Johnson-Forest Tendency

[Kadir Ateş]

Comrades:

Anyone here a sympathizer of this tendency? I just started to read CLR James and thoroughly enjoy his style and theoretical approach. Beyond Loren Goldner's article, could any comrade here point me in the direction of Dunayevskaya's foundational works? Also, why did they separate?


KA

[graymouser]

Dunayevskaya's main work is in Marxism and Freedom (Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Freedom-Raya-Dunayevskaya/dp/1573928194/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321583724&sr=8-1)), Philosophy and Revolution (Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Revolution-Dunayevskaya-Marxism-Humanism/dp/0739105590/ref=pd_sim_b_3)) and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Luxemburg-Womens-Liberation-Philosophy-Revolution/dp/0252061896/ref=pd_sim_b_2)). Her works are somewhat obscure and very heavy on Hegel, and certainly she was not a literary talent the likes of CLR James.

From what I gather, Dunayevskaya and her followers were interested in a more heavily philosophical "Marxist-Humanist" synthesis while James was heading in the direction we see reflected in Facing Reality. There isn't a major literature on the split, but the very different directions that the James and Dunayevskaya groups went in is indicative of the divergence of perspectives.

James sort of drifted in a more esoteric direction, more Third World-oriented. Among his followers, James and Grace Lee Boggs became figures in the civil rights movement while Martin Glaberman had a serious influence on such Detroit radicals as DRUM. News and Letters is the group Dunayevskaya founded, though it has a split now in the Marxist-Humanist Initiative.

The Johnson-Forrest Tendency was based on an extremely optimistic outlook - it's impossible to read State Capitalism and World Revolution or Facing Reality and not get this loud and clear. Once these hopes didn't pan out, only Dunayevskaya's philosophical approach really kept things going beyond a sort of "keep the home fires going" approach by Glaberman, Boggs et al that is reminiscent of the end of Council Communism, a fairly similar trend. Even today, News & Letters spends a great deal of its time going on about Raya Dunayevskaya and how important she was.

[RedTrackWorker]

"It was a great loss to the working class, which underwent great defeats during and after the second world war, that the Trotskyist movement did not learn from the ideas of Johnson-Forest."--Walter Daum, http://lrp-cofi.org/archive/CLRJames.html

Marxism and Freedom is particularly an important book to read.