The historical past of girls thinkers is marked by enforced obsolescence, particularly as soon as male counterparts begin working in the identical terrain. Consider Hypatia or Rosa Luxemburg, practically forgotten within the years following their assassinations. Generally curiosity in these thinkers is revived, nonetheless, years or centuries later. The life and work of Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987)—a Marxist, a Russian immigrant, a humanist, an anti-racist, a feminist, a political economist, a thinker, and a revolutionary—illustrates one thing of this sample, in what could possibly be thought-about her a number of “lives.”
Dunayevskaya burst onto the U.S. mental scene in 1944–1945, when her Marxist critique of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state-capitalist society appeared within the American Economic Review. The following debate concerned responses defending the united states by Paul Baran and Oskar Lange, additionally reaching the entrance web page of the New York Instances. But by the following decade, when the talk over “totalitarianism” reached its zenith, little point out could possibly be discovered of Dunayevskaya’s pioneering writings on the topic. The Nineteen Forties was additionally the interval when she and C.L.R. James (and later Grace Lee Boggs) led the “Johnson-Forest Tendency” in its explorations of race, class, and the dialectics of revolution, as they moved in after which out of the mental orbit of Trotskyism.
A second wave of recognition greeted Dunayevskaya’s 1958 monograph, Marxism and Freedom. The guide contained the primary translation of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts and a humanist interpretation of the entire of Marx, from 1844 to Capital. Herbert Marcuse wrote within the preface that her remedy of Marx was unsurpassed for the reason that work of Georg Lukács. Marxism and Freedom anticipated the revolutionary wave of the Nineteen Sixties in its discussions of the Hungarian revolution and protests on the a part of employees and Black individuals within the U.S., particularly the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Some 1000 turned out to listen to Dunayevskaya communicate on the guide at Berkeley in 1959, with very massive audiences within the UK as properly. Erich Fromm saluted the guide’s dialogue of Marx, and it was reviewed extensively, together with by the London Instances. But by the Nineteen Seventies references to Dunayevskaya’s guide had change into rarer within the literature on Marx.
A 3rd, extra muted, wave of recognition for Dunayevskaya occurred throughout and after the publication of her second monograph, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (1973). With its authentic remedy of Hegel’s absolutes, this guide cemented Dunayevskaya’s status as a number one Marxist thinker, particularly within the space of dialectics. It additionally resulted in an invite to current a paper to the Hegel Society of America, one of many few instances a Marxist has performed so. Whereas the critiques had been respectful and the translations plentiful, the guide appeared concurrently these of European philosophers like Lukács or Theodor Adorno had been being translated into English. Dunayevskaya’s guide tended to be overshadowed by these contributions. On the time, few commentators famous how Dunayevskaya moved effortlessly from the dialectic correct to topics like Frantz Fanon and the African revolutions, the Black insurrections inside U.S. cities, the emergent ladies’s liberation motion, and the Japanese European revolts from the left in opposition to Stalinist communism. On the political degree, the flip to the correct within the Nineteen Seventies—and the guide’s fierce critique of Mao Zedong and Maoism, nonetheless in style in what remained of the New Left—restricted its viewers amongst leftist activists outdoors academia.
A fourth wave of recognition, or maybe actually recognition manqué, greeted Dunayevskaya’s third monograph, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982). This guide contained the first-ever evaluation of Luxemburg as feminist, the primary extensively disseminated evaluation of gender in Marx’s late Ethnological Notebooks, and a hard-hitting dialogue of feminism, race, and revolution that pulled no punches by way of critiques of dominant types of feminism, particularly within the U.S. The remedy of the late Marx featured a searing critique of Engels’s economistic reductionism on ladies’s liberation, and this was adopted up by unstinting critiques of Lenin and Trotsky in addition to Luxemburg herself on the failures of what Dunayevskaya termed “post-Marx Marxism” to satisfy the profound legacies left to them by Marx. The guide appeared at a time when neoliberalism was coming to the fore. Right now, the mental left (together with its feminist wings), was shifting away from Marxism and from humanism towards poststructuralism. On this ambiance, the guide acquired few distinguished critiques. One main exception was a 1986 essay on Dunayevskaya by one of many period’s paramount feminist thinkers, the poet Adrienne Wealthy; however this alone couldn’t stem the tide.
Within the 2020s, are we on the verge of a fifth wave of recognition for Dunayevskaya’s work? A number of research strongly influenced by Dunayevskaya, together with from a number of the authors of this weblog, have acquired some consideration within the 2010s. New collections of Dunayevskaya’s writings have additionally begun to seem. In an period when it’s changing into more and more unimaginable to debate race or gender with out taking a look at capital and sophistication, or vice versa, when the entire structuralist and poststructuralist framework—anti-dialectical and anti-humanist—has receded considerably, and when Russian imperialism is as soon as extra rearing its head (and clashing with Western imperialism), is there room for an actual revival of the work of Raya Dunayevskaya’s intersectional Marxism avant la lettre? The authors of this weblog have tried to contribute to such a chance by way of the publication of our edited quantity, Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. Surprisingly, ours is the primary quantity of essays ever printed on the life and work of this exceptional thinker-activist. Allow us to hope it is not going to be the final.
Kevin B. Anderson
Kevin B. Anderson is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at College of California, Santa Barbara, civilly appointments in Feminist Research and Political Science. He’s the writer of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary, 2005), Marx at the Margins (2010/2016), and Dialectics of Revolution (2020). Amongst his edited volumes are the Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with Peter Hudis, 2004) and the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell, 2012). He additionally writes recurrently for New Politics, The Worldwide Marxist-Humanist, and Jacobin on Marxism and on worldwide politics and radical actions in Africa, Europe, and the Center East.
Kieran Durkin
Kieran Durkin is Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow on the College of York (UK), at the moment learning the Marxist Humanist custom. He’s writer of Erich Fromm’s Radical Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and co-editor, with Joan Braune, of Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future (Bloomsbury, 2020). He has appeared within the European Journal of Social Concept, New German Critique, Distinktion, and Jacobin.
