From the September-October 2017 issue of News & Letters
Explore the new online Guide here!
“The whole question of the relationship of any ongoing event with the past, with the very concept of Archives, depends on the two opposite words—continuity and discontinuity. Whereas only great divides in epochs, in cognition, in personality, are crucial, and may relate to turning points in history, no discontinuity can really achieve that type of new epochal ‘moment’ unless it has established continuity with the historic course of human development.”
—Raya Dunayevskaya
The new online Guide at www.rayadunayevskaya.org contains clickable links to all the documents in the Archives. The website of the Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund presents the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection as she organized it, together with the Supplement organized after her death. This finding tool helps the reader or researcher locate items and grasp the structure of the Archives.
When Dunayevskaya donated her Archives, she stipulated that they should be open to anyone who wanted to study them. They are now available to anyone who can access the website. This is in addition to the entire 60+ years of News & Letters newspaper available on the News and Letters Committees website. The first 55 years are also hosted on the Marxists Internet Archive. The Raya Dunayevskaya subarchive of the Marxists Internet Archive also hosts a copy of the Guide and all the documents in the Collection and Supplement, along with a selection of documents transcribed in html (web format).
Raya Dunayevskaya; Charles Denby, editor of News & Letters and author of Indignant Heart;
and Ethel Dunbar, “Way of the World” columnist and contributor to Indignant Heart
This is an incredible resource for revolutionaries and scholars, seeking not only to understand the history of freedom struggles but to advance them today so as to transform the world. The Collection, together with Dunayevskaya’s books, encompasses the body of ideas of Marxist-Humanism she developed during a lifetime in the revolutionary movement.
Raya Dunayevskaya founded Marxist-Humanism in the United States and developed a revolutionary body of ideas.
With her donation of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection to the Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Dunayevskaya sought to share and record the development of the Marxist-Humanist body of ideas, its method, its test in world events, its battles with other revolutionary ideas, while she lived. She approved the documents to be included, organized the categories of their presentation, and wrote the introductory texts. The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection represents not only a vast assemblage of Marxist-Humanism’s documents, but her concept of the organization of Marxist-Humanist thought, its categories.
The over 17,000 pages of the Collection and its Supplement are a resource for students, researchers and activists in fields as diverse as philosophy, women’s studies, social theory, intellectual history and Black studies. Her writings spanned the world: her contributions to Soviet and East European studies, as well as to African and Middle Eastern regional studies, have been widely praised.
Presenting the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection online has been made possible by News and Letters Committees and the Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund.
Donations to keep making additions to the RDMF website can be sent to:
The Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund, 228 S. Wabash, Room 230, Chicago, IL 60604,
or online to News & Letters: https://newsandletters.org/support/.