Dunayevskaya, Raya

DUNAYEVSKAYA, RAYA (1910–1987). Noted philosopher and political activist, Dunayevskaya (née Rae Spiegel) is best remembered as one of the major figures in the 1940s–1980s effort to revive the Hegelian legacy and to create a “Marxist humanism.” For her, more than for any other activist-thinker, dialectics is revolutionary thought.

Born in Russia, Dunayevskaya emigrated to the United States in 1922 and rapidly became involved in radical activities, including Communist efforts to reach black workers. Expelled from the Communist Party’s youth section in 1928, she turned to Trotskyism, for a time in the 1930s serving as Trotsky’s secretary in Mexico. When she returned to the United States, she developed her theory of the Soviet Union as a state capitalist social formation. Active in Trotskyist circles, she helped found the “Johnson-Forest Tendency” (taking a party name of “Freddy Forest”) with C. L. R. James. Their group passed through the Socialist Workers and Workers parties, 1940–1951, producing bulletins to develop their own perspective. As an independent entity, they published the newspaper Correspondence from Detroit to express workers’ own views. Following James’s deportation, Dunayevskaya and others formed their own entity, the News and Letters Committees. For thirty-two years, she led the committees in their publication of many pamphlets and several books, and the monthly paper News and Letters.

As a political philosopher, Dunayevskaya proposed returning to the early Marx and his Hegelian roots, centering on the Marxist critique of alienation and its overcoming. Her best-known work, Marxism and Freedom (1958), was for her admirers (who included many New Leftists in the United States and abroad just learning about Marxism) an incisive introduction to Marx’s thought and to the continuity of the Hegelian-revolutionary tradition. Among her other works, Philosophy and Revolution (1973) theorized the era of Third World revolution, beginning in Cuba and extending to Vietnam and elsewhere. She again sought to show the linkage between actual revolutionary struggles and revolutionary philosophy as guidance for contemporary theory and praxis. Her final major work, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, emphasizes the new social forces of revolt, and the relevance of Marx and Luxemburg for the women’s liberation movement.

While small in numbers and modest in general impact following her death, her News and Letters group maintained a worldwide network of individuals drawn to Dunayevskaya’s ideas. She pioneered women’s leadership of radical activity prior to the New Left and attempted to realize the unity of theory and practice, which she took to be the core of the revolutionary Marxism.

Raya Dunayevskaya Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library. Wayne State University, Detroit.

Raya Dunayevskaya Archive, 1910-1987. Marxist Internet Archives Website.