Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya (born Raya Shpigel, ; May 1, 1910 - June 9, 1987), later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's s ...
. It has its origins in the
Trotskyist
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
left but regarded the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
as state capitalist. By 1951, the Johnson-Forest Tendency had left the Trotskyist left to form its own organization known as Correspondence Publishing Committee. C. L. R. James was forced to leave the USA in the early 1950s and Correspondence split. The faction that stayed loyal to C .L. R. James retained the name the Correspondence Publishing Committee and continued to receive advice from James from Britain, while a significant number supported
Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya (born Raya Shpigel, ; May 1, 1910 - June 9, 1987), later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's s ...
and split to form a new group,
News and Letters Committees
News and Letters Committees is a small revolutionary-socialist organization in the United States.
History
Founded in 1955 by Raya Dunayevskaya, the Committees trace their origin to a split in the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which had ...
, which publishes a monthly newspaper, ''
News & Letters
News and Letters Committees is a small revolutionary-socialist organization in the United States.
History
Founded in 1955 by Raya Dunayevskaya, the Committees trace their origin to a split in the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which had b ...
'', that remains in print today.
In 1962, there was a further split as Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, Freddy Paine and Lyman Paine abandoned the politics of C.L.R. James for an eclectic politics that was third worldist, while keeping the organization's name. The small number of members that continued to endorse the politics of James took the name Facing Reality, after the 1958 book by James co-written with Grace Lee Boggs and Pierre Chaulieu, a pseudonym for
Cornelius Castoriadis
Cornelius Castoriadis ( el, Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης; 11 March 1922 – 26 December 1997) was a Greek-FrenchMemos 2014, p. 18: "he was ... granted full French citizenship in 1970." philosopher, social critic, economist, ps ...
, on the Hungarian working class revolt of 1956. Facing Reality was based primarily in
Detroit
Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...
and published a monthly newsletter, ''Speak Out'', as well as pamphlets by James and other leading Facing Reality figures such as Martin Glaberman. They include ''Negro Americans Take the Lead: A Statement on the Crisis in American Civilization'' in 1964 and ''
Mao
Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC ...
as Dialectician'' by Martin Glaberman as well as James' ''Marxism and the Intellectuals'' in 1963 and ''Lenin, Trotsky, and the Vanguard Party'' in 1964. In 1967, four key leading members — C.L.R. James, Martin Glaberman, William Gorman and George Rawick — of Facing Reality collaborated to write the pamphlet ''The Gathering Forces'', a document some such as
Kent Worcester
Kent Worcester (born 1959) is an American political scientist, historian, and songwriter. His work deals with popular culture, intellectual history, trade unions, and social democracy. He has written extensively on comics and graphic novels and w ...
have characterized as representing the influence of
Maoism
Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of Ch ...
even in Facing Reality. Martin Glaberman, however, has disputed this claim in a review of Worcester's book in '' Against the Current'' magazine.
Political impact
Facing Reality had a particular, if small, impact among
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
political activists at
Wayne State University
Wayne State University (WSU) is a public research university in Detroit, Michigan. It is Michigan's third-largest university. Founded in 1868, Wayne State consists of 13 schools and colleges offering approximately 350 programs to nearly 25,000 ...
in Detroit and in auto plants in the city. A
community paper
Community paper is a term used by publishers, advertisers and readers to describe a range of publications that share a common service to their local community and commerce. Their predominant medium being newsprint, often free and published at regul ...
, '' Inner City Voice'', published articles by James in the late 1960s. Glaberman taught a class on
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
's ''
Capital
Capital may refer to:
Common uses
* Capital city, a municipality of primary status
** List of national capital cities
* Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences
* Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used fo ...
'' to many of the staff of the ''Inner City Voice''. Numerous members of this group were also active in the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. In 1970, the group was dissolved at the suggestion of Glaberman over James's objections on the ground that it was too small to have an impact.
It is important to note, however that the group had a broader international influence as well, including in Italy's burgeoning "
autonomous
In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy, from , ''autonomos'', from αὐτο- ''auto-'' "self" and νόμος ''nomos'', "law", hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's ow ...
Learning from Autonomous Marxism * Martin Glaberman, "C.L.R. James: A Recollection", '' New Politics'' #8 (Winter 1990): 78–84.
* Kent Worcester, ''C.L.R. James: A Political Biography'' (Albany: State University of New York, 1996).