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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2009
An announcement and an invitation
This is an announcement and an invitation to participate in a celebration of the life and work of Raya Dunayevskaya during the 2010 centenary of her birth. It will continue throughout the year ahead, in the pages of News & Letters, and in a number of special events to mark the rich legacy of the body of ideas she founded as the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism.
Far from any look backward, this celebration looks to the future. It will be what Dunayevskaya called and practiced throughout her life: a "Retrospective as Perspective." We aim to explore the meaning of Marxist-Humanism for the 21st century, in particular the concrete problems we are confronting today in the struggle for a new world to be built on human foundations.
That discussion was never more needed than when the continued existence of capitalism has been openly questioned by theoreticians and workers alike--leading to significant calls to return to Marx, not only from the Left but from bourgeois economists as well. The burning questions, however, to be answered are: "What kind of return?" and "Which Marx?"
To work out these questions for today and tomorrow, we want to explore the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism. It began through the creation of the theory of state-capitalism and the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the 1940s. Without state-capitalist theory the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism could not have been born in 1953, when Dunayevskaya broke through on the Hegelian Dialectic and initiated a new kind of revolutionary organization. Adrienne Rich described Dunayevskaya as "living the revolution," a phrase that describes her political-philosophic-organizational developments unseparated from her vital activities with the movements from below. It included everything from the Black struggles in the midst of World War II, to her participation in the first ever miners' general strike against Automation after World War II, and her focus on women's struggles as Reason throughout history. Her voluminous correspondence with philosophers and activists in all the revolutionary developments of her lifetime is another of her activities of "thinking and doing" which defined her life.
During this centenary year, we plan to complete a collection of Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on Marx, from the 1940s to the 1980s, that will make explicit a methodology with which today's revolutionaries can confront new objective-subjective developments.
Finding answers to today's questions in our exploration and development of Dunayevskaya's work does not mean the objective situation has not changed or that we do not face new challenges. It means grasping the methodology by which Marxist-Humanism was developed as the needed philosophy of revolution for our age, in order to develop it all the way to a new society.
It is why we want to turn over space in News & Letters through the year ahead to print and hear your thoughts on the way Raya Dunayevskaya's work speaks to your life: to hear not only from those who met or corresponded with her during her life, but as well from those who met Marxist-Humanism later. We hope to hear from workers and intellectuals, students, women, and prisoners, who have been influenced by her philosophy in their own work and lives.
At the same time, we are looking forward to special meetings that are being planned to continue a dialogue with Marxist-Humanism in this centenary year. Already in the works is a public meeting in Detroit, Michigan, at the Wayne State University Archives Library, where her archives are housed and are open to all to study. Mike Smith, the Director of the Archives Library, will give the keynote address. All are welcome to attend and participate in the discussion.
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