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To my utter shock and disbelief, I realized that with the outbreak of the war,
Trotsky, who had been fighting the Stalinist bureaucracy for over a decade,
would now turn to the workers and ask them to defend Russia, because it was
a ‘workers’ state though degenerate’ . . . Actually I lost my power of speech for
two days. (p. 8)
The analysis of the Soviet social order then became a major task for
Dunayevskaya who, like a host of other left communists, insisted that ‘the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a capitalist society’, forming the State-
Capitalist Tendency within the Workers’ Party. As Gogol points out,
Dunayevskaya’s analysis of the USSR was, unlike some theories of state capi-
talism, not limited to the economic dimension. She looked at the continuance
of labour power as a commodity and the ongoing functioning of the law of
value (criticizing Trotsky’s fetishization of stratified property), the preponder-
ance of the production of the means of production over the production of
the means of consumption, the domination of dead over living labour, and
the introduction of methods of intensification of labour. But, crucially,
Dunayevskaya also examined workers’ resistance to state capitalism, and
insisted on the importance of the world dimension of the phenomenon, as
the USSR, America, the fascist nations, and Japan converged towards an ‘age
of state capitalism’.
While it was most common for those holding to a state communist
analysis to eventually read this as dating from 1917 and as linked to Lenin’s
theoretical and organizational orientations, Dunayevskaya insistently held to
the achievements of the revolution and to much of Lenin’s legacy, dating
degeneration at 1928, the year of the first five year plan. One vital signal of
this is Dunayevskaya’s life-long wrestle with the results of Lenin’s turn to
Hegel, what she called ‘the break in Lenin’s thought’, as the Bolshevik leader
attempted to account for the SPD’s vote for war credits at the commence-
ment of World War I. Translating Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s Science of
Logic, Dunayevskaya, James, and Grace Lee Boggs sought philosophical
underpinnings for the new period of struggle. This is a period marked most
significantly for Dunayevskaya by the 1949–50 miners’ general strike in
Virginia and the revolt in East Germany, and thereafter by the 1955–6 Mont-
gomery bus boycott and the 1956 rebellion in Hungary. Dunayevskaya char-
acterizes this period as, ‘The emergence of a new movement from practice
that is itself a form of theory’, focussing on worker self-activity (‘There is
nothing in thought – not even in the thought of a genius – that has not previ-
ously been in the activity of the common man [sic]’), and on the ‘dialectics
of the party’. It is also the moment that begins her accent on humanism,
insisting on the continuity in Marx’s concerns between the 1844 Manuscripts
and Capital. Dunayevskaya’s major conclusion, at this point, was that ‘the
new society is evident everywhere, appears within the old’, the sort of notion
against which Castoriadis responded with, ‘if socialist society existed, people
would probably have noticed it’.
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terms of fuller, and perhaps more balanced, accounts of, for example, her
correspondence with Marcuse (and others), her activities around strikes, her
international travels, and the background to, and competing interpretations
of, the break-up of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. There is certainly enough
to Dunayevskaya’s remarkable adventure to warrant such a treatment.