Abstract

In The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, editors Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson guide us through three decades in the intellectual itinerary of America’s foremost Hegelian Marxist, the revolutionary and philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. The founder of Marxist-Humanism, News & Letters Committees, and the newspaper News & Letters, Dunayevskaya was the author of three books, to which “she sometimes referred… as her ‘trilogy of revolution’” : Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution ; two collections, Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution and The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism ; and finally several thousand pages of articles, pamphlets, letters, lectures, speeches, and drafts reposited in Wayne State University’s Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs. In The Power of Negativity, Hudis and Anderson have culled through the extensive corpus undergirding her principal works, as well as writings related to the book she was working on when she died, “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” in order to profile the thinker at work.