From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Dec 16 2004 - 12:28:13 EST
At 7:26 AM -0500 12/16/04, Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM wrote: >Paul Mattick's 1958 review of Raya Dunayevskaya's >_Marxism and Freedom_ was just placed online: ><http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1958/dunayevskaya.htm>http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1958/dunayevskaya.htm > >Was a fair book review by a Marxist of a book written by >another Marxist with a different perspective "a Marxian >oddity" in 1958? How much have things changed since? > >In solidarity, Jerry > While it is interesting that Mattick says very little about D's economic analysis, I find myself in agreement with Mattick's criticism about incomprehensible philosophical jargon. "While it serves no purpose to detect Hegelianism in the attitudes of today's workers and to discover their attitudes in Hegelian philosophy, Dunayevskaya's direct and indirect connection of both yields only the term "freedom" as a synonym for the "new Humanism." But even if, according to Hegel, "freedom is the essence of mind," this tells us nothing with respect to the specific freedoms required for a socialist humanism. Dunayevskaya, unperturbed, however, points to the workers' opposition to both Automation and totalitarian domination as the developing realization of men's essence - freedom." Wow! Skepticism towards Hegel, the hypostatization of freedom, and the positing of essences. All in clear prose, and several years before similar points were made in at times incomprehensible philosophical jargon. RB
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