MARX’S “NEW HUMANISM” AND THE DIALECTICS OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN PRIMITIVE AND MODERN SOCIETIES Raya Dunayevskaya

MARX’S “NEW HUMANISM” AND THE DIALECTICS OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN PRIMITIVE AND MODERN SOCIETIES

Raya Dunayevskaya

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In the year of the Marx centenary, we are finally able to focus on the transcription of Marx’s last writings — the Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (transcribed and edited, with an introduction, by Lawrence Krader, 1972). They allow us to look at Marx’s Marxism as a totality and see for ourselves the wide gulf that separates Marx’s concept of that fundamental Man/Woman relationship (whether that be when Marx first broke from bourgeois society, or as seen in his last writings) from Engels’ view of what he called “the world historic defeat of the female sex” as he articulated it in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State as if that were Marx’s view, both on the “Woman Question” and on “primitive communism.” To this day, the dominance of that erroneous, fantastic view of Marx and Engels as one1 (consistently perpetuated by the so-called socialist states) has by no means been limited to Engelsianisms on women’s liberation. The aim of the Russian theoreticians, it would appear, has been to put blinders on non-Marxist as well as Marxist academics regarding the last decade of Marx’s life when he experienced new moments in his theoretic perception as he studied new empirical data of pre-capitalist societies in works by Morgan, Kovalevsky, Phear, Maine, Lubbock. In Marx’s excerpts and comments on these works, as well as in his correspondence during this period, it was clear that Marx was working out new paths to revolution, not, as some current sociological studies2 would have us believe, by scuttling his own life’s work of analyzing capitalism’s development in Western Europe, much less abbrogat- ing his discovery of a whole new continent of thought and revolution which he called a “new Humanism.” Rather, Marx was rounding out forty years of his thought on human development and its struggles for freedom which he called “history and its process,” “revolution in permanence.”

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source -praxis international