Raya Dunayevskaya’s Concept of Dialectic

Abstract

Hudis and Anderson argue that the twenty-first century has experienced a revival of Marxist thought in many spheres, as well as important academic writings on Hegel. However, these two streams of thought have operated in separate spheres, since recent Marxist writing has avoided Hegel and dialectics, while academic writing on Hegel has avoided Marx and Marxism. They argue that Dunayevskaya’s writings can help to bridge this divide. In an essay that originally appeared as the introduction to Power of Negativity (2002), a posthumous collection of Dunayevskaya’s writings on the dialectic, Hudis and Anderson provide a brief intellectual biography of Dunayevskaya, stressing her work on the dialectic, but also touching on her theory of state capitalism and its relationship to a critique of Stalinism and fascism. They trace her key philosophical insight, Hegel’s absolute negativity as new beginning, from her earliest writings. Their discussion ranges from the 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes and Marxism and Freedom (1958), to her most deeply philosophical work, Philosophy and Revolution (1973), and to the writings she left in draft form at her death in 1987. In so doing, Hudis and Anderson show affinities and differences between Dunayevskaya’s concept of dialectic those of other Hegelian Marxists like Lenin, C. L. R. James, Marcuse, and Lukács. They draw still sharper contrasts between her work and that of Adorno, who rejected Hegel’s concept of negativity in favor of his version of “negative dialectics,” and of Derrida, whose deconstructionism attacked the entire dialectical tradition.