Raya Dunayevskaya Research Articles

Towards an ontology of struggle: The Marxist-Humanist theory of social transformation in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya

This article outlines Dunayevskaya’s original but underappreciated contribution to Marxism as a body of theory and practice. Focusing specifically on her Marxist-Humanist ‘ontology of struggle’ in its various dimensions, it draws out her engagement with Marx such that a new, vitalised account of social transformation is elaborated. From her critique of labour and state capitalism to her account of the dual movement between practice and theory, to her attentiveness to the ‘voices from below’ and to the ‘new passions and forces that develop in the bosom of society’, a theory is elaborated that expands the traditional Marxian dialectic to the struggles of racialised groups, women and other minorities. In so doing, it offers a basis from which to re-appraise liberatory politics, and to renew the emancipatory thrust of Marx’s writings.

The Johnson-Forest Tendency, radicalising Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma

One of the studies that influenced US policies on race and integration the most after the second world war is Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma from 1944. At the time of publication, it received much praise from leading intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois and the novelist Richard Wright. In this article, however, the author explores a neglected Marxist critique of Myrdal’s work by Raya Dunayevskaya, who then worked closely with C. L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs in the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT). In addition to criticising Myrdal’s liberal position, the JFT developed a critique of class reductionist Marxists. Hence, this article examines the JFT’s critique of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma as a resource to advance further Marxist debates on the relationship between race and class today.

The Self-Education of Rae Spiegel (Raya Dunayevskaya): Child Radicalism and Abolitionist Pedagogies at the Crossroads of Great Migrations

Abstract: This essay explores pedagogies of abolition in the wake of World War I through the intellectual biography of Rae Spiegel, the child revolutionary who became economist, feminist, and Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. Anchoring her work in the tradition of nineteenth-century abolitionists, Dunayevskaya co-constructed schools of insurgency and outlets for the creative expression of subjugated peoples, including youth, for over sixty years. Offering critical and contextual readings of Dunayevskaya's archives of girlhood, this study locates the roots of her abolitionist pedagogies in Black study, cross-racial and cross-generational collaborations, and "Baby Red" revolts against schooling across two empires. It argues that Dunayevskaya deployed story, personal history, and the archive as pedagogical invitations to self-teaching and radical forms of collectivity.

She-Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya

The article presents an attempt to answer the following question: why was Raya Dunayevskaya, a prominent Marxist humanist philosopher, forgotten in terms of the general academic landscape of the analysis of Marxism in relation to the USSR? Dunayevskaya corresponded and worked with influential left-wing intellectuals, such as Leo Trotsky and Erich Fromm, she wrote an extensive number of articles and books regarding Marxist humanism and was an activist herself; however, she was not remembered as either philosopher or activist in the same way her colleagues were. In the article, it will be shown that Dunayevskaya's background as an Eastern European woman who criticized the USSR, as well as the peculiarity of the topic she chose to write about — Marxist humanism — prevented her from becoming a well-known left-wing philosopher, despite deserving this status. This is going to be demonstrated via outlining her path, accounting for her intellectual interactions with left-wing activists and philosophers; analyzing her philosophical ideas regarding Marxist humanism; and tracing her influence on contemporary post-colonial and feminist research. In doing so, Dunayevskaya's legacy as a Marxist humanist philosopher might be restored and reexamined, highlighting women's influence over the academic landscape of the twentieth century.

Raya Dunayevskaya: Hegel ve Marx Arasındaki Diyalektik Sınırlar

This article aims to discuss the dialectical relationship between Hegel and Marx, based on the Marxist-humanist thought of which Raya Dunayevskaya is the founder, through the concept of "alienated labor", which is one of the fundamental phenomena of Marxism. For Dunayevskaya, Marx's emphasis on humanism in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, is directly linked to his discovery of the revolutionary aspect of the dialectics of negativity, which was at the heart of Hegel's absolute idealism. Thus, from the moment when workers' movements discover the dialectic of absolute negativity, they are transformed into freedom struggles capable of human self-determination. Thus, the dialectical law formulated by Hegel as the ‘negation of the negation’ is read by Marx as the first negative, the sublate of alienated labor. For Dunayevskaya, Marx is the only one who, unlike traditional Marxism, can save the Hegelian dialectic from its mystic aura by transforming it into a philosophy of liberation. For Dunayevskaya, the dialectical boundaries between Marx and Hegel are determined by the absolute negativity/ dialectic of negativity that Marx thinks he depts to Hegel. Keywords: Raya Dunayevskaya, Karl Marx, Hegelian Dialectics, Alienated Labor, Marxist- Humanism.

Louis Dupré, Dialectical Humanist

Louis Dupré’s death marks the passing of a philosopher who made a profound contribution to the study of Marx, Hegel, and the wider tradition, and who needs to be reread today. This memoriam acknowledges his importance through placing him in conversation with the great Marxist humanist Raya Dunayevskaya.

An Exploration of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection – Marxist-Humanism: A Half-Century of its World Development

Through an exploration of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, major themes of Dunayevskaya’s contribution to Marxist thought and action are presented. Her view of Marx as a philosopher of revolution in permanence, her interpretation of Lenin as a Hegelian-Marxist thinker-activist revolutionary, her reading of Hegel’s Absolutes as New Beginning for our age, her insistence that human subjects of social transformation are not alone muscle but Mind, are revolutionary Reason as well as force, and her efforts to work out and practice a dialectic of organisation and philosophy through the Marxist-Humanist organisation she founded, News and Letters Committees, are briefly discussed using documentation from her archives, which have recently been made available on the Internet.

Raya Dunayevskaya and the Philosophy of Marxist-Humanism: Review of Russia and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day by Raya Dunayevskaya

ABSTRACTThe life-work of the Marxist-Humanist revolutionary philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya is examined through a review of two new collections of her writings—Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day. The development of her ideas from the theory of state-capitalism to the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism is presented. Her view of Marx’s “philosophic moment”—The 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts—is discussed together with her translation and analysis of Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic (Lenin’s “philosophic preparation for revolution”). Dunayevskaya’s own plunge into Hegel’s Absolutes—Absolute Negativity as New Beginning—is presented. The various dimensions of Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism are seen in the context of her as a practicing revolutionary in the United States, aligning with multiple subjects of revolution: workers, Afro-Americans, women, and youth, as well as her working out international solidarity with movements and groups in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Humanist and Anti-Humanist Discourse after Marx

This paper is concerned with evaluating humanist and anti-humanist discourse after Marx and assessing Louis Althusser’s contention of having identified an epistemological break in the work of Marx, assigning Marx’s early work to an ideological humanism and his late work to a scientific historical materialism, the science of social formations. Althusser held that the function of philosophy was precisely to distinguish ideological concepts from scientific ones and that the early Marx wrote captive by the humanist ideology of Feuerbach. Other writers held that precisely the early writings of Marx gave socialism its humanist content and thus constituted a theory of liberation, which an economism based only on the later writings had missed. Consequently, a look at the sources, meaning Marx’s works, and at the humanist interpretation of Marx, exemplified in the works of Georg Lukacs, Raya Dunayevskaya, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, as well as the anti-humanist interpretation of Marx found in Althusser, is necessary in order to evaluate Althusser’s claims. Are Marx’s early writings ideological and his later writings scientific or is there a continuity in Marx’s writings? What function did the focus on either the early or the late writings serve? What was the mode of existence of these discourses?

In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs by Stephen M. Ward

Reviewed by: In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs by Stephen M. Ward Christopher Powell Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2016) Stephen Ward's In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs focuses on the period from 1940 to 1963, during which time the ideology of Grace Lee and James Boggs morphed from Marxist left to Black nationalist. Ward argues that, along with others, James and Grace Lee Boggs, laid "the organizational and ideological groundwork for the emergence of Black Power in the middle of the 1960s." (1–2) Ward's argument, however, is unconvincing, and perhaps more importantly, eclipsed by the backdrop of Marxist factionalism. In Love and Struggle is divided into three parts. The first is biographical, examining the early lives of the book's subjects. Boggs, an African American, was born in 1919 near Selma, Alabama. Joining the Great Migration, he arrived in Detroit in May 1937, eventually gaining employment with Chrysler and with it, membership in United Auto Workers Local 7. He also joined American Youth for Democratic Action, the Young Communist League's successor organization. In 1946, disillusioned, he split from the Communists, joining the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (swp). Grace Lee's trajectory differed significantly. Born in Providence, Rhode [End Page 343] Island, in 1915 to successful Chinese immigrants, she entered Barnard at 16 and graduated from Bryn Mawr with a PhD in philosophy in 1940. She moved to Chicago, where she came into contact with the Workers Party. In 1941, Ward says, "she became a Trotskyist." (85) In order to understand the ensuing narrative, Ward provides a brief history of the American Marxist left of the 1930s and 1940s. A decade after being expelled from the Communist Party in 1928, James Cannon, Martin Ahern, and others formed the Socialist Workers' Party. In 1940, 40 percent of the membership split to form a rival Trotskyist organization – the Workers' Party (wp). In Chicago, Ahern mentored Grace Lee as a Marxist. She became an accomplished Marxist scholar, the first to translate several of Marx's essays into English. She soon joined a faction of the wp known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency (jft), named for its pseudonymous leaders J. R. Johnson and Freddie Forest, in actuality Marxist intellectual C.L.R. James and, former secretary to Trotsky himself, Raya Dunayevskaya. In 1947, condemning the wp for having "lost all confidence in the American working class," (125) the jft split from the wp and soon rejoined the swp. In 1950 the jft formally rejected Leninism, and thereby Trotskyism as well, effectively cutting its ties with the swp. Now an independent Marxist organization with a membership of about 75 people, the jft changed its name to Correspondence. The following year James Boggs and a group of Detroit comrades split from the swp and joined Correspondence. Grace Lee and James Boggs met when the organization relocated Grace to Detroit in 1953 to edit the group's eponymously titled publication. Part Two covers the period from 1953 to 1958 during which Correspondence focused on publishing. Boggs wrote; Lee edited. C.L.R James, for the most part, exercised editorial control, albeit from abroad. During this period three issues competed for the group's attention: the Kenyan independence struggle, the Hungarian Revolution, and the civil rights movement in the United States. Boggs and Lee immersed themselves in Kenya solidarity work, taking time in 1954 to marry. About the same time, Dunayevskaya and roughly half of Correspondence's membership split, citing, in reference to C.L.R. James, "the rottenness of Johnsonism." (196) Following the failed Hungarian Revolution, C.L.R. James, convinced that Hungarian anti-Communists were leading the world's working-class struggle, directed Correspondence to give substantial coverage to the subject. Far more interested in anti-colonialism abroad and civil rights at home, the Boggses did not share C.L.R. James' enthusiasm. Part Three concerns the period 1958 to 1963. During this time Correspondence gave particular attention to Robert Williams, naacp Field Secretary in Monroe County, North...

Dialectical tensions

There has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse, particularly regarding their shared concern with humanism and dialectics. Recent edited collections on Dunayevskaya’s correspondence have, however, drawn a sharp contrast between the conceptions of the dialectical method: Dunayesvkaya, who emphasized the need for ‘philosophic new beginnings’ to offer a new relationship between theory and practice, and Herbert Marcuse who, despite his piercing identification of the one-dimensionality of late capitalism, continued with a problematic basis in (orthodox) Marxist categories. In this review essay, we outline the latest of these two volumes and its distinct contributions before engaging in a critique of Marcuse’s restrictions on humanism and dialectics, via a comparison with Dunayevskaya’s dialectical approach that was premised on questioning ‘the problems of the age’ and emphasized the open and negative polarity of dialectical possibilities.

Film Review: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, by Grace Lee

Grace Lee American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, 2013, LeeLee Films. It is difficult to reconcile the opening images of Grace Lee's film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs with its opening monologue. As a seemingly fragile old woman pushes a walker past the desolate ruins of Detroit's Packard plant, we hear her say, 'I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit.' The initial temptation is to read the opening ironically, as in Mark Binelli's (2012) Detroit City is the Place to Be, or any of the other versions of Detroit as urban dystopia that plague our popular consciousness. This sense of irony is reinforced by the filmmaker's frequent use of dissolves that juxtapose images of Detroit's past as a bustling, thriving, racially segregated metropolis with its present as a partially deserted majority black city. However, irony is not a trope to describe the life of activist, thinker and revolutionary Grace Lee Boggs. And as the film unfolds, it is clear that Grace Lee the filmmaker loves Grace Lee Boggs, her subject and namesake, too much to simply impose such an irony. Lee Boggs loves her adopted hometown, and that love is the very antithesis of irony: it is passionate, committed, and frequently, it seems from the backdrops of gutted homes and burned-out businesses that texture this film, unrequited. And so viewers are left to ponder: if not irony, then what does Lee Boggs mean when, in surveying the devastation, she remarks, and this is a symbol of how giants fall'? The giants Grace Lee Boggs has seen fall are many. As a testament to a life lived at the intersection of every radical movement and revolution that has come to define the 20th century, American Revolutionary traces a life that embodies all of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the project of revolutionary change. Born Grace Lee in 1915, she trained as a philosopher but was unable, as a Chinese-American woman, to find academic employment due to the racism and sexism of the 1930s. Lee Boggs found her way to Marxism through her work in Chicago's black community, where she came under the influence of C.L.R. James. Arising out of her experience in Chicago and the influence of James, she came to see the black community as the lynchpin to building an American revolutionary movement. However, she also became convinced that James and fellow Trotskyite Raya Dunayevskaya were mired in patterns of thinking inherited from the Russian Revolution, and so she came to Detroit, then ground zero of working-class politics and therefore revolutionary politics, to edit the socialist newspaper Correspondence. It was to be written by the social forces she saw as being at the forefront of a new American Revolution: blacks, women and youth. And it was in Detroit that she met the revolutionary autodidact and Chrysler line worker, James 'Jimmy' Boggs, and began an enduring life partnership with him, committed to thinking through, and perhaps fomenting, the next American Revolution. Inspired by Malcolm X, black nationalism and the black power movements, Grace and Jimmy became instrumental in organising the African-American community in what was then, and remains, the most racially segregated city in the USA. …

Did Lenin Refound Marxist Dialectics in 1914?

During the twentieth century a number of competing accounts of Lenin’s theory and practice have sought to reclaim its true meaning from ossification under Stalinism. One account popular today is the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks written in 1914 and 1915. According to thinkers such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin Anderson, Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic represent a radical break from classical dialectical materialism. For these Hegelian-Marxists, Lenin’s acerbic remarks on Engels’s and Plekhanov’s dialectics reveal him as the forerunner of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse and represent a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the dialectics of revolution. In this article I submit these arguments to the test of a fine grained textual analysis. I conclude, opposite to the Hegelian-Marxist narrative, that Lenin neither intended to nor accomplished a refoundation of Marxist dialectics in 1914. The notion of quantity-quality leaps Lenin adds to his works from 1914 onwards show him less as an innovator in Marxist philosophy and more as a keeper of the flame of dialectical materialist orthodoxy.

New Forces of Resistance: Antiessentialist Revolutionary Subjectivity in Marxist Theory

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that, around the turn of the twentieth century, working-class fragmentation forced an unresolvable crisis upon Marxist theory and practice. This crisis revolves around Marxist theory’s notion of the working class as the revolutionary subject and the problem that arises when this notion fails to materialize in the real world. While taking this criticism seriously, the current essay also explores the question of whether or not this crisis is in fact unresolvable and inherent to Marxist theory as such. This is accomplished by turning to the thought of two nonacademic Marxist thinkers, C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. Ultimately, this essay points toward possible alternative conceptions of Marxism’s revolutionary subject(s).

The enduring significance of the thought of Karl Marx

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess Marx's enduring significance in the center of his thought, the first volume of Capital. In Capital and related writings, Marx systematically works out his theory of value. Although Marx's value theory has been widely thought to be internally inconsistent, the “myth of inconsistency” in reclaiming Marx's “Capital” has been recently refuted by Kliman.Design/methodology/approachBased on Kliman's refutation, a logically coherent interpretation of Marx's theory is on hand. The paper therefore aims to bring out the philosophical character of Marx's critique of political economy, to which the terms and relations of value theory are essential. It is rooted in the abiding humanism he first discovered through his critical appropriation and transformation of Hegelian philosophy.FindingsFollowing Raya Dunayevskaya in Marxism and Freedom, this paper interprets Marx to have founded a new critical science of society “that was at the same time a philosophy of history.” Hence Marx's use of ontological categories in Capital (“substance,” “essence,” “appearance”) is fully methodologically self‐conscious and deliberate. Categories derived from Hegel's Science of Logic (as Lenin rightly grasped) explain the “bewitched and distorted world” of capitalist social relations.Originality/valueThis paper shows that, thinking historically, Marx works out the “notion” of capital from the standpoint of its negation. As if seen through a camera obscura, capital is the domination of alienated, past, objectified, abstract, and dead labor over living labor power. In conclusion, emphasis is placed on the subjective as well as the objective condition necessary to the revolutionary transcendence of the law of value.

Book Review: The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, by Raya Dunayevskaya. Edited and introduced by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson. Boston: Lexington Books, 2002

Book Review: The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, by Raya Dunayevskaya. Edited and introduced by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson. Boston: Lexington Books, 2002

The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom

The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx by Raya Dunayevskaya, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson; Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough by August H. Nimtz, Jr.; The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition by John ReesThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Raya Dunayevskaya’s Conception of Ultimate Reality and Meaning

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

The Past Is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960's. By Sheila Rowbotham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. - Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (Second Edition). By Raya Dunayevskaya. With a new foreword by Adrienne Rich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

The Past Is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960's. By Sheila Rowbotham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. - Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (Second Edition). By Raya Dunayevskaya. With a new foreword by Adrienne Rich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Reviews and notes

Polling a People of Paradox Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). Richard F. Hamilton and James D. Wright, The State of the Masses (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1986). James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith, Beliefs About Inequality: Americans’ Views of What Is and What Ought to Be (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1986). Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon, The American Perception of Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, by Rick Roderick, St. Martin's Press, 1986, 194 pages. $12.95. By Raya Dunayevskaya: Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1985), 308 pp., $38.50 hardcover, $15.95 paper. Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), 250 pp., $19.95 hardcover, $10.95 paper. Philosophy and Revolution from Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao (New York: Delacorte Press, 1973), out of print. Marxism and Freedom from 1776 until Today (New York: Twayne Publishing, 1958), out of print. Originary Politics: Dick Howard's From Marx to Kant Nomadology: The War Machine by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Semiotext(e) Press, 1986), 147 pp., $4.95.