May 12, 1953
Dear H:26
I am going to take the plunge and if it turns out that I have behaved like a bull in a china shop - well, I simply have to take my chances or I will never get to sleep nights at all.27
There is no concrete problem that I meet daily, no matter how minor, that doesn't send me scurrying to the LOGIC and by now I'm so drunk with it all that I brazenly shout that in the dialectic of the Absolute Idea is the dialectic of the party and that I have just worked it out.
Just like that. I have taken the plunge.28 But I will restrain myself from beginning with the conclusions and the differentiation of us from Lenin and even us from 194829 but I will have you bear with me as I go through the whole last chapter of the Logic. However, before I do so, let me state what I am not doing: 1) I am not touching upon the mass party; the workers will do what they will do and until they do we can have only the faintest intimation of the great leap. 2) This is not 1948, but 1953; I am not concerned with spontaneity versus organization, nor with Stalinism which the workers will overcome.30
I am concerned only with the dialectic of the vanguard party of that type of grouping like ours, be it large or small, and its relationship to the mass.
Let's begin with the beginning: "The Absolute Idea has now turned out to be the identity of the Theoretical and the Practical Idea" (p. 466 J&S; 824M; 548W).31 At this moment this means to me that the party is the identity or unity of the activity of the leadership and the activity of the ranks. "[E]ach by itself is one-sided and contains the Idea itself only as a sought Beyond and unattained goal; each consequently is a syntheses of the tendency and both contains and does not contain the Idea..." (p. 466 J&S; 824M; 548-49W).32 And further down on the same page we have the warning that the Absolute Idea "contains the highest opposition within itself."
While the staggering truth of this last phrase sinks in, I will make one more quotation from that page: "The Absolute Idea is the only object and content of philosophy. As it contains every determinateness, and its essence is to return to itself through its self-determination or particularization, it has various phases. It is the business of philosophy to recognize it in them. Nature and Spirit are different manners of presenting its existence...." (p. 466 J&S; 824M; 549W).
Because the party is the only object and content of our philosophy here, I wish to make two jumps here. One is to contrast to the manner in which Other is explained on this page where "Notion... as person, is impenetrable and atomic subjectivity; while at the same time it is not exclusive individuality, but is, for itself, universality and cognition, and in its Other has its own objectivity for object" (p. 466 J&S; 824M; 549W). Here then Other is the proletariat outside. What I wish to contrast to it is the description of Other when the Notion is further developed on p. 477 where Other turns out to be, not the proletariat outside, but the party itself.33 Hegel says:
"The second or negative and mediated determination is at the same time the mediating determination. At first it may be taken as simple determination, but in truth it is a reference or relation; for it is negative - the negative, however, of the positive, and includes the latter. It is not therefore the Other of a term to which it is indifferent, for thus it would be neither an Other, nor a reference or relation; it is the Other in itself, the Other of an Other. It thus includes its own Other, and so is contradiction, or the posited dialectic of itself" (pp. 476-77 J&S; 834-35M; 562W).
The other jump that I referred to that I wish to make is to leave the Logic for a moment and go to the last chapter in the PHENOMENOLOGY. In that chapter on Absolute Knowledge Hegel writes: "The object as a whole is the mediated result (the syllogism) or the passing of universality into individuality through specification, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through cancelled individuality or specific determination" (p. 791B; 480M; 550H).34
Take a second look at the phrase, "the mediated result" and remember that our object is the party and that we are working out the triangular relationship not only politically but philosophically that, syllogistically speaking, the party is the totality, the mediated result of the three layers35 and at the same time it is what it is by its relationship to the proletariat outside, on the one hand, and to the universal of socialism, on the other hand, except that the two are now not "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" but interpenetrated.
Hegel goes on (p. 804): "Spirit is the movement of the self which empties (externalises) itself of self and sinks itself within its own substance, and qua subject, both has gone out of that substance into itself, making its substance an object and a content, and also supersedes this distinction of objectivity and content" (p. 804B; 490M; 561H).
So Socialism too as it "externalizes" itself in parties, and in this case I mean not the vanguard grouping but the Paris Commune, the Soviets, the CIO, and so is Hegel talking of history: "The other aspect, however, in which Spirit comes into being, History, is the process of becoming in terms of knowledge, a conscious self-mediating process - Spirit externalized and emptied into Time" (p. 807B; 492M; 563H). But he does not leave it at history (which includes historic development for us not only of the above, but the historic development of the party 1903, 1920-23, now). He ends Absolute Knowledge with (p. 808):
"The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as spirit, finds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms ( Geister) as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conservation, looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears. Both together, or History (intellectually) comprehended ( begriffen) form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless, solitary, and alone" (p. 808B; 493M; 564H).
Now the way I see this connect with the Logic, (p. 466 J&S; 824M; 548W), where I left off before I began jumping around, is that where the "various phases" could have meant stages of development within the party such as 1903, 1920-23, etc., the recognition of the different manners of the existence of the Absolute Idea as Nature and Spirit, or the country and something like the CIO rather than, a "strict party" meant you are a fool if you cannot recognize the party in that for that is socialism just as at one time it was sufficient to define it as "electricity plus soviets".36 The world concepts, the American roots, and us. We will come back to that, but now I wish to return to Hegel as he develops his Absolute Idea logically. On the next page (467) he writes: "Thus the logical idea has itself as infinite form for content... As opposed to form, content appears as Other and as given..."
"The Absolute Idea itself has only this further content, that the form-determination is its own perfected totality - the pure Notion... What remains therefore to be considered here is not a content as such, but the universal element of its form - that is, the method" (p. 467 J&S; 825M; 550W).
In the party both as political organization and as the realization of the theory of knowledge, the "form-determinations" or form of relations between leaders and ranks, between the various layers, and within each layer tells the whole story. There is no content outside of that. Or, once again to stick close to Hegel, "The method therefore is both soul and substance, and nothing is either conceived or known in its truth except in so far as it is completely subject to the method..." (p. 468 J&S; 826M; 551-52W) .
Hegel brings this development of method to a climax by contrasting sharply what it is to inquiring cognition where it is "in the position of a tool, of a means which stands on the subjective side, whereby the method relates itself to the object" (p. 469 J&S; 827M; 553W), to what it is in the dialectic: "But in true cognition the method is not merely a quantity of certain determinations: it is the fact that the Notion is determined in and for itself, and is the mean [the middle member] only because it equally has the significance of objective, so that in the conclusion, it does not merely achieve an external determinateness through the method, but is posited in its identity with the subjective Notion" (p. 469 J&S; 827M; 553W).
It is directly after this that Hegel discloses to me the secret of something that I have been chewing over like a dog does a bone, for many a moon - the intuition of the leader which he calls "internal intuition". First, let's watch the process of arriving at internal intuition: 1) method only has to have a beginning and so that is where we must begin; 2) but this beginning (and he warns later that "neither in actuality nor in thought" is there any beginning "so simple and abstract as is commonly imagined") is not "the immediate of sensuous intuition" which "is manifold and individual"; 3) no, this beginning is "internal intuition." (p. 470, 471 J&S; 827, 828, 829M; 554, 555W).
Secondly, note the contrast between "the immediate of sensuous intuition" and which comes from that which is, from the way, we would say, the third layer lives, and "the internal intuition" of the leader which comes from the way he thinks.
Jam these two opposites together, and you will first understand a sentence back on p. 467: "The self-determination therefore in which alone the Idea is, is to hear itself speak..." (p. 467 J&S; 825M; 550W). In a word, the self-development of socialism, objectively and subjectively, gives off impulses which come one way to the leader, another way to the class as a whole, but what is important is that it is determined to appear "to hear itself speak". And the beautiful part about the "internal intuition" is that this "beginning must be inherently defective and must be endowed with the impulse of self-development" (p. 471 J&S; 829M; 555W).
So that, finally, we reach Hegel's conclusion that nothing in life or in thought has a beginning so simple as is imagined but that "every beginning must be made from the Absolute, while every progress is merely the exhibition of the Absolute... The progress is therefore not a kind of overflow, which it would be if in truth that which begins were already the Absolute; rather the progress consists in this, that the universal determines itself and is the universal for itself, that is, is equally also individual and subject. It is the Absolute only in its completion" (p. 471-2 J&S; 829M; 555-56W).
So although we began with the universal of socialism and although we have seen socialism in the various phases of the Commune, the Soviets, the CIO, it is not yet IT for it can be it "only in its completion". The new society will not be until it is; now we see only intimations, approximations, but it is nevertheless all around us, in the lives of the workers and in the theory of the party, so until the solution of the conflict and the abolition of the division, we are back to stages of development: " cause is the highest stage in which the concrete Notion as beginning has an immediate existence in the sphere of necessity, but it is not yet a subject which, as such, preserves itself also in its actual realization" (p. 472 J&S; 830M; 556W).
Here I wish you to remember that in this page and in the next is where Lenin made his own 16-point definition of the dialectic, the essence of which was three-fold:37 1) the transformation of anything into its opposite (collapse of 2nd International); 2) the absolute in every relative which is the transition to something else (Monopoly as eve of socialist revolution); and 3) thought reflects reality (objective world connections). That we can fit Lenin in too here historically can now be seen from the fact that in the previous section on The Idea of Cognition, Lenin had gone further, saying that "Man's cognition not only reflects the objective world but creates it",38 but when he reached the Absolute Idea it was not the creativity that he developed but the objective world connections because to him in 1915 the Idea as "objective truth" of necessity predominated over any actual Reconstruction of society, or the 1917 "socialism looking at us through all windows".39>
We, however, can go further, and not only further than Lenin but further than we ourselves did in 1948 when the Nevada Dialectics so profoundly held forth on the positive in the negative. But holding fast to the positive in the negative then meant only the general development of socialism through overcoming Stalinism, whereas now we can be more concrete, at least in relation to our own organization where the mediating determination is a negative "but the negative of the positive and includes the latter." Now you can see why some 11 pages back40 I called attention to this further determination of Other as "its own Other... the posited dialectic of itself" (p. 477 J&S; 835M; 562W): "-The first or immediate term is the Notion in itself, and therefore is the negative only in itself; the dialectic moment with it therefore consists in this, that the distinction which it implicitly contains is posited in it. The second term on the other hand is itself the determinate entity, distinction or relation; hence with it the dialectic moment consists in the positing of the unity which is contained in it" (p. 477 J&S; 835M; 562W).
We have reached the turning point despite the unity or the party as a totality, since: "The negativity which has just been considered is the turning point of the movement of the Notion. It is the simple point of negative self-relation, the innermost source of all activity, of living and spiritual self-movement, the dialectic soul which all truth has in it and through which it alone is truth; for the transcendence of the opposition between the Notion and Reality, and that unity which is the truth, rest upon this subjectivity alone. -The second negative, the negative of the negative, which we have reached, is this transcendence of the contradiction, but is no more the activity of an external reflection than the contradiction is: it is the innermost and most objective moment of Life and Spirit, by virtue of which a subject is personal and free" (pp. 477-78 J&S; 835-36M; 563W).
NOW STAND UP AND SHOUT PERSONAL AND FREE, PERSONAL AND FREE, PERSONAL AND FREE AS LENIN SHOUTED LEAP, LEAP, LEAP WHEN HE FIRST SAW DIALECTICAL DEVELOPMENT TO BE THAT AND ALSO THE OBJECTIVE WORLD.41
I will return to freedom, and where our age proves it has abolished the distinction between theory and practice and that which is the preoccupation of the theorists freedom out of one-party totalitarianism42 is the preoccupation of the great masses, but now I must still stick close to Hegel for when he reaches that point he goes not into paeans of freedom but an attack on all old radical parties from the Social-Democracy (Kant to Hegel) to the SLP43 (formalists to Hegel) and he does not let go until the method itself extends itself into a system (p. 480).
And on p. 482 he says: "The method effects this as a system of totality... This progress determines itself, first, in this manner, that it begins from simple determinateness and that each subsequent one is richer and more concrete". It has not been a straight line, but an approach both rearward and forward so that now we can see: "In the absolute method the Notion preserves itself in its otherness, and the universal in its particularization, in the Judgement and in reality; it raises to each next stage of determination the whole mass of its antecedent content, and by its dialectical progress not only loses nothing and leaves nothing behind, but carries with it all that it has acquired, enriching and concentrating itself upon itself" (pp. 482-83 J&S; 840M; 569W).
So that none of the other philosophies (parties to us) just degenerated or died, but their achievements have been incorporated in the new philosophy or party and this new has been enriched "concentrating itself upon itself" for we have that new source, the third layer.44
Now watch this: "Each new stage of exteriorization (that is, of further determination) is also an interiorization, and greater extension is also higher intensity" (p. 483 J&S; 840-41M; 570W). What a more perfect description of going outward with B,45 and becoming richer inward and more intense.
"The highest and acutest point is simple personality," continues Hegel, "which, by virtue alone of the absolute dialectic which is its nature equally holds and comprehends everything within itself because it perfectly liberates itself..." (p. 483 J&S; 841M; 570W). So we are back at liberation and until the end of The Absolute Idea that will be the theme, liberation, freedom and an absolutely uncompromising, Bolshevik attack on impatience. If you are right and the Unhappy Consciousness should somehow go as part of Abernism - and I agree with you there - then nevertheless I will not let go of Leland.46 Just listen to the absolutely devastating analysis by Hegel, and remember Hegel does it as he has already approached freedom and we met that type when we approached independence.47
p. 484: "That impatience whose only wish is to go beyond the determinate (whether in the form of beginning, object, finite, or in any other form) and to be immediately in the absolute, has nothing before it as object of its cognition but the empty negative, the abstract infinite - or else would-be absolute, which is imaginary because it is neither posited nor comprehended" (p. 484 J&S; 841-42M; 571W).
I am shaking all over for we have come to where we part from Lenin.48 I mentioned before that, although in the approach to the Absolute Idea Lenin had mentioned that man's cognition not only reflects the objective world but creates it but that within the chapter he never developed it. Objective world connections, materialism, dialectical materialism it is true, but not the object and subject as one fully developed - that's what he saw. Then he reaches the last paragraph: "For the Idea posits itself as the absolute unity of the pure Notion and its Reality, and thus gathers itself into the immediacy of Being; and in doing so, as totality in this form, it is Nature" (p. 485 J&S; 843M; 573W).49
There Lenin stops - it is the beginning of the last paragraph - and he says: "This phrase on the last page of the Logic is exceedingly remarkable. The transition of the logical idea to Nature. Stretching a hand to materialism. This is not the last phrase of the Logic, but further till the end of the page is unimportant".50
But, my dear Vladimir Ilyitch, it is not true; the end of that page is important; we of 1953, we who have lived 3 decades after you and tried to absorb all you have left us we can tell you that.
Listen to the very next sentence, "But this determination is not a perfected becoming or a transition..." (p. 485 J&S; 843M; 573W). Remember how transition was everything to you in the days of Monopoly, the eve of socialism. Well, Hegel has passed beyond transition, he says this last determination "the pure Idea, in which the determinateness or reality of the Notion is itself raised to the level of Notion, is an absolute liberation, having no further immediate determination which is not equally posited and equally Notion. Consequently there is no transition in this freedom... The transition here therefore must rather be taken to mean that the Idea freely releases itself in absolute self-security and self-repose" (p. 485, 486 J&S; 843M; 573W).
You see, Vladimir Ilyitch you didn't have Stalinism to overcome, when transitions, revolutions seemed sufficient to bring the new society. Now everyone looks at the totalitarian one-party state, that is the new which must be overcome by a totally new revolt in which everyone experiences "absolute liberation." So we build with you from 1920-3 and include the experience of three decades.
But, H, (Hauser, not Hegel) I have not finished yet, not that last paragraph in Hegel, nor my summation, for we must retrace our steps to the paragraph before and as we do, let's keep in mind Marx's last chapter of Capital (Vol. I). Hegel writes: "In so far the pure Idea of Cognition is enclosed in subjectivity, and therefore is an impulse to transcend the latter; and, as last result, pure truth becomes the beginning of another sphere and science. This transition need here only be intimated" (p. 485 J&S; 843M; 572-73W). And then he goes into how the Idea posits itself and is liberation. That, he says, he cannot fully develop here; he can only intimate it.
Now you will recall that that is precisely what Marx does in the Accumulation of Capital when he reaches the laws of concentration and centralization of capital and socialization of labor. He says he cannot develop those, but he can give an intimation, and this intimation turns out to be that: 1) the ultimate would be centralization of capital "in the hands of one single capitalist corporation"; 2) that it would not matter if that occurs peacefully or violently; 3) but, that with the centralization grows also the revolt, and it is not just any revolt but one that is "organized, united, disciplined by the very mechanism of capitalist production."51
H, are you as excited as I? Just as Marx's development of the form of the commodity and money came from Hegel's syllogistic U P I, so the Accumulation of Capital (the General Absolute Law) is based on the Absolute Idea.52
Remember also that we kept on repeating Lenin's aphorism that Marx may not have left us "a Logic" but he left us the logic of Capital.53 This is it - the logic of Capital is the dialectic of bourgeois society: the state capitalism at one pole and the revolt at the other.
At one stage we tried to divide socialization of labor from revolt, the form being still capitalistic, and the latter the beginning of socialism. We didn't get very far because that socialization was capitalistic but revolt liberates it from its capitalistic integument. Marx, however, dealing with the dialectic of capitalist society did not make the negation of the negation any more concrete, but, on the contrary, in the last chapter returns to the origins of capitalism.
Now we are ready to return to the last few sentences of the Logic ending with "But this next resolution of the pure Idea - to determine itself as external Idea - thereby only posits for itself the mediation out of which the Notion arises as free existence that out of externality has passed into itself; arises to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit, and to discover the highest Notion of itself in that logical science as the pure Notion which forms a Notion of Itself" (p. 486 J&S; 843-44M; 573W).
( Please, Hauser, can you get a hold of a copy of Philosophy of Spirit or is it Mind? I am brazen enough to want to swim there too. I have an instinct that we couldn't get very far there when we tried it before because we equated Mind to party, but now that I believe the dialectic of the Absolute Idea is the dialectic of the party, I feel that Mind is the new society gestating in the old, and I feel sure we could get a lot of very valuable dialectical developments there, and what is so significant about that also is the building of the new within the old makes it possible to stop jumping from high point to high point but rather to follow concretely since this new is in the daily struggle).
Somewhere in the letters about Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks it is stated that Lenin was aware of the gap between his Universal ("to a man") and the concrete Russian proletariat, where we are more aware of the identity of the Universal and the concrete American proletariat. What, further, these two years of our organization showed was the high stage of social consciousness of the new layers attracted to us: they practice in the paper before they join and yet they appreciate leadership. Perhaps I'm stretching but I feel that in the Absolute General Law when Marx was developing the dialectic of bourgeois society to its limit and came up with the revolt "united, organized and disciplined" he also set the limits to the dialectic of the party which is part of bourgeois society and will wither with its passing as will the bourgeois state. It appears to me when objective and subjective are so interpenetrated that the preoccupations of the theoreticians of the man on the street is can we be free when what has arisen is the one-party state, the assertion of freedom, "personal and free" and full liberation takes precedence over economics, politics, philosophy, or rather refuses to be rent asunder into three and wants to be one, the knowledge that you can be free.
Do you remember the letter of May 20, 1949: "We are poles apart from Hegel but very close to him in another respect. 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, and on our basis".54
W. (Raya Dunayevskaya)
26 "H" stands for "Hauser," the organizational name used by Grace Lee Boggs in this period; "W", the signature at the end, stands for "Weaver", the organizational name used by Raya Dunayevskaya in this period.
27 This sentence does not appear in the 1956 [mimeographed] edition.
28 The first two sentences of this paragraph do not appear in the 1956 edition.
29 The phrase "even us from 1948" refers to a 1948 manuscript by C.L.R. James, then co-leader with Raya Dunayevskaya of the "Johnson-Forest Tendency" within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). James' manuscript, first called the "Nevada Document", has since been published in book form as Notes on Dialectics (Westport: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1980).
30 In the 1956 edition, this paragraph rends as follows: "But I will restrain myself from beginning with the conclusions, and the differentiation of us from Lenin and even us from 1948, but I will have you bear with me as I go through the whole last chapter of the LOGIC. However, before I do so, let me state what I am not doing: I am not touching upon the mass party; the workers will do what they will do, and until they do, we can have only the faintest intimation of the great leap. 2) This is not 1948, but 1953; I am not concerned with spontaneity versus organization, nor with Stalinism which the workers will overcome.
31 Hegel's Science of Logic, Vol. II, translated by W.H. Johnston and L.G. Struthers (New York: MacMillan, 1929); all quotes in the following text are from this edition. The first parenthetical page citation refers to Vol. II of the Johnston & Struthers translation, designated hereafter as "J&S"; the second is to the translation by A.V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969) and is designated as "M"; the third is to the German edition, published as Vol. 6 of Hegel's Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf Verlag, 1969), and is designated hereafter as "W".
32 In the 1956 edition Dunayevskaya added the words -"Hegel continues," preceding this quotation.
33 In the 1956 edition this paragraph reads as follows: Because the party is the only object and content of our philosophy here, I wish to make two jumps here. One is to contrast the description of Other on this page to that on p. 477. On p. 466 he defines Notion "as person (which) is impenetrable and atomic subjectivity; while at the same time it is not exclusive individuality, but is, for itself, universality and cognition, and in its Other has its own objectivity for object." Here, then, Other is the proletariat outside. On p. 477, however, Other turns out to be, not the proletariat outside, but the party itself.
34 Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, translated with an introduction by J.B. Baillie (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931). All quotes from Hegel's Phenomenology in the following text are from this edition. The first parenthetical page citation refers to the Baillie translation, designated hereafter as "B"; the second refers to the translation by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) and is designated as "M": the third refers to the German text as edited by Johannes Hoffmeister (Harmburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952) and is designated as "H".
35 C.L.R. James developed a concept of "three layers" after the Johnson-Forest Tendency left the SWP, patterned on his interpretation of Vol. IX of Lenin's Selected Works. The term "first layer" referred to the "intellectual leadership"; "second layer" referred to the "experienced politicos"; "third layer" referred to the rank and file workers, women, Blacks and youth who were seen as representing the masses outside. With her 1953 philosophic breakthrough, Dunayevskaya worked out the totally new concept of the relationship between the "movement from theory" and the "movement from practice that is itself a form of theory".
36 This refers to Lenin's 1920-21 view that " Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country". See Lenin's Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), Vol. 31, p. 419 and p. 516.
37 See Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Vol. 38, pp. 220-22. Also see Appendix B of Dunayevskaya's Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 until today (New York: Bookman Associates, 1958), pp. 349-50, for the first English translation of Lenin's "Abstract of Hegel's 'Science of Logic", as there are significant differences between Dunayevskaya's translation and that of the later editions. Hereafter, the editions are cited us "Lenin, CW, Vol. 38" and "RD, App. B," respectively.
38 Lenin, CW, Vol. 38, p. 212; RD, App. B, p. 347. Both editions quote Lenin's aphorism fully as: "Man's cognition not only reflects the objective world, but creates it."
39 See Lenin, CW, Vol. 25, p. 363.
40 See above.
41 See Lenin, CW, Vol. 33, p. 123; RD. App. 8, p. 330.
42 In the 1974 edition the phrase "freedom from out of one-party totalitarianism" is separated off with dashes.
43 "SLP" refers to the Socialist Labor Party.
44 In the 1974 edition the phrases philosophies (parties to us) and new source, the third layer, are underlined.
45 "B" refers to Charles Denby's Indignant Heart, first published in 1952. An expanded edition was published in 1978 as Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal (Boston: South End Press); a new expanded edition was published in 1989 by Wayne State University Press.
46 Martin Abern, one of the founders of Trotskyism in the U.S., died in 1947. In a 1953 document entitled "Our Organization", Dunavevskaya characterized "Abernism" as "cliquism, unprincipled combinationism, gossip and intrigue". Leland was the organizational secretary in 1951-52 of Correspondence Committees, the organization to which Dunayevskaya belonged from 1951 to 1955.
47 The Johnson-Forest Tendency "approached independence" in June, 1951, when it left the SWP and formed a new organization, Correspondence Committees.
48 In the 1974 edition the phrase, where we part from Lenin, is underlined.
49 In the 1974 edition this paragraph has vertical double lines drawn alongside it.
50 Lenin, CW, Vol. 38, p. 230. RD, App. 8, p. 352.
51 Karl Marx, Capital (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), Vol. J, pp. 836-37. Also see the Marx Library edition, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, I977), p. 929.
52 This refers to Hegel's syllogism "Universal-Particular-lndividual"; see "The Notion" in Hegel's Science of Logic (pp. 234-57 J&S; 600-22M; 273-300W). See also Marx's Capital, Vol. I, chapter I, "The Commodity," and chapter 25, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation".
53 See Lenin, CW, Vol. 38, p. 317; RD, App. 8, p. 353.
54 This statement is from a letter of C.L.R. James to Grace Lee Boggs (see The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, Wayne State University Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, #1613).