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149 Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–87)1 More philosopher and political theorist than economist, Raya Dunayevskaya is best known for her humanist interpretation of Marxism and her characterization of Soviet society as a form of ‘state capitalism’. Born in a small Ukrainian village near the Romanian border on 1 May 1910, she emigrated to the USA with her family in 1922 and soon became active in the revolutionary movement in Chicago. Dunayevskaya was expelled from the youth section of the US Communist Party in 1928, and joined the Trotskyists. In 1937–39 she served as Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in his exile in Mexico, breaking with him in 1939 on the question of the class nature of the Soviet Union. Under the pseudonym of Freddie Forest she was associated with C.L.R. James (J.R. Johnson) in the Johnson–Forest Tendency, which constituted the state capitalist opposition fraction in American Trotskyism during the 1940s. Dunayevskaya later established her own political organization, propagating the ideas of Marxism–Humanism in a series of books and pamphlets and in the monthly paper News and Letters. She died in Chicago on 9 June 1987. Fourteen volumes of her personal papers were issued on microfilm in 1988– 89 as The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection by Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs. Based on her early reading and translation of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which were not widely available in the west until the 1960s, Dunayevskaya argued that there was a profound continuity in Marx’s...