Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution

In this important and wide-ranging critique of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) Raya Dunayevskaya examines the life, political thought, and action of one of the most crucial revolutionary figures of our time. Dunayevskaya sheds new light on the questions of socialist democracy after the revolution, disclosing both the unprobed feminist dimension of Rosa Luxemburg and the previ­ously unrecognized new moments in Marx's last decade concerning the role of women and the peasantry. As the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the United States, Dunayevskaya (1910-87) was an internationally respected writer, philosopher, and revolutionary. This new and expanded edition includes two previously unpublished articles by Dunayevskaya, including her “Challenge to all Post-Marx Marxists.” From the reviews of thefirst edition “Raya Dunayevskaya is part of the history of women’s liberation.... Who she is and what she thinks matters to our understanding of what and where the movement for women’s liberation has been and might go.... Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution is something more than a critical philosophic biography. But that it certainly is: an account of Luxemburg as woman, thinker, organizer, revolutionist.... What I hear Dunayevskaya saying above all is that we have reached the point in history where real freedom is at­tainable, if we are willing to commit ourselves to a more inclusive definition of freedom than has ever been attempted. If indeed Marx was moving in such a direction, we can't leap forward from Marx without understanding where he left off, and what he left to us.“ —Adrienne Rich, Women’s Review of Books