OFFICIAL CALL FOR CONVENTION

to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2010-2011

February 28, 2010

To All Members of News and Letters Committees

Dear Friends:

So deep is the decay in the world order as we prepare for our 2010 national gathering that it raises the specters of war and revolution. In the U.S., at the center of war and economic crisis, it is manifested in a very visible reach toward fascism, at the same time that there are undercurrents of revolt by labor and youth, by women and Gays, by Blacks and Latinos. The perils of the decay are clearest of all in Haiti's earthquake, which revealed the destructive power of fault lines not only in the earth but in capitalist society. Over 250,000 were killed in the quake and its aftermath, and countless more were left wounded, homeless, hungry, vulnerable to epidemics. At a time when some North American reporters were marveling at the spontaneous cooperation of the poor sharing what little they had, 20,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers arrived in Haiti, there to provide "security" as much as to help with rescue and aid efforts.

Self-mobilization from below has been expressed not only in cooperation but in protests demanding the resignation of President Preval and the restoration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, twice elected President and twice overthrown in U.S.-aided coups. Less visible to the outside world is the battle over Haiti's future, with the movement from below resisting the way aid is being used, along with military occupation by the U.S. and UN, and a compliant national government, to stifle the movement and tighten the neoliberal capitalist vise on the masses.

The poorest, most oppressed country in the Western Hemisphere reveals the future for large sections of even the most "advanced" countries unless the capitalist form of development is cast aside, making it imperative not only to resist but to be armed with a philosophy of revolution in permanence. The fact that we cannot know what may develop there, and whether the revolt may take some new direction, only makes a philosophy of revolution that much more important, as the most vital preparation for revolution and against counter-revolution. That is why we aim to complete, in this Centenary Year of Raya Dunayevskaya's birth, a book of selected writings by her on Marx.

* * *

Haiti's history brings out the dialectic of revolution and counter-revolution--the history of our age. The people of Haiti created a unique revolution 200 years ago of Black masses overthrowing the slavemasters. The newly independent U.S. joined at that moment with the European colonial powers to contain that slave revolution and punish the Haitians. Repeated imperialist intervention and native-born dictators could never eliminate the masses' resistance. Their creative revolt and self-mobilization toppled Jean-Claude Duvalier and allowed Aristide to emerge as a leader raised up by the mass movement. The calls for his return today are calls for self-determination by the Haitian masses. The potential for revolution is precisely what the intervention by the U.S. aims to stifle.

Haiti's vulnerability to the deadliness of the earthquake was greatly magnified by centuries of imperialism and counter-revolutionary regimes--from counter-revolution from within immediately after the revolution, to repeated U.S.-led imperialist intervention in the 20th and 21st centuries. From 1825 to 1947, in one of the most egregious displays of a colonial power draining a former colony, France forced Haiti to pay it "reparations" equivalent to over $20 billion in today's dollars. More recently, capitalist globalization hollowed out social services and infrastructure, and the peasant economy has been deliberately decimated, impoverishing farming families and driving many into city slums. Rather than allowing true human development, all capitalism has done for that country has been to suck out unpaid hours of labor and strip the ecology bare to enrich overseas coffers and a tiny native elite.

This history is illuminated by Dunayevskaya's Marxist-Humanist analysis that capital sufficient to industrialize the "backward" lands will not be available so long as the determinant is the accumulation of surplus value--that is, unpaid hours of labor. In other words, capital's own laws of development preclude it from developing these countries. Precisely the same laws are at work in the world economic crisis, which is an expression of capitalists' inability to escape the decline in the rate of capital accumulation. Neither financial bubbles nor immense Keynesian state expenditures have achieved more than a temporary amelioration, and even in the richest land, the U.S., millions are facing years without jobs.

At the root of the general crisis of world capitalism, as well as of Haiti's desolation, are the laws of capitalist development--laws unbreakable except by freely associated labor in revolutions that usher in new stages of development. From the start of the African revolutions in the 1950s, this analysis was projected in our pamphlet on Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions, which is to be excerpted in the new book. As struggles deepened against the revolutions' internal contradictions and against neocolonialism, and for a second revolution, Dunayevskaya developed the comprehension of the African revolutions in a new context in her Philosophy and Revolution and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, making a category of the dialectic of the self-developing Subject and of the urgency of revolution in permanence. Today's grinding worldwide economic crisis demands a new look at how the development of that theory continued in what will also be in the new book, Dunayevskaya's analysis of the global crisis in the 1970s that ended the post-World War II boom. There she pointed to the capitalists themselves recognizing the decline in the rate of profit and investment. Their awareness that there is to be no next boom made them look at the actual structural changes with "overwhelming preponderance of constant capital (machinery) over variable capital (living labor employed)Ņas well as the world production and its interrelations."

Because Marxist-Humanism is not only about what we are against but what we are for, we have seen what other Marxists did not in Marx's last decade, when he investigated the relationship between capitalistic countries and the "underdeveloped" lands, as well as the questions of organization and the Man/Woman relationship. Writings in the new book examine these "new moments" in Marx, grasping in them the question of new paths of development, new paths to revolution. These categories provide ground not only for opposing the way the impulse of the people of the U.S. to help the Haitians is being channeled into imperialist types of "aid," but for projecting a revolutionary vision connecting the cooperative ways ordinary Haitians are responding to the devastation, with the need and prospects for revolutionary transformation in both countries.

* * *

The need for revolutionary transformation in the U.S. has been made more stark in the year since Barack Obama's election. While the economic crisis gave impetus to a coming together of white labor with Black America sufficient to elect the first Black President of the U.S., the Right has been straining to break apart that coalition by exploiting racism and the persistence of economic suffering. The crumbling of President Obama's domestic agenda is an object lesson in the ineffectiveness of pragmatism and compromising half-measures. The threat posed by "Tea Party"-type movements cannot be dismissed just because of their corporate bankrolling, at a time when naked racism and all the ideas of the John Birch Society have become accepted as mainstream discourse. In part, its rise reflects the rulers' well-grounded fears of labor revolt against capital. New contract clauses worked out by management and labor bureaucrats to prevent factory occupations show that they have not forgotten the sitdowns of the last two years. Nor is the far Right's ferocity separate from the homegrown terrorism of the airplane attack on the IRS building in Austin, or of the war on women including the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Wichita.

At the same time, the administration is intensifying U.S. wars abroad that kill and maim unconscionable numbers of civilians. Obama's timeline for withdrawing troops from Iraq is in jeopardy as sectarian violence is rekindled and sectarian power plays threaten to deligitimize the coming elections there. In Afghanistan the war has been massively expanded. Behind the current offensive and its civilian casualties, there lurks the question of how lasting any battlefield victory can be after the promised June 2011 "beginning" of troop withdrawal, which is supposed to leave the country in the hands of the corrupt, despised, and ineffectual government of Hamid Karzai, a government antithetical to democracy, women's rights, and human rights in general. In truth, there is no end in sight for either the fighting in Afghanistan or the war's extension to Pakistan and Yemen, with sabers rattling over other countries such as Somalia and Iran.

* * *

The most important revolt of the past year has been the still ongoing one in Iran, where the protests sparked by Ahmadinejad's stealing the election continue, yet the government has been able to contain them so far and is waging fierce and deadly repression. Two events make our intervention even more crucial now: the movement's growing self-criticism and search for a new direction; and Iran's continuing nuclear program, which partly aims to undercut the movement--the more radical parts of which mostly oppose Iran's quest for nuclear weapons--but also threatens to spur an arms race in the Middle East, if not globally. The ground for our intervention this year was set shortly before the protests began, when we reprinted Dunayevskaya's Political-Philosophic Letter on "What has happened to the Iranian revolution?" In addition to participating in solidarity protests, meetings, and debates, we have printed in the pages of News & Letters both moving reports of the continuing revolutionary protests and theoretical articles posing questions to the intellectuals whose ideas have failed to keep up with the new point reached by the masses, including the relationship of a philosophy of revolution to new forms of organization. Marxist-Humanism poses the question of where all the revolt leads if it is not armed with a philosophy of revolution.

That explains why we must make this Centenary Year a new point of projection of the Marxist-Humanist body of ideas, which is what we are celebrating. Our task to complete the book of Dunayevskaya's writings on Marx is not "internal" but about making those ideas known and concretizing them for the new decade. What characterizes all our endeavors for this Centenary Year is renewed outreach and projection, the test of which is organizational growth.

* * *

We here issue a Call for a national Convention this Memorial Day weekend. The outgoing National Editorial Board will meet in Executive Session Friday evening, May 28. Beginning on Saturday morning, May 29, and running through Sunday, May 30, all sessions of the Convention will be open to members and to invited friends, who are given the same privileges to the floor for discussion.

We are asking the Chicago local to host the Convention and to be responsible for a Saturday evening party to greet out-of-towners. All locals and members at large are asked to let the Center know at least two weeks in advance who will be attending the Convention, in order for the host local to plan meals and arrange for housing.

With this Call begins a full 90 days of pre-Convention discussion. A draft Perspectives Thesis will be published in the May-June issue of News & Letters so that it can be discussed by members and friends, correspondents and critics, before the Convention. Articles for pre-Convention Discussion Bulletins must be submitted to the Center by Monday, May 3. Any articles after that date must be copied in your local and brought to the Convention to be distributed there. Discussion within our local committees and with all those we can reach and whom we may wish to invite to the Convention becomes a measure of the inseparability for us between preparation for our Convention and all our activities throughout the pre-Convention period.

--The Resident Editorial Board

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