May 20?, 1949
My dear G:
I forgot to mention that I had read your notes.1 I thought them wonderful, and I liked their ad hoc character. No theses. Those are better and unless I deceive myself, there is more material in them this way, more leaps.
I have not been doing much but I went over Mat'm and Empirico-C; and had a good look at the Philosophy of Mind.2 I got nothing from the second for our task now, but I have a hunch something is there for us. But looking at your notes, the P'v3 and M'm and Empirico-C'm and thinking a bit, I get the following:
2. I begin with 2 because 1 will come out of all this. Lenin 1907 and P'v had to fight old-fashioned bourgeois idealism, and wrote to suit.4 Why? Because their enemy was Russian Menshevism permeated by liberalism, the radical petty-bourgeoisie. Note: Lenin had read P'v years before: he had written Who are the Friends of the People5 (about which more later). That was against the Narodniks.6 Now in the reaction he had to battle for plain materialism. Reading the book over I find no inadequacy. He did what he saw needed to be done. He deals with the epistemological question, in general.
2) In 1914 the enemy is the labor bur'y 2nd Int., on a world scale: socialism itself is in question; not from liberal idealists, not from Kantians but from avowed Marxists, materialists.7 Therefore his study of the Logic had to clarify materialism, not materialism from idealism but from vulgar materialism from dialectical materialism. Hence, opposition, contradiction, the moving principle of the dialectic: and then to practice. The subjective contained in the objective. In outline, as a universal, he does State and Revolution and after he does that, he had a program for the rev'n, Threatening Catastrophe., etc.8
3) Now in 1948 I sit down to write in Nevada.9 What, as I look back, strikes me as the thing that I felt most needed to be done: this, that error is the dynamic of truth. That Stalinism is the concrete by which the proletariat arrives at concrete socialism, that Stalinism is the perversion of Leninism, but contains it in the role of the party, national defense repudiated, international action firmly adhered to, repudiation of private property, etc. It is not the unity of opposites merely - it is a very vivid feeling that only by this means that we can understand progress.
I feel that this means much more to us in 1948 than it did to Lenin in 1914. Do you feel that way?
Secondly, as I told you, the other day, I feel strongly that the differences between synthetic cognition and dialectical philosophical cognition, dominates our approach; it did not dominate his. Here is another reason added to the one I gave you the other day. Stalinism is a materialism much more dangerous than vulgar materialism. It actually attacks and carries out all renovation of capitalism except the abolition of wage-labor. Already Engels had said that state cap'm contains within it the technical means etc. etc. only that the prol't remains prol't.10 (I omit the idealism and positivism into which the Stalinists are hurled).
We have a more deadly enemy than either Lenin or Pl'v (1894) or Lenin (1908) or Lenin (1914) had. Hence for us the new aspect - the complete theory of knowledge, dialectic worked at and out and in a way that our predecessors did not have the necessity to do. And as Lenin had to attack Pl'v and Rosa,11 so we have to clear up all problems with the 17th.12
Between 1894-1908 we have epistemology and chiefly quantity into quality; in 1914 unity of opposites, contradiction; in 1948 we have as our main objective the negation of the negation, and the clarification of the very types of cognition within the dialectic itself.
Finally L13 in 1914 had to emphasize practice. For us in 1948 there was no theory and then practice. For us theory is practice; their unity for us is established by the needs of life. There was still a division in L's time (1914). I see it in his notes, I am very conscious that for us that division does not exist. I see a dialectical development in the Marxist studies of dialectic.
But there is more to it. We include in our epistemology, materialism of idealism, the whole dialectical theory of knowledge, practice, all ending in the practice of prol'n i.e. rev'y politics.14 I use "politics" in the Greek sense - the whole man, the complete man. Today the problem of epistemology is a political problem, i.e. the full and complete actions of universal man, politics, economics, philosophy. Lenin had this in 1914 as an abstract universal, or if you like a first statement of the concrete universal. In 1908 or thereabouts the political party was for him the only means by which the workers could test the relation of forces. Today the party, in the sense that we use it, now, is the only test of all knowledge, etc. I don't know if you see this as I see it.
Now we can get back to No. 1. When KM15 was working out the theory in the forties he worked it out completely in the abstract. He had in the Economic-Philosophic M.S.16 to work out Epistemology; against Bauer & Co;17 Feuerach18 (the theses), Proudhon,19 and against Hegel he took up all problems, nature, humanity, humanism, negation of negation, practice (philosophic and political); what was still objectively separate in L's mind in 1914 - theory and practice, Marx made into a complete whole, in the Economic-Philosophic Mns and again in Cpl. Vol. 1, 512,20 you remember where he says, industry will collapse unless man becomes fully social. The basic opposition was (for him then) between the emergence of real humanity from out of the degradation of the prol. I do not see that very clearly in Lenin against the Narodniks in 1894.21 In the Holy Family, quoted in the introd'n to German Ideology, also, there is a famous passage in which he very clearly uses this Hegelian concept as the reason for the prol. as human.22 So you see, Marx uses the dialectic completely in working out a theory against Hegel and his perverse progeny. But later stage by stage certain aspects of it emerge and are treated until today we have to use it all, but much more concretely and in greater wealth, detail, etc. than he did. Finally if Lenin saw the importance of philosophic idealism, in 1914, we see it more than he. We are poles apart from Hegel, but very close to him in another aspect. As materialists we root man in his environment, but now that the real history of humanity is about to begin, the Hegelian concept of speculative reason, comes to life with us, as never before, tho on our basis.
Re the Logic, again. Naturally, Lenin, in proving that capitalism had to develop in Russia, in fighting for an arena in which to create a Social-Democratic party in Russia, used the broad sweep of dialectic which could be got second-hand from Marx. In his essay on Marx in 1912 (3?) he had the regular concept of dialectic.23 But it is when the prolet. itself divided in 1914 that he feels the need for a more penetrating study of the Logic. So there it is.
Here are a few odd remarks. You say L in 1915 sees that dialectics is the main thing, not the mat'm. I have shown it, or rather indicated why. The core of dialectic is self-movement through opposition. Good. But that is the core of dialectic - for him, in 1914. But for us, 1948, in our world: the core of dialectic is the materialist interpretation of Hegel's last chapters in the Logic, the complete interpenetration of subjective & objective idealism and materialism. We see that error is the dynamic of truth more clearly than L. But for that very reason we have to move on. Think of that passage in Vol. III, p. 900 and something in which KM talks about what man must be - the necessity of creating an environment suitable to his human nature, what the freedom consists of. He sounds like a Unitarian minister, there are powerful overtones of philosophical idealism, until suddenly he ends: "Its fundamental premise is the shortening of the working day".24
You see, in writing to Marcuse, we have to know precisely where we stand, in relation to Lenin, so that when we write, we lay the basis for ourselves tomorrow. In fact we cannot write clearly at all unless we have this development in order.
You say again: the whole question as to whether knowledge and the categories are external... involves the party... If the categories are developing content, then the masses are living process, etc. etc.25 Good. Now after this I look at Lenin again, 1914, he writes as if all this is very new to him.26 Look on p. 51 of the Notes where he says:
"Very profound and wise! The laws of logic are the reflection of the objective in the subjective consciousness of man".27
Look at the way he repeats it. The concrete grasp of this is new to him. Now in 1948 this was not new to us, even before we grasped the importance of his Notes. What was new to us in Hegel, to us who had experienced 1923-45? We had to see the organizations of the prol't so developing "categories" of society. Lenin had reacted to the Social-Dem'y;28 we were reacting to Stalinism. We had far more knots and focal points to draw from. We therefore were able to join the subjective, i.e. the party, to the objective, the mass (the org'd prol) in a way L could not.29 He was terribly aware of the gap between his Universal and the concrete. (I must take this up some day). His greatness is that he strove to bridge it. We, 1948, and in the US in particular (tho educated by the European experience) see that there is not so much a gap as a unity. Where he saw the gap, we see the unity. Can you do something with this? Finally, and really finally; Lenin says KM did not leave a Logic, but he left us the Logic of Capital.30 Now in his 1894 work he dealt with the general theory of Capital, dealing with economic and social relations against the stupidities of the Narodniks.31 In 1908 he takes up elementary epistemology. In 1914, he deals with labor bur'y, opposition with prol't, relates this to the concrete cap'm of the day, etc. and finds State and Rev'n.32 The party and party policy continue to be the expression of these relations. Your para where you say "the whole question of the party" is correct, but only in its context. We have begun the dialectics of the party itself. The party is so much the expression of everything, that we battle not with the logic of Capital, not ordinary epistemology, but with the epistemological, the economic, the historical, the political significance of the party. Looking through and thinking over L'm,33 at its various stages of philosophical development, I do not see this, just this. The real history of humanity is beginning. He posed the problem in S&R in terms, general, of the mass, the inevitability of soc'm,34 etc. We are beyond that. For us it is now Mind, the subjective element, the party. But on this issue we are on one side; and everybody else, but everybody, is on the opposite side.
If we can get somewhere on this, then we can put L' in 1914 very precisely historically and ourselves also, theoretically and practically. For today there is no problem of the economic basis of society, no problem of epistemology, nothing at all, except: Man can be free. Is he able to do it? If so, how? Socialism? yes? But it means the one-party state. The every-day preoccupation is the same preoccupation of abstract theory. I think this is very significant for our case.
J.
(Please forgive my typing job - It's done between cashiering, phoning, answering salesmen, etc. - G)35
1 The editor has been unable to identify the 'notes' by Grace Lee (Boggs) that CLR James was referring to. The phrase 'I forgot to mention' also suggests that there was some prior correspondence from James to Lee (Boggs), but whether it was on a topic related to Dunayevskaya's translation of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel, or not, is not clear.
2 'Mat'm and Empirico-C' is an abbreviation of Lenin's, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, (1908). Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (sometimes translated as Philosophy of Spirit) is the third part of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, (the 'shorter' Logic is the first part and The Philosophy of Nature the second part of the Encyclopedia).
3 "P'v" is an abbreviation of Plekhanov. Georgi Velentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), was one of the founders of the first Marxist organisation in Russia (the Emancipation of Labour Group, founded 1883). He was a major intellectual influence on Lenin.
4 The reference to the fight against 'old-fashioned bourgeois idealism' appears to be a reference to the polemics by Lenin and Plekhanov against the influence of Machism amongst Marxists in Russia. This Machist tendency was led by Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928), (a philosopher and founding member of the Bolsheviks) and included the Bolshevik luminary Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933) (a cultural critic, essayist and orator, who was appointed as the first Commissar of Education after the October 1917 revolution). Lenin's, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, (1908), was written in opposition to the influence of Machism. Two works in which Plekhanov wrote against the Machists were, Fundamental Problems of Marxism, (1907) and Materialismus Militans: Reply to Mr Bogdanov, (1908-1910).
5 Lenin, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, (1894).
6 The Narodniks were a revolutionary tendency in Tsarist Russia who believed that Russia did not have to develop to socialism via capitalism and viewed the peasantry as a revolutionary class who could overthrow Tsarism.
7 "labor bur'y" is an abbreviation of 'labour bureaucracy' and "2nd Int." is an abbreviation of Second International.
8 "rev'n" is an abbreviation of "revolution". "Threatening Catastrophe" is a reference to Lenin's, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, (1917). The other work referred to by James in this sentence is Lenin's State and Revolution, (1917).
9 This is a reference to 'The Nevada Document' (Notes on Dialectics), written by CLR James in late 1948, while he was in Nevada to finalise his divorce from his first wife, Juanita, from whom he had been estranged since leaving Trinidad for England in 1932. Each chapter of the Notes consists of James's analysis of sections of Hegel's Science of Logic, alongside a discussion of the relevance of Hegel's insights to understanding the development of the Trotksyist movement and the current state of the revolutionary Left and the working class, particularly in the USA. It was written as an internal discussion document and circulated, chapter-by-chapter as each was written, amongst the JFT membership. After the break-up of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the document circulated, in mimeographed form, amongst the various organisations that James played a leadership role in. It was eventually published, with a new introduction by James, as Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1980), by Allison and Busby in London and Lawrence Hill in the USA.
10 "cap.m" is an abbreviation for "capitalism". "prol.t" is an abbreviation of "proletariat".
11 "Rosa" is a reference to Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), a major figure in Second International. She was one of the few major figures in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who actively opposed World War I as an imperialist war. She broke with the SPD over its leadership's stance on the War. Her major work on Marx and political economy, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), was influential amongst her Marxist contemporaries, but was criticised by Lenin.
12 The editor is baffled by the reference to "the 17th". Is it a reference to one or both of the revolutions in Russia in 1917?
13 "L" is an abbreviation of "Lenin".
14 "prol'n i.e. rev'y" is an abbreviation of "proletarian i.e. revolutionary".
15 "KM" is an abbreviation of "Karl Marx".
16 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), (alternatively know as Marx's Paris Manuscripts). This collection of documents were written by Marx while in exile in Paris. They were written as notes, for the purpose of self-clarification, and were not intended for publication. They are fragmentary, and sections are missing and have not been located. They are, however, widely recognised as a hugely important element in Marx's oeuvre. Marx's intellectual debt to Hegel is evident in the Manuscripts. They remained unpublished until the 1920s, when a Russian translation, and versions in the original German, were made available in the USSR. In the 1940s, before any English language translation was available, the JFT translated some of the key sections. A collection of three of the essays, translated from the German by Grace Lee (Ria Stone), were published by the JFT, in mimeographed form, in August 1947 as Essays by Karl Marx. Raya Dunayevskaya's translation of two of the essays, 'Private Property and Communism' and 'Critique of the Hegelian dialectic', (from Russian translations), were published as appendices to the first edition of her Marxism and Freedom, in 1958, three years after she had parted ways with James and Lee.
17 "Bauer & Co" is a reference to the Young (or Left) Hegelians. A trend in German philosophy, that both Marx and Engels (separately) dabbled in, before they broke philosophically from it. They wrote The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (1844-5) as critiques of Young Hegelianism. Neither works were published in Marx or Engels's lifetimes.
18 Ludwig Feuerbach was a Young Hegelian, who broke philosophically from the group's 'idealism', to formulate a 'materialist' critique of religion. Both Marx and Engels were influenced by Feuerbach's 'materialism'. For Marx, however, Hegel remained a deeper philosophical influence (see e.g.: 'Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy', from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844).
19 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), is considered by many to be 'the father of anarchism'. Marx met, and became friends with, Proudhon while in exile in Paris in the mid-1840s. But Marx later became critical of him, and wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) as a critique of Proudhon's System of Economical Contradictions: or, Philosophy of Poverty (1847). Supporters of Proudhon, like Marx, helped to found the International Workingmen's Association (The First International). Disputes between the 'Proudhonists' and the 'Marxists' led to the break-up of the First International.
20 "Cpl. Vol. 1" is a reference to Marx's, Capital: Volume 1. The editor has been unable to identify the passages, in either the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) or in Capital: Volume One, that James was referring to.
21 James is most likely referring to Lenin's The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of it in Mr. Struve's Book (1894).
22 The editor has been unable to identify the passages, in either the The Holy Family (1844) or in The German Ideology, that James was referring to.
23 This appears to be a reference to Lenin's essay 'The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism', which was published in March 1913.
24 The quote is from Chapter Forty-Eight of Marx's Capital: Volume Three (1894).
25 James appears to be referring to notes, or a letter that Grace Lee (Boggs) wrote. The editor has been unable to locate the notes or letter being referred to.
26The text in a lot the parts of this paragraph of the version of the letter in the digitised archive are very difficult to discern. The text provided by the editor is the editor's best guess at the original text.
27 Dunayevskaya's translation of Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks on Hegel, page #1543.
28 "Social-Dem'y" is most likely an abbreviation of "Social Democracy", a reference to the parties of the Second International.
29 "org'd prol" is an abbreviation of "organised proletariat".
30 Lenin's reference to the Logic of Capital can be found in Dunayevskaya's translation of Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks on Hegel, page #1574.
31 Lenin, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, (1894).
32 "bur'y" is an abbreviatio of "bureaucracy"; "prol't" is an abbreviation of "proletariat"; "cap'm" is an abbreviation of "capitalism" and "State and Rev'n" is a reference to Lenin's State and Revolution, (1917).
33 'L'm' appears to be an abbreviation of 'labour movement', but it could be an abbreviation of 'Leninism'.
34 "S&R" is an abbreviation of State and Revolution; "soc.ism" is an abbreviation of "socialism".
35 This comment from Grace Lee (Boggs), inside the brackets, suggests that the original letter by CLR James was handwritten, and subsequently typed up by her.