Raya Dunayevskaya
| Raya Dunayevskaya | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Raya Shpigel May 1, 1910 Yaryshiv, Russian Empire (today Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine) |
| Died | June 9, 1987 (aged 77) Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Marxist-Humanism, Hegelian Marxism, Marxist feminism |
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Main interests
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social theory, social revolution, social movements, dialectical philosophy, Marxist praxis, Marxism, women's liberation |
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Notable ideas
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State capitalism, movement from practice that is itself a form of theory, Black masses as vanguard, absolute negativity as new beginning, post-Marx Marxism as pejorative |
Raya Dunayevskaya, born Raya Shpigel (Russian: Ра́я Шпи́гель; May 1, 1910 - June 9, 1987), later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism in the United States of America. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.
Of Jewish descent, Dunayevskaya was born Raya Shpigel in today's Ukraine and emigrated to the United States (her name changed to Rae Spiegel) and joined the revolutionary movement in her childhood. Active in the American Communist Party youth organization, she was expelled at age 18 and thrown down a flight of stairs when she suggested that her local comrades should find out Trotsky's response to his expulsion from the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. By the following year she found a group of independent Trotskyists in Boston, led by Antoinette Buchholz Konikow, an advocate of birth control and legal abortion. In the 1930s, she adopted her mother's maiden name Dunayevskaya.
Without getting permission from the U.S. Trotskyist organization, she went to Mexico in 1937 to serve as Leon Trotsky's Russian language secretary during his exile there. Having returned to Chicago in 1938 after the deaths of her father and brother, she broke with Trotsky in 1939 when he continued to maintain that the Soviet Union was a "workers' state" even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. She opposed any notion that workers should be asked to defend this "workers' state" allied with Nazi Germany in a world war. Along with theorists such as C.L.R. James, and later Tony Cliff, Dunayevskaya argued that the Soviet Union had become 'state capitalist'. Toward the end of her life, she stated that what she called "my real development" only began after her break with Trotsky.
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