This Political-Philosophic Letter of Raya Dunayevskaya speaks to the need to return to philosophical roots at times of deep crisis, including addressing the question of how to maintain independence when fighting counter-revolution.
Science of Logic
Essay: The Forum in Defense of Territory and Mother Earth–Unity of the struggles from a dialectical perspective, and what comes next?
August 29, 2020In light of the Zapatistas’ Forum in Defense of Territory and Mother Earth, Héctor explores the search for unity by diverse movements in relation to Hegel’s dialectic of the whole and the parts.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Urgently needed in a time of political crisis: Philosophy and revolution as process
November 13, 2019Recalling the Watergate break-in and cover-up that led to President Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation, the text goes into the discussion of practicing dialectics and working out the unity of philosophy and revolution for the current moment of crisis.
From the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Iran–Unfoldment of, and contradictions in, revolution
January 30, 2018Excerpt from Dunayevskaya’s March 25, 1979, Political-Philosophic Letter “Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution” that gives a history of revolt and speaks to today’s rebellions in that country by workers, women and youth.
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Historic initiative of the masses and Lenin’s philosophic break
November 14, 2017Raya Dunayevskaya’s outline for a 1948 speech in Pittsburgh for the Russian Revolution’s anniversary; and “Lenin and the Dialectic: A Mind in Action,” taking up Lenin’s philosophical preparation for revolution. .
As Others See Us: The new French edition of Marxism and Freedom ‘To retake the historical initiative’
January 31, 2017Frédéric Monferrand introduces the new French edition of Marxism and Freedom. This excerpt concentrates on how the work reconstructs the Hegelian philosophical consistency of Marx’s Marxism so that it comes to life–from the 1844 Manuscripts to “Capital,” through the idea that history is the history of the efforts of humanity to make itself free.
Philosophic Dialogue: Dialectic of the party or dialectic of philosophy and organization?
July 5, 2016Eugene Gogol explores the point that the radical heart of Hegelian dialectics is the negation of the negation–the positive within the negative that constructs the new society. He traces this idea in Marx and Lenin and then how Raya Dunayevskaya saw this dialectic expressed in her breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes, where she ascertained a dual movement: a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory and the movement from theory to philosophy.
Essay: Revolutionary feminism and Hegel’s notion of Life
March 15, 2016Olga Domanski delves into G.W.F. Hegel’s section on “Life” in his Science of Logic to show its meaning for the women’s movement today, facing lethal attacks on abortion rights and an alarming increase in rapes, battering, poverty and unemployment as well as an ever-widening gap between feminist theory and the lives of Black and working women.
Readers’ Views, Sept.-Oct. 2015, Part 2
August 31, 2015Readers’ thoughts on “Dialectics of Philosophy and of Forces of Revolution”; “Free Mumia!”; “Federico Arcos, 1920-2015”; and a section of “Voices from Behind the Bars.”
Philosophic Dialogue: On the 1953 letters
March 8, 2015In Hegel we witness subjectivity coming out of objectivity, and the opposite movement. Dunayevskaya’s May 20, 1953, Letter interprets the Hegelian dialectic in a revolutionary way. What philosophical-political conclusions can be made?
May 20, 1953, letter on Absolute Mind
January 28, 2015Raya Dunayevskaya’s May 20, 1953, letter is one of the historic-philosophic writings included in The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism.
Philosophic dialogue on Dunayevskaya’s May 12, 1953, letter on Hegel’s Absolutes
November 23, 2014Raya Dunayevskaya’s May 12, 1953, letter on Hegel’s Absolutes needs to be read in the context of how what is embryonic is developed, and of the continuity and discontinuity in relationship to her earlier thinking and to the Johnson-Forest Tendency.
1953 letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, Part 2 of 3
November 22, 2014Raya Dunayevskaya’s May 12, 1953, letter—presented in two parts, beginning in the previous issue—is one of the historic-philosophic writings included in The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism.
Dialectics of revolution: American roots and world Humanist concepts, Part II
September 14, 2014From the November-December 2010 News & Letters
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Editor’s note: For the centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya’s birth, we present excerpts from her March 21, 1985, lecture at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, at the opening of a three-month exhibition of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (RDC). The [=>]
The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism
September 9, 2014From the May 2003 issue of News & Letters.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives
Editor’s note: Raya Dunayevskaya’s “Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes” were a philosophic breakthrough that led to the birth of Marxist-Humanism. We are reprinting this 1987 commentary by her where she reexamined them in light of her effort to work [=>]
1953 letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, Part 1 of 3
August 30, 2014Raya Dunayevskaya’s May 12, 1953, letter—presented in two parts, here and in the next issue—is one of the historic-philosophic writings included in The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism
Hegel’s Absolute Idea is for workers
May 5, 2013Although we, as a state capitalist tendency, had been saying for years that we live in an age of absolutes, that the task of the theoreticians was the working out materialistically of Hegel’s last chapter on The Absolute Idea, we were unable to relate the daily struggles of the workers to this total conception. The maturity of the age, on the other hand, disclosed itself in the fact that, with automation, the worker began to question the very mode of labor. Thus the workers began to make concrete, and thereby extended, Marx’s profoundest conceptions, for the innermost core of the Marxian dialectic, around which everything turns, is that the transformation of society must begin with the material life of the worker, the producer.
The 200th anniversary of Hegel’s absolute method
November 29, 2012Essay
by Ron Kelch
All revolutions, in the sciences no less than in general history, originate only in this, that the spirit of man, for the understanding and comprehension of himself, for the possessing of himself, has now altered his categories, uniting himself in a truer, deeper, more intrinsic relation with himself.
–Hegel
Today’s global search for a new [=>]
November-December 2012 issue of News & Letters is now available on the web
November 24, 2012Lead
Obama’s re-election doesn’t end clash of two worlds
The two worlds of the rulers and the ruled shone through the suffocating blanket of propaganda surrounding the election in which Barack Obama won a second term. A pronounced gender gap and long lines at the polls in African-American and Latino areas reflected the determination to defeat the [=>]
István Mészáros and the Dialectic
March 19, 2012Essay
by Eugene Walker
István Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Volume I, The Social Determination of Method. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
Global depression conditions have once again brought to the fore capitalism’s grave contradictions, and with it, new interest in the work of Karl Marx. This is not alone a theoretical question. The massive protests in [=>]