Draft chapters of Dunayevskaya’s new book, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, which had been circulating in 1979, greatly illuminated the revolution in Iran as it was developing and as it related to the first Persian Revolution in 1906. What few knew was that that first revolution, which had developed under the impact of the 1905-06 Russian Revolution, had manifested so great a uniqueness of its own that out of it—for the first time anywhere in the world — there developed a Woman’s Anjumeni (Council). (See Dunayevskaya’s “Two Worlds” column, News & Letters, Dec. 1978, “Iran’s Revolutionary Past — and Present.”) The 1979 Revolution signaled nothing short of a shift in global power, since it not only overthrew the Shah but undermined the U.S.’s dominance in the Gulf region. The present, ongoing, deep, global recession, with its ever-expanding militarization, has reached nuclear heights that threaten Apocalypse Now, and make it imperative to grapple with the dialectics of revolution under the whip of the counter-revolution. This becomes especially urgent because the revolutions in our era — from Iran to Poland, from the Black Revolt in South Africa to the revolution in El Salvador — must contend not only with the mailed fist of counter-revolution in their own countries, but with the struggle for global power by the two nuclearly-armed Titans, U.S. and Russia, which are now threatening the very existence of humanity. The primary reason for News and Letters’ designating 1980 as “the year of the book” was not merely as deadline for the completion of Rosa Luxemburg, Wo- men’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, but because its three elements — Rosa Luxemburg, as great revolutionary theoretician whose appreciation of the spontaneity of the masses illuminates the present revolutionary struggle for new forms of organization; women’s liberation today, as a new revolutionary force; and Marx’s philosophy of revolution, rooted in his discovery of a whole new continent of thought and of revolution — create ground for us to contend with the reality of the crises today by working out revolutionary perspectives for the 1980s.