Abstract

Dunayevskaya is a unique thinker for the twentieth century. She combines an involvement in freedom struggles with a very deep commitment to philosophical ideas and exploration. She served as secretary to Leon Trotsky in 1937–38, but then broke with him in 1939 during the Hitler-Stalin pact and developed a very sophisticated analysis of state capitalism. “She argued that Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hitler’s Germany, and especially Stalin’s Russia represented varieties of a new stage of global capitalism”. This volume presents her life-long thinking, showing how influential her reading of Hegel was for her interpretation of how humanity works to make itself free. She used Marx and Hegel to think through how the movement of negation promotes human freedom. She explored “the positive within the negative, to express philosophically the yearning of women, children, and men to be whole human beings.