Whether one is interested in Marxist theory or in a scholarly treatment of Hegelian philosophy, this new collection of Raya Dunayevskaya's writings on the dialectic in Hegel and Marx is a must-read. _The Power of Negativity_ is a truly compelling book for anyone who wants to delve into Hegel's thought, Marx's relation to dialectics, and the major debates on dialectical philosophy in 20th Century Marxism.

_The Power of Negativity_ illuminates all of this through a range of pieces, including detailed summaries and extensive commentaries on Hegel's most philosophically important works: the Phenomenology of Mind, the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia Logic, and the Philosophy of Mind. It contains several expositions of Dunayevskaya's unique and thoughtful interpretation of Hegel, as well as of her analysis of "Marx's transformation of Hegel's revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of 'revolution in permanence,'" which presents her views on what is fundamental to a Marxist concept of a new society, from the breakdown of the division between mental and physical labor to the transformation of the relationship between women and men. It contains correspondence with such scholars as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, George Armstrong Kelly, Louis Dupre, Jonathan Spence, and C.L.R. James, as well as worker-thinkers Charles Denby and Harry McShane; and lectures to audiences as varied as Hegel scholars, African-American workers, and Japanese student radicals. It contains philosophic critiques and commentaries on major theoreticians such as Lukacs, Korsch, Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Mao, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as expositions of her own distinctive Marxist-Humanist philosophic standpoint.

Dunayevskaya came of age in the period when Stalin's counter-revolution, coming from within the revolutionary movement, succeeded in transforming what grew out of the Russian Revolution into its opposite, totalitarian state-capitalism that still called itself "Communism." She recognized the Russian Revolution's transformation into opposite as a fundamental challenge to revolutionary Marxism, and set about using Marx's economic categories and Russia's "five-year plan" statistics to prove that Russia had become a state-capitalist society. But she also saw that an economic/political answer was not sufficient and a re-creation of Marx's philosophy of revolution was required to meet the challenge of the age. This led to her founding of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, to which an "unchained" version of Hegel's dialectic of absolute negativity is central. As Dunayevskaya put it in one of the pieces in _The Power of Negativity_:

"...because Absolute Negativity signifies transformation of reality, the dialectic of contradiction and totality of crises, the dialectic of liberation, Hegel's thought comes to life at critical points of history, called by him 'birth-times of history.'"

A thorough, clear, and accessible introduction explores the relationship of the dialectic to the nature of the present moment and the relationship of Dunayevskaya's work to contemporary issues in dialectical philosophy. The introduction also gives an overview of her writings on dialectics as well as an overview of the book and its structure, after which the reader is well prepared to plunge into the rest of the book. This book makes a contribution to the clarification of theoretical issues that are central to the problem of transforming reality. One of its virtues is that it provides accessible discussions of some of Hegel and Marx's philosophic works, many in the form of lectures and informal discussions.

Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolutions Reaching for the Future is the last completed major work of Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, the first edition having been published only two years before her sudden death in 1987. In her 1986 review of this work for the Women's Review of Books, the poet and theorist Adrienne Rich described Dunayevskaya as one of the longest continuously active woman revolutionaries of the 20th century whose thought and activity "matters to our understanding of what and where the movement for women's liberation has been and might go." Hers is not the prose of a disembodied intellectual. She argues; she challenges; she urges on; she expostulates; her essays have the spontaneity of an extemporaneous speech . . . you can hear her thinking aloud. She has a prevailing sense of ideas as flesh and blood, of the individual thinking, limited by her or his individuality yet carrying on a conversation in the world. The thought of the philosopher is a product of what she or he has lived through. This collection of 35 years of Dunayevskaya's essays on women reveals how she saw the dialectics of revolution worked out in one single dimension-"Woman as Reason and Revolutionary Force"-globally and throughout history. That this book is even more important to a new generation of feminists in the 1990s than when this book first appeared a decade ago is due to the deepening of the retrogression the Women's Liberation Movement has suffered over this decade-not only from the forces of reaction outside the movement, but from the contradictions within the movement. What had first drawn Adrienne Rich to Dunayevskaya's work and a rethinking of the relationship of Women's Liberation to Marxism was the need to confront those contradictions. Similarly,the Black feminist writer and theorist Gloria Joseph has welcomed Dunayevskaya's discussion of the contradictions confronting feminists today. In a sharp "critique of all those leading feminist scholars" who "have excluded working-class women and Black women from their elite 'private enclave,'" what Joseph singled out was Dunayevskaya's powerful discussion of Sojourner Truth's phrase ashortminded," which she invented to criticize the great Black Abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, for not including women in the struggle for enfranchisement after the Civil War. What Dunayevskaya saw in Sojourner Truth's phrase, Joseph stressed, was a concept, one that had become a new language of thought against any who would impose a limitation to freedom." Any who today, she concluded, "put limitations on who the movement is for and (ignore) who remains exploited in the process of others being liberated," is similarly "short-minded." Her 1992 book, Gathering Rage: The Failure of 20th Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda, is especially illuminating in finding in Dunayevskaya's work the "point of departure for those of us who seek answers in the multiple intersections of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation." Throughout Dunayevskaya's life and work," Randall stresses, "Women's liberation was an unnegotiable concern." The second part of the title of this collection: Reaching for the Future, is what speaks the most directly to today's new generation of "women's liberationists," whose task it becomes to continue working out the dialectic to full freedom. No one has said it better than Meridel LeSueur, the powerful woman writer from the Midwest, best known for her proletarian writings of the 1930s and her classic history of North Star Country, whose work for women's liberation has continued well into her 90s. When she heard of the plans for a new edition of Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution she wrote: "There is a wonderful spirit in this book, and it is badly needed in this time of questioning and new problems." She later framed this thought in one insistent sentence: "We need the new moment, we need it badly." Olga Domansk

I do not mean to use Raya Dunayevskaya as a straw-man, so to speak, but this book simply does not hit the mark. In it, the author asserts that Rosa Luxemburg was a blatant feminist. This, as anyone who has studied Luxemburg's life would know, is an absolute overstatement. It is clear that this claim was only made for the author's own end. Rosa Luxemburg cannot simply be called a feminist: She actually rejected the women's movement! Luxemburg indeed holds a place in the larger scope of feminist history, but Dunayevskaya's work is over-simplified and should not ever be used as a reputable piece of history as regards that admirable socialist leader.

The book presents a variety of useful discussions of Rosa luxemburg and Marxism. The analysis and discussion of Luxemburg's "Accumulation of Capital" makes VERY valuable reading. Add to that the discussion of women's liberation (and Rosa Luxemburg's complicated and contradictory relationship to it) and Marx's Ethnological Notebooks, and you have one of the most interesting recent Marxist works written by an actual revolutionary, not an academic.

Not all of the moments equal those, and I still think problems present themselves at moments where Dunayevskaya places forces other than the working class as the historical Subject. Overall, however, I think this book is a fine example of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition.

"Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution" is the third book in the "trilogy of revolution" by the Marxist humanist philosopher, Raya Dunayevskaya (who died in 1987). This second edition includes a foreword by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, a new essay by the author, a biographical note by the editor and five pages of "New Thoughts" on the book. These "New Thoughts" are passages added as answers to questions raised in a 1983 lecture tour by the author. The book has three parts, as the title suggests. The first, "Rosa Luxemburg as Theoretician, as Activist, as Internationalist," covers an enormous amount of ground with striking originality. As Adrienne Rich suggests, it is "not a conventional biography but rather the history and critique of a thinking woman's mind." The main chapters deal with Luxemburg's ideas--on spontaneity, on economics and debates with Lenin, as well as the major events of the period--war and revolution. The second part, "The Women's Liberation Movement as Revolutionary Force and Reason," begins with a short section on the historical importance of the "Black dimension" to the history of the women's movement. The second chapter returns to Luxemburg and takes issue with Peter Nettl's authoritative biography. Nettl's assertion that Luxemburg's years after the break-up with her lover Leo Jogiches were "lost years," is a "typical male attitude" according to Dunayevskaya who documents Luxemburg's myriad activities and theoretical work including Mass Strike. Her address to the 1907 Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in London on the meaning of the 1905 revolution appears as an appendix. Dunayevskaya feminist sensibility that Luxemburg's wish not to be "pigeonholed" into the "woman question," and argument that her passionate espousal of revolution had a "hidden feminist dimension," are other controversial aspects of the book. The second part concludes with the modern day feminist movement, which Dunayevskaya believes has raised important questions, specifically on organizational forms. The feminist demand for a decentralized form of organization is, for example, a new appreciation of the creativity of a movement that was not only interested in the overthrow of the existing reality but also creating new human relations. This concern is the central element of Marxist humanism and why Marx Marxism must be returned to as a totality. The final section, "Karl Marx--From Critic of Hegel to Author of Capital and Theorist of 'Revolution in Permanence,'" takes up nearly half the pages of the book. It is not biographical but considers Marx's idea of revolution in permanence in its first articulation in his Doctoral Dissertation of 1841, to his last writings on anthropology, "The Ethnological Notebooks." Two elements, Marx's rootedness in Hegelian dialectics and its reconceptualization as "Revolution in Permanence" remain central to each chapter. Over and over again we are introduced to new elements of Marx that have been ignored by other scholars, including little discussed aspects of the "1844 Manuscripts," the "Grundrisse" and "Capital." Moreover the "Critique of the Gotha Program" (1875) becomes an important element in an original chapter that traces Marx's ideas about organization. Dunayevskaya argues quite convincingly that Marx had a concept of organization that was very much tied up with his world view and philosophic outlook. It is the truncations by post-Marx Marxists (Luxemburg, Mehring, Kautsky and Lenin among the first) that has remained the received view. Lassalle was elevated to the authority on organization while Marx was denigrated to an intellectual figure in the British museum. However it is not "merely" the question of organizational form but the idea of what Marx's Marxism, as a "philosophy of revolution" is, which concerns Dunayevskaya. Here Engels comes in for the sharpest critique as the first "post-Marx Marxist." Although the critique of Engels is implicit throughout the book it comes to the fore in the final chapter which concentrates on Marx's last writings: "The Ethnological Notebooks," his letter (including drafts) to Vera Zasulitch and the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto. All of these are concerned with the possibility of revolution coming first in a "backward" land. The contrast between Marx's "Ethnological Notebooks" and Engels' "Origin of the Family" (Engels supposedly based his Origin on Marx's notes) is profound. Dunayevskaya's represents one of the few analyses of "The Ethnological Notebooks" and it is surprising that others have not contrasted Marx and Engels on this point. Briefly, Dunayevskaya shows that Marx concentrates on showing the dualities within the primitive commune, and the transformation into opposite of gens into caste society. Rather than the deterministic and stageist view put forward by Engels in the Origin, which saw class society developing at the end of the primitive commune, with the "historic defeat of the female sex," Marx traced the process of dissolution within the commune itself. Dunayevskaya contends that in the context of Marx's increasing "hostility to colonialism.... [t]he question was how total the uprooting of existing society and how new the relationship of theory and practice" had to be. She adds that Marx's studies enabled him (Marx not Engels) "to see the possibility of new human relations, not as they might come through a mere 'updating' of primitive communism's equality of the sexes, as among the Iroquois, but as Marx sensed they would burst forth from a new type of revolution" (190). It was this new type of "revolution" that Dunayevskaya attempts to connect to Marx's concept of the Man/Woman relation set forth in the 1844 manuscripts viz: "the direct, natural relationship of human being to human being is the relationship of man to woman." What remains central to Dunayevskaya's view of Marx is the "human resistance of the subject" which she calls a multilinear view of human development. "Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution" is an engaging and stimulating account by someone who viewed the dialectic as the lifeblood of Marxism. Those still interested in a dialectical and humanistic view of Marx might find points of disagreement but they will find this book a refreshing interruption.

This book has the interesting intellectual origins of Marxist-Humanism, a variant of Hegelian Marxism actually connected to active revolutionary organizing. Dunayaevskaya came out of Trotskyism, having been Trotsky's political secretary in Mexico, and a member of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency in the Socialist Workers' Party and Workers' Party in the United States.

One of the earliest groups to grapple with race and gender in a serious way through the Marxist tradition, this book grounds the reader in the intellectual moment and its relation to the broader historical moment that signify the break with 'orthodox' post-Marx Marxism.

The article on Organization at the beginning alone makes for a valuable read, as Dunayevskaya begins to posit some of the problems of thinking about post-Lenin organization and revolutionary organization.

Worth reading, as is all of Dunayevskaya's work.