Raya Dunayevskaya 1955
Source: Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #12040 [External Site].
Transcribed: by Chris Gilligan, December 2025.
April 15, 1955
Dear Arthur:
I want to take two minutes out of backlog and finances - the two things which must occupy us without diversion for the next two months - to enclose a letter from [Herbert] Marcuse so that you have an idea about the long-term project as well and also because a few areas of my relations with J [CLR James] you might be able to fill in.
You are well acquainted, I am sure, with Marcuse's "Reason and Revolution". What you may not know is that J, G [Grace Lee-Boggs], and I were so impressed with it when it first came out in the early 1940s that we tried meeting him but the letter we were to send to him took us no less than some six months to correspond about, and we never got around to actually establishing a relationship until I finally took matters into my own hands as recently as my last tour, met him and left the letters on the Absolute Idea with him. This is his response. He is interested enough also to want to make a trip to Detroit, he told me, in order to meet these workers from whom I told him I get these impulses. It will be something to see how he talks to a Si [Charles Denby] or Effie or Ruby.
Where you come in is that I am tracing when it was when serious divergences arose between me and J and 1947 was a big one - we didn't look at the SWP with the same eyes and he was very anxious to tone down all our studies to where they were either private or if offered to the party would end when Lenin died. Thus my book on philosophy was not to go beyond 1923 and made acceptable to JPC [James P. Cannon] and John G. Wright. Just before I left for Europe I dictated some notes to John on how to study the 12 volumes of Lenin's Selected Works. They were supposed to have been published by the youth - maybe that is one of the things you referred to as being too complex in your recent letter - but never were. You were then in charge. Do you recall why it was J and G did not wish "to polish and publish them"?
Then came 1950 when I saw no point in staying in the party after SCWR [State Capitalism and World Revolution]. I believe you were still around. I believe you had some criticisms of your own before you went away and wrote about them, but I never saw them. Have you a copy of that?
Finally of course was the Absolute Idea as full freedom vs. his concept of "error as dynamic of truth". I do not mean "his" concept in the sense that it isn't Hegelian or we don't see the value of that. I mean it is "his" in the sense that he did not go beyond that except to make himself the only "mediator" between the final truth and freedom and our present world.
No hurry about answering any of this.
Yours,
Rae
Arthur (Art) Kunkin [External Site] (1928-2019) is best known as the founding publisher and editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, the first and largest circulation of the 1960s 'underground' counter-culture papers. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he was a member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. He worked (as a business editor) on the Socialist Workers' Party newspaper The Militant and was Los Angeles editor of the Johnson-Forest Tendency publication Correspondence. He sided with Raya Dunayevskaya in the split in the Johnson-Forest Tendency and he worked on News & Letters in its early years.