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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2001 Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2001-2002The power of negativity in today's freedom strugglesThe protest at the G-8 summit of the major industrial powers in Genoa on July 22 will go down in history as a turning point in the development of the movement against global capital. For the first time a protester was killed by police in an anti-globalization protest in a western nation. The demonstrations only increased in size and militancy after the brutal murder of 23-year old Carlo Giuliani. The demonstrators rejected the rulers' agenda so totally that even the bourgeois press had to admit that the movement against "globalization" has now become a movement aiming to uproot the very existence of capitalism. (See eyewitness report, page 11.) The G-8 summit was held at a moment when a serious crisis looms over the global economy. For the first time in decades the world's three largest economies are running out of steam at once. Japan is experiencing its tenth year of stagnation; Germany's growth rate has fallen to 1%, and the U.S. is on the brink of recession. Since January the U.S. has lost 600,000 jobs in manufacturing as layoffs ripple through every industry. Even the much-touted service sector is affected. A simultaneous downturn in the U.S., Germany and Japan will have a serious impact on a world economy that has proven unable to provide the most basic means of subsistence for hundreds of millions-in Asia, Africa and Latin America especially. The only thing the leaders of the G-8, beginning with Bush, said about all this was to call for lower trade barriers-and attack the demonstrators on the streets of Genoa for not really caring about poverty in the Third World! In fact, the protesters know that global capital has imposed a horrendous debt burden on Africa, prevents it from obtaining the drugs needed to alleviate the ravages of AIDS, and is responsible for the capitalist-fostered wars now ripping at Africa's innards. They know that global capital is responsible for exacerbating the divisions between rich and poor in Latin America where it has armed ruling cliques like Colombia's to the teeth in its war against the populace. And they know that global capital has had a disastrous impact on the Middle East where U.S.-imposed sanctions continue to kill thousands in Iraq while Israel's Sharon is being given a free hand to intensify his war against the Palestinians. The utter callousness of the world's leaders is seen in the failure of the G-8 summit to say anything about the escalating crisis between Israel and the Palestinians. A day before Carlo Giuliani was murdered in Genoa, settlers in the West Bank killed three more Palestinians, including a three-month old infant. Yet while Bush pontificated against the "violence" of the demonstrators in Genoa he had nothing to say about Israel's state-sanctioned violence which, with U.S. aid, continues to inflame a conflict that could spill over any moment into full-scale war. Clearly the battles will escalate over the globalization of capital. As the protests expand, the multiplicity of struggles and concerns contained within them expands as well. Environmentalists and farmers, trade unionists and feminists, anti-racist activists and gays and lesbians have all come together in them. It is not just the size, but the content of the protests that is striking. More and more the refrain heard is, as one woman said, "The capitalist system is a way of living that I don't agree with at all." The extent of the challenge to existing society is seen from the protests' "own working existence." Instead of a centralized leadership, the emphasis is on decentralization; instead of focusing on a single issue, the emphasis is on bringing together a multiplicity of forces. The more capital subjects all relations to its need for self-expansion, the more the struggles against it seek out diverse, creative, and non-hierarchical forms of association. In this sense the movement is in the process of defining for itself an organization of society opposed to capital. This exciting development does not free revolutionaries from the need to dig anew into dialectical philosophy. It only makes it more imperative. Dialectics is "the algebra of revolution"; it expresses the dual rhythm of tearing down the old and creating the new. The more the struggles move to directly oppose capitalism, and the more they seek to envision new human relations freed from its dominance, the more the importance of the dialectic of negativity will make itself felt. The imminent publication of a new Marxist-Humanist work-THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX BY RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA (Lexington Books: Lanham, Md., forthcoming)-could not be appearing at a better time. Its internalization and projection will determine all our perspectives for 2001-2002. I. Bush's stealth presidency and its impact on world politics Bush's acts since he took office explode any illusion that he is a "moderate" out to tame the far Right. The unprecedented degree of deceit and manipulation, which allowed him to steal the White House in one of the most closely contested elections in U.S. history, has aided his attempts to turn the clock back on everything from civil rights to women's rights, from labor conditions to the environment. He is following Reagan's approach of rushing to set into place an array of reactionary policies that will far outlast his hold on power. While some claim that the decline of the white militia movement shows that the far Right is receding in importance, the reason it has declined is because its constituency likes who is now in the White House. The extreme Right hasn't disappeared, it just changed addresses. Nothing shows that more than Bush's drive to go full steam ahead with nuclear missile defense. A. Capital's unrestrained arms buildup The administration's declaration in July that it will unilaterally void the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty by moving ahead with costly plans for a full-scale nuclear missile "defense" system is wreaking havoc with global politics. The ABM treaty has served as the pillar of arms control treaties for the past 30 years, and its jettisoning by Bush will spark a new arms race. Bush's push for an even more extensive nuclear missile "defense" system than the one proposed by Clinton isn't a matter of just rejecting the ABM treaty. It is part of an effort to undermine ALL arms controls treaties, as a signal that the U.S. will now do what it wants, when it wants. In May the administration rejected a draft agreement to enforce the treaty banning biological warfare. It has also stopped paying fees to the international organization charged with verifying the 1997 treaty banning chemical weapons. Bush is also trying to destroy the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which the Senate rejected two years ago. (It can be brought up again for ratification.) The treaty is supported by 158 of the 161 countries in the UN, but the administration says it is working to "improve test site readiness" in preparation for violating its provisions. Clearly Bush wants out of any agreement that restricts the U.S.'s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And new weapons are being built all the time. The U.S. is now building a nuclear weapon 100 times more powerful than the hydrogen bomb. This "pure fusion weapon" will produce an explosion with relatively little fallout, blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear explosives. BUSH'S EXTREMIST REJECTION OF EVEN THE MOST MINIMAL ARMS CONTROL HAS NOT BEEN SEEN SINCE THE EARLY DAYS OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION. Given the huge cost of Bush's untested nuclear missile defense system (over $100 billion) and the conflict it is already producing with Russia and China, one may wonder why he is so relentlessly pursuing it. Yet there is method to the madness. There may be no evidence at the moment that the proposed nuclear missile defense system can actually shield against incoming missiles; but the same technology can be used for a relatively simpler task-shooting down satellites in earth orbit. As Paul B. Stares of the Center for International Security and Cooperation put it, "Some of the military defense system currently under consideration...would have the inherent capability to attack satellites. A satellite is less challenging to shoot down than a warhead. Satellites are more fragile and harder to disguise and move in predictable paths, making them easier prey. A mediocre anti-missile defense system can still constitute a highly effective anti-satellite weapon" ("Making Enemies in Space," THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 15, 2001). The crucial role played by satellites in all aspects of capitalist production and communication today makes them a key military target. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld announced in May that the administration wil increase funding for space-based lasers to shoot down satellites-which is also banned by the ABM treaty-as part of preparing for "sustained offensive and defensive space operations." The groundwork for this was laid by the Clinton administration two years ago, which announced in a then-confidential study that "The ability to perform space force application [of military weapons] in the future could add a new dimension to U.S. military power."(1) Clearly, Bush's drive to kill the 1972 ABM treaty is aimed at enabling the U.S. to freely embark on a new stage of military brinksmanship. This has Russia deeply worried. Bush's declaration that NATO should expand to Russia's border by including the Baltic states-which U.S. rulers previously refrained from declaring, though Clinton moved in that direction by expanding NATO into East Europe-is stoking serious tensions with Russia. Russia's Putin is responding by playing the China card, just as Nixon did three decades ago. In June Putin signed onto the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which pledges Russia, China, and four Central Asian republics to closer political cooperation. And on July 16 Russia and China signed a "friendship and cooperation pact," the first such treaty between the two nations since the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s. As Russia and China draw closer, the U.S. and China draw further apart, even as U.S. companies continue to make use of China to pump out untold amounts of unpaid hours of labor from their "globalized" sweatshops. China's rulers know that Bush's missile defense plan will make their nuclear force obsolete. China is therefore planning on a TEN-FOLD increase in the size of its nuclear arsenal. Since North Korea and Iraq (which the U.S. supposedly needs a missile defense system to be protected from) do not have any satellites to speak of, whereas China has a considerable number, China's rulers see Bush's plans to militarize space as a direct threat. China is therefore more than willing to pursue a "strategic partnership" with Russia to counter-balance the U.S. This is not to suggest that Russia, even in alliance with China, can directly challenge U.S. global dominance. The fact that no state power is in the position to seriously challenge U.S. imperialism's drive for single world mastery does not, however, minimize the dangers posed by it. India, for example, has been one of the few countries to openly embrace Bush's nuclear missile defense plan since the plan would make it easier for it to build up its nuclear arsenal. India's rulers now talk of creating a "strategic partnership" with the U.S. This is not rhetoric. Clinton signaled closer ties when he became the first U.S. president to visit India. Bush is building on this by saying he will lift the sanctions imposed by Congress on India after it set off a nuclear device in 1998. This is being watched not only by Pakistan, India's longtime adversary, but also by China. As one analyst put it, "A significant warming of U.S.-Indian ties, powered by conceptual agreement on missile defense, could cause the Chinese to expand and accelerate their nuclear upgrades, to poke at India through help to Pakistan and to take risks that have not been well-calculated....The chances of serious conflict between India and China may now outrank the more obvious antagonisms between China and Taiwan as a threat to global stability" ("China eyes U.S.-India relations," Jim Hoagland, The WASHINGTON POST, July 2, 2001). Meanwhile the U.S. has 7,000 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and Russia 6,000. The French, British and Chinese arsenals are much smaller. There are now about 14,000 warheads among the five countries combined-enough to destroy the world 500 times over. B. Capital's unrestrained war on the environment One does not have to wait for the next regional war or global confrontation to be aware of the destructive nature of the global capitalist system. That is clear from its impact on the environment. When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, the crisis is already upon us. Study after study has concluded that rising sea levels, thinning ice caps, and the spread of new strains of virulent diseases are caused directly or indirectly by the global warming produced by the emission of greenhouse gases. The Pacific island country of Tuvalu has already appealed to Australia and New Zealand to help relocate its 50,000 residents, since it will be totally under water in a few decades. A conference of climatologists in Amsterdam in July warned that even small shifts in global temperature due to increased greenhouse gas emissions can lead to sudden and abrupt climate changes. Earth's climate, it said, is nonlinear-even small increases in temperature built up over time can have a cascading effect, triggering abrupt changes like the melting of the Arctic Sea ice cap, which would be disastrous. Another report, issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, concluded that those who will suffer most from global warming will be poorer countries in Africa and Asia and the poorest people in the richest countries, increasing the North-South divide and the poverty gap. "Africa is the continent most vulnerable to the impacts of projected changes because widespread poverty limits adaptation capabilities," the report stated. "Agriculture is the economic mainstay in most African countries, contributing 30-35% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa and 55% of the total value of African exports. In most African countries, farming depends entirely on the quality of the rainy season-a situation that makes Africa particularly vulnerable to climatic change."(2) To the ravages of AIDS, poverty, and underdevelopment, Africa now faces the dangers associated with global warming-even though with relatively little capitalist development it produces the least greenhouse gas emissions of any continent. The U.S., with 5% of the world's population, produces 25% of its greenhouse gases. Yet Bush is trying to kill the Kyoto accord on global warming and is pushing, as are politicians across the country, for accelerated burning of fossil fuels. All limits are being removed to the expansion of the oil industry, natural gas industry, and coal industry-as well as the nuclear power industry-with only token efforts to spur conservation and energy efficiency. Estimates are that these policies will increase the emissions that cause global warming by 35% over the next decade. The 1997 Kyoto accord was criticized at the time by environmentalists for setting standards that were too WEAK. And yet even that is too much for Bush! WHAT DRIVES THESE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE POLICIES? THE GREED OF BUSH'S CORPORATE SPONSORS IN THE MILITARY AND ENERGY INDUSTRIES PLAYS A ROLE. BUT MORE IS INVOLVED THAN JUST THE LUST FOR SHORT-TERM PROFIT. CORPORATE GREED AND THE LUST FOR PROFIT ARE BUT THE PHENOMENAL EXPRESSIONS OF CAPITAL'S INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE DRIVE FOR SELF-EXPANSION. Capital's destructive drive for self-expansion is rooted in the nature of the labor process in capitalism. As long as the labor process is not controlled by the workers, as long as the very act of laboring is alienating, the product of labor, capital, takes on a life of its own. Society will be subjected to capital's drive to produce for the sake of production, which oppresses the worker and despoils the environment, so long as the process of labor is not controlled by workers through their own free association. The ongoing effort to "free up" the movement of capital through "free trade," "privatization," and sweatshop labor-often referred to as "the globalization of capital"-is integral to capitalism's very nature. But the effort to remove restrictions to capital's self-expansion does not mean the nation-state is becoming uncoupled from the world economy. While the welfare state has been severely undermined over the past two decades, the state is not withering away. It remains an important conduit for capital accumulation, as the $63 BILLION spent since 1985 on nuclear missile defense alone indicates. State-directed military expenditure has long been integral to capitalism, and the end of the Cold War has not changed that. This needs to be reiterated in light of the claims made by Tony Negri and Michael Hardt in EMPIRE, that globalization presents us with a totally new reality in which economic power is "decentered" and beyond the control of any single person, corporation, or country. They argue that the nation state is becoming an anomaly as its powers are being supplanted by supranational institutions like the WTO, IMF, and so on. Yet capital has NEVER been controlled by a single person, corporation, or country. It is true that the restructuring of the past two decades has made it harder than ever to control capital. But this isn't creating a "decentered" world in which the nation state takes a back seat. The U.S. drive for single world mastery, which has accompanied each step of globalization, should make that clear. The market and the state are not absolute opposites. Capital is driven to cast off all barriers which limit its self-movement; and the state often plays an important role in facilitating that. As Marx wrote in CAPITAL: "'After me the deluge!' is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profits)? But looking at things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him" (CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 381). II. Challenges facing the movements against global capital A. The Black dimension's response to capitalist restructuring It is no secret to African Americans that today's economic restructuring goes hand in hand with the heavy-handed use of state power. It is evidenced in the daily reality of police abuse, racial profiling, and the prison warehousing of a generation of Black and Latino youth. Resistance to this statist repression reached a new stage in April with the revolt of the Black community in Cincinnati. As we showed in the May NEWS & LETTERS, the Cincinnati rebellion was a spontaneous uprising against what is called "the globalization of capital." Just as the gutting of jobs, public housing, welfare, and the growth of homelessness, prison construction, and police abuse flow from the strategy employed by U.S. capital, so the revolt against it in Cincinnati posed a challenge to its very dominance. This is hardly the first time this has occurred. Racism is the Achilles heel of U.S. "civilization" and has been integral to each stage of capital accumulation in U.S. history. The revolt against racism by African Americans has therefore posed the sharpest and most persistent challenge to capitalist oppression of any sector of the working class. From the inception of this country Africans and African Americans sought to negate through their self-activity the most vicious forms of capitalist primitive accumulation-beginning with the barbarisms of the slave trade and slavery, followed by a century-long struggle to vanquish sharecropping and farm tenancy and the form of American apartheid known as segregation, and continuing with the fight against the contemporary forms of capitalist oppression today. The urban revolts from Watts 1965 to Los Angeles 1992 especially exposed the class and racial inequities of U.S. capitalism. This is no less true of the Cincinnati rebellion of 2001. This poses a key challenge to the activists engaged in protests against global capital. The racial divide remains very real in this country, and not only between rulers and ruled. The movement against global capital will not be able to move from opposing phenomenal expressions of capital, like "free trade," to fully opposing capital itself, unless it grasps the vanguard nature of the Black dimension. The truncated way in which "globalization" is often understood stands in the way of recognizing this. The phrase "globalization of capital" does not really capture what is NEW today. Capital, after all, has been a global system since the birth of the transatlantic slave trade in the 16th century. It has undergone many stages and forms of globalization since then. It is more accurate to call what many refer to as "globalization" the radical restructuring of the world economy set into motion by capital's response to the global economic recession of the mid-1970s. The 1974-75 global recession was pivotal since it showed that capitalism was suffering from a steep decline in its rate of profit. As Raya Dunayevskaya noted at the time in MARX'S 'CAPITAL' AND TODAY'S GLOBAL CRISIS, the 1974-75 recession was not a mere passing stage; it instead revealed a structural crisis in capitalism as a whole. Capital responded by embarking on a massive restructuring, centering on an assault on the gains workers had made from decades of class struggles. Cutbacks in wages, benefits, and public spending in order to "free up" capital for investments in new technology and labor-saving devices; closing even profitable plants and enterprises or moving them to areas with cheaper labor and raw materials; lifting barriers to the movement of capital between national borders; and reorganizing work processes to maximize output in shorter units of socially necessary labor time, all became integral parts of capital's restructuring. The resulting redistribution of value from workers' consumption (wages for U.S. workers fell 20% from 1975-95) to consumption by capital-reflected in new labor-saving devices, computerization, and high-tech-went hand in hand with the growth of sweatshop labor, and not just overseas. In the 1980s the number of sweatshops employing children in New York City increased by 500% The displacement of Black labor through deindustrialization and layoffs in the late 1970s and 1980s produced a disproportionately Black permanent army of the unemployed which scars today's inner cities. Capital's ability to migrate overseas in search of higher profits was predicated upon its ability to stripmine the productive assets of the Black community at home. By the 1980s, in places like South Central Los Angeles there were no factories left at all; and in the Southeast side of Chicago the few plants still open were so automated that the number of jobs was tiny. AS PLANTS PICKED UP AND LEFT, WHAT THEY LEFT BEHIND WAS POLLUTION-THE TOXIC RESIDUE OF PRODUCTION THAT HAS BEEN POISONING RESIDENTS FOR YEARS. The dialectic of history is such that each new stage of capitalism, no matter how much it sets back revolutionary forces, is met by its dialectical opposite-the emergence of "new passions and new forces." This is no less true of the present stage of capitalism. In the late 1970s grassroots struggles began around the environmental impact of capitalist production on community health. The best known is Love Canal, N.Y. Lesser known are two Black communities where grassroots anti-toxic struggles began at about the same time: the Altgeld Gardens housing project in Chicago, which was built on a toxic waste dump and is surrounded by polluting factories, and Longview Heights in Memphis, Tenn. where a chemical plant was located next to a residential neigh borhood. In rural Warren County, N.C. in 1982 the first nationally supported protests against environmental racism took place, with 500 jailed for blocking trucks taking toxic PCB-laden soil to a landfill. By now such environmental organizing from below has become widespread. Although it is not always recognized as environmental, even by the participants, it proves that not only have the destructive threats of synthetic chemicals become universal; a new environmental consciousness has become universal as well. To understand its significance, we have to grasp the environmental movement in the broad sense as a component of humanity's many-sided reaching for liberation. It is only as an integral part of realizing that total human liberation that we can truly achieve environmental justice and the new kind of relationship between humanity and nature that we are hungering for. Three out of four grassroots leaders in the environmental justice movement are women. The usual explanation is that these struggles are motivated by health effects of toxic substances and that women take responsibility for the health of the family, especially children. True as this is, it is also true that the grassroots struggles took off after the rise of the Women's Liberation Movement. Along with the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, the awareness of the existence of a women's movement and the spread of ideas of women's liberation are part of the ground from which the community environmental struggles grow. These struggles in turn become a beginning of development for the women involved who often say they are different people than they were before joining them. They develop broadly critical views of society. They question all sorts of things, from the lack of democracy seen in the government's bowing to corporate interests, to the relations of domination within the family. As a recent statement of the Defense Depot Memphis, Tennessee-Concerned Citizens Committee put it, "Gone are the days when people of color can sit back and leave the decision-making process that relates to environmental racism to elected officials and unelected bureaucrats. Trusting in these people to protect you and your family is not only crazy, it is deadly. Recognize environmental racism for what it is-a legally sanctioned genocide." Black America's response to the economic restructuring of the past two decades has been multidimensional-as the ongoing struggle of dockworkers in South Carolina, largely led by Black workers, shows. South Carolina is trying to railroad five workers for their part in a protest last year against the ideology of "right to work," which 600 riot police had viciously attacked. In response, a widespread campaign of solidarity with the dockworkers has arisen. (See "Workshop Talks," page 1.) The persistence of such protests does not mean that a coalescence between the Black dimension and predominantly white youth and labor engaged in anti-globalization protests will automatically emerge. To begin to overcome that divide, today's activists need to grasp the concept of BLACK MASSES AS VANGUARD OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION(3) as well as broaden their critique of "globalization" by addressing its impact on the lives of working people and minorities inside the U.S. B. Dialectics of national liberation No less critical is the need to solidarize with national liberation struggles overseas. That this remains an unfinished task is seen from the response of some leftists to the arrest of Serbia's Milosevic by the International War Crimes Tribunal. The overthrow of Milosevic in Serbia and his arrest by The Hague Tribunal was long overdue. It is therefore all the more disturbing to hear some on the Left condemn his arrest on the grounds that Milosevic was a "victim" of U.S. aggression. The attitude underlying this is not new. Many leftists remained silent about Milosevic's genocide against Bosnia and refused to support the movements for national liberation in Bosnia and Kosova, on the grounds that Milosevic was opposed for a time by the U.S. Some even argued that the U.S. bombed Serbia over Kosova because it stood outside the system of globalized capitalism. Such a view ignores the global stage of state-capitalism. State-capitalism emerged as a new world stage in the 1930s. In Russia, state-capitalism emerged through a transformation into opposite of a proletarian revolution into a totalitarian society under Stalin. In the West, state-capitalism emerged during the New Deal as part of the effort of western capital to stave off revolution and economic collapse in the Great Depression. Yugoslavia was not outside the global state-capitalist system; it was a state-capitalist society from the inception of Tito's reign in the 1940s. By the 1980s, the impact of the 1974-75 world recession had caught up with Yugoslavia as output plummeted and unemployment skyrocketed. Milosevic, who had served as a state-capitalist apparatchik for years, recognized that the reigning ideology was coming apart at the seams. He jumped on the nationalist bandwagon and became the architect of Serbian reactionary nationalism, initiating the genocidal wars that murdered over 200,000 in Bosnia and Kosova. MILOSEVIC WAS NOT "VICTIMIZED" BY THE U.S. BECAUSE HE STOOD OUTSIDE THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST SYSTEM. THE U.S. COLLUDED WITH MILOSEVIC FOR YEARS AND ALLOWED HIM TO GET AWAY WITH OUTRIGHT GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA. IT MOVED AGAINST HIM IN KOSOVA ONLY WHEN HIS GENOCIDAL ATTACKS THREATENED TO MAKE NATO LOOK LIKE A HELPLESS GIANT ON THE EVEN OF ITS EXPANSION INTO EASTERN EUROPE The failure to grasp the reality of state-capitalism explains, in part, why so many on the Left were disoriented by Milosevic's regime and failed to support the struggles for national liberation against it in Bosnia and Kosova. It is true that those struggles did not speak in explicitly revolutionary language. But as we showed in our writings on Bosnia and Kosova in the 1990s, that did not mean they were purely "nationalist" movements lacking a liberatory dimension. New questions and demands arose from them; yet for the most part, their voices were not heard.(4) This revealed a void in thought that continues today. Struggles for national liberation continue to emerge, from Indonesia to Sudan, but they are being ignored. A massive national liberation movement has arisen in Aceh, in northwest Indonesia, where over 1,000 have been killed this year by government security forces. Yet virtually the only support for Aceh in the West has come from environmentalists opposing ExxonMobil's links with the government. Whatever happened to the idea of relations between national movements and international ones? Is the right of a nation to self-determination going to be ignored even if it faces genocidal slaughter? The tendency to skip over the dialectic of national liberation struggles today flows from limitations in the Left's historic attitude to imperialism and anti-imperialism. In the post-World War II era many leftists uncritically supported various nationalist struggles and regimes, even when led by reactionary forces, on the grounds that they opposed U.S. imperialism. Whether it was uncritically supporting the PLO or IRA, or tailending Libya's Kadaffi or Iraq's Hussein, it meant "canonizing nationalism though void of working class character, as national liberation."(5) This approach has led to a dead-end. Narrow nationalist regimes and struggles have not only failed to pose an alternative to global capitalism, they have helped strengthen it. Yet many on the Left are now responding to this reality by simply rejecting national liberation struggles-as if there is no difference between narrow nationalism and struggles for national self-determination. Whereas in the past many leftists uncritically supported nationalist regimes and movements simply because they claimed to oppose U.S. imperialism, many now withhold support for national liberation movements simply because (in Bosnia and Kosova, at least) the U.S. CLAIMS to support them. In this, we are witnessing the ultimate ramifications of the narrow concept of anti-imperialism which defined much of the Left. The actual content of mass struggles continues to be overlooked, in favor of focusing everything on a narrow ground of opposition to "imperialism." In light of this, it needs to be emphasized that Dunayevskaya's theory of state-capitalism was never simply an economic analysis. It also led to the rediscovery of Marx's humanism. She recognized that the rise of totalitarian state-capitalism from out of actual revolutions, and the way the state-capitalist rulers in Russia, China and elsewhere continued to use "Marxist" language, had seriously disoriented revolutionaries. Radicals lost their capacity to keep their fingers on the pulse of human relations as they confined the struggle for liberation in a statist framework. In response, she reached not simply for an economic or political critique of state-capitalism, but for a philosophy of liberation that would express not just what we oppose, but what we are FOR. This led to the development of Marxist-Humanism. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of "Communism" has made it more important than ever to have a philosophy of liberation to keep one's finger on the pulse of human relations. The need to solidarize with newly emerging national liberation struggles confirms it. Support for such struggles comes from a philosophy of liberation and it dies without one. C. Why philosophy? Why now? A philosophy of liberation is not an ideology, a "party line," or something that "excludes" a diversity of voices. A philosophy of liberation is instead what can broaden the view of forces of revolt and show how deep the uprooting of class society must be. History shows that the mere opposition to capitalism does not by itself produce revolutionary new beginnings. Again and again organizations calling themselves revolutionary have arisen which ended up reproducing the most fundamental division of class society-the separation between mental and manual labor. It is seen in top-down, hierarchical organizational forms, with intellectuals in the lead and workers as "followers." Today's activists are reaching for something very different, as seen in the emphasis on decentralization and diversity and an attraction to anarchism. YET THE SEPARATION BETWEEN MENTAL AND MANUAL LABOR DOESN'T SHOW ITSELF ONLY IN HIERARCHICAL FORMS OF ORGANIZATION. IT ALSO SHOWS ITSELF IN SEPARATING IDEAS FROM ACTION, IN COUNTERPOSING THEORY TO SPONTANEOUS STRUGGLE. THIS IS A FALSE DIVISION, WHICH EXPRESSES THE ALIENATIONS OF CLASS SOCIETY. Every new struggle raises THEORETICAL questions, whether or not everyone in it is aware of it. Grappling with theory is crucial if a movement is to become fully conscious of its goal. Without making space for the discussion and development of revolutionary ideas and philosophy, the movement will end up reproducing the most capitalist relation of all-the separation of mental from manual labor. That is the lesson from the movements of the 1960s, which failed to reach a revolutionary transformation because they were weighted down with the notion that theory can be picked up "en route." The view held by many today that philosophy is just another form of ideology will get the movement no further. The more new struggles emerge, the more theoretical questions will be raised which cannot be answered without grappling with a revolutionary body of ideas. That is why we emphasize the need to carve out a space in today's movements for a discussion and debate on what MARX'S Marxism means for today. That this is not a question of imposing an "alien agenda" on the movement is shown by our work in eliciting the views of those opposing today's racist criminal injustice system. As one prisoner recently wrote us in response to an essay which appeared in NEWS & LETTERS, "Speculative philosophy is as essential to the struggle for human liberation as individual and collective action in the streets. It is, in fact, a melding of these things that is the essence of a permanent revolution." III. Experiencing absolute negativity-in theory, practice, and organization The task of working out a comprehensive critique of capital makes it crucial to discover what MARX'S Marxism means for today. No thinker had a more comprehensive critique of capital than Marx; and no thinker had a more expansive vision of what human relations can be when freed from its confines. Even some mainstream pundits are beginning to sense this. One new book states: "Marx was a remarkably astute analyst of globalization...one of the things that he would recognize immediately about this particular global era is a paradox he spotted in the last one: The more successful globalization becomes, the more it seems to whip up its own backlash...There is even a suspicion that globalization's psychic energy may have a natural stall point, a moment when people can take no more" (John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, A FUTURE PERFECT). Needless to say, such pundits tend to ignore Marx's concept of the ALTERNATIVE to capital. One would hardly know from them that Marx had a profoundly revolutionary and humanist concept of freedom, rooted in the transformation of human relations at the point of production, between men and women and between the races, and in society as a whole. It is not surprising that the mainstream press would ignore this part of Marx. The movements against global capital, however, cannot afford to skip over Marx's concept of a new society. Marx was not simply another socialist theorist; he had a distinct concept of a new society, born from a transformation of Hegel's revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution. Grasping the ABSOLUTE OPPOSITE of capital calls on us to grapple with the TOTALITY of Marx's philosophy of revolution, which centers on the notion of "revolution in permanence." How are revolutionaries contributing to the effort to meet this challenge? Are they meeting today's struggles with a creative projection and development of ideas? Some are responding to the present moment by reverting to outdated ideas and forms. One expression is the reversion to the notion of a "vanguard party." This is not restricted to small groups which have long fetishized the elitist "party to lead." As the discussion around the publication of a previously unknown work by Georg Lukacs defending his HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS indicates, some independent thinkers and activists are emphasizing the need for "a party" to serve as the "mediator" between the consciousness of the masses and the goal of a new society.(6) THIS RETURN TO VANGUARDIST CONCEPTS IS, THOUGH, FAR FROM BEING PREDOMINANT. FAR MORE COMMON IS THE TENDENCY TO REJECT VANGUARDISM IN THE NAME OF SPONTANEOUS FORMS OF ORGANIZATION-WITHOUT, HOWEVER, SPECIFYING THE ROLE THAT CAN BE PLAYED BY GROUPS OF REVOLUTIONARY THEORETICIANS. It isn't that spontaneous forms of organization are not crucial in developing an alternative. The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, has enabled many autonomous communities to develop alternative forms of production, distribution of goods, and social interaction in face of the authoritarian Mexican state. Traditional hierarchical relations between community leaders and the rank and file have been broken down, as have, in some cases, oppressive relations between men and women. Though a development on the level of Chiapas is not evident in the U.S., efforts to reach for a different future are discernible beneath the surface here as well. The Cincinnati rebellion gave birth to new organizations aimed at enabling Black youth to speak for themselves in the face of the failure of the established Black political leadership to address their concerns. This search for new forms of organization can also be seen in the protests against global capital. History, however, shows that the task of working out an alternative to capital cannot be left to spontaneous forms alone. When the "party" is rejected in favor of spontaneous forms of organization, without working out the RELATIONSHIP between spontaneous struggles and a grouping of revolutionary theoreticians, what happens to the ideas, theories, and philosophies needed in any movement? Even the greatest FORM of organization, left to itself, can lead to a dead end if the IDEAS at stake in any revolutionary transformation are not seriously grappled with. The need to go beyond getting stuck in "first negation"-focusing on what we are against-by projecting a concept of the new human relations we are for-which in Hegelian language is called "the negation of the negation"-calls for a whole new relationship between philosophy and organization. A new book will soon be off the press which speaks directly to this-THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX BY RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA. This collection of essays, letters, and speeches shows how Marxist-Humanism restated Marx's philosophy of revolution through a four-decade encounter with "the source of all dialectic"-Hegel's dialectic of ABSOLUTE negativity. THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY brings together a wide range of Dunayevskaya's writings on dialectics-from her philosophic correspondence with C.L.R. James and Grace Lee in the late 1940s and 1950s to her letters on Hegel's Absolutes in the early 1950s, and from speeches and essays on Marx's Humanism and Hegel's dialectic in the 1960s and 1970s to her work in progress on "Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy" in the 1980s. This book discloses how Hegel's Absolutes impacted Marx's vision of a new society and remains of critical importance in light of the contributions of today's movements from practice. THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY is not a substitute for the three major works of Marxist-Humanism-MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958), PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION (1973), and ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION (1982). Rather, it illuminates their philosophic contributions. It shows how Marxist-Humanism developed an alternative to both vanguardists and those who emphasize spontaneity but stop short of a new relation of theory to practice. As Dunayevskaya wrote in 1987,
This is the total opposite of the vanguardist notion that "the party" serves as "the mediatOR" between the immediate struggles of the masses and the goal of a new society. As Dunayevskaya wrote in an essay that appears in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, "dialectical mediation is the middle that first creates from itself the whole." It is not an outside force, like "the party," which serves as mediator between the immediate struggle and the ultimate goal. It is rather an inner force, the subjects of revolt, which are mediatION when they fully manifest their Reason, when they become inseparable from philosophy, from the dialectic of negativity. Achieving that entails working out the integrality of the movements from practice and from theory on a continuous basis. When the masses become theoreticians, when they "master the principles of the dialectic," a path opens to breaking down the barriers that separate the immediate struggle from the ultimate goal of a new society. In a word, the role of a revolutionary organization such as News and Letters Committees is not to "lead," it is not to substitute itself for the masses, it is rather to hear and answer the questions arising from mass practice, to probe into the Hegelian and Marxian dialectic, and to practice new relations between the subjects of revolt and philosophy in its publications, its activities, and its organizational life. That is how those reaching for a new society can become "practitioners" of the dialectic. That is how they can "experience" the dialectic of absolute negativity. As Dunayevskaya wrote in her "Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy of June 1, 1987," which is also in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, "Though committee-form and 'party-to-lead' are opposites, they are not ABSOLUTE opposites. 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. That which Hegel judged to be the synthesis of the 'Self-Thinking Idea' and the 'Self-Bringing-Forth of Liberty,' Marxist-Humanism holds, is what Marx had called the new society. The many paths to get there are not easy to work out." The challenge that the founder of Marxist-Humanism left us was to work out the DIRECT relation between dialectics and organization, on the basis of the "philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism," her 1953 "Letters on Hegel's Absolutes." Only by meeting this challenge could we claim to be transcending the legacy of "post-Marx Marxism as pejorative, beginning with Engels." The category of "post-Marx Marxism," first developed in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, does not imply a wholesale rejection of the contributions of the greatest Marxists. Each generation, including our own, has a responsibility to absorb the contributions of past revolutionaries. Rosa Luxemburg in particular made many important contributions, such as her theory of spontaneity and her concept of the need for revolutionary democracy after, as well as before, the revolutionary seizure of power. As Dunayevskaya wrote in an essay in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, "The totally new question that Luxemburg posed-socialist democracy after gaining power-pointed to a new aspect of Marxism itself." Luxemburg put it this way in her famous critique of Lenin in 1918: "Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created." Luxemburg's theory of revolutionary democracy has taken on more importance than ever in light of the many unfinished and aborted revolutions of the past century. Lenin also made a number of critical contributions, especially with his "Abstract of Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC" of 1914-15. This was not only one of the most important studies of Hegel by a Marxist; it also deeply impacted his view of the revolutionary nature of movements for national liberation. Lenin's dialectical grasp of the struggles for national liberation in his post-1914 writings on the "National Question," especially in Ireland, Asia and Africa, remain of critical importance today. At the same time, however, Lenin never related his study of Hegelian dialectics to questions of organization; he instead held firmly to the elitist concept of the "party to lead." As Dunayevskaya wrote in an essay in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, "While Lenin rejected any type of 'half-way dialectic' on the National Question, he did not see that same type of 'half-way dialectic' in himself on the question of the vanguard party." Unlike Lenin, Luxemburg rejected the National Question. Yet she too never fully broke from the concept of the "vanguard party." Nor did she delve into dialectics, either "in itself" or in relation to organization. The category of "post-Marx Marxism" reveals that even the greatest Marxists were not continuators of MARX'S Marxism, insofar as they did not live up to the inseparability of philosophy and organization which Marx projected in his 1875 CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM. CONCRETIZING THAT INSEPARABILITY INVOLVES MORE THAN JUST BREAKING FROM POST-MARX MARXISTS ON POLITICAL GROUNDS. IT INVOLVES JOURNEYING INTO "THE SOURCE OF ALL DIALECTIC"-HEGEL'S DIALECTIC-AND MAKING IT INTEGRAL TO ORGANIZATION ITSELF. What we found since the founder of Marxist-Humanism's death is that some who were once with us recoiled from meeting this challenge. Instead of trying to work out the direct relation between dialectics and organization they reverted back to the old and tired approach of keeping "voices from below" in a separate compartment from philosophy. The group that calls itself "Freedom Voices" is a striking illustration of how much easier it is to return to some old form of the past rather than embark on the "untrodden path" opened up by the philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism. That many are not measuring up to the creativity of today's struggles only confirms how important it is to work out an ongoing engagement with the dialectic of negativity. In bringing together many of Marxist-Humanism's writings on dialectics, THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY will open new doors to surmounting the stopping point barrier of "post-Marx Marxism." Projecting it is the core of all of our tasks. Our aim is for THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY to become a turning point in our organization. This will demand new theoretical creativity on our part as well as a new determination to build the one organization in the U.S. that is dedicated to the Marxist-Humanist principles formulated by Raya Dunayevskaya. We are under no illusion that the publication of the book will by itself break through the conspiracy of silence surrounding the philosophic contributions of Marxist-Humanism. Projecting it will take hard labor-in meetings, debates, and dialogues in the revolutionary movement. It entails extending our outreach with those involved in the movements against global capital, in each local News and Letters Committee. Achieving this will test our seriousness about being disciplined by the self-determination of the Idea. THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY can also impact our development of NEWS & LETTERS. This year we added new worker as well as prisoner columnists to NEWS & LETTERS as part of deepening our elicitation of voices from below. This has gone hand in hand with developing new dialogues on philosophy as seen in our section on "Globalization & Dialectics" in the May issue. We aim for this development of theory/practice, as a unit, to further develop in the coming year-which centers upon expanding the circulation and distribution of NEWS & LETTERS. Our work with THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY is key for our work in the Black dimension. This year we will issue a new edition of AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL: BLACK MASSES AS VANGUARD and a Marxist-Humanist statement on the Black dimension by the National Editorial Board. "Black masses as vanguard" is not just a POLITICAL category; it is a profound concretization of Marxist-Humanism's breakthrough on Hegel's Absolutes. Demonstrating that in terms of the realities of today will be a major component of our new statement. We also plan on issuing a pamphlet on Marx's value theory, which will address the relevance of Marx's CAPITAL for today's battle of ideas. And we are issuing a pamphlet containing some of the theoretic work done by members of News and Letters Committees in the period in which we worked on THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, entitled EXPLORATIONS IN DIALECTICAL AND CRITICAL THEORY: FROM HEGEL TO DERRIDA AND FROM MARX TO MIZAROS. Our work last year in creating the new booklet, THE REVOLUTIONARY JOURNALISM OF FELIX MARTIN: WORKER-PHILOSOPHER, testifies to our determination to concretize the unity of worker and intellectual. We have also expanded our internationalization of Marxist-Humanism, as seen in the work of the Marxist-Humanist publication in Britain, HOBGOBLIN, and in the relations forged with new friends in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Just as none of these goals can be separated from THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, so to, that concentration cannotbe separated from the finances needed to make them real and to keep NEWS & LETTERS alive and growing. The Sustaining Fund we establish every year to assure the publication of NEWS & LETTERS remains a crucial way in which we break down the division between "inside" and "outside" and deepen our outreach. The many tasks demanded by the internalization and projection of THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY bring us face-to-face with practicing dialectics. Hegel spoke to that in his SCIENCE OF LOGIC when he wrote, "Each new stage of exteriorization (that is, of further determination) is also an interiorization, and greater extension is also higher intensity." We invite all our readers to join us in taking the journey of discovery into concretizing this dialectic of negativity. -The Resident Editorial Board NOTES 1. For more on this, see THE DEFENSE MONITOR, Vol. 30, No. 2, February 2001. 2. "The Regional Impacts of Climate Change," report of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2001. 3. For the full development of this concept, see AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL: BLACK MASSES AS VANGUARD (Detroit: News and Letters, 1983). 4. See BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA: ACHILLIES HEEL OF WESTERN 'CIVILIZATION' (Chicago: News and Letters, 1996) and Kosova: Writings from NEWS & LETTERS, 1998-99 (Chicago: News and Letters, 2000). 5. See Raya Dunayevskaya's political-philosophic letter, "Lebanon: The Test Not Only of the PLO but the Whole Left" (August 1976). 6. See Peter Hudis, "The dialectic of the party: Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness reconsidered," NEWS & LETTERS, June 2001. 7. "The Year of Only Eight Months" (January 3, 1987), SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 10690. |
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