On Feb. 27, I saw the letter by Michael Scully who offers a curious critique of Marxist-Humanists for wearing fatigues and protesting the war at the same time.

In this bizarre and unexplained analysis, Scully raises a question as to whether Marxist-Humanists take on the challenge of Hegel’s philosophy, and whether we believe in the unity of thought and action.

Though I suspect Scully’s angst is really with the anti-war movement as a whole and not one person’s attire, I appreciate his raising the question of Hegel’s relationship to Marx, and for that matter to Kant.

Scully says Kant, “thought before he spoke,” which raises an interesting question about the division between thought and reality in our world as well as in Kant’s method.

Hegel points out in his “Science of Logis” that Kant believed the “notion is and remains utterly separated from reality” and therefore Kant’s method concentrates on the objective, or empiricism.

Hegel’s dialectic transcends this division between subjective and objective and affirms “the absolute idea has now turned out to the identity of the theoretical and practical idea; each of these by itself is one-sided.”

From this Hegelian dialectic, Marx developed his philosophy of “revolution in permanence,” the unity of theory and practice.

Marxist-Humanism, founded in 1955 by Raya Dunayevskaya, strives to be a continuation of Marx’s Marxism, recreated for our age.

In Scully’s threat to “go back to Kant” is hidden a disdain for the Hegelian tradition he tries to challenge us with.

But clearly his critique doesn’t measure up to a Kantian tradition, much less a Marxist/Hegelian critique which, as Marx wrote, measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the idea.

For Hegel (as well as Marx) the idea was always freedom, “Only that which is an object of freedom can be called an idea.”

Our concern in the Marxist-Humanist Forum is to end the division between the drive of the “self determination of the idea” and the “self bringing forth of liberty.”

In other words, our aim is precisely to unite a philosophy of liberation with our organization and to uproot this alienating, war-mongering system based on the destruction of humanity and human creativity.

Julia D. Stege

Marxist-Humanist Forum