March 5th, 2011 will mark 140 years since the birth of a figure who should be as well-known and celebrated as Che Guevara: her name is Rosa Luxemburg. To commemorate the occasion, and to inaugurate a decade-long project to properly restore the life and thought of this extraordinary woman, Verso Books presents The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg.

The most comprehensive collection of Luxemburg’s letters ever published in English—over half of them translated here for the very first time—The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg is an irresistible compendium of correspondence from the heroic German revolutionary to her comrades, friends and lovers. Even for those who are familiar with her work, this is Rosa as never seen before— revealed in all her wit, eloquence and human warmth.

The letters will be accompanied by a plate section showcasing Luxemburg’s sketches and handwritten notes as well as photographs of her key correspondents, including leading figures in the international labor and socialist movements whom she counted as her closest friends: Leo Jogiches, Karl Kautsky, Clara Zetkin and Karl Liebknecht.

As a woman, a Pole and a Jew, Luxemburg’s climb to the top of German Social Democracy was one shadowed by great hostility. But bursting forth from these letters is the intellect and sheer dedication to a cause of an individual who would not be quietened—one well aware of her own power: “I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.”

To quote Peter Hudis, writing in his Introduction, “Rediscovering Rosa Luxemburg”:  One of the most insightful theorists and original personalities of modern radicalism, Rosa Luxemburg deserves a new hearing in light of the complex problems facing efforts at social transformation today … Her painstaking analysis and opposition to the logic of capital speaks especially powerfully to our time, poised as we are at the edge of an economic, political and ecological catastrophe …

Luxemberg’s fiercely independent intellect and uncompromising defense of human liberty speaks more powerfully to our era than to any other.

Rosa Luxemburg’s time is now.

Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed. To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America. But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism. While some of these writings show a problematically unilinear perspective and, on occasion, traces of ethnocentrism, the overall trajectory of Marx’s writings was toward a critique of national, ethnic, and colonial oppression and toward an appreciation of resistance movements in these spheres.

In 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels espoused an implicitly and problematically unilinear concept of social progress. Precapitalist societies, especially China, which they characterized in ethnocentric terms as a “most barbarian” society, were destined to be forcibly penetrated and modernized by this new and dynamic social system. In his 1853 articles for the New York Tribune, Marx extended these perspectives to India, while viewing the communal social relations and communal property of the Indian village as a solid foundation for “Oriental despotism.” Postcolonial and postmodern thinkers, most notably Edward Said, have criticized the Communist Manifesto and the 1853 India writings as a form of Orientalist knowledge fundamentally similar to the colonialist mindset.

By 1856-57, the anti-colonialist side of Marx’s thought became more pronounced, as he supported, also in the Tribune, the Chinese resistance to the British during the Second Opium War and the Sepoy Uprising in India. During this period, he began to incorporate some of his new thinking about India into one of his greatest theoretical works, the Grundrisse (1857-58). In this germinal treatise on the critique of political economy, he launched into a truly multilinear theory of history, wherein Asian societies were seen to have developed along a different pathway than that of the successive modes of production he had delineated for Western Europe.

During the 1860s, Marx concentrated on Europe and North America, writing little on Asia. It was in this period that he completed the first version of Capital, Vol. I, as well as most of the drafts of what became Vols. II and III of that work. But he also concerned himself with the dialectics of race and class during the long years of the American Civil War, 1861-65. Although the North was a capitalist society, Marx threw himself into the anti-slavery cause, critically supporting the Lincoln government against the Confederacy within the British and European labor and socialist movements. In his Civil War writings, he argued that white racism had held back labor as a whole, later writing in Capital that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where in a black skin it is branded.”

Marx also supported the Polish uprising of 1863, which sought to restore national independence to that long-suffering country. He and his generation of leftists viewed Russia as a malevolent, reactionary power, a form of “Oriental despotism” based in the communal social forms and property relations that predominated in the Russian village. It constituted the biggest threat to Europe’s democratic and socialist movements. Since Russian-occupied Poland stood between Russia proper and Western Europe, Poland’s revolutionary movement represented a deep contradiction within the Russian Empire, one that had hampered its efforts to intervene against the European revolutions of 1830 and initially, those in 1848 as well. As with India and China, by 1858 Marx also began to shift his view of Russia, taking note of the looming emancipation of the serfs and the possibility of an agrarian revolution, as seen in several of his articles on Russia for the Tribune.

The labor and socialist networks that Marx helped to form in Western Europe in support of the U.S. and Poland were crucial to the founding of the First International in 1864. During his years of involvement with the First International Marx focused to a great extent on Ireland. His theorization of Ireland marked the culmination of his writings on ethnicity, race, and nationalism. British workers, he held, were so greatly imbued with nationalist pride and great power arrogance toward the Irish that they had developed a false consciousness, binding them to the dominant classes of Britain, and thus attenuating class conflict within British society. This impasse could be broken only by direct support for Irish national independence on the part of the revolutionary elements within British labor, something that would also serve to reunite labor within Britain, where Irish immigrant labor formed a subproletariat. On more than one occasion, Marx linked his conceptualization of class, ethnicity, and nationalism for the British and the Irish to race relations in the U.S., where he compared the situation of the Irish to the African-Americans. He also compared the attitudes of the British workers toward the Irish to those of the poor whites of the American South, who had too often united with the white planters against their fellow Black workers. In this sense, he was creating a broad dialectical concept of class, race, and ethnicity.

By the 1870s, Marx returned to his earlier preoccupation with Asia, while also deepening his studies of Russia. Whereas he had previously concentrated on Russian foreign policy, he now began to learn Russian in order to study that country’s internal social structure. Marx’s interest in Russia increased with the publication of Capital in Russian in 1872, especially after the book generated more debate there than it had in Germany. Some of the changes Marx introduced into the 1872-75 French edition of Capital concerned the dialectic of capitalist development out of Western feudalism that was at the heart of the book’s part eight, “The Primitive Accumulation of Capital.” In direct and clear language, Marx now stated that the transition outlined in the part on primitive accumulation applied only to Western Europe. In this sense, the future of Russia was open, was not predetermined by that of Western Europe.

During the years 1879-82, Marx embarked upon a series of excerpt notebooks on scholarly studies on a multifaceted group of non-Western and non-European societies, among them contemporary India, Indonesia (Java), Russia, Algeria, and Latin America. He also made notes on studies of indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. One core theme of these excerpt notebooks was the communal social relations and property forms found in so many of these societies. In his studies of India, for example, two issues emerged. First, his notes indicated a new appreciation of historical development in India, as against his earlier view of that country as a society without history. Although he still saw the communal forms of India’s villages as relatively continuous over the centuries, he now noted a series of important changes within those communal forms. Second, these notes show his preoccupation, not with Indian passivity as in 1853, but with conflict and resistance in the face of foreign conquest, whether against the Muslim conquerors of the medieval period or the British colonialists of his own time. Some of that resistance was, he argued, based upon indigenous communal forms.

If Marx’s theorization of nationalism, ethnicity, and class culminated in his 1869-70 writings on Ireland, those on non-Western societies reached their high point in his 1877-82 reflections on Russia. In a series of letters and their drafts, as well as the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto he co-authored with Engels, Marx began to sketch a multilinear theory of social development and of revolution for Russia. Russia’s communal villages were contemporaneous with industrial capitalism in the West. If a village-based social revolution in Russia could draw upon the resources of Western modernity by linking up with a revolution on the part of the Western labor and socialist movements, Russia might be able to modernize in a manner far different from capitalist development, he wrote. Moreover, a revolution in rural Russia could be the “starting point” for such an international revolutionary outbreak, he concluded.

In sum, I argue in this study that Marx developed a dialectical theory of social change that was neither unilinear nor exclusively class-based. Just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction, so his theory of revolution began over time to concentrate more on the intersectionality of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and class. To be sure, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense, for the critique of a single overarching entity, capital, was at the center of his entire intellectual enterprise. But centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity. Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference, but also on occasion made those particulars — race, ethnicity, or nationality — determinants for the totality.

In Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat offers a comprehensive critique of the interrelated concepts of "victim" and "survivor" as they have been ideologically distorted in Western thought. Framed by the phenomenological perspective of Edmund Husserl, Nissim-Sabat carries out her argument through an intense engagement with current scholarly work on Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sophocles' Antigone, akrasia, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, feminist ph…

Die Schriften Raya Dunayevskayas, einer Schlüsselfigur des marxistischen Humanismus in den USA, skizzieren eine Philosophie der Befreiung, die dem modischen Abgesang auf die Dialektik ebenso entgegensteht wie einem Verharren in reiner Negativität. Gemäß Lenins Diktum, dass ein kluger Idealismus dem klugen Materialismus näher stehe als ein dummer Materialismus, unternimmt Dunayevskaya eine Hegel-Lektüre, die Subjekt, Praxis und Freiheit ins Zentrum rückt. Ebenso entschieden richtet sie Marx’ Philosophie der Revolution nicht nur gegen den östlichen Staatskapitalismus, sondern auch gegen Theoretiker des “Westlichen Marxismus” wie Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch oder Theodor W. Adorno – gestützt auf die Überzeugung, dass keine Philosophie ihren Namen verdient, die nicht die “Stimmen von unten” in sich aufnimmt. Was Dunayevskayas Denken von akademischer Selbstgenügsamkeit abhebt, ist nicht zuletzt diese Orientierung an den Kämpfen ihrer Zeit – von den wilden Streiks in den USA über den ungarischen Aufstand 1956 bis zur neuen Frauenbewegung in den siebziger Jahren.

Helen Macfarlane, a young British woman, was living in Vienna when she was radicalized by the 1848 Revolution. On returning to England in 1850, she became a journalist for the radical wing of the Chartist movement. The Chartists received support from such luminaries as Karl Marx and Fredrich Engles; the latter had written on the movement's political significance. It was Marx who described Macfarlane as the most original writer in the Chartist press. Macfarlane was the first English translator of…

This volume, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, provides an annotated selection from Luxemburg’s major political and economic works – Accumulation of Capital, the Mass Strike, Reform or Revolution, on nationalism, on Lenin, on the Russian Revolution, etc. — as well as her letters.  Several important Luxemburg texts that have been translated into English for the first time by Ashley Passmore and me: a recently discovered 1911 critique of Lenin on democracy; a study of communal social structures in a variety of non-Western and precapitalist societies – among them India, Inca Peru, the Russian village, and Southern Africa — from her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy; an article on slavery; and all of her articles on gender. The editors have contributed an introduction that argues for Luxemburg as a Marxist for our times.

Few thought systems have been as distorted and sometimes misconstrued as those of Marx and Hegel. Philosophy and Revolution, presented here in a new edition, attempts to save Marx from interpretations which restrict the revolutionary significance of the philosophy behind his theory. Developing her breakthrough on Hegel's Absolute Idea, Raya Dunayevskaya, who died in the June of 1987, aims at a total liberation of the human person—not only from the ills of a capitalist society, but also from th…

Book Review – English:

Shannon Brincat, Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 25, No. 2 (July 2011)

Stacey Whittle, “Philosophy on the Barricades,” International Socialism No. 127 (Summer  2010)

Angelica Nuzzo, Hegel-Studien (Germany), Bd. 42 (2007)

Dialogue with Chris Arthur, News & Letters, Feb-Mar & Apr-May 2006 (also appeared in Studies in Marxism, No. 9, 2002-03 & No. 11, 2007)

Patricia Johnson, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 57, No. 1, September 2003

Eli Messinger, Science & Society, Vol. 68, No. 1, Spring 2004

Eric Piper, Historical Materialism, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2005

Anne Pomeroy, “Why Marx, Why Now?: A Recollection of Dunayevskaya’s Power of Negativity,” Cultural Logic, 2004

Russell Rockwell, Critical Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2003

Ben Watson’s Review in Radical Philosophy and David Black’s Response (2002-04)

A Chinese Student, “Reflections on Hegel, Marx and Mao,” News & Letters, Aug.-Sept. 2002

Book Review – Other Languages:

(German) Interview by Simon Birnbaum with Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson on US Left, Jungle World, 18:2, May 2007

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“Brilliant theorist, committed activist, and passionate scholar, Raya Dunayevskaya was a role-model for my generation We are fortunate to have her back in this wonderfully edited work that conveys the excitement of a time when, for Raya and her interlocutors (C. L. R. James and Herbert Marcuse among others), philosophy and the struggle against social injustice were two sides of the same urgent endeavor. Her understanding of dialectics as a method whereby each generation has to discover its own revolutionary task, her insistence that Marxism means humanism in the most inclusive sense and that socialism means the social actualization of individual freedom — these are ideas that appear young and fresh against the weary and sophistic pessimism that dominates much theory in the academy today. And more: in contrast to the boring pap of commodified culture and political sound bites, Raya’s interpretation makes the logic of Hegel’s absolute idea a fascinating and compelling read.”

—Susan Buck-Morss, Cornell University, author of The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

“As we enter a new millennium, critical and dialectical thinking is more important than ever in charting the vicissitudes of capital and political struggle. Raya Dunayevskaya’s writings on Hegelian and Marxian dialectics are highly insightful and relevant to the theory and politics of the contemporary moment. Thus Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson’s collection of some of her most important writings provide access to a valuable theoretical and political legacy.”

—Douglas Kellner, UCLA, author of Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity

“Dunayevskaya writes, particularly in the letters and talks, like a person ‘drunk’ on Hegel. But rather than causing her to lose control, this drunkenness is a measure of her intellectual excitement, an infectious one that gets transferred to her readers. She is especially good in linking Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. Her varied attempts to explain the importance of Hegel’s absolute idea and theory of negation for the traditions that followed, but also for the hoped-for revolution, are as clear and convincing as any I’ve seen from her pen. It’s a truly impressive display, and one that will delight as well as instruct most readers.”

—Bertell Ollman, New York University, author of Dialectical Investigations

“[This book] is the portrait of an exceptional mind at work, and a treasure trove of insights and provocative ideas. The matters Dunayevskaya brought forward remain of supreme historical importance. The editors have made this a labor of love, with fastidious footnoting, intertextual referencing, and a superb introduction. Dunayevskaya’s courage and vitality shine through and through.”

—Joel Kovel, Bard College, author of The Enemy of Nature

“With the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya, the continent of revolutionary thought underwent a seismic shift, the world-historical reverberations of which we are still feeling today and which continue to grow stronger in this new millennium as the crisis of world capitalism intensifies. Dunayevskaya is one of the great revolutionary thinkers of the last century and her work on the dialectics of philosophy is unsurpassed in the development of Marxist humanism. Expertly edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, this volume is destined to become a classic. History bequeaths us few gifts, and it is up to the present generation of revolutionaries to take advantage of this opportunity to engage with Dunayevskaya’s most important ideas, condensed in this exceptional edited edition.”

—Peter McLaren, UCLA, author of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire

The introduction by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson is a fine essay – so lucid and explicit yet sacrificing no complexity. It should be accessible to a range of people – students, or people recently stimulated to think about the nature of capitalism and the requirements of a different society, as well as longtime socialists who need the “placing” of Raya’s thought as it’s provided here.”

—Adrienne Rich, author of What Is Found There, on the introduction

In this classic exposition of Marxist thought, Raya Dunayevskaya, with clarity and great insight, traces the development and explains the essential features of Marx's analysis of history. Using as her point of departure the Industrial and French Revolutions, the European upheavals of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Paris Commune of 1871, Dunayevskaya shows how Marx, inspired by these events, adapted Hegel's philosophy to analyse the course of history as a dialectical process that moves 'fr…

This book takes up Lenin’s extensive but little-known writings on Hegel, especially his 1914-15 notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic. I argue that in these notes, Lenin broke with the crude materialism of his generation of Marxists and of his own earlier work like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908).  His confrontation with Hegel was part of a rethinking of his old categories in light of the crisis and break-up of the Second International (world socialist movement) during the First World War.  He drew from Hegel concepts like subjectivity and self-movement, and he also interrogated the possibility that the diremption between idealism and materialism advocated by Engels ran the danger of falling into a crude materialism that ignored subjectivity and human consciousness.  Instead, Lenin argued that human cognition not only reflects the world (in a materialist sense), but also creates the world (in the sense of revolutionary subjectivity). He concluded that it was impossible to grasp Marx’s Capital without a thorough study of Hegel’s Logic.

At the same time, certain limits were evident in Lenin’s dialectics, not only the fact that he did not make public his new thinking on Hegel, but also in his failure to grasp fully core Hegelian categories like negation of the negation, absolute negativity, or the relation of theory to practice.  Nonetheless, Lenin’s wartime studies of Hegel helped to give a richer, more dialectical quality to his subsequent and better-known writings on imperialism, anti-colonial movements, and the state and revolution. In particular, I argue that Lenin’s studies of Hegel helped him to create dialectical analysis of imperialism, in a double sense:  (1) Monopoly capitalism was the product of a dialectical “transformation into opposite” of the old capitalism and it engendered a new phenomenon, global imperialism. (2)

The rise of imperialism strengthened global capital, but it also led to new contradictions within the global capitalist system, to anti-colonial national liberation movements – from China and India to Ireland — as new forms of resistance that could ally with the Western working classes against capital.  In this sense, Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel had more than a philosophical importance and were part of his wider break with established Marxism and his attempts to refound a revolutionary Marxism upon the ruins of the Second International.

This book takes up as well the considerable discussions of Lenin’s writings on Hegel by Western Marxists such as Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Lucio Colletti, and Louis Althusser.  Here the positions vary considerably, with Lukács and Korsch having discussed Lenin’s Hegel notebooks rather briefly, using his work to validate theirs at strategic junctures in the face of the crude materialism of Lenin’s successors.  A generation later, Lefebvre, James, and Dunayevskaya took Lenin’s Hegel notebooks up more fully, considering them to have been a crucial chapter in the history of Marxism, one that informed their own concepts of dialectic and which influenced their own studies of Hegel.

For Dunayevskaya especially, this was closely tied to the young Marx’s writings on humanism and dialectic in the 1844 Manuscripts as well.  For their part, Althusser and Colletti, who launched counterattacks against Marxist humanism and the post-World War II focus by critical Marxist thinkers on consciousness and the human subject. In doing so, they took up not only the young Marx, but also Lenin’s 1914-15 writings on Hegel, seeking to collapse them back into a more orthodox interpretation of Lenin and his legacy.

This collection of 17 writings by Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987), founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., contains a selection from her vast writings on the theory of state-capitalism, ranging from her original analysis of Russia as a state-capitalist society in the early 1940s to writings on the global phenomenon of state-capitalism from the 1940s to the 1980s. For development of this theory proved of critical importance in her creation of a new philosophy of dialectics for the post-World War I…