Alternatives to Vanguardism. 4: Raya Dunayevskaya
Aporia, Counter-Culture and Counter-Revolutiom
In 1914 the parties of the Second International were committed to mobilising the international workers movement to prevent war between rival imperialist powers; ,when the Guns of August sounded, socialist and trade union leaders fell into line. When Lenin, then exiled in Geneva, received a telegram telling him that German Social Democracy had voted in the Reichstag for war credits, his first reaction was to dismiss it as a forgery.
Rosa Luxemburg was not so surprised. The “Pope of Marxism”, Karl Kautsky, had long argued that the German working class should subordinate its autonomy to a reformist strategy in which the centralized bureaucracy of the bourgeois state was to be a conciousnesss-forming tool of “progress”. Kautsky, having ruled out the tacticof the Mass Strike, failed to address how the socialists might educate and assimilate those non-proletarian forces that could be won over. In Germany the failure to do so installed the germ of defeat that later led to counter-revolution and the eventual triumph of fascism.[i]
In Luxemburg’s critique of reformism, Gillian Rose in The Broken Middle sees a notion of transcendence: that the proletariat could only exercise its revolutionary will if it went “outside” and “beyond” the existing society. This wasn’t so much utopianism, as the recognition of an “aporia”: a state of being, caught in the schism between theory and practice, which was resistant to a priori logic and determination - as formulated by Kant - even though it lacked any discernable path of transcendence. In Greek Antiquity, Poros, the god of plenty and resourcefulness meets Penia, the child of poverty and powerlessness; and after drinking too much, is seduced by her. Their child is Eros, who inherits the “nature” of both parents, and lives in a state of aporia. The word aporia is the privative of the word porus, which refers to a ford or ferry crossing point in a river. So aporia is an impasse, in which the navigator may be faced with danger and uncertainty of success. In the concrete terms which Rose assigns to Luxemburg, the resolution of the aporia would require the difficult union of the daily struggle and “the great world transformation”. This new movement would have to grope along the path between the revolutionary Scylla of abandoning the mass character of the social democratic party and the reformist Charybdis of abandoning the goal of socialist transformation.
In the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War movement, which created a whole new generation of radical youth, had its organisational origins in the civil rights movement. In 1970 a young Left activist corresponded with Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87) on the question of the counterculture: “The movement is now not primarily in the factory; the consciousness is not there nearly so much as in the rock-drug culture.” [ii] Dunayevskaya’s reply points out that the workers didn’t respond well to middle-class leftists telling them what they should do – whether agitation for a “general strike now!” or whatever. And the fact that workers were unipressed by leftist arguments – did not necessarily mean they were only concerned with “bread and butter” issues and incapable of transcending trade-union consciousness. Although Dunayevskaya doesn’t, as does Gillian Rose, employ the term “aporia”, she appears to recognise it historically in relating the New Left to German Social Democracy:
“Do you know that the Kaiser was the only one who knew something that Lenin did not know, that he need not fear the Second International’s opposition to the first world holocaust he was going to unleash because the socialists were so elitist, lived so much by themselves, had their rituals for everything from marriage as ‘against’ the bourgeois type, to naming of their children by revolutionary instead of biblical names, that they has no contact with the unorganised ‘backward’ masses and this isolation ensured capitulation.”
German Social Democracy was a massive movement, but that didn’t make it the party of the masses. In effect, it became a massive sect, a sort of secular religion, preaching to the masses without actually engaging with them. Of course Germany Social Democracy “favoured” the replacement of the Kaiser’s monarchy with a democratic republic, but when it came to elections what figured were the “bread and butter” issues. Rosa Luxemburg argued that holding on to the call for a republic was a principle that trumped the ephemeral short-termism of persuading monarchists to vote socialist, which would have the dire consequences in eventually unleashing fascism.
Quite separate from the industrial proletariat of the 1960s was the Woodstock “nation.” Dunayevskaya conceded that this counterculture was “certainly a superior phenomenon to the Establishment.” After all, the counterculture bespoke of the duality of the existing society and the “two worlds within the existing structure that undermine it.” But counterculture wasn’t the Revolution. And objectively, self-appointed ‘People’s War’ factions - such as the Weather Underground, and other groups, influenced by Maoism, who believed that power came out the barrel of a gun and that a prairie fire could be started by a single spark - weren’t revolutionary. Against their “violent spouting,” she argued,
“…the forces of the new, the combatants, culturally as well as in a class sense, are lined up for the life and death struggle long before they are ‘armed’. Does that make the ones who are ‘armed’ the revolutionaries? Even though their chaotic acts lead to the tragic blowing up of themselves, and even though it gives the NixonAgnew terrorists the excuse to conduct their preventive civil war before the objective situation and the subjective forces have coalesced to assure the victory of the social revolution.”
The problem was philosophical:
“…to think that activity is only ‘doing’, irrespective of the underlying philosophy, is not only as one-sided as the ivory-tower type of thinking, but is precisely what the establishment, the power structure.... are counting on us as doing… We, thereby, prove only one thing. We are as organically part of this society we were supposed to be uprooting as the society itself is, because we are operating within its pragmatic, philosophic structure”
Dunayevskaya was not enthusiastic about the new utopian hippie communes, which were set up in separation from the rest of society. Again, that was “precisely what capitalism does want. That is to say, to break up the various revolutionary forces the revolutionary forces from ever finding each other.” She traced the problem back to the times of the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists.
“So-called communal living is not new in America and is the very opposite of the Paris Commune ‘storming the heavens’… the American intellectuals were inspired by the utopian socialists to build their ‘communes’ at the very moment when the Abolitionists were trying to show them that association with the blacks is the only ‘transcendental’ gesture that meets the challenge of the times. Whether or not you would like to look into that period with Abolitionists' eyes, or only with eyes of today and as a poet. I would very much like to see a review by you of Hawthorne's Blithendale Romance.’
Sadly, the review never appeared and I have been unable to trace the identity of Dunayevskaya’s correspondent.
[i] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle, 1995, pp. 198-216
[ii] Raya Dunayevskaya, “Philosophy, 'life-style' and U.S. workers,” News and Letters, Vol. 15, No. 8, Oct, 1970
The man on the left in the top picture is Diego Rivera not Andre Breton.