RFH 137 Reading Dunayevskaya’s “Form and Plan” in 2025 (Part I)

Radio Free Humanity: The Marxist-Humanist Podcast

Co-hosts Andrew Kliman and Gabriel Donnelly dive into the archives! This is the first of a two-part discussion of the text of a presentation that Raya Dunayevskaya gave in the early 1950s, titled “Form and Plan.” She argues that the alternatives are not whether or not to plan, but the “despotic” plan of capital vs. the cooperative plan of “freely associated men.” The despotic plan is a form of capitalism that reveals its despotic essence. Thus, Dunayevskaya sees “form” in a new light, not as something opposed to and less important than “essence,” but as something that forms and reveals essence. This insight gives her a new appreciation of volume 3 of Capital, which deals with the forms that capitalism takes in the market and in thought. She argues that “we” (the Johnson-Forest Tendency) “have greatly underestimated” that volume, because the JFT focused on counterposing form and essence in order to combat opponents who regard private property and markets, not capitalist production, as capitalism’s distinctive feature. Plus current-events segment: On Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo piece, “Trump’s Already Lost.” The co- hosts discuss the kind of loss that Marshall has in mind, and the great distance between it and the total, thoroughgoing loss that is needed, They also discuss the Canadian election results, and the fact that Polievre’s loss does not equate to an outright rejection of Canadian Trumpism. Radio Free Humanity is co-hosted by Gabriel Donnelly and Andrew Kliman, and sponsored by Marxist-Humanist Initiative (https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/ ).