MACMILLAN 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. 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 heterogenous social 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) Review “This is an important collection of essays appraising the legacy of an underappreciated Marxist philosopher, Raya Dunayevskaya. Perhaps her underappreciation was rooted in the philosopher’s own gender, or perhaps in her stunning recasting of Marxism itself through an early and avid commitment to frameworks of gender and race. Now as mass antiracist protests redefine the horizons of human freedom on our streets, Raya Dunayevskaya’s writing can do the work it was always meant to do, provide a theoretical grounding to the cry for freedom of the oppressed. ―Tithi Bhattacharya, co-author of Feminism for the 99% (2019) “The essays in this collection explore Raya Dunayevskaya’s revolutionary humanism, which extends class analysis to race, gender, and other dimensions of dominance, and insists that theory does not stand above practice but shapes and is shaped by the experience of liberatory social movements. Dunayevskaya’s work highlights and develops the humanism at the center of Marx’s thought and makes Marx relevant to our time.” ―Barbara Epstein, Professor of the History of Consciousness Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, and author of Political Power and Cultural Revolution (1993) “Too many intellectuals fail to see that dialectical studies and innovations on revolutionary practice is not exclusively men’s work. As ideas of women ranging from those of Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and He-Yin Zhen to Grace Lee Boggs have been receiving increased attention, it is clear that their critical challenge is to think human transformation and flourishing through what everyone has to offer. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, and Heather A. Brown, and the community of scholars they assembled to explore the t