Rosa Luxemburg Women S Liberation And Marx S Philosophy Of Revolution

This collection of 35 years of Dunayevskaya's writings, based on active participation, interviews, and meetings develops the dialectics of revolution which emerges from masses in motion, including not only women and men, but the forces of labour, youth, the black dimension and women's liberation.

Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day: Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya brings out the contemporary urgency of the totality of Marx’s body of ideas and activities, and the inseparability of his economics, humanism, and dialectic.

This study of the origins and development of Marxist-Humanism probes the philosophic-organizational labors of Raya Dunayevskaya. Beginning with her work as secretary to Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico in 1937-38, the book explores her development of state-capitalist theory in the 1940s and her thought-dive into Hegel's Absolutes in the 1950s. Each of Dunayevskaya's major works--Marxism and Freedom (1958), Philosophy and Revolution (1973), and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1983)--is examined inseparable from the objective world events and revolu-tionary subjectivity that unfolded from the 1940s into the 1980s. The U.S.-Russia super-power rivalry, the Sino-Soviet Conflict, the rise of the Afro-Asian-Latin American and East European revolts and revolutions, together with the Black Di-mension, Women's Liberation, anti-war youth, and rank-and-file labor struggles in the United States--all in fusion with the re-creation of the Hegelian and Marxian dialectic in the later half of the twentieth century--formed the contours of Dunayevskaya's labors traced within this new work. Her final, unfinished and unpublished studies on Dialectics of Organization and PhilosophyÓ are examined in the concluding part.

Marx worked out as a totally new relationship of philosophy to revolution. Today's revolutionaries turn their backs on this at their peril. Few thought systems have been as distorted and sometimes misconstrued as those of Marx and Hegel. Philosophy and Revolution, presented here in a new edition, attempts to save Marx from interpretations which restrict the revolutionary significance of the philosophy behind his theory. Developing her breakthrough on Hegel's Absolute Idea, Raya Dunayevskaya, who died in the June of 1987, aims at a total liberation of the human person-not only from the ills of a capitalist society, but also from the equally oppressive state capitalism of established communist governments. She assumes within her theory of class struggle issues as diverse as feminism, black liberation, and even the new nationalism of third world countries. Moreover, Dunayevskaya combines within herself an incorruptible objectivity with a passionate political attitude, making this work a vibrant and concrete discussion of the vicissitudes of society, justice, equality, and existence.

This book analyses the development of Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) as an outstanding Marxist thinker and socialist politician in the era of imperialism and revolution. Identifying the driving force behind Luxemburg’s development as the deep unity between her passionate, emphatic life and her political and theoretical work, the authors retrace the inner dynamics of its different stages while highlighting the deep rupture caused by the experience of the Russian Revolution. On the basis of new publications of her Polish works and other writings, Luxemburg's strategic approaches are located in an Eastern European context. The authors discuss Luxemburg’s unique analyses of the first experiments in socialist participation in government, of the first Russian revolution and of the forms of accumulation of capital to outline the foundations of her novel understanding of both democratic-socialist revolution and of a society that would point beyond social democracy as well as Bolshevism – a vision that will gain new significance in the twenty first century. This book looks upon the lasting heritage of Rosa Luxemburg as the groundbreaking thinker of the unity between democracy and socialism.

Raya Dunayevskaya is one of the twentieth century’s great but underappreciated Marxist and feminist thinkers. Her unique philosophy and practice of Marxist-Humanism—as well as her grasp of Hegelian dialectics and the deep humanism that informs Marx’s thought—has much to teach us today. From her account of state capitalism (part of her socio-economic critique of Stalinism, fascism, and the welfare state), to her writings on Rosa Luxemburg, Black and women’s liberation, and labor, we are offered indispensable resources for navigating the perils of sexism, racism, capitalism, and authoritarianism. This collection of essays, from a diverse group of writers, brings to life Dunayevskaya’s important contributions. Revisiting her rich legacy, the contributors to this volume engage with her resolute Marxist-Humanist focus and her penetrating dialectics of liberation that is connected to Black, labor, and women’s liberation and to struggles over alienation and exploitation the world over. Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism is recovered for the twenty-first century and turned, as it was with Dunayevskaya herself, to face the multiple alienations and de-humanizations of social life.

In this classic exposition of Marxist thought, Raya Dunayevskaya, with clarity and great insight, traces the development and explains the essential features of Marx's analysis of history. Using as her point of departure the Industrial and French Revolutions, the European upheavals of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Paris Commune of 1871, Dunayevskaya shows how Marx, inspired by these events, adapted Hegel's philosophy to analyze the course of history as a dialectical process that moves "from practice to theory." The essence of Marx's philosophy, as Dunayevskaya points out, is the human struggle for freedom, which entails the gradual emergence of a proletarian revolutionary consciousness and the discovery through conflict of the means for realizing complete human freedom. But freedom for Marx meant freedom not only from capitalist economic exploitation but also from all political restraints. Continuing her historical analysis, Dunayevskaya reveals how completely Marx's original conception of freedom was perverted through its adaptations by Stalin in Russia and Mao in China, and the subsequent erection of totalitarian states. The exploitation of the masses persisted under these regimes in the form of a new "state capitalism." Yet despite the profound derailment of Marxist political philosophy in the twentieth century, Dunayevskaya points to developments such as the Hungarian revolt of 1956, and the Civil Rights struggles in the United States as signs that the indomitable quest for freedom on the part of the downtrodden cannot be forever repressed. The Hegelian dialectic of events propelled by the spirit of the masses thus moves on inexorably with the hope for the future achievement of political, economic, and social freedom and equality for all.