Articles tagged “Dunayevskaya; Raya”

This volume contains annotated selections from Raya Dunayevskaya’s lifelong writings on Hegel, Marx, and dialectics, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson.  It comprises work on dialectics that did not appear in Philosophy and Revolution (1973) and other of her books published during her lifetime.  It begins with one of Dunayevskaya’s last writings on dialectics, followed by a closely linked text, her 1953 “Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes,” which first carved out her own unique concept of dialectic.  The volume also includes substantial outlines of major works by Hegel such as the Phenomenology and the Logic.

In addition, it features a selection of her letters on dialectics to Black, labor, and student activists, as well as to the philosophers and social theorists Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, C. L. R. James, Grace Lee Boggs, Jonathan Spence, George Armstrong Kelly, and Louis Dupré.  Finally, it contains writings from Dunayevskaya’s last years on dialectics of organization and philosophy, connected to an unfinished book on that subject that sought to go beyond the dichotomy in radical thought between the vanguard party and grassroots spontaneous movements.  The editors have also contributed an introduction, “Raya Dunayevskaya’s Concept of Dialectic,” that situates her writings on dialectics within a larger tradition involving earlier thinkers like Lukács, Adorno, James, and Lenin, as well as more recent ones like Derrida.