The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1954 column by Raya Dunayevskaya on Roy Cohn (1927-1986), Joseph McCarthy’s chief lawyer and lieutenant. The piece is titled “The Gang Lawyer” and appeared in Correspondence in February 1954. The timing of this piece was prescient, as it appeared shortly before the opening of the televised Army-McCarthy […]
Tag Archives: Raya Dunayevskaya
I never ceased to be amazed at the amount of S.W.P. nostalgia floating around out there (Alan Wald, Paul Le Blanc, etc). One consistent thread in much of this school of thought is the unnecessity of the many splits the party underwent in its history (for one example, see Paul Le Blanc’s “What Happened to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has invoked. —Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (1915) *** I don’t often express enthusiasm about the appearance of new left groups, but I have come across a case in which I’m at least willing to withhold judgment. The International Luxemburgist […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has just made available a 1953 text by Raya Dunayevskaya, “Malenkov Pledges H-Bomb and Caviar.” This document appeared in Correspondence, the newspaper of the group that had been known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency until 1951, when its members openly broke with Trotskyism and left the Socialist Workers Party to embark upon […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has just made available one of Raya Dunayevskaya’s analyses of the political aftermath of Stalin’s death in March of 1953. “Russian Regime Cannot Afford a Beria Show Trial,” which appeared in Correspondence on January 9, 1954, recounts the execution of Lavrenti Beria, chief of the Russian secret police, in the context […]
Criticism &c. 