Raya Dunayevskaya's Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation(Marx, Engels, and Marxisms)

Raya Dunayevskaya is one of the twentieth century’s great but underappreciated Marxist and feminist thinkers. Her unique philosophy and practice of Marxist-Humanism—as well as her grasp of Hegelian dialectics and the deep humanism that informs Marx’s thought—has much to teach us today. From her account of state capitalism (part of her socio-economic critique of Stalinism, fascism, and the welfare state), to her writings on Rosa Luxemburg, Black and women’s liberation, and labor, we are offered indispensable resources for navigating the perils of sexism, racism, capitalism, and authoritarianism. This collection of essays, from a diverse group of writers, brings to life Dunayevskaya’s important contributions. Revisiting her rich legacy, the contributors to this volume engage with her resolute Marxist-Humanist focus and her penetrating dialectics of liberation that is connected to Black, labor, and women’s liberation and to struggles over alienation and exploitation the world over. Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism is recovered for the twenty-first century and turned, as it was with Dunayevskaya herself, to face the multiple alienations and de-humanizations of social life.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction.- 2. Raya Dunayevskaya’s Concept of the Dialectic.- 3. Unchaining the Dialectic on the Threshold of Revolution: Dunayevskaya’s Discovery of Hegel in the Birth of Marxist-Humanism.- 4. The Indispensability of Philosophy in the Struggle to Develop an Alternative to Capitalism.- 5. Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marx.- 6. Women as Force and Reason: Dunayevskaya, Marx and Revolutionary Subjectivity.- 7. Raya Dunayevskaya on Race, Resistance, and Revolutionary Humanism.- 8. The Dialectic in Marxism and Freedom for Today: The Unity of Theory and Practice and the Movement of Today’s Concrete Struggles.- 9. Marxism and Freedom: Apropos of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Book.- 10. Why 21st century Marxism has to be Humanist.- 11. On Capital Accumulation, the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit, and Crisis Theory.- 12. The Revolutionary Travels of Marxism and Freedom.- 13. Why Marx is More Relevant than Ever in the Age of Automation.- 14. Raya Dunayevskaya’sEmancipatory Marxism.- 15. Beyond Anti-Humanism: Alienation, Praxis, and the Dialectics of Liberation.- 16. Two Kinds of Subjectivity in Marxism and Freedom: Hegel, Marx, and the Maoist Detour.

About the Author :
Kevin B. Anderson is Professor of Sociology, Political Science and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. His previous books include Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary, 2005), and Marx at the Margins (2010/2016). Kieran Durkin is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at University of York, UK and has been a Visiting Scholar at University of California Santa Barbara, where he studied the Humanist Marxist tradition. He is author of The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (2014) and  Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory (co-edited with Joan Braune, 2020). Heather A. Brown is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Westfield State University, USA. She has written widely on Marxism, feminism, and ecology and is the author of Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (2012).

Review :
“Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism is particularly helpful to readers unacquainted with Marxism and Freedom and the arguments and political positions that she developed and found validation for in Marx.” (Sean Sheehan, Marx and Philosophy, marxandphilosophy.org.uk, May 20, 2021) “[This] book … make important contributions to pushing Marxist debates beyond a dichotomizing critique of intersectionality theory. And moving forward, an intersectional historical materialism can foster greater appreciation of the mutually constitutive dynamics between capitalism’s variegated political economic landscapes and heterogenoussocial terrains characterized by differential subordination. Such a dialectical approach is particularly relevant in the present, given the proliferation of diverse ‘non-standard’ labour arrangements, alongside reactionary movements globally, which seek to deepen existing cleavages of differential subordination.” (Stephen Campbell, Dialectical Anthropology, April 30, 2021)