CRITICAL THEORY, ALIENATED LABOR, RAYA D, CLR JAMES (REPLY TO RAKESH)

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to Rakesh for this informative post.  One question and one
comment for clarification:

>I have found Stephen Eric Bronner's reconstruction and critique

>of this tradition to be very compelling

Please specify what Bronner's work is, with some bibliographical
references.

>only one who has theoretically explained the centrality of

>alienated and fragmented work to Marx's critical theory

>is Postone.  Actually he has an important predecessor not yet

>mentioned: Raya Dunayevskaya in *Marxism and Freedom*.

This characterization of the uniqueness of Raya Dunayevskaya is
misleading.  From 1953 or so on Raya pursued her own philosophical
agenda.  But to attribute the basis of Raya's understanding of
alienated labor to Raya alone is to accept her self-promotion and
the lies perpetuated by the News & Letters cult.  This view of
labor was jointly worked out by Raya, Grace Lee (Boggs), and
C.L.R. James, with the assistance of others, within the
Johnson-Forest Tendency in the 1940s.  The leader of the group was
James, and he not only gave it direction, but also was the
catalyst in the synthesis of everybody's contributions.  Raya
split from James in 1955 and slandered him from that day forward.
Raya and her followers have always bellyached about being
disacknowledged by James.  The fact is that James publicly
recognized her contributions to his dying day, and he should not
be blamed for Marty Glaberman's carelessness about attributing the
authorship of certain documents.  (James was notoriously passive
about the use of his work, not to mention indifferent to
self-promotion, hence no cult was ever established to carry on his
legacy.)  On the contrary, Raya and her followers have never been
honest about James's monumental influence in her work, especially
in her first major book, MARXISM AND FREEDOM.  Let's not
perpetuate the distortion of history and the omission of James
from the history of Marxist theory.


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