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In reference to Paul Zarembka's comment on the negation of the negation
(OPE-L 3222):
In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx had written that "communism is humanism
mediated by the transcendence of private property. Only by the
transcendence of this mediation, which is nevertheless a necessary
presupposition, does there arise *positive* Humanism, beginning from
itself."
In her _Philosophy and Revolution_, pp. 54-55, Dunayevskaya commented
that "This integrality of second negativity with Marx's Humanism which
would follow communism was so worrisome a reality over a hundred years
after its conception that Stalin, from the start of his triumph over all
other tendencies, felt the need to 'eliminate' the negation of the
negation. He simply did not bother to list it among the 'principles of
the dialectic'" in his essay on Dialectical Materialism.
In _Marxism and Freedom_, p. 62, Dunayevskaya reports on a 1955 article,
also dealing with Marx's 1844 manuscripts, written by V.A. Karpushkin.
It appeared in _Questions of Philosophy_ the leading philosophy journal
in Stalinist Russia. "From Marx's viewpoint," according to Karpushkin,
"the problem of the negation is subordinate to the basic law of the
dialectic -- the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. ... Just as
decisively did Marx come out against the mysticism of the Hegelian schema
of the first and second negation, against drawing the conclusion of a
struggle of opposites from some kind of negativity which allegedly
inherently clings to things, as Hegel put it."
Dunayevskaya (p. 63) commented that "It is that actual world of Russia
with its forced labor camps that compels this Russian attack against
Marxism. It is not the idealism of Hegel that worries them. It is the
revolutionary method of the dialectic and the Humanism of Marx that
threatens their existence in theory even as the working class does in
life. The deeper the crisis in Russia, the greater the need for an
ideology to keep the workers at work."
It was not only the young Marx, of course, who clung to the concept of
negation of the negation. It is the culmination of _Capital_, the
expropriation of the expropriators. Whereas capitalism, the first
negation, negates individual property, the new society, the second
negation, re-establishes individual property. "This is the negation of
the negation."
Andrew Kliman
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