Raya Dunayevskaya

Dunayevskaya's most original theoretical contribution was the theory of Soviet state capitalism, developed jointly with C.L.R. James. In 1939 she broke with Trotsky, who continued to regard the USSR as a 'workers' state.' While Trotsky held to the formula of a 'degenerated workers' state' corrupted by bureaucracy, Dunayevskaya analyzed Soviet production relations and concluded that the USSR was a new class society in which the state itself functioned as capital, exploiting the working class: 'state capitalism.'

Within the Workers Party, formed after the 1940 split in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Dunayevskaya (party name 'Freddie Forest') and James ('J.R. Johnson') organized the Johnson–Forest Tendency. They held that the USSR was state-capitalist, while the WP majority argued for 'bureaucratic collectivism.' Drawing on Marx's early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and on detailed study of the Soviet economy, Dunayevskaya argued that state capitalism was not merely a Soviet anomaly but a new world stage of capitalism. Much of this early analysis appeared in The New International in 1942–1943.

The British Trotskyist Tony Cliff independently reached similar conclusions, and the two are recognized as the twin founders of state-capitalism theory. This work sparked one of the most fundamental debates within the anti-Stalinist left over the class character of the USSR and laid the philosophical groundwork for Dunayevskaya's later development of Marxist Humanism.

Dunayevskaya's most original philosophical legacy is Marxist Humanism. In 1953, studying Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic, she advanced an interpretation of Hegel's 'absolutes' as a dual movement, from practice to theory and from theory to philosophy, calling this 'the philosophic moment.' The entire development of Marxist Humanism flowed from this insight.

Beginning in 1954, she engaged in a years-long correspondence with critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, debating the dialectic of necessity and freedom in Hegel and Marx. Marcuse wrote the preface to the first edition of Marxism and Freedom (1958). The book rejected the Althusserian separation of Marx's early and late writings into distinct, discontinuous periods, instead reconstructing the humanist core running through Marx's entire body of thought. During the Cold War, she maintained a 'Third Camp' position, independent socialism, neither Washington nor Moscow, and interpreted the 1953 East German uprising and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution as workers' attempts to return to Marx's humanism.

In Philosophy and Revolution (1973), she offered a dialectical reading spanning Hegel to Sartre and Marx to Mao, and completed her 'trilogy of revolution' with Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1982). She formulated women's liberation not as a secondary task subordinated to class struggle but as a constitutive moment of revolutionary dialectics, and sought to integrate diverse liberation struggles, the Black liberation movement, disability rights, and more, within the horizon of Marxist Humanism.