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The first major philosophical work of Raya Dunayevskaya's to appear since her death in 1987, The Power of Negativity is a collection of diverse writings ranging from lengthy analyses of Hegel to lectures to newspaper columns, letters, and notes on works in progress. The collection discloses that Dunayevskaya's concept of the dialectic was unique; she regarded it as the method of (successful) revolution. The power of "negative" thinking to help transform reality is the unifying theme of an otherwise diverse collection.
Key Words: Humanism, Marxist philosophy, Dialectic
Concepts of dialectic differ perhaps as much as attitudes to dialectic. Nowadays, when recommending "dialectical thought," what its radical proponents are frequently recommending is a certain method of social analysis or framework for systematizing social relations. Others are embracing a certain kind of logic that, they believe, accurately describes capitalism's "totalizing" tendency to absorb and subsume everyone and everything standing outside it. This new, posthumously edited collection helped clarify for me a crucial difference between such approaches and that of Raya Dunayevskaya, the Marxist-humanist philosopher who died in 1987. Her writings did not simply apply one or another existing concept of the dialectic differently, to different problems or toward different political ends. Her very concept of the dialectic was different. She regarded it as "the ... method of revolution" (191).
It would perhaps be more helpful to say "method of successful revolution." Throughout her life, Dunayevskaya was preoccupied by what she judged to be a succession of revolutions that did not result in genuine liberation-revolutions that turned into their opposite, failed revolutions, aborted revolutions, and self-limiting revolutions. This new work shows her engaged, for almost forty years, in a continuing effort to help overcome this problem by means of philosophical investigations. And she argued that the success of future revolutions depends in part upon whether live forces for revolution are given access to and unite with a philosophy of revolution, specifically with what she called Marx's "transform[ation of] Hegel's revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution" (295). "Naturally," she wrote, "praxis-the activity of men, mental and manual ... contains the answer. But everyone from Marxists to anarchists never tires of speaking of praxis without ever, at least not since 1917, achieving a social revolution. So a...