July 15, 1949
My Dear Grace:
Your letter on Bukharin1 disappointed me. Some of the material was precious but the whole thing seemed to me off the track. Remember. You are now doing the counter-revolution within the revn in terms of the Logic. What Bukharin is we more or less know. What is required is to show in terms of Larger and Smaller Logic2 that this happens in every big leap into a new stage. It is fine when you give a general survey that clarifies everything. But for the time being that is enough. Spend a week if need be showing how Hegel sees this as a permanent movement - Cromwell, Napoleon, Stalin. Get the logical movement of these in logical, strictly logical Hegelian terms.
Another thing I must warn all of us against. We will not be able to write freely, e.g. bring in Engels on Schelling,3 etc. (I give this only as an example) We have to prove everything out of the Logic, Lenin's own writings, writings of Plekhanov, Bukharin against Lenin and such like. We cannot stir out of that. We have to pin them down to: Lenin said on Dialectics the passage in July-Nov. essay on Marx. In 1915 he said (Vol. XI, p. 84)4. The difference is, so and so. Then they say yes or no. If not they will murder us. Nobody is going to be given extensive treatment in which to create confusion. Later I shall detail the set pages in Lenin that we have to deal with (there will be others of course that you all will choose). but our opponents whoever they are will be faced with chapter and verse and what we say those precise ones mean.
I am for example working on the last chapter of the Larger and on the Hist'l Tendency of Cap. Accul'm.5 and I am staying there. Intensive work, not extensive. I regret to say that I haven't done much. A mass of ideas but they are not coming out and I had to stop to do Levellers and the review6. But the ideas are there I know and I shall get them out. They are very valuable ones.
J.
Dear Rae7 1) The Flynn book doesn't seem obtainable - [...] on Rakovsky. 2) How about you using paper with holes in it for my files - like this 3) Can you give me more details on Lenin and Bukharin's "Transition Period [...]". G-
1 The previous letter in this correspondence. Dated 9th of July 1949.
2 The 'Larger Logic' is Hegel's Science of Logic, (1812-16). The 'Shorter Logic', is Book One of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830).
3 Engels, Anti-Schelling, (1841).
4 V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, Volume XI: The Theoretical Principles Of Marxism, (International Publishers, 1939). The English translation of the essay 'On Dialectics' that is available on the MIA is 'On the Question of Dialectics'.
5 "Hist'l Tendency of Cap. Accul'm." is the Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, which is the title of Chapter 32 of: Karl Marx Capital: Volume 1.
6 James (under the pseudonym G.F. Eckstein) wrote two articles on the English Revolution - 'Cromwell and the Levellers' and 'Ancestors of the Proletariat' which were published in the SWP publication Fourth International. The editor is unable to identify what 'the review' is a reference to.
7 The italicised text, in a different font colour, was a handwritten note, added by Grace Lee on the copy of the letter that she sent to Raya Dunayevskaya. The italicised text is the author's best guess at the contents of this note.