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Raya Dunayevskaya

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Raya Dunayevskaya (1910 – 1987) was the founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism in the United States of America. First known as Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.

Contents

Biography

Born in Ukraine, Dunayevskaya immigrated to the United States and joined the revolutionary movement in her childhood. Active in the American Communist Party youth organization, she was expelled at age 18 as a "Trotskyist" for wanting to hear both sides of the argument after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. By the following year she found a group of independent Trotskyists in Boston, led by Antoinette Bucholz Konikow, an advocate of birth control and legal abortion. Without getting permission from the U.S. Trotskyist organization, she went to Mexico in 1937 to serve as Leon Trotsky's Russian language secretary during his exile there. Having returned to Chicago in 1938 after the deaths of her father and brother, she broke with Trotsky in 1939 when he continued to maintain that the Soviet Union was still a "workers' state" even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact). She opposed any notion that workers should be asked to defend this "workers' state" allied with Nazi Germany in a world war. Toward the end of her life, she stated that what she called "my real development" only began after her break with Trotsky.

Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx's early writings (later known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, or Humanist Essays) led to her 1941-1942 analysis that not only was Russia a state capitalist society, but that state capitalism was a new world stage.

In 1940 she took part in the split in the Socialist Workers Party that led to the formation of the Workers Party (WP), with whom she shared an objection to Trotsky's characterisation of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state. Within the WP, she formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency alongside C. L. R. James (she being "Freddie Forest" and he "J.R. Johnson", named for their party cadre names). The tendency argued that the Soviet Union was state capitalist, while the WP majority maintained that it was bureaucratic collectivist.

Differences within the WP steadily widened, and in 1947, after a brief period of independent existence during which they published a series of documents, the tendency returned to the ranks of the SWP. Their membership in the SWP was based on a shared insistence that there was a pre-revolutionary situation just around the corner, and the shared belief that a Leninist party must be in place to take advantage of the coming opportunities.

By 1951, with the failure of their shared perspective to materialise, the tendency evolved a theory that rejected traditional Leninism and saw the workers as being spontaneously revolutionary. This was borne out for them by the 1949 miners' strike. In later years they were to pay close attention to automation, especially in the automobile industry, which they came to see as paradigmatic of a new stage of capitalism. This led to the tendency leaving the SWP to begin independent work.

After more than a decade of developing the theory of state capitalism, Dunayevskaya deepened her study of the Hegelian dialectic, taking on a task the Johnson-Forest Tendency had set itself: exploring Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. She discovered in Hegel's Absolutes a dual movement: a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory and a movement from theory reaching to philosophy. She considered these 1953 letters to be "the philosophic moment" from which the whole development of Marxist-Humanism flowed.

In 1954-1955 Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James split. In 1955, she founded her own organization, News and Letters Committees, and a Marxist-Humanist newspaper, News and Letters, which remains in publication today. The newspaper is notable for the significant coverage it devotes to women's struggles, the liberation of workers, women, people of colour, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual rights and the disability rights movement, and not separating that coverage from philosophical and theoretical articles.

Dunayevskaya authored what came to be known as her "trilogy of revolution": Marxism and Freedom (1958), Philosophy and Revolution (1973), and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1982). In addition, she selected and introduced a collection of writings, published in 1985, titled Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution.

In the last year of her life she was working on a new book which she had tentatively titled, Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: The 'Party' and Forms of Organization Born Out of Spontaneity.

Raya Dunayevskaya's speeches, letters, publications, notes, recordings and other items are located in the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit. Microfilm copies of the collection are available from the WSU Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs. Guides to the collection are available from News & Letters.

Works

Marxism and Freedom: from 1776 Until Today

Published in 1958, this is the first expression in book form of Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxist Humanism. A central theme of Marxism and Freedom is Dunayevskaya's assertion that the "movement from practice is itself a form of theory." This concept was developed by Dunayevskaya from a direct encounter with Hegel's dialectical philosophy and particularly his Absolutes, which she interpreted as posing a dual movement from practice to theory, and from theory to practice. Blacks, workers, women, and youth struggling for freedom were not faceless masses to be led, she held, but the source of new stages of cognition because in their very actions was embedded a theory of human liberation. One example of this is the West Virginia Miners General Strike of 1949-1950, where Dunayevskaya pointed out that instead of merely demanding higher wages, the workers were asking questions such as, "What kind of labor should man do?" and "Why should there be such a gulf between thinking and doing?" She based the book's structure on her view that history and theory emanate from the movement from practice.

The book aimed to "establish the theory of Marxism on native grounds." The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Abolitionist movement, the American Civil War, and the fight for the Eight-hour day by American workers, and were seen by her as revolutionary American struggles which provided fertile ground for the Humanism of Marx. Dunayevskaya analyzed the latter struggles as making "historic contributions" to Marx's thinking, especially in the structure and content of his major theoretical work Capital. The new stage of Automation in production--whether in the mines with the "continuous miner" (a machine the miners called a "mankiller") or in the auto shops--with its consequent speed-up, was also seen by Dunayevskaya as a new stage in American worker revolt.

The 1958 edition of Marxism and Freedom contained the first published English translations of Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and of Lenin's notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic. She felt a false division had been made between the "young Marx" of 1844, and the "mature Marx" of Capital. Rather, she saw Marx's complete body of work as a development of 1844, where he broke with bourgeois society and labeled his own thought "a thoroughgoing Naturalism, or Humanism."

Among those who argued for separating Marx into two distinct thinkers--one young and idealistic and the other mature and scientific--were Soviet Union theoreticians. Dunayevskaya believed the Communist state turned Marxism into its opposite--the totalitarian theory and practice of Stalinist and post-Stalin USSR--and signaled a new stage of world state-capitalism. Marxism and Freedom presented an analysis of the USSR's economy as state-capitalist--rather than socialist, bureaucratic collectivist, or a Degenerated workers' state--based on Marx's economic categories and official Soviet statistics. She pointed to the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution as more than revolts against Communism, because they based themselves on Marx's Humanism. Later editions added critical analyses of Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution.

Marxist intellectual and well-known Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse wrote the Preface to the first edition of Marxism and Freedom, and Scottish Socialist Harry McShane wrote a Preface to the British edition. The 2000 edition featured a new foreword by Green Party activist and social theorist Joel Kovel.

Quotes

–from Marxism and Freedom

–from Philosophy and Revolution

–from Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution

External links

Bibliography

Books

Introductions

References

 

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