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Raya Dunayevskaja (1910 – 1987) was a Ukrainian born immigrant to the United States of America who was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Dunayevskaja was the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the United States.
In her role as a Russian speaker and member of the SWP, Dunayevskaja was asked to join the staff of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, from which assignment she returned to the USA in 1939. In 1940 she took part in the split in the SWP that led to the formation of the Workers Party (WP) headed by Max Shachtman. Within the WP, she formed the Johnson-Forrest Tendency alongside C. L. R. James (she being "Freddie Forrest" and he "Johnson", named for their party cadre names). The tendency argued that the Soviet Union was state capitalist, while the WP majority maintained that it was bureaucratic collectivist.
Differences within the WP steadily widened, and in 1946 after a brief period of independent existence during which they published a series of documents, the tendency returned to the ranks of the SWP. Their memebership of the SWP was based on a shared insistence that there was a pre-revolutionary situation just around the corner, and the shared belief this meant that a Leninist party must be in place to take advantage of the coming opportunities.
By 1951, with the failure of their shared perspective to materialise, the tendency evolved a theory that rejected traditional Leninism and saw the workers as being spontaneously revolutionary. This was borne out for them by the 1949 miners' strike. In later years they were to pay close attention to automatisation, especially in the automobile industry, which they came to see as paradigmatic of capitalism. This led to the tendency leaving the SWP to begin independent work.
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