Democracy, Dialectics, and Difference: A Critical Representation of the Hegelian Marxist Tradition

In 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe issued a serious challenge to the Marxist theoretical tradition with the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Six years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the end of a nearly century long experiment with Marxism in practice. Both of these events ought to make scholars question the relevance of Marxist critique in the 21st century. This research looks at the work of activist and intellectual Raya Dunayevskaya in order to construct a response to both the current economic and political crises as well as the theoretical crisis that Marxist political thought currently faces. In order to do so, Dunayevskaya's work is compared with two of her contemporaries, C. L. R. James and Cornelius Castoriadis. It is argued that Dunayevskaya represents a unique tradition of libertarian and Hegelian Marxism that is able to respond to the dual crisis mentioned above. This is shown by 1) laying out a Marxist conception of the political that can compete with those offered by current non-Marxist thinkers; 2) claiming that Dunayevskaya and James are able to integrate the concepts of race and gender into their conception of democratic politics in a way that does not fall into the weaknesses of Marxism as theorized by its post-structuralist critics; 3) explaining Dunayevskaya's contribution to the understanding of Marx's appropriation of Hegel; 4) arguing that these facets of Dunayevskaya's thought offer an important contribution to Marxist, anarchist, and radical democratic scholars and activists in the context of current popular struggles.