Raya Dunayevskaya

Raya Dunayevskaya (May 1, 1910 – June 9, 1987), born Raya Shpigel, later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was an American Marxist humanist.

Quotes

  • Let me examine the alleged "distinction from capitalism" characteristic of the Soviet Union and see whether it isn't a distinction from a certain stage of capitalism rather than from capitalism as a whole. The determining factor in analyzing the class nature of a society is not whether the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class or are state-owned, but whether the means of production ... are monopolized and alienated from the direct producers. The Soviet Government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise. ... "Bureaucratic state socialism" is an irrational expression behind which there exists the real economic relation of state-capitalist-exploiter to the propertyless exploited.
    • "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society" (1941), in Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution (2017), p. 210

Quotes about Raya Dunayevskaya

  • Raya Dunayevskaya was a major thinker in the history of Marxism and of women's liberation-one of the longest continuously active woman revolutionaries of the twentieth century. In fierce intellectual and political independence, her life and work defied many mind-numbing labels that self-described conservatives, liberals, and radicals have applied to voices for political and social change.
  • But Sisyphus is not, finally, a useful image. You don't roll some unitary boulder of language or justice uphill; you try with others to assist in cutting and laying many stones, designing a foundation...Another was , who wrote vividly and trenchantly of the concrete revolutionary lives of women, and whose fusion of Marx's humanism with contemporary feminisms expanded my sense of the possibilities of both.