News & Letters, July 1998

DRAFT FOR MARXIST-HUMANIST PERSPECTIVES, 1998-1999

News and Letters Committees publishes the Draft of its Perspectives Thesis each year directly in the pages of NEWS & LETTERS. As part of the preparation for our upcoming national gathering, we urge your participation in our discussion around this thesis because our age is in such total crisis that no revolutionary organization can allow any separation between theory and practice, workers and intellectuals, "inside" and "outside," philosophy and organization. We are raising questions and ask you to help in working out the answers.

CAPITALISM'S NEW GLOBAL CRISIS REVEALS THE TODAYNESS OF MARX

Introduction: The post-Cold War nuclear peril

We live at a time when everything seems imbued with its opposite. At the very moment when a mass movement in Indonesia forced Asia's longest-ruling dictator from power, the detonation of nuclear tests by India and Pakistan has brought us to the brink of military conflagration. New and potentially revolutionary challenges are arising at the same time as new threats to the existence of civilization.

The India-Pakistan nuclear tests do not simply confirm old realities. In India the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) is anxious to develop a nuclear arsenal, as well as make use of simmering conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir, as a way to broaden its shaky base of support. The opposition to the BJP was expressed in a statement by the National Alliance of People's Movements, an association of 200 grassroots and environmental movements in India, which denounced the nuclear tests on the grounds that real national "glory would have been the availability of clean drinking water, housing, employment, health services and opportunities for education."(1) Pakistan's rulers have meanwhile made it clear that they will use nuclear weapons to prevent another defeat at the hands of Indian forces should war break out over Kashmir. Over 1.5 billion people now live in an area threatened by nuclear catastrophe.

The ramifications of this go beyond India-Pakistan. India's test irritated China, which is spending vast amounts on new nuclear weapons of its own. Pakistan's test caused jitters in Iran which is sure to accelerate its effort to obtain nuclear weapons. Even more ominous developments loom in Russia, which has an increasingly unstable nuclear arsenal. Only a little over a year ago the head of a nuclear complex in Chelyabinsk, V. Nechai, killed himself because he lacked the money to pay his employees and could not assure the safety of the plant's operations.

The engine of today's nuclear proliferation, however, is the U.S. It was no secret that China supplied blueprints to Pakistan for a nuclear bomb and advice on how to make one small enough to fit on a missile. Yet the U.S. did nothing to stop this. At the same time, Clinton pushed ahead with NATO's expansion, even though it came at the cost of killing any chance of further nuclear arms agreements with Russia. Russia has not ratified the START II treaty and will surely not do so now.

The U.S. is instead embarking on a new stage of nuclear weapons development. This was seen on March 25 when it conducted a "subcritical" nuclear test code-named Stagecoach. Though the test was supposedly to monitor the reliability of plutonium in aging warheads, it was really part of a $45 billion program to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As one arms expert put it, "A real scientific and technical revolution is going on in nuclear weapons design."(2)

What drives this nuclear arms build-up? In large part, it is capital's werewolf hunger for self-expansion. The arms industry remains highly profitable and Clinton has no intention of getting in its way. This is reflected in his refusal to roll back Stagecoach and other new arms programs on the grounds that it would crimp the profits of arms contractors. This likewise defines Clinton's trip to China, which is not about curbing nuclear weapons but "furthering trade" and "opening up business opportunities" in this heartland of child labor and sweatshops.

At no time has the naked pursuit of corporate profit through the instrumentality of state power been so total a determinant of U.S. foreign policy. This has led to the growing nuclear proliferation, of which we have seen only the beginning.

Clearly, the notion that the nuclear peril came to an end with the end of the Cold War was a hollow illusion. The Cold War may be over, but the insane logic of capital accumulation which helped drive it is as alive and dangerous as ever.

Today's situation may be even more dangerous than before since the one thing the U.S. and USSR were determined not to permit during the Cold War was small or medium-sized powers deciding the timing of the nuclear holocaust for them. With only one superpower left, it now becomes harder for the U.S. to control nuclear proliferation, even if it wanted to. The post-Cold War era has also seen a proliferation of longstanding conflicts between regional powers which sends its rulers thirsting for nuclear arms. Thomas Graham, formerly of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, recently said, "We are at perhaps the most dangerous period since the beginning of the nuclear age, with the possible exception of the Cuban missile crisis."

All of this makes newly concrete the repeated emphasis placed by Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, on Marx's statement, "To have one basis for life and another for science is a priori a lie."

I. Globalized capital in crisis: from East Asia to the U.S.

'Contagion' in the global economy

"The capitalists may not be ready to "agree" with Marx, that the supreme commodity, labor-power, is the only source of all value and surplus value, but they do see that there is such a decline in the RATE of profit compared to what THEY consider necessary to keep investing for expanded production, that they are holding off--so much so that now their ideologists are saying low investment is by no means a temporary factor that the capitalists would "overcome" with the next boom. THERE IS TO BE NO NEXT BOOM. It is this which makes them look both at the actual structural changes....as well as the WORLD production and its interrelations."

--Raya Dunayevskaya (1977)(3)

What underlies today's nuclear tensions is that globalized capitalism is more unstable, precarious, and crisis-ridden than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Nothing shows this more than the impact of the East Asian economic crisis.

What is striking about the crisis there is how fast it spread from one area to another. The currency crisis in Thailand spread to Malaysia, South Korea, and then Indonesia. This shook the Suharto regime to its foundation and helped lead to the emergence of a mass movement which pushed him from power. Yet East Asia's troubles are far from over. Its depth and impact on the U.S. only truly comes into focus when we view what is happening in Japan.

Japan is suffering from six years of virtually no growth and is now deep in a recession. When Japan's "bubble economy" collapsed in the early 1990s and the return on investments there soured, it sent hundreds of billions of dollars to East Asia in the form of loans and direct investments in an effort to sustain corporate profit rates. This flood of foreign investment set off a speculative bubble in East Asia, which collapsed last summer. The East Asian economies are now unable to repay their loans from Japan, adding to a debt crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Japan's Finance Ministry admits that its banks hold bad loans to the tune of $614 billion; in proportion to the size of the economy that is 10 times larger than the U.S.'s savings and loan disaster. Yet even this is the tip of iceberg, since hundreds of billions of dollars of additional debt never make it onto the balance sheets of government and corporations. Japan is trying to get out of this crunch by increasing exports to the U.S. Yet this is the same approach being taken by other Asian nations to dig themselves out of their economic morass. This creates pressure for each to devalue its currency to cheapen its exports which in the long run only adds to the debt which prompted the maneuvering in the first place.

This has a global impact. Russia is facing near-insolvency, in part because South Korean capital, which invested heavily there since 1991, has now pulled out. Latin America is also in trouble, as seen in currency instability in Brazil and plummeting stock markets in Mexico and Chile. Most importantly, new foreign investment in China is drying up at the very time that China is laying off millions of workers from state-owned industries. An unraveling of China's economy will have a huge impact on the world's economy.

While this is occurring, Bill Clinton acts as if all is well on the U.S. front, as he boasts of a "booming economy" that has supposedly managed to remain immune from the crises wrecking the rest of the world. The "low" rate of U.S. unemployment, 4% rate of economic growth, and the "end" of inflation is heralded as proof that we have entered a "new economy" freed from the economic dislocations of the past.

Yet most of the growth here is also of a speculative nature, set off by capitalists pulling their investments out of East Asia and elsewhere and sending them to Wall Street. The NY and NASDAQ stock exchanges have added $4 trillion in the last four years, while the Dow Jones average has increased four-fold since 1992. This speculative bubble has mushroomed out of all proportion to the growth of the real economy. Productivity, the key economic indicator, has risen by just over 1% a year from 1990-1998--the same as over the past two decades and a far cry from the 3% yearly increase in the 1950s and 1960s.

Moreover, this has become an increasingly two-tier economy, especially seen in the growing numbers of the working poor. One in four children live in poverty nationwide and 300,000 are illegally employed. Almost half of American families in poverty have at least one working adult. The gutting of welfare has only added to this. While 10 million have been moved off the welfare rolls, the jobs most people end up getting are without benefits, even health care.

Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans living in poverty in the South today is the same as in 1969--23%. For the first time, the poverty rate in the Western states is as high. Since the bull market in stocks took off in 1985, the number of those going hungry each day has grown by 50%, to 30 million.

Despite the growth of the Black middle-class, most Blacks have seen no gain from the economic "miracle" touted by Clinton. The inner cities remain mired in depression conditions and Blacks suffer over twice the rate of unemployment of whites. The much-touted "surge in employment" largely reflects the growth of low-wage sweated labor.

Clinton may still imagine that the influx of foreign capital will manage to prop up the U.S. economy, especially since its labor costs in manufacturing are $20 per hour less than Germany's and $10 per hour less than Japan's, which has a more militant legacy of labor unrest than usually acknowledged. But as the impact of the global economic crisis ripples outward, it is only a matter of time before the speculative bubble bursts here as well. Japan remains central in this. If the crisis in Japan becomes so acute that it stops recycling its trade surpluses into U.S. treasury bonds, the U.S. economy will quickly unravel.

Bourgeois pundits have coined a phrase for this tendency of economic crises to spread quickly from one region to the next--CONTAGION. What is striking about this is that whereas in the post-World War II era capitalists figured out how to prevent total financial collapses like that of 1929 through an array of state-interventionist measures in the economy, today they lack a viable mechanism to stave off such crises in the international arena. The utter failure of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to stem the decline in East Asia is a case in point. No sooner was the globalized nature of capitalism heralded as proof of a "new stage" of capital, than globalization itself turned out to be an engine for spreading economic crises from one nation to the next.

This situation makes newly concrete the perspectives Karl Marx outlined in his last decade (1872-83) when he turned with new eyes to developments in the technologically underdeveloped world. He incorporated many of these new perspectives in his revision of Volume 1 of CAPITAL in its French edition in 1872-75. In one passage, left out of the fourth German edition by Engels, he wrote:

"But only after mechanical industry had struck root so deeply that it exerted a preponderant influence on the whole of national production; only after foreign trade began to predominate over internal trade, thanks to mechanical industry; only after the world market had successively annexed extensive areas of the New World, Asia and Australia; and finally, only after a sufficient number of industrial nations had entered the arena--only after all this had happened can one date the repeated self-perpetuating cycles, whose successive phases embrace years, and always culminate in a general crisis...we ought to conclude, on the basis of the laws of capitalist production as we have expounded them, that the duration is variable, and that the length of the cycles will gradually diminish" (CAPITAL, Vol. 1, Fowkes trans., p. 786).(4)

WHAT IS NEW IN TODAY'S GLOBALIZED CAPITAL... AND WHAT IS NOT

Today's globalized capitalism has given rise to several illusions. One is that globalization is a new feature of the post-1989 world. In fact, capital has been globalized since its inception. As Marx said in the GRUNDRISSE, "The world market forms the presupposition of the whole as well as its substratum" (p. 227). Just as globalization is not new, today's level of capital movement is not unprecedented. Between 1898 and 1914 the amount of capital moving across national borders as a percentage of global Gross Domestic Product was higher than today. Moreover, capitalism assumed a new global stage in the 1930s and 1940s with the rise of state-capitalism as a world phenomenon in Stalin's Russia, Japan, the New Deal in the U.S., and elsewhere.(5)

What changed in the 1980s and 1990s was not the fact of globalization, but rather its FORM. Crucial in this was the 1974-75 economic recession, which revealed a worldwide decline in the rate of profit. To satisfy its inner compulsion to accumulate on an ever-expanding scale, capitalism found it necessary to force down the variable component of capital--the amount of value accruing to workers in the form of wages and social benefits.

One way to effect this is to remove barriers to the direct global competition of capital. By removing national restrictions to capital movement like trade barriers, legislation protecting workers' rights, and environmental regulations, each company is forced to directly compete against all others in the world market. As a result, the pressure to cut wages and benefits becomes irresistible; otherwise, the company loses out to those elsewhere in the world who do. This not only drives greater capital movement across national boundaries but also within them, as capital searches for new sources for low-paid sweated labor such as in the U.S. South.

Together with investing in new technologies and exerting greater flexibility and control over the labor process, globalization is used to increase the proportion of constant capital relative to variable capital. Globalization has become capital's outer expression of its inner core.

This is also what drives today's growing megamergers such as of Chrysler-Daimler and Citicorp-Traveler's. The more firms are thrown into direct global competition, the more they try to push aside and/or manage their rivals through megamergers. Globalization thus creates downward pressure on wages and benefits while accelerating the concentration and centralization of capital.

The force which effects this is the state. The state is used to open up financial markets, provide tax shelters for multinationals in low-wage enterprise zones, break trade unions, force the masses to assume the debt run upthrough military spending and tax breaks for businesses, and so on. The naked hand of state power has accompanied each step in the further globalization of capital. We still live in the era of state-capitalism; the RESTRUCTURING of capitalism since 1974-75 has not changed that.

Of course, some of the functions of the state have changed. It no longer has "legal" title to the ownership of capital, nor does it directly plan the bulk of production as it did in the state-capitalist regimes which called themselves Communist in Russia and East Europe. Nor does it try to maintain a welfare state as it did in the West from the 1930s onward. The state has instead now become the handmaiden of direct capital accumulation by freeing up all avenues for its self-expansion.

Yet while those who skip over the role of the state in today's capitalism are in error, no less in error are those who think the importance of the state means it can be appealed to in order to rein in and control capital's destructive march over humanity. The simple fact is that capital can no longer be controlled. Capitalism's werewolf hunger for accumulation is so deep, and the tendency of the rate of profit to decline remains so constant, that capital must be "freed up" to seek the lowest level of wages and benefits in order for the system to reproduce itself on an ever-expanding scale.

The state therefore does not control capital; capital controls the state. This has always been true of state-capitalism. As Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in MARXISM AND FREEDOM of Russian state-capitalism, "Stalin thought he was fashioning the State in the image of the Party. Consciously, that is what he was doing. Objectively, however, the exact opposite was true. The State transformed the Party in its image, which, IN TURN, was but a reflection of the production process of capitalism at its ultimate stage of development" (p. 259).

The illusion that capital can be controlled without abolishing the law of value and surplus value--a notion long held by Social Democrats, Stalinists, and other leftists--is contradicted by the nature of capital itself. As Marx wrote in the GRUNDRISSE, "Capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital--money as self-reproductive. If ever it perceived a certain boundary not as a barrier, but became comfortable within it as a boundary, it would itself have declined from exchange value to use value. The barrier appears as an accident which has to be conquered" (p. 334).

Another illusion about today's globalized capital is that it makes national boundaries and nationalism obsolete. Instead, it has been accompanied by an INTENSIFICATION of national conflicts as rulers appeal to narrow nationalism in the face of mass unrest and declining living conditions. Nowhere is this now more evident than in Kosova.

Serbian ruler Milosevic's genocidal attacks on the Albanian populace in Kosova is a replay of his war against Bosnia. What is also being replayed are the lies and hypocrisy of the U.S., which is threatening NATO air strikes if Milosevic continues his campaign of ethnic cleansing. The biggest lie of all is the administration's claim that air strikes can bring "peace" to the region since they supposedly did so earlier in Bosnia. The very opposite is the case. The NATO air strikes against the Serbs in 1995 occurred just as Bosnian and Croatian forces were about to inflict a military defeat on Serbian forces. The U.S. used those strikes to pressure the Bosnians to call off their advance and accept the Dayton accords which partitioned Bosnia along ethnic lines.

This gave Milosevic a new lease on life. Today's war in Kosova would never have occurred if Bosnia had been allowed to inflict a military defeat on the Serbs.

The administration's claim of being concerned with the suffering of the Kosovars is no more believable than its earlier hypocrisy in regard to the Bosnians. The U.S. opposes an independent Kosova and calls the Kosova Liberation Army "terrorist." The U.S. is acting not out of support for the national struggle of the Kosovars, but out of concern that Milosevic's actions jeopardize regional stability. Whatever action it takes will not be in the masses' interests. Globalized capital continues to collude with narrow nationalism, with genocidal consequences.

The only way out of this insane logic is to uproot the capital relation itself. At no time in history has it been more imperative to break with the illogical logic of this dehumanized system which will stop at nothing, including nuclear war, in its endless pursuit of "production for the sake of production."

FORCES OF REVOLT AS REASON

It should be evident that uprooting this system cannot be achieved without a great many forces of revolution--workers, women, youth, Blacks and other minorities, gays and lesbians, indeed all who strive to transform the conditions of oppression into an existence worthy of our human nature. As against those whose minds have become so swept up into the logic of capital that they cannot even see such forces, their presence continues to make itself felt.

This is reflected in how it is not only capitalism which has become more international; so have many freedom struggles against it. This is true of the wave of strikes that have swept West Europe since 1995 against the high levels of unemployment. Cross-border organizing and multi-national workers' protests remain a central part of the struggles there. In East Asia the protests against the austerity measures in Thailand helped inspire mass movements in South Korea and Indonesia. The Indonesian movement has helped breathe new life into the South Korean struggle where workers have launched strikes against layoffs and cutbacks.

Another expression of this emerged at a conference of miners in Tuzla, Bosnia, in March to oppose mine closings and other austerity measures; it brought together miners from Bosnia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, South Africa, Greece, Turkey, Spain, and Scotland. Miners have long been in the forefront of the struggle against Milosevic, as seen in the struggles of the Kosovar miners of Trepca in the 1980s and early 1990s.

At the March conference the miners discussed not only economic issues but such political questions as opposition to the Dayton accords. One Bosnian miner said, "When Bosnia was invaded, the miners were the first to take up arms. In the Tuzla region alone 6,000 miners fought in the Bosnian army. Three hundred were killed and 600 invalided. The first person to die on the front line was a miner. The politicians cannot ignore us. These trousers I wear are from before the war. We know who fought and who is now getting rich." It is a striking illustration of how the national struggle to preserve and extend Bosnia's multiethnic heritage, far from becoming a closed world unto itself, has led to a new expression of proletarian internationalism.

While nothing on that level has yet emerged in the U.S., new developments are arising. One is the International Workers' School scheduled to be held this October in Atlanta which aims to bring together public sector workers from five Southern states along with workers from Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, Haiti, Germany and elsewhere. Another is the way the Frente Autentico de Trabajadores of Mexico allied itself with U.S. and Canadian unions early this year to create the first North American labor coalition aimed at combating sweated labor and plant closings. While such efforts may still be on a small scale, they reflect the search for new forms of organization and struggle to combat the might of global capital.

While it is too early to tell what will emerge from these efforts, this much is clear: The reasoning of the masses constantly creates new organizational forms. This was seen in the movement that brought down Mobutu in Congo last year, which saw the emergence of revolutionary mass committees such as the CHEMBE CHEMBE. This had a galvanizing effect, not alone on Congo, but elsewhere in Africa as seen in a renewed discussion of revolutionary ideas there. The fact that, as our African correspondent put it, "immediately after victory these committees do not only lose their influence but are put totally out of function and replaced with one-party or multi-party dictatorships"--or as in South Africa, by bourgeois democracy--does not free revolutionaries from the need to dig into the forms of consciousness and organization which emerge from below.(6)

New openings have emerged here as well. Although women's liberationists confront the loss of many hard-fought gains and face a crisis in abortion rights, women are in the forefront of fighting welfare-to-work schemes that have turned into welfare-to-homelessness for countless women and children. They are also active in support for women prisoners who suffer specific problems on top of the dehumanization of all the imprisoned. And Black women are organizing unions in the South, as in the catfish industry, which were once considered impossible to organize.

Although numerous strikes take place that go unheralded in the national press, the United Autoworkers strike that erupted on June 5 when 3,400 members of Local 659 in Flint, Mich. walked out over health and safety violations, subcontracting, and the failure of General Motors to live up to its contract, did attract attention because it is seen as a showdown on the "downsizing" occurring in all industries. The strike indicates that while capitalism may be intent on cutting back the top of its "two-tier" work force, the historic "two-tier" in workers' resistance may be breaking down. Meanwhile, there are indications that a new generation of youth may be emerging not weighted down by the failures of the past, as seen in youth activity in prisoner support campaigns, against police brutality, and against the continued sanctions against Iraq.

Yet this does not mean we can underestimate the strength of the forces of reaction. Its strength was shown in the brutal torture and murder of James Byrd Jr., a Black man in Jasper, Texas, by three white supremacists. Though the cruelty of this act is incredible, it is no isolated incident; a racist climate has been generated that allowed it to occur, seen in the "copycat" attacks on Blacks modeled on the Jasper incident which later occurred in Louisiana and Belleville, Ill.

A racist backlash is occurring all over, and its seeds are planted by completely "lawful" ballot measures. One was the approval in California of a ballot initiative to eliminate bilingual education. As one Latina educator commented, racism can be the only motivation for this proposition since no one can claim that one year of immersion in English leads to English-language proficiency. This follows the passage of Proposition 209 last year which aimed to cut the number of minorities in state universities by gutting affirmative action. In this it has succeeded--the number of minorities admitted to the University of California at Berkeley fell from 20% last year to 11% this year; the number of Blacks fell from 562 to 191.

Clearly racism is the card which U.S. capitalism continuously uses. Yet the enormous energy expended to stir up racism reflects the depth of the revolutionary challenge to American "civilization" from Black America which has continually placed it on trial. As the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 showed, such revolutionary challenges are not far beneath the surface, and when they emerge they can have a galvanizing impact not only on Black America but also on women, youth and white labor.

Precisely because global capitalism is today more unstable, precarious, and crisis-ridden than at any time since the end of the Cold War, we must be prepared for the challenges sure to emerge from new struggles against it. As Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in the Marxist-Humanist Perspectives Thesis of 1977, "It's later, always later--except when spontaneity upsurges and you realize IT IS here and now, and you aren't there and ready." With this in mind we need to look at the central political-philosophic-organizational challenge facing us.

II. THE TODAYNESS OF MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION

Given today's realities, it is no wonder that the 150th anniversary of Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO has led to new discussion of Marx's critique of capitalism. As one symposium put it, the MANIFESTO 's discussion of capital's drive for self-expansion is "the best characterization of capitalism at the end of the 20th century currently available."(7) Our organization has been a part of these discussions in conferences on the Manifesto in New York, Berkeley, Chicago and Detroit, as well as Paris, Oslo and Glasgow.

Yet while there is increasing awareness of the importance of Marx's critique of capitalism, there has been much less discussion of the importance of his concept of a new society. Marx's concept of revolutionary socialism is in fact often dismissed as irrelevant even by those praising the cogency of his critique of capitalism. Such claims are expressive of the spirit of the times. The collapse of most of the state-capitalist regimes which called themselves Communist, and the utter failure of any number of efforts at socialist transformation in the Third World and the West, have exposed a long-standing crisis in the effort to project a viable alternative to existing society. The explicit projection of a socialist perspective has by now virtually vanished from the historic agenda. As a result, the new struggles encounter not only the might of the rulers but also a void in the articulation of an alternative to capitalism.

Faced with this, those trying to hew a path out of today's retrogression are asking: What is needed in order to restate and recreate Marx's concept of a totally new, human society? What new theoretic ground is needed to project a comprehensive liberating alternative to existing society?

Those who remain within the confines of post-Marx Marxism are completely ill-equipped to answer these questions. This is largely because of their failure to grasp mass revolts not just as force, but as Reason. Again and again workers' struggles have raised new questions about the content of a new society by asking "what KIND of labor should man perform." This search for new human relations has also been voiced by women's liberationists questioning the alienating form of man/woman relations, by national minorities opposing racism, and by gays and lesbians questioning the nature of sexuality. Yet many radicals continue to give scant attention to the forms of consciousness and organization arising from below, in remaining trapped either in economic determinism or political voluntarism wherein the subjective factor is reduced to "the party." Such skipping over the MIND of the oppressed loses sight of the ground for working out a vision of the future.

But while the concept of a new society cannot be worked out if the mind of the oppressed is skipped over, neither can it be worked out on the basis of spontaneous consciousness alone. The ability of masses of people to spontaneously come to socialist consciousness, proven over and over in this century, is not the same as saying that so total a concept of socialism as is spelled out in Marx's philosophy of revolution can be reached spontaneously. Marx, after all, was not simply one among many other socialists; his philosophy was distinct, and contained a distinct concept of the new society. Grasping and restating that concept does not come spontaneously, but demands hard, serious, ORGANIZED labor.

THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY

There is no philosophy better equipped to meet this challenge than Marxist-Humanism. That is because Raya Dunayevskaya's founding and development of this philosophy centered on a restatement of Marx's revolutionary vision through a new and creative return to Hegel's dialectic.

She showed that Marx arrived at his concept of a new society not only by closely studying the history of workers' movements and keeping his ears attuned to ongoing struggles, but also through a direct engagement with Hegel's philosophy. Of foremost importance to Marx was Hegel's concept of self-movement through absolute negativity. In Hegel, all forward movement proceeds through the power of negativity, the negation of obstacles to the subject's self-development. The transcendence of these obstacles is reached, not simply through the negation of their immediate forms of appearance (what he calls first negation), but through a second negation. This movement through the negation of the negation, or absolute negativity, is what produces the POSITIVE, the transcendence of alienation.

In his ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC of 1844, Marx appropriated this concept of transcendence of alienation through second negativity to express the process by which capitalism can be abolished. The first negation, he says, is the abolition of private property. Yet this negation by no means ensures liberation. To reach true liberation the communist negation of private property must itself be negated. Only then, Marx says, will there arise "positive Humanism, beginning from itself."

This projection of the new society as not simply the nationalization of property or abolition of the market but rather the creation of new human relations in production, between men and women and in society as a whole, became the basis of the concept of "revolution in permanence" which he spent the next 40 years concretizing. Marx's concept of revolution involved a total uprooting of class society. That concept of socialism could not have emerged without his transformation of Hegel's revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution.

Marx's rootedness in Hegel's dialectic is also seen in CAPITAL where he based his chapter on "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation" on Hegel's Absolute Idea. Just as the Absolute Idea in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC contains "the highest contradiction within itself," Marx showed that the ultimate logic of capitalist production contains an internal, irreconcilable, ABSOLUTE contradiction--the accumulation of capital at one pole and the emergence of "new passions and new forces" striving to uproot it on the other.

In response to today's crises, there is a reaching out for new philosophic ground with which to rearm the radical movement. This is leading some to look anew at the dialectic in Hegel and Marx. Yet the question which often gets posed to us, by workers and intellectuals alike, is "Why do you need the Absolute Idea to express this vision of a new society? Why is it important to return to Hegel's concept of absolute negativity for today?"

The context in which these questions are asked is one in which the predominant view is that Hegel's Absolutes express capital's drive to universalize itself. This has been argued with particular force by István Mészáros in BEYOND CAPITAL. He writes, "The question is: are we really destined to live forever under the spell of capital's global system glorified in its Hegelian conceptualization, resigned...to the tyrannical exploitative order of his World Spirit?"(8) For Mészáros, as for others, the need to free ourselves from the notion that there is no alternative requires breaking from the Hegelian dialectic itself. The problem with this position is that the philosophic ground from which Marx drew his very concept of liberation--the notion of self-movement through absolute negativity--is jettisoned. The philosophic void in projecting a comprehensive vision of a liberating alternative therefore persists, even among those trying to hew a path out of today's retrogression.

As against this, Dunayevskaya saw that in light of the realities of our age, defined by counter-revolution emerging from WITHIN revolution, it became imperative to achieve continuity with Marx's concept of a total uprooting by directly returning to Hegel's Absolutes. In first doing so in a series of letters written in May 1953, she discovered that Hegel's Absolutes express, in abstract form, the vision of the new society itself. As she put it in the first work of her "trilogy of revolution," MARXISM AND FREEDOM, FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY, "Nothing changed Marx's social vision: the vision of the future which Hegel called the Absolute and which Marx first called 'real Humanism' and later 'communism.' The road to both is by way of 'the negation of the negation'" (p. 66).

Her struggle to make this vision of liberation explicit led her, by 1973, to publish PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION: FROM HEGEL TO SARTRE AND FROM MARX TO MAO, in which she projected a new philosophic category--Absolute Negativity as New Beginning.

She there showed that the concept of absolute negativity expresses the quest by masses of people to not simply negate existing economic and political structures, but to create TOTALLY NEW HUMAN RELATIONS as well. In situating the concept of absolute negativity in the struggles of workers, women, youth, Blacks and other minorities, she opened new doors to appropriating and projecting this concept PHILOSOPHICALLY. Once the dialectic of second negativity is seen as intrinsic to the human subject, it becomes possible to grasp and project the idea of second negativity as a NEW BEGINNING, as a veritable force of liberation. This concept of Absolute Negativity as New Beginning provides a new basis for working out a vision of the future--of totally new human relations, of an end to the division between mental and manual labor and of alienated gender relations--which can animate and give direction to the freedom struggles of our time.

The role of our organization as a catalyst and propellant in the freedom struggles hinges on assuming organizational responsibility for projecting and developing these conceptions. Yet achieving this calls for a fundamental reorganization on our part. This is because internalizing and projecting the central concept in PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION--Absolute Negativity as New Beginning--has been a missed moment in the history of our organization. This is not because of any outright hostility to Hegelian dialectics. It is because we were all so excited at how absolute negativity is embodied in live forces of liberation, that we shied away from the PHILOSOPHIC PROJECTION projection of the concept of absolute negativity itself.

Dunayevskaya spoke to this in her "Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy" of June l, 1987: "We were so enamored of the movement from practice that we were hardly as enthusiastic or as concrete about the movement from theory, if not actually forgetting it."

Since the measure of all our work consists in overcoming this, we need to take a closer look at the problem of assuming organizational responsibility for philosophy, as it has shown itself in even the greatest Marxists.

ROSA LUXEMBURG AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIZATION

Few Marxists were greater than Rosa Luxemburg. Today, on the 100th anniversary of her famous debate with Eduard Bernstein on "Reform or Revolution," we still have much to learn from her contributions as well as limitations.

Luxemburg made an original contribution in 1898 in subjecting the new stage of monopoly capitalism-imperialism to a devastating critique and exposing the reformism of those within the radical movement who had accommodated themselves to it. She showed that monopoly capitalism and imperialism did not negate Marx's concept of revolution, but made it more imperative. And in opposition to Bernstein's call to "remove the dialectical scaffolding from Marxism," she wrote that "the dialectic is the intellectual arm of the proletariat...when [Bernstein] directs his keenest arrows against our dialectical system, he is really attacking the specific mode of thought employed by the conscious proletariat in its struggle for liberation."

And yet, as Dunayevskaya shows in Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, Luxemburg's defense of the dialectic did not lead her to delve into the dialectic of negativity itself. Unlike Lenin, who in 1914 turned to Hegel as part of reorganizing his own thinking after the collapse of the Second International, Luxemburg kept her distance from philosophy. Perhaps as a consequence, she never rethought her objection to considering national struggles as revolutionary. She opposed imperialism and national oppression and singled out the sufferings inflicted on the Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. But she never accepted the national struggles as a subject of revolution.

But while she rejected the national question, she did understand the importance of spontaneous class struggles. Perhaps more than anyone in the Marxist movement, she made a category out of revolutionary mass consciousness born from spontaneity. The mind of the oppressed was no abstraction to Rosa Luxemburg, but the very essence of revolution. For this reason, she critiqued many Marxists, including Lenin with whom she worked closely on many matters, for over-emphasizing centralism and "leadership" over the masses. For her, Marxism was the only theory to recognize the independent self-movement of the working class. The masses do not have to be schoolmastered, she said; their self-movement generates not only practical struggle but also the consciousness of the new society itself.

Her emphasis on mass consciousness, however, also contained a duality. It is addressed in Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution: "Luxemburg was absolutely right in her emphasis that the Marxist movement was the 'first in the history of class societies which, in all its moments, in its entire course, reckons on the organization and the independent, direct action of the masses.' However, she is not right in holding that, very nearly automatically, it means so total a conception of socialism that a philosophy of Marx's concept of revolution could likewise be left to spontaneous action. Far from it. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the 1905 Revolution, where spontaneity was absolutely the greatest, but failed to achieve its goal. The question of class consciousness does not exhaust the question of cognition, of Marx's philosophy of revolution" (p. 60).

By treating Marx's philosophy as virtually identical with the consciousness generated by spontaneous struggles, Luxemburg failed to single out the philosophic and organizational labor needed to restate Marx's concept of a new society. It isn't that she didn't see the importance of theory. She knew that theory and organization were crucial. But by acting as if cognition, Marxism, were synonymous with mass consciousness, she failed to see that the "historic reason to exist" for a Marxist organization hinges on philosophically restating Marx's Marxism for one's time. She instead held to another concept of organization--the elitist vanguard party--even while espousing spontaneity.

Dunayevskaya's critique of Luxemburg was no mere look into the past. It was part of projecting direction for overcoming the barriers to working out the inseparability of philosophy and organization in the present. We can especially see this in terms of a figure closer in time to our own who also focused on spontaneous freedom struggles--C.L.R. James, the co-leader along with Dunayevskaya of the Johnson-Forest Tendency of the 1940s and early 1950s.

James considered spontaneous mass consciousness as of such importance that he made a veritable category out of it. He also turned directly to Hegelian dialectics, as seen in his 1948 NOTES ON DIALECTICS. Indeed, he even went so far as to pose the need to explore Hegel's Absolutes in light of the realities of the age of state-capitalism. Yet James ultimately recoiled from posing a new relation between philosophy and revolution, as seen in his 1950 statement, "There is no longer any purely philosophical answer to all this. These philosophical questions, Marxism says, can be solved only by the revolutionary action of the proletariat and the masses."(9)

It is true that a new stage of cognition can arise only when there is a leap to freedom by the masses. It is also true that the proletariat's activity is not just muscle, but Reason. But working out a restatement of Marx's Marxism for one's time takes hard, prolonged theoretical labor. This cannot be done in isolation but requires a philosophic nucleus of practicing revolutionaries. James, however, refrained from working out out any new relation between philosophy and organization. The defect that Dunayevskaya pinpointed in Luxemburg--acting as if mass consciousness exhausts the question of cognition, of Marx's philosophy of revolution--has surfaced again and again in even the best revolutionaries of our time.

What flowed from the critique of Luxemburg in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION was the need to work out the inseparability of organization and philosophy, of a body of ideas, of the self-determination of the Idea itself. This cannot be achieved without the forces of liberation. But it also requires seeing that no single force contains the Idea in the fullness of its expression. As Dunayevskaya wrote on the final page of that work, "It is not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and of deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx's concept of the philosophy of 'revolution in permanence.'"

This was at the heart of what she called "the dialectics of organization and philosophy." She added, "At the point when the theoretic form reaches philosophy, the challenge demands that we synthesize not only the new relations of theory to practice, and all the forces of revolution, but philosophy's 'suffering, patience, and labor of the negative,' i.e., experiencing absolute negativity. Then and only then will we succeed in a revolution that will achieve a classless, non-racist, non-sexist, truly human, truly new society."(10)

III. PHILOSOPHIC-ORGANIZATIONAL TASKS FOR 1998-1999

In the past decade we have had to work out how to continue Marxist-Humanism in a changed world defined by the collapse of state-capitalism that called itself Communism, on the one hand, and the emergence of a global stage of retrogression, on the other. In the face of this, we did not, as did so many others, retreat from the projection of Marxian principles of revolution. Nor did we succumb to the ideological pollution which declared that the subjects of revolt had become "absorbed" by high-tech capitalism. We instead dug into new voices from below, as seen in our creation of a new local of News and Letters Committees in Memphis-Mississippi, our activity with prisoners, our work on the subjectivity of sexuality, and activity with other forces of revolt. At no time have we allowed today's retrogression to define our thinking. Yet we have not fully confronted or worked through the untrodden path in post-Marx Marxism--the relation of dialectics and organization.

What provides a new opening for meeting this challenge is our work on a new collection of Dunayevskaya's writings on the dialectic in Hegel and Marx, entitled "The Power of Negativity." In containing a wide range of her writings on the dialectic proper--such as her 1953 "Letters on Hegel's Absolutes," summaries of Hegel's major works, correspondence with such figures as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Charles Denby, and lectures on her major philosophic works--it will allow for a fuller appreciation of the importance of her philosophic contribution. When taken together with her "trilogy of revolution," it can provide ground for rethinking and redeveloping the fullness of Marx's concept of socialism as a liberating project.

The question which faces us now, as we prepare for new struggles that are sure to emerge against the crises of globalized capitalism, is this: Will our projection of Marxist-Humanism's contributions on the dialectic become the energizing principle for developing our organization as a tendency within today's freedom movements? Will our effort to assume organizational responsibility for the philosophic projection of Absolute Negativity as New Beginning spur greater outreach to the forces of liberation? Will it lead to extending the contributions to and the distribution of News & Letters, our newspaper? Will it lead to the organizational growth needed for us to become a recognized and viable tendency in the world of freedom struggles and ideas? It is not simply that in addition to philosophy we need action and organization; it is that the energizing principle for organization must come from assuming responsibility for the dialectic in philosophy. We therefore project the following tasks for 1998-1999:

l) There is no task more important for this organization than ensuring that the major works of Marxist-Humanism remain in print. This involves finding a publisher for "The Power of Negativity," but also making sure that the trilogy of revolution, including MARXISM AND FREEDOM and PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, are again in print.

2) We have continued to make the archives of Marxist-Humanism available by donating additional volumes of Dunayevskaya's papers to the Wayne State University Archives. Yet more than a decade after her death, many letters remain to be donated. We aim to complete this work in the coming period.

3) Because NEWS & LETTERS is the ongoing publication through which we can meet the challenge of philosophically projecting Marxist-Humanism in the battle of ideas unseparated from the voices of revolt, it becomes critical to reach new readers who become contributors to its development. For this reason we aim to initiate a circulation drive that will invite the energies of all readers in finding both new subscribers, bookstore and newsstand outlets, and more discussion around our unique combination of theory/practice.

4) The uniqueness of News and Letters Committees will be manifested this year in two new publications. One is a Marxist-Humanist Statement on the Black Dimension which will be completed by the end of this year for publication in 1999. The other is a pamphlet written by a prisoner who became a Marxist-Humanist through the process of writing VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS. It is due out this year.

5) As in all our work, the finances needed to continue our paper, pay for new publications, and expand our activity rests on the inseparability of outreach and inreach. We have never failed to receive creative help from our readers at each critical point since our founding for the goals we establish for ourselves in a sustaining fund. The barest minimum we need this year will be $45,000.

6) Most of all, the way to demonstrate our organizational responsibility for the Idea of Marxist-Humanism is our greatly needed organizational growth. It remains a crucial measure of what Marxist-Humanism means by practicing dialectics.

The challenge projected by the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the Draft for Perspectives for 1985-1986 remains as true as ever: "As practicing dialecticians, the need is to demonstrate that total freedom requires putting an end to the division between mental and manual labor. There is no other road to establishing new human relations. In these nuclear times, when the very question of the survival of civilization is at stake, this ultimate problem has put an end to the division between ultimate and immediate. The immediate, the practical, the revolutionary goal is the daily practice."

END NOTES

l. See "India raises menace of nuclear war" by Maya Jhansi, NEWS & LETTERS, June 1998, and her "Right-wing BJP claims power amid deepening crisis in India," in NEWS & LETTERS April 1998.

2. See "Virtual Nukes--When is a test not a test?" by Bill Mesler, THE NATION, June 15/22, 1998.

3. See MARX'S 'CAPITAL' AND TODAY'S GLOBAL CRISES, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Detroit: News and Letters, 1977), p. 10.

4. For a discussion of the significance of this passage and Marx's last decade as a whole, see Raya Dunayevskaya's ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), chapters 10 and 12.

5. See THE MARXIST-HUMANIST THEORY OF STATE-CAPITALISM: SELECTED WRITINGS BY RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA (Chicago: News and Letters, 1992).

6. "Africa after the fall of Mobutu," by Ba Karang, NEWS & LETTERS, May 1997.

7. This statement by Hans Magnus Enzensberger is from a symposium on the MANIFESTO in THE LOS ANGELES TIMES of Feb. 1, 1998.

8. István Mészáros, BEYOND CAPITAL (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), p. 12. For a critique of Mészáros' book, see "Envisioning the New Society" by Peter Hudis, NEWS & LETTERS, May 1997.

9. C.L.R. James, STATE-CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Co.), pp. 128-29.

10. Dunayevskaya wrote this as an added paragraph to ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION shortly after its publication. It appears on p. xxxvii of the book's 1991 edition. She returned to this passage in her "Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy" of June 1, 1987. See THE PHILOSOPHIC MOMENT OF MARXIST-HUMANISM (Chicago: News and Letters, 1989).