Our present societal and intellectual landscape is marked by fear, disruption, and radical change. The political sinews that regulated and managed the global capitalist system after 1945, and which at first seemed to have been reinvigorated by the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991, are fraying, from NATO to the EU, in no small part the result of disastrous wars in the Middle East. At an economic level, the Great Recession of 2007–2008 wiped away the neoliberal claims to have solved the problems of stagnation that had doomed the earlier Keynesian economics, as the new economy revealed itself to be a house of cards. A decade later, the COVID-19 epidemic triggered an even deeper economic crisis while laying bare as never before the dehumanization of contemporary capitalism. Even in developed countries like the U.S. and the UK, central governments floundered in early 2020 while medical, delivery, food, grocery, janitorial, and other workers performed the dangerous labor that is really basic to social existence. Across the globe, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives to the pandemic, while billions suffered wrenching economic privation. This was both a healthcare and an economic crisis, deeper than anything since the Great Depression.
By late spring 2020, as society began to awaken from the first phase of COVID-19, the greatest mass movement in the U.S. since the 1960s broke out over the police murder of George Floyd, a semi-employed Black man in Minneapolis. During this Black Lives Matter uprising, which spread across the country and internationally, hundreds of thousands of mainly young people demonstrated, occupied highways and streets, toppled statues of prominent racists, attacked and looted luxury goods stores, burned at least one police station and surrounded another, while occupying the surrounding streets. The Trump administration met demonstrators outside the White House with repression so forceful that it backfired, with even military leaders being forced to distance themselves publicly from Trump, the most openly racist president in a century. Rubbed raw by mass unemployment, indebtedness, and lack of affordable housing, the new generation of youth faces a world it did not make, in a stance of resistance and of idealism in the finest sense of the word. More sensitive to sexism, heterosexism, and, above all, racism, than any previous generation, they have followed the lead of Black youth, swelling the Black Lives Matter movement into a massive challenge to the social order that shows no sign of abating. As Ndindi Kitonga, one of the contributors to this volume intoned, after participating in the first weeks of the uprising in Los Angeles:
What we call for with regard to these curfews and the harassment is a questioning of where the money is coming from to fund this. The City does not run out of rubber bullets or tear gas. Yet, as someone who does outreach to our unhoused people, I beg the City for personal protective equipment (PPE) and shelter. I beg for food and unemployment compensation to help our people. There seems to be no resources to help people, but there are always resources to brutalize people. Something else I want to emphasize is that while this is of course an anti-racist protest, it is also a working class uprising of people of all colors. This is also an anti-capitalist uprising. It is a demand for people to stop being overcome by capital. The graffiti in Beverly Hills is not just “fuck the police,” but it is also down with capitalism and down with white supremacy. We witness people connecting the dots, you see.
These are exactly the connections, or intersections, that were central to the life and work of Raya Dunayevskaya, and that are at the heart of this book.
Today, global capitalism is increasingly seen as the enemy of human flourishing, whether in its exploitation of labor, its environmental destruction, its virulent racism, or its continued threat of nuclear destruction. The new generation faces a life of precarity, underemployment, overwork for those employed, and indebtedness. Even strong proponents of the capitalist order see no clear way back toward the promised land of growth and prosperity.
The concomitant crisis in thought and in wider society has led to neofascist and rightwing populist and nationalist forces coming to power in a number of countries, most notably the U.S., Britain, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, older authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia have tightened the screws on their populations even as Australia burned and the Syrian people faced a final massacre by the Assad regime.
But the crisis in the economic, political, and ecological spheres has also led to a resurgence of the left and of revolutionary opposition to systems of global dominance, as seen most dramatically in the 2011–2013 revolutions in the Middle East/North Africa region (MENA), the 2011 Occupy movement, and early Black Lives Matter, as well as in electorally based movements like Syriza in Greece and those around Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the U.S. In 2018–2020, grassroots radical activism returned with a vengeance, with the Yellow Vests and the pension strikes in France, and most dramatically with the outbreak of what is being called the Second Arab Spring in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Sudan also exhibited a deeper African dimension that resonated in both North and Sub-Saharan Africa. At an intellectual level—what the socialist tradition has called “the battle of ideas”—Marxist thought has also seen a resurgence, especially in the English-speaking world, putting postmodernism and the politics of difference on the defensive.
Today’s intellectual left is, broadly speaking, divided into two major streams. The first stream, often espousing some forms of Marxism, highlights capital and class, accusing the left of the 1990s and after of being stuck in what it disparages as “identity politics.” The second stream holds to a focus on race, gender, and sexuality, attacking Marxists for a kind of class reductionism whose return they are shocked to see.
Can a Marxist theory and practice, albeit one that is informed by intersectionality, dialectically transcend (aufheben) this contradiction? More specifically, can the theory and practice of the Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987) help to overcome this contradiction within today’s progressive left? Those are the issues that inspired the present volume.
As someone who pioneered the rigorous class analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist and who early on critiqued Rosa Luxemburg’s quasi-underconsumptionist economic theories as inadequate, Dunayevskaya was the rare Marxist thinker at home as easily with arguments about declining profit rates in Vol. III of Capital in relation to economic crisis, as she was with Hegel, dialectics, and the young Marx. From her earliest days in the Communist Party youth group in Chicago in the late 1920s, she also fought for the centrality of race to an understanding of U.S. capitalism, subsequently working with C. L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs in the 1940s and 1950s to critique class-reductionist Marxism via a creative reading of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. By the 1960s, she had written profoundly on the African revolutions and their theorists, especially Frantz Fanon, also developing at this time concept of “Black masses as vanguard” of the American revolution. By the 1970s, she began to explore anew socialist feminism, here centering on a century of struggle as well as on key women Marxist theoreticians and their neglected feminist dimension, most notably Luxemburg.
Her resulting 1982 book, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution ran up against a certain indifference if not outright rejection in many quarters, including many feminist academics. A major exception was the acclaimed revolutionary feminist poet Adrienne Rich, who, nudged by the Black revolutionary feminist Gloria Joseph, analyzed in depth the work of Dunayevskaya in this period. In 198...