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News and Letters Committees
Constitution and By-Laws
Preamble
People everywhere, today, are looking for a new way of
life under which they can be free to guide their own destiny: to set and
establish their own way of living, own conditions of work, and own forms of
association with each other. The totality of the world crisis is seen in the basic
inability of either the Russian, the Chinese, or the American social, economic
or political systems to solve any of the basic problems of the working-class, or
to be able to offer any present or future freedom from exploitation,
discrimination, degradation or misery. The age of state-capitalism, whether in its
single-party totalitarian form or its parliamentary form, can offer nothing to
humanity but the prospect of another war. The advent of nuclear
weapons, possessed by all contenders for world power, seriously raises the
question of the survival of humanity in the event of such a struggle. We believe
that the working people are the only force in the world today capable of
changing present-day society and of evolving the forms and the shape of future
society. Just as in 1936-37,
the American working people found their own way, through the sitdown strikes, to
industrial organization and the CIO, so they are searching today for the new
political and social forms to fight the labor bureaucracy. Since
the 1949-1950 miners'strike and
the advent of automation, the problem of guiding their own destiny has moved to
the point of production itself and posed the basic question: "What kind
of labor should man do? Why
should there be a division between mental and manual labor?" Abroad, the
June 17th, 1953 revolt of the East German workers, and a few weeks later, the
revolts in the Vorkuta forced labor camps in Russia itself, began that which
came to a climax in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 -- Workers' Councils
leading the struggle for total freedom. They
have answered affirmatively the question: "Can man be free in this
age of totalitarianism?" The necessity
for a new society is clear from the working people's opposition to war. That
opposition is based upon a vision of a new society in which they, to a man,
woman and child control their own lives. Any
opposition to war, which is based on less than this, must end in capitulation to
the warmongers. We feel that
the Black masses occupy a place of special significance in American life. Their
struggle for equality and justice, which is taking place every day in every city
of the country and increases in tempo and effectiveness, stands in the forefront
of the struggle of all oppressed people for full freedom. Since
the 1960s the Black Revolution is one more proof that the Black masses -- men,
women and children -- are vanguard in the American revolution. We feel that
the youth are a most precious source of our development. We
recognize that even though the youth are not directly involved in production,
they are the ones whose idealism in the finest sense of the word combines with
opposition to existing adult society in so unique a way that it literally brings
them alongside the workers as builders of the new society. The rise of
Women's Liberation, as a movement, is proof both of the correctness of our
having singled out, in 1955, women as a revolutionary new force, and of the
inseparability of women's liberation as Reason, as well as force. As part of the
total search for a fundamentally new way of life, we hereby establish News and
Letters Committees. In keeping
with this principle, we establish the paper, News & Letters,
whose editor shall be a worker, and the articles for which shall be written on a
decentralized basis. The
establishment of the publication, News & Letters,
is an integral part of this quest by workers, Blacks, youth and women, for
totally new relations and for a fundamentally new way of life. We undertake
that space be available in the paper for youth which they will write and edit
for themselves in keeping with the principle that they are organizationally
independent of these News and Letters Committees. In
establishing News & Letters, our purpose is to create a means of communication among working people
on their common problems, aspirations, ideas and needs. The
paper thus becomes a weapon in the class struggle. We
are creating a center around which the basic ideas of workers' emancipation and
freedom can crystallize and find the broadest possible form of public
expression. News & Letters shall be published at least ten times a year. News & Letters was created so that the voices of revolt from below could be heard not
separated from the articulation of a philosophy of liberation. It
is our aim to assure its publication and to promote the firmest unity among
workers, Blacks and other minorities, women, youth and those intellectuals who
have broken with the ruling bureaucracy of both capital and labor. We
see the labor bureaucracy as the last barrier to the full emancipation of the
working-class. We hold that
the method of Marxism is the guide for our growth and development. Just
as Marxism was born out of the working-class struggles of Marx's day, so today,
Marxism is in the lives and aspirations of the working people. We
hold it to be the duty of each generation to interpret Marxism for itself. The
main problem is not what Marx wrote in 1843 or 1883, but what Marxism is
today. We reject the attempt of both Communists and the
Administration to identify Marxism, which is a theory of liberation, with its
exact opposite, Communist totalitarianism. Heretofore, American radical groups have failed to establish the theory of Marxism on native grounds despite (1) the great traditions of the Abolitionist movement whose aims and activity paralleled that of Karl Marx and the Workingmen's First International that came to the aid of the North in the Civil War; and (2) the historic contributions the struggle for the 8-hour day by the American workers made to Marx's thinking, specifically to the structure of his greatest theoretical work, Capital. We have therefore undertaken to set forth our own interpretation, in book form. Marxism and Freedom . . . from 1776 until todayhas accomplished this task by: (1) establishing the American roots of Marxism; (2) presenting a comprehensive attack on present-day Communism, which is, in truth, a form of state-capitalism; (3) re-establishing Marxism in its original form of "a thorough-going Naturalism or Humanism"; and (4) pointing to the new Humanist philosophy of the working-class in this period of Automation as expressed in their actions, and in their own words through News & Letters. What Marxism
and Freedom, with its dialectical
form of presentation of history and theory as emanating from the movement from
practice did do is lay the foundation for the articulation of the unity of
philosophy and revolution. Philosophy
and Revolution -- From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao,
in articulating the integrality of philosophy and revolution as the
characteristic of the age, and tracing it through historically, caught the link
of continuity with the Humanism of Marx, that philosophy of liberation which
merges the dialectics of elemental revolt and its Reason. The
new historic passions and forces set in motion in the 1950s gave birth to a new
generation of revolutionaries in the 1960s, and in the 1970s have put a mark of
urgency on the need of integrality also of philosophy and organization. As
against "the party to lead" concept, such integrality of dialectics
and organization reflects the revolutionary maturity of the age and its passion
for a philosophy of liberation. The third of
our theoretical-philosophic works, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's
Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, was published in the Marx centenary, when the three-decade-long movement
from practice to theory that is itself a form of theory was challenged by the
totality of global crises in a nuclear world. It was also the period when Marx's heretofore unknown
writings from his last decade had finally become available. It was there that we, as Marxist-Humanists, discovered a
trail to the 1980s in Marx's "new moments" on new paths to revolution,
on new concepts of man/woman relations, and on philosophy of revolution as
inseparable from organization. Thus, Rosa
Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution
projects that the totally new relationship between technologically
under-developed and developed lands, which Marx was working out, needs further
development now that a whole new Third World has emerged in our age. At
the same time, the "new moments" of Marx's last decade, as well as his
first discovery of a whole new continent of thought and of revolution in the
1840s -- his "revolution in permanence" -- were seen as calling for a
critical re-examination of the relationship of spontaneity and vanguard party in
the revolutions of the early 20th century, the Russian Revolution led by Lenin
and the German led by Luxemburg, in light of the soured and unfinished
revolutions of our age. We see
the absolute challenge to our age as the need to concretize Marx's
"revolution in permanence" not alone as the determinant for theory and
practice, but as ground for organization in place of "the party to
lead," in order to achieve the total uprooting of this exploitative,
racist, sexist society and the creation of truly new human relations. Because Marxism
and Freedom (1958), Philosophy
and Revolution (1973), and Rosa
Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution
(1982) -- which we have concretized on the American scene and for the Black
dimension as American Civilization on Trial
(1963, 1983) -- are rooted in and parallel the movement from practice to theory
of our age with our own theoretical development since our birth, they are the
theoretical foundations for the Marxist-Humanist organization, News and Letters
Committees. However, they are
not a "program." They
are a contribution to the theoretical preparation for revolution without which
no revolutionary organization or grouping can match the challenge of our era. We make no
pretense of being a political party. We
constitute ourselves as News and Letters Committees whose members come together
to promote their ideas in an organized manner and constantly to renew them in
the practice of the class struggle. We
have no interests separate
and apart from those of the workers as a whole. Those who join
us in these committees do so freely by an acceptance of these general
principles. They are bound
only to carry out the decisions which the members have arrived at
democratically. Others, who
are not members, are free to contribute material for the paper and to
participate in the discussions of these committees. Accepting
these principles, we adopt the following By-Laws for our conduct: By-Laws
* * * This Constitution was adopted July 8, 1956, and amended three times -- September 1, 1958; October 21, 1973; and September 4, 1983. Copies of the original Constitution and of all amendments are included in the documents preserved and on microfilm at the Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit, Michigan 48202. For our participation in the 1949-1950 Miners' General Strike, see both the Prologue to 25 Years of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. and the documents on deposit and on microfilm at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs of Wayne State University under the title: "The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection: Marxist-Humanism -- Its Origins and Development in the U.S., 1941 to Today." |
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