From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Lebanon: The Test Not Only of the PLO but the Whole Left

November 23, 2024

It is crucial both to oppose Israel’s attacks on the Lebanese people and to confront the state of the resistance and its contradictions. To grapple with how the 1970s failed Lebanese revolution set the stage for today, we present this 1976 piece by Raya Dunayevskaya on the dialectic of developments, from regional rulers’ maneuvers, to the ambivalence of the Left, to the masses in motion.

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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Hegelian Leninism, Part Three

May 18, 2024

Third and last part of Dunayevskaya’s presentation on “Hegelian Leninism.” Here, the author deals with the transformation into opposite of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin’s seven last years (1917-1924), and what has happened with Marxism and Socialism since then, including her critique to the thought and practice of Mao Zedong.

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Down with Putin’s war on Ukraine!

February 27, 2022

No to war on Ukraine! The capitalist system in crisis ever veers toward war. Putin is not so much the exception but the embodiment of the ongoing shift in world politics, signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked. The destruction of democracy and the move to the Right, which Putin has aided, helps set the stage for that nightmare.

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Jonathan Spence (1936-2021)

February 3, 2022

Remembering Jonathan Spence, a noted China scholar at Yale and the author of more than a dozen books on Chinese history spanning centuries and social classes.

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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Rival approaches to Marxist humanism

May 8, 2021

Since the term “Marxist humanism” has once again become current, but subject to the most varying, and often sanitized, meanings, we present Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1961 writings on “Marxist Humanism in New Books and Reviews.” Once more, we face the questions she explored then: Why now, and how did these writers end up so opposite to where they seemed to be starting from?

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Youth: Marx speaks to youth alienation

Young people keep taking matters into our own hands. Our time of total crises calls for a philosophy to help us understand the problems at the root of our misery and give us hope we can create a new society. This makes Marx a contemporary for youth, looking for a way out of life under capitalism’s hopeless future.

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Editorial: Caucasus war concerns all of humanity

November 26, 2020

Humanity needs to take head of the warfare that broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in late September, over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh which took the lives of thousands of soldiers, and hundreds of innocent civilians, on both sides.

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IV. What to do in the face of compounding crises—medical, economic, political, and the philosophic void

April 30, 2020

Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part IV: In the absolute opposite of today’s society, one based on freely associated labor instead of slavery to capi­tal’s production for production’s sake, we can leave behind pervasive misery, precarity and antagonism, and self-development and cooperation can flourish, as can a rational relationship to nature. We can see the beginnings in self-organization from below and the ever-growing rejection of capitalism. Against the large part of the Left that focuses on the power of the state to combat disasters, we must bring out the self-activity of mass­es in motion and not disarm ourselves by separating mass struggles from dialectical philosophy of revolution.

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New book: Dunayevskaya on Russian Revolution

August 29, 2017

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, a new book collects writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on the Revolution, counter-revolution, and their consequences, aiming to help create new revolutionary beginnings today. .

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V. Lies, facts and ground

May 17, 2017

The administration’s war against truth and reason, such as climate change denial, calls for more than fact-checking. What is needed is to establish a totally opposite ground, that of liberation.

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Philosophic Dialogue: Dialectic of the party or dialectic of philosophy and organization?

July 5, 2016

Eugene 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.

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V. Toward organizational new beginnings

May 13, 2016

Part V of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Together with the depths of counter-revolution, the passion for philosophy points to both the need for and the potential for totally new beginnings in the transformation of society, for new banners of freedom as a polarizing force.

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Editorial: Putin’s retrogressionism

December 10, 2015

Putin found a formula: to participate in genocide while claiming to be fighting “terrorism.” This says everything about the nature of his retrogressive rule, and about the hypocrisy of the U.S. and Europe

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The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism

September 9, 2014

From 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 [=>]

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Readers’ Views, July-August 2014, Part 1

July 7, 2014

From the July-August 2014 issue of News & Letters

RESPONSES TO MARXIST-HUMANIST PERSPECTIVES

The Marxist-Humanist Perspectives (N&L, May-June 2014) give a critical assessment of the polarization between the oppressive forces of capital’s social relations and humanity’s efforts to realize human dignity. It shows humans are not just passive victims of capital. First [=>]

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From the U.S. to Ukraine, crises and revolts call for philosophy

May 5, 2014

Revolution and counter-revolution contend now, while the prolonged global capitalist economic crisis refuses to end. The question arises: where is the needed banner of total uprooting of the system and creation of new human relations as the goal? This objective need is present in every struggle from outright revolution in the Middle East to movements in the U.S. Beset by attacks and contradictions, they have in turn sparked counter-revolutions.

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Ukraine and Bosnia: historic uprisings

March 16, 2014

In Ukraine, an unexpected eruption of mass struggle led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s corrupt, oligarchic, and ultimately murderous President Viktor Yanukovych. In Bosnia, at the same time, massive, nationwide discontent with the corrupt system left in place when the 1995 Dayton Accords partitioned the country has led to the equally unexpected creation of new forms of democratic organization.

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Vorkuta revolt 60 years on: ‘Russia more than ever full of revolutionaries…’

July 3, 2013

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya:
In 1953 Russian slave laborers in Vorkuta acted

Editor’s note: July-August marks the 60th anniversary of the historic strike in the Russian slave labor camp in Vorkuta. Following Dunayevskaya’s May 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, the 1953 revolts in Russia and East Germany were formative events for Marxist-Humanism. Few agreed with [=>]

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Escape from Camp 14

April 10, 2013

Escape from Camp 14 is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in a North Korean slave labor camp to escape, doing so at the age of 23 in 2005. Shin’s life is testament to the putrid essence of that militarized, state-capitalist totalitarian society.

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