterpreted by readers unaware of his core politics. In that allusive opening sentence, Adorno is talking about the failure of Soviet Russia to carry out Marx's programme of changing the world rather than simply interpreting it. However, when Pop Idol winner Will Young says: "Adorno's right, pop culture is a commodity" (Time Out interview, 2002), you suspect that Young's encounter with Adorno's thought on a Cultural Studies course was severely truncated, the critical Leninism erased. Given Dunayevskaya's bluntness, such recuperation is not possible; and in this respect Eugene Gogol is a loyal follower. Dunayevskaya's pithy mode of expression wasn't just a foible or style, it came from the way she developed her ideas: testing them on left activists who were not conversant with academia — both in conversation and in letters. Her correspondence with "the last of the Red Clydesiders", Harry McShane, is stunning for its insight and candour (this correspondence is surveyed by Peter Hudis, erstwhile comrade of Gogol, in a pamphlet published by Glasgow's John Maclean Society: Harry McShane and the Scottish Roots of Marxist Humanism). Contact with Dunayevskaya led McShane to develop a politics free of the Stalinist tropes still bedevilling the Left today. But is there any point in enshrining these activist ideas in such a formidable scholarly tomb? Well, yes, because the book bursts with new findings and unheralded discoveries. Issuing forth from collective discussion, its prose avoids the sterility of what Bakhtin called "monologism", the idealist proposal that we subsume our own thoughts to those of another. Its unacademic provenance has drawbacks: I counted 48 typos, and there is repetition of a key quote from Marx (p. 344, p. 369) which is attributed to Grundrisse somewhere (no page reference) because it comes from one of Dunayevskaya's translations (I found it online in Jack Cohen's translations of excerpts from Grundrisse, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Lawrence and Wishart, 1964). But activist culture tends to be oral and urgent, so footnoting the results is not easy. Publication under a single author's name is likewise somewhat problematic. In this context, ideas don't belong to anyone, but suddenly they do. Difficulties of ascribing ideas to individuals is, though, a sign of life (compare the confusion around who exactly wrote what in the Volosinov-Bakhtin-Medvedev circle). So the book itself points at the social flaw it is talking about: in an exchange system, those who produce use values in capitalist societies are not rewarded equably (nor will they be in a truly communist society, since the idea of a "reward" for labour retains an aspect of alienation, but that's another story — see Peter Hudis's Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Brill, 2012). In the Gogolian universe, the Cartesian notion of a reality produced by the solitary thinker at his (yes, his) desk bites the dust: like all production, intellectual production is social (Marxist-Humanist collectives; discussion in pubs and student bars; blog comment-threads and Facebook posts; seminars and conferences; domestic discussion), while property rights remain individual (academic credit points). The inability of bourgeois categories (both legal and commonsense) to describe this process explains why intellectual life is meant to revolve around a small cluster of stars (Zizek, Badiou etc). It's easier to realise profit if it's clear who "invented" the ideas, who they belong to, "each thought branded with the identity of its author" as William James put it, revealing the origin of modern American wealth in cattle and slavery. But genuinely progressive ideas arise from liberty of expression unconstrained by institutional title or celebrity status: for Dunayesvskaya, dialectical philosophy is not a mystery or a cult. It arrives in 500BC, in Athens, with democracy. As Evgeny Pashukanis explained in Law & Marxism (1929), the liberal idea of equality enshrined in law assumes the market place: it is a set of rules which allows people to treat things and employees as commodities. Liberal equality is abstraction, equivalence, the refusal of specificity and difference. Gogol's equality is different. It is more akin to the equality of de Sade: No distinction is drawn among the individuals who comprise the Sodality; not that it holds all men equal in the eyes of Nature — a vulgar notion deriving from infirmity, want of logic, and false philsophy — but because it is persuaded and maintains that distinctions of any kind may have a detrimental influence upon the Sodality's pleasures and are certain sooner or later to spoil them. (Marquis de Sade, Juliette, 1797, translated Austryn Wainhouse, New York: Grove Press, 1968, p. 418) The philosophical kernel of Marxist-Humanism is that Hegel's revolutionary logic supersedes Kant's antinomy between selfish subject and moral law. This means that denunciations of "ultra-leftism" and "petit-bourgeois individualism" such as we find in "post-Marx Marxists" (Dunayevskaya's term for Social Democracy and Communism) push the genie back in the bottle, revert to bourgeois categories and close the gate on the "new continent of thought" discovered by Marx. The Situationists called this transcendence of Kant "radical subjectivity"; Marxist-Humanists call it "the absolute becoming of revolution permanence" or "PERSONAL AND FREE". Both attempt to describe the post-war drive to mass freedom exemplified by Berlin (1953), Budapest (1956), Paris (1968) and the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements in the USA, a drive perhaps most palpably experienced today by listening to Ascension (Atlantic, 1966) by John Coltrane — or looking at the aerial views of crowds of protesters gathering in Cairo, Istanbul, Rio or Bucharest regularly posted on Facebook. History has proved Dunayevskaya right. After anti-capitalism and the advent of social media, those on the Left talking about "discipline" and "democratic centralism" resemble company lawyers defending a brand (hear money talk: "this is not a game", "we are not a debating club"). They have nothing to do with an anti-capitalism provoked worldwide by corrupt governments, war plans and austerity agendas. But if Dunayevskaya is "spontaneist" (in "Leninist" parlance), why organise, in fact why do anything at all? Even if their critique of orthodox Leninism sounds like Autonomism, Marxist-Humanists are very different. Autonomists are neo-Kantians. In their theories, the working class becomes a "thing in itself" untouchable by concepts and uncorrupted by them (my first encounter with the Autonomists was in a 1980s Leeds riven by weekly physical confrontations between the Anti-Nazi-League and the National Front; the contribution of Italian delegates to an Autonomist Conference at the Polytechnic was to spray "FUCK THE LEFT" in giant letters in a subway leading to the Poly). Dunayevskaya was determined that the critique of vanguardism should not become her group's fulltime activity: she wanted a sober assessment of class forces and appropriate action. Likewise, Gogol's proletarian Hegelianism does not breathe the despair of intellectuals for whom the forces of history are beyond reach; instead, we are the working class, we inhabit philosophy, we are actually where it's at. In this, it could be defined as a religion or a mysticism, but only by using anti-humanist/positivist categories. For anyone who wants to examine the life we lead and understand it, it's a stirring programme for action. As mentioned earlier, autodidactism does have its pitfalls, and the book could be much improved by a sympathetic edit. The first page of the prologue, for example, has the sentence: "For Lenin at the outbreak of the First World War and on the edge of a revolution in Russia …", and you wonder if you're going to be able to make your way through 300 pages by someone who can't tell when they're making an elementary blunder: in 1914 Lenin had no idea he was on the edge of a revolution! The SDP had voted for war bonds, the Marxist international was in ruins, socialist peace initiatives had proven to be phony-baloney. Lenin's political world had collapsed. In 1918, the number of metal-workers in Petrograd plummeted from 197,686 to 57,995; that's not "decimated" (p. 167), it's more than twice that bad. But these solipsisms are quickly forgiven because Gogol's argument is urgent and single-minded, and his materials so refreshingly original. Contemporary dispute in London over "Leninism" is so remote from anything Lenin actually said, it's best depicted as farce (go online to find Ian Bone's "Game of Trots", or BloggingJBloggs1917's "Occupy Marxism!"). But read Gogol on the difficulty of reconstructing Russian society on socialist principles after 1917, and you hear the real Lenin, a voice all thinking socialists have learned from; that unique way of piling up telling adjectives in a stream as nuanced and expressive as a tenor sax solo when Art Blakey is on drums: One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organizational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called "upper classes", only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organizational development of socialist society. (p. 164) Gogol is no vulgarian or workerist. He doesn't think mere activism can replace up-to-date research or philosophical rigour — a footnote refers to recent books by Kevin Murphy and Simon Pirani on working conditions in early Soviet Russia. But the detail does not swamp his argument, it's all held in place like iron filings by a strong magnet, and it's likewise beautiful. Dunayevskaya emerged from Trotskyism, indeed worked as the Old Man's secretary in Mexico, but Gogol follows her lead and criticises his militarization of labour. But this is no anarchist or liberal attack, which would dub Trotsky a villain in order to celebrate Kropotkin or Churchill. Instead, it's a contribution to a debate which raged then and rages now: if capitalism is coercive and unacceptable in the way it uses unemployment to force us into work, how can we organise things better? The Workers Opposition is cited and, as usual with this kind of deep Marxism, you find a woman writing some of the best material — in this case, Alexandra Kollontai. The issue here is whether a society which dispenses with the logic of money and judges acts by their social use-value still requires trade-union-style protection of workers. This debate, about transcending bourgeois individualism and rights, also propels Valentin Volosinov's Language and Marxism and his book on Freud (which latter, characteristically for texts produced in left "study circles", may or may not actually be by him). In the Freud polemic, emphasis on "direct utterance" becomes an attack on the concept of the unconscious, and one can discern themes which could be used by bullying Stalinist officials. Gogol's sympathy for problems facing workers (this is no Zizekian smash-and-grab raid on radical-sounding concepts) means that the discussion is dialectical and nuanced, and contra rumour, Lenin emerges as the most dialectical and nuanced commentator of all, truly "polylingual". Lenin argues that the Workers Opposition overestimate the changes mere regime-change can make to a society. Now you begin to sway against Kollontai. In a field littered with many a grotesque conceptual apparatus, where some "ism" named after a single person is so often meant to solve all (Bakhtin damned this as "monologism"), Gogol makes workers' politics fluid again, i.e. real. To anyone who has been battered by post-structuralism's scholastic exercises on "sovereignty", where it's imagined that febrile abstractions will somehow bake a political loaf, Lenin provides music to the ears: A workers' state is an abstraction. What we actually have is a workers' state, with this peculiarity, firstly, that it is not the working class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and, secondly, that it is a workers' state with bureaucratic distortions. (p. 169) And unlike those who later proclaimed the USSR "socialism in one country", Lenin understands that a political victory (a concept) does not exhaust the actuality (thing conceived), which is a peasant country with a bureaucracy. In 1921: Do we now have classes? Yes, we do. Do we have a class struggle? Yes, and a most furious one! (p. 170) Following Dunayevskaya, Gogol praises Lenin for learning from Hegel in 1914 (the collapse of the world socialist movement in the face of World War I had him looking for first principles, only to discover that the Neo-Kantian interpreters of Capital hadn't used Hegel's dialectical logic, and so they'd misinterpreted it and lost the revolutionary idea), but criticises him for failing to inform party members how he'd arrived at his new ideas. This is characteristic of Marxist-Humanist writers: you are never allowed to settle for a hero, there's always a flaw, and you begin to realise that you thinking about the problem is more important than subscribing to a dogma. For Lenin, only in practice was there a resolution of contradictions, the confrontation with reality. On one level this was certainly true. But the failure to bring forth the philosophical vantage point of your political practice for your comrades left them philosophically rudderless in trying to navigate the contradictory developments of the Soviet state. Here, without surrendering the philosophical high ground for moral or institutional banalities à la Mao Tse Tung, Gogol plunges democracy and freedom into the very springs of political practice: we've all got to talk at the highest theoretical level because no-one can do it for us. In one footnote (p. 216) Gogol describes Marx's relationship to Hegel as one "that simultaneously expressed indebtedness and sharp critique": a creative relationship to the past. Gogol treats Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg, the revolutionaries Dunayevskaya learned so much from, in the same way. You keep seeing a giant slain and then a new super-hero, a new idea, emerge from the corpse. It has none of the bitterness and vilification natural to dogma, and has more in common with the syntax of Greek myth and William Blake (both themselves fruits of oral traditions): individuals split in two, combine with their opposites, become rivers or stars. So, as is correct for a book of philosophy, Toward a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization isn't just a useful survey of workers' politics durinmg a certain historical period, it's also a manual on how to think: "indebtedness and sharp critique". Gogol doesn't find the need to "get beyond" Dunayevskaya, it's true, but her work is so rich with voices — including that of Louis Gogol, top medic and member of the News and Letters collective, Eugene's father and Dunayevskaya's brother-in-law — and so far unenshrined in any dogmatic "ism", this is not a problem. Her "I am changing my mind on Lenin" in the correspondence is unimaginable coming from Ted Grant, Tony Cliff or Alex Callinicos … although the relationship of Dunayevskaya's ideas to aspects of the 60s revolution beyond Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam war protest and the Women's Movement — e.g. radical psychiatry, the Situationists, the Underground, Science Fiction, Free Jazz and Psychedelic Pop — does suggest an intriguing field of play. The book is studded with gems, short enough in fact to become Facebook posts, which is how they could well become effective politically: a three page demolition of Lukács the Party man (pp. 220-222); exposition of Hegel that brings his phrases into a shimmer of quasi-Daoist poetry, like a physicist explaining the precarious state of the liquid crystal, the sensation that someone is telling you how we work, the antinomy between mind and matter transcended (p. 252, p. 272, p. 303); recourse to Marx's fabulous letter to Arnold Ruge of September 1843 (one that, according to student protestor Jacob Bard-Rosenburg, has become "something of a mantra" to his generation): the revolutionary task is "not to give consciousnes to the masses, but to help make what was implicit in the masses' practice, explicit" (p. 307); Dunayevskaya's capitalised "NOW STAND UP AND SHOUT PERSONAL AND FREE, PERSONAL AND FREE, PERSONAL AND FREE AS LENIN SHOUTED LEAP, LEAP, LEAP …"; a polemic versus John Holloway's belief that Adorno's Negative Dialectics can shed light on developments in Latin America (Gogol makes the same criticism of Western/academic Marxism as Gail Day's Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art : the revolutionary thrust of Capital is destroyed by omitting use value and seeing only a logic of exchange value); a demolition of Moishe Postone's anti-humanist "Capital without people". To conclude, I'd like to quote from the pamphlet by Eugene Gogol's comrade, rival, faction-fight enemy, political nemesis (whatever) Peter Hudis: Harry McShane and the Scottish Roots of Marxist Humanism. Raya Dunayevskaya wrote to McShane encouraging him to read Hegel and talk in public about what he found. Politically educated in the Communist Party, only leaving in 1953 when the workers' uprising in Berlin persuaded him that the USSR was now a force of reaction worldwide, McShane was diffident about entering those vast perfumed portals of abstract reasoning, and even more diffident about refering to Hegel in public. Although in the 1920s and 1930s, the Communist Party of Great Britain encouraged worker autodidacticism, reprinting Marx and Engels and Josef Dietzgen in popular editions, by 1953 it assumed that academics did the intellectual work of the party. Dunayevskaya perfectly expresses the frustration revolutionary Marxists feel with "purely intellectual" discussion, and the joy they experience when they meet people prepared to live rather than merely master ideas … it's this joy which drives — and organises! — Gogol's book. So it seems right to end there. Again, there is an unconsummated union to be made between Dunayevskaya and Adorno, since Adorno's emphasis on music was always about dispensing with inherited culture and knowledge ("Kultur") and bravely facing a subjective emotional response using analytical tools derived from science (Marx and Freud). Hence the Adornoite finds that experts and seen-it-alls on the scene get everything wrong, whereas if you drag someone off the street to witness these attempts to speak without codes, they usually get it at once (if it's any good) or see through the charade (if it's not): music listening as an attempt to outwit the concept. Dunayevskaya to McShane: I really must get worker-revolutionaries who have not previously thought of philosophy involved in a dialogue on it, if even it is only to say they don't understand the philosophic categories because the manner in which they express their non-understanding is much more understanding than some intellectuals' glibness and it helps me a great deal. (p. 13, RD to HMcS 15-xi-1964) This is an entire programme in utero; and if you wish to be of that party, then there'd be no better place to start than with Eugene Gogol's wonderful book.
I'd like to thank David Black for his helpful comments on a draft of this review.
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