The co-hosts interview Anne Jaclard, who worked with Dunayevskaya for 22 years, as a political colleague and as an occasional secretary, and who now serves as MHI’s organizational secretary. They discuss Dunayevskaya’s childhood years in Ukraine and Chicago; her activities as a young adult with African-American groups and as a Trotskyist; her work with Trotsky in Mexico; and her break from Trotsky and development of state-capitalist theory. The discussion then turns to Dunayevskaya’s collaboration with, and subsequent break from, CLR James, and her development of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism. Jaclard provides brief accounts––intertwined with personal recollections and vignettes––of how Dunayevskaya’s major writings contribute to revolutionary theory and to our understanding of Marx’s Marxism and the Hegelian dialectic.
This episode’s current-events segment, which provides a post-mortem on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, responds to Zack Beauchamp’s recent analysis of the import of Sanders’ failure. Was it really “Marxist political strategy” that failed, as Beauchamp contends?
