June 2000

Where Western Marxists tended to become mandarins, and to retreat into the academy, Dunayevskaya and her group valorized ordinary workers and gathered in all of the oppressed and dispossessed as agents of absolute negativity. Already in the present text, Dunayevskaya reaches toward a liberating theorization of this pattern, namely:

"Where Hegel saw objective history as the successive manifestations of a world spirit, Marx placed the objective movement in the process of production. He now saw the core of the Hegelian METHOD—the self-movement which is internally necessary because it is the way of the organism's own development-in the self activity of the proletariat" (p. 55).

We fight, in Dunayevskaya's vision, to realize the full being, inner and outer, of the oppressed. Once this is grasped, no bureaucratization, no state capitalism, no recycling of domination, can stain the radical project. Nor can this project be extinguished by the triumph of reaction such as we have witnessed in recent years....

A special burden for those living in an age of counterrevolution is to sustain both hope and clarity of judgment. Where there is injustice and expropriation, rebellion will arise: that is given in the terms of the human condition, and in the endless evils of the world. These uprisings will come due; the real question is, how transformatively will they be developed? There is a magnificence about Raya Dunayevskaya's thought, well illustrated in this, her path-breaking volume, which provides a real ground for that hope. It is a ground that remains to be built upon.

—From new Humanity Books foreword by Joel Kovel