Title: The Indispensability of Philosophy in the Struggle to Develop an Alternative to Capitalism
Abstract: Does philosophy "as such" become redundant with the advent of the Marxian critique of capital, or does it become indispensable in light of the need to grasp and transcend the logic of capital? This question has given rise to interminable debates in the history of Marxism, as seen in the tendency to reduce Marxism to positive "science," on the one hand, and the effort to affirm the enduring importance of philosophy by thinkers ranging from Gramsci to the Frankfurt School, on the other. What has largely been neglected, however, is the existence of a distinctive branch of Marxism in the United States that grappled with this question, as seen in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya. This paper will explore how debates over the role of philosophy, which played a decisive role in the Johnson-Forest Tendency of the 1940s and early 1950s, led Dunayevskaya to develop a variant of Marxism that affirms philosophy as a special form of consciousness that remains indispensable for grasping the truth of the world.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-12-10
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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