Raya Dunayevskaya (1961)
THAT politics can be a creative activity, a means whereby man extends his own freedom, is a truth that is periodically forgotten. In 1961 we are still emerging from the political wilderness we entered in 1914 when the old world broke down and chaos ensued. The brave and brilliant attempt of the October Revolution to build a new world came to grief by 1923. Mankind found no answer to Mussolini and Hitler save world war. A whole inter-war generation failed to understand its own problems. Parties that called themselves ‘Communist’ rested upon dogma and terror. Parties that called themselves 'Socialist’ rested upon the petty ambitions of their leaders. Politics became a dirty word.
Yet there were fewer illusions in 1945 than there were in 1918 and of these there was not much left after 1953/6, the years of the risings in Vorkuta, Berlin, Posnan, the 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U., the Hungarian Revolution and Suez. And after Suez rose Africa. Then of their own accord common people from Britain to Japan began to move against the Bomb.
A vast debate, deep, initially shapeless and with no respect for the persons of self-styled leaders, swept the old organisations and called new ones into being. That debate has produced results — and this pamphlet is one of them.
Raya Dunayevskaya, Leon Trotsky’s secretary during the Moscow Trials period, broke with Trotsky over the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and began a searching re-examination of the nature of the Soviet Union. By 1941 she had come to the conclusion that what the world was witnessing was the truth of Marx’s prediction that the process of accumulation would end by delivering all capital “into the hands of one single capitalist or capitalist corporation.” This, she saw, was what had already happened in the Soviet Union. Nationalised property, as such, was not one whit less capitalist than private property. The relations between employer and employed under the Five Year Plans were essentially the same as under capitalism elsewhere. She then concluded — having studied the situation in the U.S.A.—that the new shape of capitalism was not peculiar to the Soviet Union but signified nothing less than a new stage in world capitalist development. State capitalism had succeeded or was succeeding monopoly capitalism the world over.
With the aid of this basic theory (including as it does a fundamental belief in the capacity of perfectly ordinary people to determine their own destiny) Dunayevskaya has elaborated a complex of new socialist ideas involving a rediscovery of the humanism of Marx and Lenin. Her ideas have been expressed in this pamphlet, in her book Marxism and Freedom (reviewed in Appendix II) and in the Detroit monthly paper News and Letters.
In Britain the Labour Party was crushingly defeated at the General Election of the autumn of 1959. Never had such a well organised political campaign produced so miserable a result! It was clear that the re-think was more necessary than ever. In Cambridge a group of left-wing students of the University Labour Club began to meet informally to enquire more deeply into what was wrong in the Movement and to test their conclusions in the critical atmosphere of the Labour Club and in its journal Cambridge Forward. The publication of this pamphlet is one result of that activity — the Left Group’s baptism in publishing and, we hope, a meaningful contribution to the new socialist internationalism.
PETER CADOGAN
5, Acton Way, Cambridge.
15th May, 1961.