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

This wide-ranging work, first published in 1981, has three outstanding features:

It consists of one of the most sensitive explorations of Rosa Luxemburg, showing that her work as a fervent advocate of socialism and democracy had a feminist dimension.

It connects Marx’s critique of alienation and dehumanized social relations to the perspectives and demands of modern feminism.

It also contained the first detailed discussion in English of Marx’s last decade (1872-83), when he turned to a study of Indigenous peoples in the Americas as well as communal formations in Russia, Asia, and Africa in searching for pathways to socialism that… show more.

Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. This book contained the first-ever analysis of Luxemburg as feminist, the first widely disseminated analysis of gender in Marx’s late Ethnological Notebooks, and a hard-hitting discussion of feminism, race, and revolution that pulled no punches in terms of critiquing dominant forms of feminism, especially in the U.S. The treatment of the late Marx featured a searing critique of Engels’s economistic reductionism on women’s liberation, and this was followed up by unstinting critiques of Lenin and Trotsky as well as Luxemburg herself on the failures of what Dunayevskaya termed… show more.