This essay first appeared as the foreword to the second edition of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). I had previously written a review-essay on Dunayevskaya’s work when the first edition of Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution was published in 1985 (See The Women’s Review of Books 3, no. 12 (September 1986): 1, 3–4.
Raya Dunayevskaya was a major thinker in the history of Marxism and of women’s liberation—one of the longest continuously active woman revolutionaries of the twentieth century. In fierce intellectual and political independence, her life and work defied many mind-numbing labels that self-described conservatives, liberals, and radicals have applied to voices for political and social change. Born in 1910, between two revolutions, she said of her beginnings:
I come from Russia 1917, and the ghettos of Chicago, where I first saw a Black person. The reason that I’m starting that way—it happens to be true—but the reason that I’m starting that way is that I was illiterate. You know, you’re born in a border town—there’s a revolution, there’s a counter-revolution, there’s anti-Semitism—you know nothing, but experience a lot. . . . That is, you don’t know that you’re a revolutionary, but you’re opposed to everything.
Now, how does it happen that an illiterate person, who certainly didn’t know Lenin and Trotsky, who as a child had never seen a Black, had begun to develop all the revolutionary ideas to be called Marxist-Humanism in the 1950’s? It isn’t personal whatsoever! If you live when an idea is born, and a great revolution in the world is born—it doesn’t make any difference where you are; that becomes the next stage of development of humanity.
Dunayevskaya was using her own early life to illustrate a core theme of her writing: the inseparability of experience and revolutionary thinking, the falseness of the opposition between “philosophy” and “actuality.” Her readings of past history and contemporary politics were drenched in the conviction that while thinking and action are not the same, they must continually readdress and renew each other. For the spontaneous responses of a Russian Jewish girl, growing up in a climate of revolution, brought at the age of twelve to the Jewish ghetto in Chicago (in the twenties she “moved herself to the black ghetto), to become the ongoing catalyst for a lifetime’s commitment to human freedom, required a structuring of her experience that Marx’s (not Marxist) theory was soon to provide her. She was to become not just literate, but learned in philosophy and history—and here again labels fail us, since for Dunayevskaya philosophy was the making of history: the envisioning of “the day after,” “the creation of a new society.” At the same time, her political activities—first among black activists, then with the West Virginia miners’ strike of 1949–50, and so on into the Women’s Liberation Movement of the past two decades—set her on a lifelong path of both participating in and reflecting on mass movements.
The separation—willed or unaware—of intellectuals from the people they theorize about, the estrangement of self-styled vanguards and their “correct lines” from actual people’s needs and aspirations, is hardly news. Dunayevskaya tried, in the very structure of her life and writings, to show us a different method. What does it look like when, as part of a movement, we try to think along with the human forces newly pushing forth, in ever-changing forms and with ever-different faces? How can we conceptualize a miners’ strike, a poor people’s march, a ghetto revolt, a women’s demonstration both as “spontaneous activity” and as the embodiment of new ideas—not yet perhaps written down except in rain-blurred flyers—about power, resources, control of the products of one’s labor, the ability to live humanly among other humans? How do we extract new kinds of “reason” or “idea” from the activities of “new passions and new forces” (Marx’s phrase) without losing continuity with past struggles for freedom? How do we think clearly in times of great turmoil, revolution, or counterrevolution without resorting to a party line based only on past dogma or on internecine graspings for power? How do we create a philosophy of revolution that itself helps make revolution possible? The American Communist party was to lose its way among such questions.
Dunayevskaya’s way of grounding herself was to turn to Marx. Not, I should emphasize, as a turning backward but as rescuing for the present a legacy she saw as still unclaimed, having been diminished, distorted, and betrayed by post-Marx Marxists and the emerging “Communist” states. But she didn’t simply turn to Marx, or to Hegel (whose work she saw as a living, still uncomprehended, presence in Marx’s own thought), as texts. Her work, including Rosa Luxemburg, is an explication of the fullness of Marx’s thought as she came to live it, in living through the liberation movements of her own era. She translated Marx, interpreted Marx, fitted together fragments of Marx scattered in post-Marxist schisms, refused to leave Marx enshrined as dead text, ill read, or relegated to “the dustbin of history.”
It was Marx’s humanism above all that she felt had never been adequately understood—in particular his recognition of what she called the black and women’s dimensions, but more largely as he sought not merely the “overthrow” of capitalism but a vision of “revolution in permanence,” a dynamically unfolding society in which the human individual could freely develop and express her or his creativity; not a static Communist utopia but an evolving human community.
I come out of a strain of feminism that saw itself as a leap forward out of Marxism, leaving the male Left behind, and for which a term like Marxist-Humanism would, in the late sixties and early seventies, have sounded like a funeral knell. A major problem (a problem not just of language but of organizing) was to break from a paradigm of class struggle that erased women’s labor except in the paid workplace (often even there), and also from a “humanist” false universal deriving from the European Renaissance glorification of the male. Radical feminists were of necessity concerned with keeping the political focus on women because in every other focus—race, class, nation—women had gotten lost, put down, marginalized. In addition, we were fighting a dogma of class as the primary oppression, capitalism as the single source of all oppressions. We insisted that women were, if not a class, a caste; if not a caste, an oppressed group as women—within oppressed groups and within the middle and ruling classes.
And, as Dunayevskaya is quick to point out, “the Women’s Liberation Movement that burst onto the historic scene in the mid-1960s was like nothing seen before in all its many appearances throughout history. Its most unique feature was that, surprisingly, not only did it come out of the left but it was directed against it, and not from the right, but from within the left itself.” It’s clear how eagerly she welcomed this new force as it sent shock waves through radical group after radical group, starting with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1965. But although her own thinking was obviously incited and nourished by the contemporary Women’s Liberation Movement, she had, even in the forties, recognized “the woman dimension,” and one of her earliest essays in Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is an account of organizing by miners’ wives in the 1949–50 anti-automation strikes in West Virginia. Dunayevskaya recognized women not just as revolutionary “Force” (contributing courage, support, strength) but also as “Reason”—as initiators, thinkers, strategists, creators of the new.
The first thing to strike a reader, ranging through Dunayevskaya’s books, is the vitality, combativeness, relish, impatience of her voice. Hers is not the prose of a disembodied intellectual. She argues; she challenges; she urges on; she expostulates; her essays have the spontaneity of an extemporaneous speech (some of them are) or of a notebook—you can hear her thinking aloud. She has a prevailing sense of ideas as flesh and blood, of the individual thinker, limited by her or his individuality yet carrying on a conversation in the world. The thought of the philosopher is a product of what she or he has lived through.
Marxism and Freedom (1957) is a history of the process of Marx’s thought, as it evolved out of eighteenth-century philosophy and Hegel’s dialectic through the mass political movements of the nineteenth century, as it became adapted and modified by Engels, Trotsky, and Lenin and, finally, in Dunayevskaya’s words, “totally perverted” by Stalin. She traced the shift from Marx’s idea of a workers’ state with no separation of manual and mental labor, to Lenin’s failed attempt to create a “workers’ state,” to Stalin’s creation of a corporate totalitarian state run by the Communist party—which she defines as counterrevolution. She saw, in the East German workers’ strike of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, evidence of a continuing revolutionary spirit in Eastern Europe (which was to capture world attention in the upheavals of 1989). She ends the first edition of Marxism and Freedom with the Montgomery bus boycott as a spontaneous movement kept within the hands of black people.
In Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya grapples, in the face of the Stalinist legacy, with the question: What happens after? What happens when the old oppression has been successfully resisted and overthrown? What turns revolutionary leaders into tyrants? Why did the Russian revolution turn backward on itself? How do we make the “continuing revolution” “the revolution in permanence” in which this cannot happen? She is passionate about “the movement from theory to practice and from practice to theory” as a living process and about the necessity for new voices speaking for their own freedom to be heard and listened to, if a movement is to keep on moving. She had the capacity, rare in people learned in Western philosophy and theory—including Marxists—to respect and learn from other kinds of thinking and other modes of expression: those of the Third World, of ordinary militant women, of working people who are perfectly aware that theirs is “alienated labor” and know how to say that without political indoctrination. Maybe Dunayevskaya would claim she originally learned this from Marx.
Marxism and Freedom has as its focus the “movement from practice to theory.” Dunayevskaya writes of the shaping impact of American slavery and the Civil War on Marx’s thought when he was writing Capital; she acknowledges the unfinished legacy of Reconstruction and recognizes the acute significance of the Montgomery bus boycott—the “Black dimension.” Women’s liberation is not yet a focus, although already in the fifties, long before Marxism and Freedom was written, Dunayevskaya was keenly attuned to women’s leadership and presence both within and outside radical groups. In “The Miners’ Wives” (1950) she notes that while the press depicted the women as bravely going along with the strike, they were in fact activists, sometimes pushing the men. In a long-unpublished essay of 1953, she sharply criticizes the Socialist Workers party for failing to recognize that the women who had streamed by the millions into factories in the United States during World War II were “a concrete revolutionary force” searching for “a total reorganization of society.” “By continuing her [sic] revolt daily at home, the women were giving a new dimension to politics” (Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution, p. 34). Perhaps it’s not by mere oversight that this essay remained so long unpublished. In it Dunayevskaya makes clear that the equality of some women as leaders within the party did not extend to any real recognition of women as a major social force. Possibly her own consciousness of women, though keen, received only negative responses in the organization of which she was then a part. But her entire life was a demonstration of “Woman as Force and Reason,” activist and thinker.
Philosophy and Revolution (1973) retraces some of the history of philosophy in Marxism and Freedom, moving on from there to discuss the Cuban revolution and the student and youth uprisings of the sixties, along with the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement. This work feels—until the last chapter—less dynamic and more laborious, more like a political-philosophy textbook. But in both books, Dunayevskaya is on a very specific mission: to rescue Marx’s Marxism from the theoretical and organizational systems attributed to him; to reclaim his ideas from what has been served up as Marxism in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and among Western intellectuals. She insists that you cannot sever Marx’s economics from his humanism—humanism here meaning the self-emancipation of human beings necessarily from the capitalist mode of production, but not only from that. The failure of the Russian revolutions to continue as “revolution in permanence”—their disintegration into a system of forced labor camps and political prisons—was the shock that sent Dunayevskaya back to “the original form of the Humanism of Marx,” translating his early humanist essays herself because “the official Moscow publication (1959) is marred by footnotes which flagrantly violate Marx’s content and intent.” “Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing.” But she refuses to “rebury” Marx as “humanist,” shorn of his economics.
Rosa Luxemburg (1982) is much more than a philosophical biography. But that it certainly is: a sympathetic yet critical account of Luxemburg as woman, thinker, organizer, revolutionist. A central chapter is devoted to Marx and Luxemburg as theorists of capital, dissecting Luxemburg’s critique of Marx in her Accumulation of Capital. Dunayevskaya dissents at many points from Luxemburg’s effort to fulfill, as she saw it, Marx’s unfinished work. But beyond the economic debate Dunayevskaya asserts that Luxemburg, despite her eloquent writings on imperialism, never saw the potential for revolution in the colonized people of color in what is now called the Third World; and, despite the centrality of women to her antimilitarist work, never saw beyond the purely economic class struggle. Where Marx had seen “new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society” as capitalism declined, Luxemburg saw only the “suffering masses” under imperialism.
Luxemburg was “a reluctant feminist” who was “galled in a most personal form” by the “Woman Question” but, “just as she had learned to live with an underlying anti-Semitism in the party, so she learned to live with . . . male chauvinism.” (Does this have a familiar ring?) In particular, she lived with it in the figure of August Bebel, a self-proclaimed feminist who wrote of her “wretched female’s squirts of poison,” and Viktor Adler, who called her “the poisonous bitch ... clever as a monkey.” However, when she was arrested in 1915 it was on the eve of organizing an international women’s antiwar conference with Clara Zetkin. Of their relationship Dunayevskaya says: “Far from Luxemburg having no interest in the so-called ‘Woman Question,’ and far from Zetkin having no interest outside of that question, . . . both of them . . . were determined to build a women’s liberation movement that concentrated not only on organizing women workers but on having them develop as leaders, as decision-makers, and as independent Marxist revolutionaries.” In fact, from 1902 on Luxemburg had been writing and speaking on the emancipation of women and on woman suffrage; in 1911 she wrote to her friend Louise Kautsky, “Are you coming for the women’s conference? Just imagine, I have become a feminist!” She debated Bebel and Kautsky over the “Woman Question,” and broke with Kautsky in 1911, yet, in her short and brutally ended life, feminism and proletarian revolution never became integrated. Dunayevskaya is critical of Luxemburg but also impatient with present-day feminists who want to write her off.
In Luxemburg, Dunayevskaya portrays a brilliant, brave, and independent woman, passionately internationalist and antiwar, a believer in the people’s “spontaneity” in the cause of freedom; a woman who saw herself as Marx’s philosophical heir, who refused the efforts of her lover and other men to discourage her from full participation in “making history” because she was a woman. But the biography does not stop here. The book opens into a structure generated, as Dunayevskaya tells us, by three events: the resurgence of the Women’s Liberation Movement out of the Left; the publication for the first time of Marx’s last writings, the Ethnological Notebooks; and the global national liberation movements of the seventies that demonstrated to her that Marxism continues to have meaning as a philosophy of revolution. Luxemburg’s life and thought become a kind of jumping-off point into the present and future—what she saw and didn’t see, her limitations as well as her understanding. We can learn from her mistakes, says Dunayevskaya, as she begins developing the themes she would pursue in Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution.
In this thirty-five-year collection of essays, interviews, letters, lectures you see Dunayevskaya going at her central ideas in many different ways. Agree or not with her analysis here, her interpretation there: these working papers are some of the most tingling, invigorating writing since the early days of Women’s Liberation when writing and organizing most often went hand in hand. In her irresistible depiction of women in movement, across the world and through history, Dunayevskaya really does hold to an international perspective. She chides and criticizes Simone de Beauvoir, Sheila Rowbotham, Gerda Lerner; she praises Wuthering Heights, A Room of One’s Own, the “Three Marias” of the New Portuguese Letters, the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde; she says Natalia Trotsky went further than Trotsky; she chastises Engels for diluting and distorting Marx, and post-Marxists and feminists for accepting Engels’s Origins of the Family as Marx’s word on women and men. Her quarrel with the Western post-Marxists is that they’ve taken parts of Marx for the whole, and that what has been left out (especially the dimensions of women and the Third World) is crucial in our time. Her quarrel with the Women’s Movement is that feminists have jettisoned Marx because he was a man, or have believed the post-Marxists without looking into Marx for themselves. She insists that Marx’s philosophy, far from being a closed and autocratic system, is open-ended, so that “in each age, he becomes more alive than in the age before.” That Marx was himself extraordinarily open to other voices than those of European males.
But why do we need Marx, anyway? Dunayevskaya believes he is the only philosopher of “total revolution”—the revolution that will touch and transform all human relationships, that is never-ending, revolution in permanence. Permanence not as a party-led state that has found all the answers, but as a society all of whose people participate in both government and production and in which the division between manual and mental labor will be ended. We need such a philosophy as grounding for organizing, since, as she says in Rosa Luxemburg, “without a philosophy of revolution activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, without ever revealing what it is for.”
Dunayevskaya bases her claims for Marx on her reading of his entire work, but attaches special importance to the Ethnological Notebooks (only transcribed and published in 1972) as showing that at the very end of his life, as in his early writings, he was concerned with humanism—not simply class struggle but with the values and structures of precapitalist, non-European societies and the relationship of the sexes in those societies. In these manuscripts, jotted between 1881 and 1882, Marx reviewed the anthropological-ethnological writings of Lewis Henry Morgan (Engels based his Origins on Marx’s notes on Morgan), John Budd Phear, Henry Maine, and John Lubbock. And indeed, as I read the Notebooks, Marx seems to be on a search for how gender has been structured in precapitalist, tribal societies.
Marx didn’t go along with the ethnologists in their definitions of the “savage” as measured against the “civilized.” Capitalism doesn’t mean progress; the civilized are also the damaged. He saw “civilization” as a divided condition—human subjectivity divided against itself by the division of labor, but also divided from nature. He was critical of Morgan for ignoring white genocide and ethnocide against the American Indians, of Phear’s condescension toward Bengali culture, and of the ethnocentricity of the ethnographers in general.
But neither did Marx idealize egalitarian communal society; he saw that “the elements of oppression in general, and of woman in particular, arose from within primitive communism, and not only related to change from ‘matriarchy,’ but began with the establishment of ranks—relationship of chief to mass—and the economic interests that accompanied it.” He watched closely how the family evolved into an economic unit, within which were the seeds of slavery and serfdom, how tribal conflict and conquest also led toward slavery and the acquisition of property. But where Engels posited “the world historic defeat of the female sex,” Dunayevskaya notes that Marx saw the resistance of the women in every revolution, not simply how they were disempowered by the development of patriarchy and by European invasion and colonization. The Ethnological Notebooks are crucial in Dunayevskaya’s eyes because they show Marx at a point in his life where his idea of revolution was becoming even more comprehensive: the colonialism that evolved out of capitalism forced him to return to precolonial societies to study human relations and “to see the possibility of new human relations, not as they might come through a mere ‘updating’ of primitive communism’s equality of the sexes . . . but as Marx sensed they would burst forth from a new type of revolution.”
Dunayevskaya vehemently opposes the notion that Marx’s Marxism means that class struggle is primary or that racism and male supremacism will end when capitalism falls. “What happens after?” she says, is the question we have to be asking all along. And this, she sees in the Women’s Liberation Movement, both women of color and white women have insisted on asking.
And, indeed, what is finally so beautiful and compelling about the Marx she shows us is his resistance to all static, stagnant ways of being, the deep apprehension of motion and transformation as principles of thought and of human process, the mind-weaving dialectical shuttle aflight in the loom of human activity.
Raya Dunayevskaya caught fire from Marx, met it with her own fire, brought to the events of her lifetime a revitalized, refocused Marxism. Her writings, with all their passion, energy, wit, and learning, may read awkwardly at times because she is really writing against the grain of how many readers have learned to think: to separate disciplines and genres, theory from practice. She’s trying to think, and write, the revolution in the revolution. Anyone who has tried to do this, in any medium, knows that the effect is not smooth or seamless.
Rosa Luxemburg may not fit the expectations of many readers schooled in leftist, feminist, or academic thought. It is, first of all, not a conventional biography but rather the history and critique of a thinking woman’s mind. It supplies no anecdotes of Luxemburg’s childhood, no dramatic version of her assassination. It does, however, explore the question of how Luxemburg’s sexual and political relationship with Leo Jogiches expressed itself both in intimate letters and in her theory. But Luxemburg’s central relationships, in Dunayevskaya’s eyes, were her intellectual relationship with the work of Marx as she understood it and the relationship of her whole self to the revolution. Most biographers of women still fail to recognize that a woman’s central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come and go. And Dunayevskaya doesn’t end the book with Luxemburg’s death, because she doesn’t see that death as an ending. She goes on to throw out lines of thinking for the future, lines that pass through Luxemburg’s fiery figure but don’t finish with the woman who “joyfully [threw her] whole life ‘on the scales of destiny.’ ”
“No one knows where the end of suffering will begin,” writes Nadine Gordimer about the 1976 Soweto schoolchildren’s uprising in her novel Burger’s Daughter. In her 1982 essay “Living in the Interregnum,” she muses about the sources of art and goes on, “It is from there, in the depths of being, that the most important intuition of revolutionary faith comes: the people know what to do, before the leaders.”
Dunayevskaya concludes:
It isn’t because we are any “smarter” that we can see so much more than other post-Marx Marxists. Rather, it is because of the maturity of our age. It is true that other post-Marx Marxists have rested on a truncated Marxism; it is equally true that no other generation could have seen the problematic of our age, much less solve our problems. Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew [emphasis mine]. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. It is not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and of deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx’s concept of the philosophy of “revolution in permanence.”
And this work is indeed going on. Chicana lesbian-feminist poet, activist, and theorist Gloria Anzaldua writes, in 1990:
What does being a thinking subject, an intellectual, mean for women-of-color from working-class origins? ... It means being concerned about the ways knowledges are invented. It means continually challenging institutionalized discourses. It means being suspicious of the dominant culture’s interpretation of “our” experience, of the way they “read” us....
... Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world. Thus we need teorías that will enable us to interpret what happens in the world, that will explain how and why we relate to certain people in specific ways, that will reflect what goes on between inner, outer and peripheral “Ps within a person and between the personal “I”s and the collective “we” of our ethnic communities. Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries.... We need theories that point out ways to maneuver between our particular experiences and the necessity of forming our own categories and theoretical models for the patterns we uncover.... And we need to find practical applications for those theories.... We need to give up the notion that there is a “correct” way to write theory.
It’s made so difficult, under the prevailing conditions of capital-shaped priorities, male supremacism, racism, militarism to envision that revolution without an end to which Dunayevskaya devoted her life. Most of us, even in our imaginations, settle for less. Living under these conditions, we can lose sight of the fact that we “live human beings” are where it all must begin—lose sight even to the point of denying the degree to which we are suffering. At certain moments, if we’re lucky, we touch the experience, the flash, of how it would feel to be free. Raya Dunayevskaya clearly never let go of her experiences of the fullness of being human, of “how it would feel”—and she wanted that experience to be the normal experience of every human being everywhere.
1991