Raya DunayevskayaPhilosopher ofMarxist-Humanism![]() A book byEugeneGogolOn Raya Dunayevskaya . . .The first thing to strike areader,ranging through Dunayevskaya’s books, is the vitality, combativeness,relish, impatience of her voice. Hers is not the prose of adisembodied intellectual. She argues; she challenges; she urges on; sheexpostulates; her essays have the spontaneity of an extemporaneousspeech or of a notebook—you can hear her thinking aloud. . . .Raya Dunayevskaya caught fire from Marx, met it with her own fire,brought to the events of her lifetime a revitalized, refocused Marxism.. . . She’s trying to think, and write, the revolution in therevolution. —AdrienneRich, “Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marx” Dunayevskaya’s book goes beyondthe previous interpretations. It showsnot only that Marxian economics and politics are throughout philosophy,but that the latter is from the beginnings economics andpolitics. —HerbertMarcuse, Preface toMarxism and Freedom [Dunayevskaya] is permeated bythe conviction that socialism andfreedom are indivisible united, and can only exist together. She is aradical Humanist who deeply believes that the betterment of the welfareof all humanity can be achieved without the loss of individual freedom,through a new Humanism. —ErichFromm, Foreword toPhilosophy andRevolution About the book . . .This study of the origins anddevelopment of Marxist-Humanism probesthe philosophic-organizational labors of Raya Dunayevskaya. Beginningwith her work as secretary to Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico in1937-38, the book explores her development of state-capitalist theoryin the 1940s and her thought-dive into Hegel’s Absolutes in the 1950s. Each of Dunayevskaya’s major works—Marxismand Freedom (1958),Philosophyand Revolution(1973), andRosa Luxemburg, Women’sLiberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1983)—isexaminedinseparable from the objective world events and revolutionarysubjectivity that unfolded from the 1940s into the 1980s. The U.S.-Russia super-power rivalry, the Sino-Soviet Conflict, the riseof the Afro-Asian-Latin American and East European revolts andrevolutions, together with the Black Dimension, Women’s Liberation,anti-war youth, and rank-and-file labor struggles in the UnitedStates—all in fusion with the re-creation of the Hegelian andMarxiandialectic in the later half of the twentieth century—formed thecontours of Dunayevskaya’s labors traced within this new work. Herfinal, unfinished and unpublished studies on “Dialectics ofOrganization and Philosophy” are examined in the concluding part. egogol@hotmail.com |