Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism

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 Her final, unfinished and unpublished studies on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy"" are examined in the concluding part.