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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2002
Editorial
World in disarray after 9/11
New York--One year after the largest terrorist attack in
history, the world’s solemn attention was on Ground Zero in New York. On that
tragic day, a sense of unity was expressed with family members of the victims
and those who risked and sometimes lost their own lives to rescue and comfort
others. In reaching across the race, sex and class boundaries of capitalism they
showed a dimension of the new human relations we need to go beyond capitalism. But the “unity” many Americans still feel in
commemorating those who died, as well as the heroic actions of 9/11, is
increasingly separated from the call for multiple wars emanating from the Bush
administration. Although many will still line up behind Bush’s call for war in
Iraq, fear and mistrust of his bellicose plans are evident in the U.S, and
around the world. This is seen not only in rank-and-file U.S. soldiers who
openly question the need for a war in already devastated Iraq, but serious
misgivings have even appeared within the U.S. rulers and their allies. There are
two worlds, rulers and ruled, in every country. The rulers are using 9/11 to
project “kill or be killed” with their policy of “pre-emptive” strikes
in the service of capitalism everywhere. ‘WE POSE NEW SOCIETY’ One year ago, the title of our editorial said it all:
“To the barbarism of terrorism and war, we pose the new society.” As we
developed our response to the human tragedy of 9/11, we made clear that the
anti-war movement would fail to give a direction that would inspire further mass
opposition because a total view was needed. We believed anti-imperialism
couldn’t be one-sided; it had to critique both Bush’s militarism and Islamic
fundamentalism. We analyzed how Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism in India and
Pakistan threatened each other with nuclear weapons and made other countries
consider developing and using their own nuclear arms. Over the following year, News and Letters Committees
supported the work of RAWA against fundamentalism, helping with fund-raisers,
opening the pages of News & Letters to let them speak in their own voices.
We analyzed the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, recognizing that with respect
to the oppression of women “Afghanistan is everywhere” and called for
critical support for the Berber movement in Algeria, the Egyptian feminists, the
reformers in Iran, and the Labor Party in Pakistan. We noted that U.S. support for dictatorial regimes in
Southwest Asia like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgystan may “instead of
undermining Islamic fundamentalism…actually strengthen it…Radical Islamic
fervor has become inseparably interwoven with growing popular discontent against
corrupt brutal regimes.” A CHANGE IN THINKING We pointed out that for a revolution to succeed and not
to succumb to counterrevolution from within, an ongoing working out of
dialectical philosophy--a change in our thinking--is needed. We said that the
unique category of “absolute negativity as new beginning” must be
inseparable from our organization’s response to Bush, Islamic fundamentalism
and the failure of the anti-Stalinist left to pose an alternative revolutionary
vision for the anti-capitalist movement. We said our political response must be grounded in
second negation, what we are for--“positive humanism beginning from
itself”--rather than concentrating all our opposition on the first negation by
criticizing Bush but leaving the “lesser evil” from our critique. With the publication of the edited collection THE POWER
OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX by Raya
Dunayevskaya, we have a specific text that can help us project the philosophic
principles of freedom in the struggle to overcome the fragmentation of human
beings under capitalist domination. In fact, without realizing it, George Bush’s
undialectical thinking, his absolute opposition of “either you are with us or
you are against us” has challenged us to grapple with the dialectic “in and
for itself” in order to project a total view of opposition to both war and
terrorism. Despite his rhetoric about a “culture” of freedom and the
sacredness of individual lives versus terrorism, Bush’s philosophy is
interpreted on the street to mean “either kill or be killed.” ‘LOGIC’ OF CAPITAL Bush, whose “logic” always represents the needs of
capital in his choice of targets, uses the deaths caused by terrorist attacks to
justify “pre-emptive” strikes against Iraq, a state with no demonstrable
connection to 9/11. The Bush Administration extends this to other countries of
the “axis of evil,” and whomever else they, as the “universal will” of
capitalist global expansion, deem to be terrorists. We absolutely oppose the inhuman philosophy of dead capital that presents itself as the war on terrorism. In the coming year, we invite all we can reach to help us project second negation as the method needed in the ongoing revolutionary movement for new human relations. We aim to create a space for the self-development of each to be inseparable from the self-development of all. |
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