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Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya (born Raya Shpigel, Рая Шпигель; 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. 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 Lithuanian Jewish descent, Dunayevskaya was born Raya Shpigel in the Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) and emigrated to the United States in 1922 (her name changed to Rae Spiegel) and joined the revolutionary movement in her childhood.
Active in the Communist Party USA 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 Leon 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 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" which had signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. 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.
Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx's early writings (later known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844), led to her theory that not only was the USSR a "state capitalist" society, but that "state capitalism" was a new world stage. Much of her initial analysis was published in The New International in 1942–1943.
In 1940, she was involved in the split in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that led to the formation of the Workers Party (WP), with which she shared an objection to Trotsky's characterisation of the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state". Within the WP, she formed the Johnson–Forest Tendency alongside C. L. R. James (she being "Freddie Forest" and he "J. R. Johnson", named for their party cadre names). The tendency argued that the Soviet Union was "state capitalist", while the WP majority maintained that it was bureaucratic collectivist.
Differences within the WP steadily widened, and in 1947, after a brief period of independent existence during which they published a series of documents, the tendency returned to the ranks of the SWP. Their membership in the SWP was based on a shared insistence that there was a pre-revolutionary situation just around the corner, and the shared belief that a Leninist party must be in place to take advantage of the coming opportunities.
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Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya (born Raya Shpigel, Рая Шпигель; 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. 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 Lithuanian Jewish descent, Dunayevskaya was born Raya Shpigel in the Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) and emigrated to the United States in 1922 (her name changed to Rae Spiegel) and joined the revolutionary movement in her childhood.
Active in the Communist Party USA 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 Leon 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 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" which had signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. 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.
Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx's early writings (later known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844), led to her theory that not only was the USSR a "state capitalist" society, but that "state capitalism" was a new world stage. Much of her initial analysis was published in The New International in 1942–1943.
In 1940, she was involved in the split in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that led to the formation of the Workers Party (WP), with which she shared an objection to Trotsky's characterisation of the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state". Within the WP, she formed the Johnson–Forest Tendency alongside C. L. R. James (she being "Freddie Forest" and he "J. R. Johnson", named for their party cadre names). The tendency argued that the Soviet Union was "state capitalist", while the WP majority maintained that it was bureaucratic collectivist.
Differences within the WP steadily widened, and in 1947, after a brief period of independent existence during which they published a series of documents, the tendency returned to the ranks of the SWP. Their membership in the SWP was based on a shared insistence that there was a pre-revolutionary situation just around the corner, and the shared belief that a Leninist party must be in place to take advantage of the coming opportunities.
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