The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1954 piece by Raya Dunayevskaya on the deeply reactionary nature of the Communist Control Act (“On Both Sides of the Iron Curtain“), which, despite a few successful legal challenges since its passage, is still in effect. It appeared as her regular unsigned column in the September 18 […]
Category Archives: Texts
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available the 1953 column by Raya Dunayevskaya (“Intellectuals and the Radical Workers“) that I mentioned in an earlier post. This version, which appeared in Correspondence, is a little fuller account of the encounter of A.J. Muste and the American Workers Party with the radical intellectuals of the 1930s than […]
Paresh Chattopadhyay has published a review of a collection of socialist writings edited by Irfan Habib, a prominent Marxist historian of Mughal India, in the most recent issue of Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 45, Issue 41; Oct. 9-15, 2010). As usual, Chattopadhyay does not let his scholarly respect for an individual deter him from […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1959 column by Raya Dunayevskaya on Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the 21st Congress of the Russian Communist Party (“Khrushchev Talks On and On“). Dunayevskaya’s comments on the Russia-China tensions, as well as those on Khrushchev’s main concern, raising the low productivity of the Russian worker, are insightful. […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1958 column by Raya Dunayevskaya on A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party, a short-lived but important political grouping of the Great Depression (“Unemployment and Organizations to Fight It“). She had firsthand knowledge of the topic, as she was a member of the the Workers Party of the U.S., […]
The fever pitch of commentary on the racist and reactionary political phenomenon that goes by the name “Tea Party” since the recent primary elections necessitates at least an attempt at a class analysis of this movement. The often-used term “populist” is an inadequate description, as there have been strong movements in U.S. history with what […]
I recently had the opportunity to examine the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of André Breton’s Œuvres Complètes, as well as the rare illustrated Album André Breton volume. The first volume came out in 1988 and the fourth, and final one, just appeared in 2008. The Pléiade editions are beautifully produced books, although one wishes […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1957 critique by Raya Dunayevskaya of The New Class by Milovan Djilas. Djilas was one of the leaders of Yugoslavian Communism until he broke with Tito in 1954. Dunayevskaya’s critique is interesting for its focus on Djilas’s interpretation of Marxism rather than on the political ramifications of […]
I have just discovered a fascinating book (originally published in Quebec as Les Écrivains Noir et le Surréalisme) titled The Black Surrealists by Jean-Claude Michel, a teacher in Miami. I don’t recall this book being cited in Robin Kelley’s Black Brown and Beige (reviewed earlier on this blog), which is a shame because it contains […]
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima, which resulted in at least 70,000 immediate and direct fatalities (an additional 40,000 were killed outright in the bombing of the historic city of Nagasaki three days later—40,000 more died there in the following months from injuries). To commemorate this occasion, […]
Criticism &c. 