Crisis compels a return to Marx

In this special issue we are publishing our Draft Perspectives Thesis, part of our preparation for the national gathering of News and Letters Committees over Memorial Day weekend. We have published every one since 1975, breaking new ground for the Marxist movement. We do it because our age is in such total crisis, facing a choice between absolute terror or absolute freedom, that a revolutionary organization can no longer allow any separation between theory and practice, philosophy and revolution, workers and intellectuals, "inside" and "outside." We ask you to join in the discussion of these Perspectives. We are not presenting any "pat answers" to the question, "Where Do We Go from Here?" We are raising the questions that demand answers--and we ask you to help us in working them out.

• Part I: World in Meltdown and Revolt

• Part II: Political-military crises from Afghanistan to Sudan

• Part III: The needed return to Marx is through the re-creation of his Humanism as Marxist-Humanism

• Part IV: Marxist-Humanist tasks for 2009-2010

Part I: World in Meltdown and Revolt

The forces stirred by the swarm of crises shaking capitalism's world order to the core were manifested both inside and outside the London Summit of the G20. Tens of thousands of marchers converged on the Bank of England on April 1, in four streams led by the new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Red horse against war; Green horse against climate chaos; Silver horse against financial crimes; and Black horse against land enclosures and borders, hailing the 360th anniversary of the English Revolution's Diggers and their designation of the Earth as "a common treasury for all." Protest signs ranged from "Jobs not bombs" to the huge banner reading, "Capitalism isn't working / Another world is possible."

Not far off, thousands of mainly young people pitched tents to create a Climate Camp across from the European Climate Exchange, a center of the scam called carbon trading, raising the banner: "Stopping carbon markets, because nature doesn't do bailouts." Yet another protest opposed the U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the true depth of revolt was shown in the latest factory occupations, as hundreds of workers sat in at three auto parts factories being closed by Visteon UK in Basildon, Enfield and Belfast. One worker, John McGowan, told a reporter, "We intend to carry this camp here for as long as we possibly can, right through to next week, next month, if it takes it. There are people willing to do it, and we have organized ourselves."[1] In Greece, a 24-hour nationwide general strike on April 2, the day of the summit, showed how the masses of workers can shut down a country. Stathis Anestis, a spokesman for the Greek General Confederation of Workers, called it "Greece's response to the G20 summit in London. Those who created the crisis are now trying to fix it, and the solutions they're handing down to governments like ours are not to be trusted."[2]

(A) U.S. challenged by Europe and China as fears of new Depression raise specters of fascism and war

Inside the G20 summit, intended to forge united action by the world's biggest economies, U.S. President Barack Obama and his counterparts sweated to paper over their quarrels about how to take on the meltdown. The urgency of the action they wished to take is underscored by the fact that this is only the second summit of G20 heads of state. But Obama, calling it a "turning point" and begging the world to "wait and see," could not hide European countries' rejection of his top goal, to pump up their stimulus spending, nor his rejection of their demand for international financial regulation.

The rift between the U.S. and most of Europe was expressed most starkly by European Union President Mirek Topolanek's declaration the week before, that President Obama's deficit-funded stimulus program is the "road to hell."

The rifts are also within the EU. The warning by Hungary's Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany of a "new iron curtain," if the richer nations of West Europe fail to aid the East, threw cold water on the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism in East Europe.[3] Now what is falling is not a wall but the illusion that the crisis of state-capitalism was limited to the East bloc. Far from solving the East's problems, turning to mixed private and state-capitalism has left those countries and even the Eastern part of wealthy Germany stuck in a legacy of poverty, pollution, and unemployment. That is deepening in today's crisis, leading observers such as Ron Asmus of the German Marshall Fund to ask: "Is the democratic transition in danger?"

Strikes and protests have swept the region, from Montenegro to Estonia Governments have fallen in Latvia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The simmering discontent was expressed in January by participants in Bulgaria's "Nationwide People's Protest," who declared, "We are fed up with living in the poorest and most corrupt country."

CHINA'S CHALLENGES

In a separate challenge, China won more power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Having exploited its most available resource, labor power, to become the world's sweatshop, China has now become the creditor of last resort. The U.S. even had to smooth over its recent confrontation with ships from the Chinese Navy, which has strengthened enough to challenge the much more powerful U.S. Navy regionally. That does not mean that China can ignore the challenge from within, as it officially admits 20 million unemployed, with tens of thousands of labor revolts every year. (See "China workers' revolt")

The rifts between rulers are not just policy differences but have raised fears of trade war, which the G20 believe they have averted for now with their meager stopgaps.[4] But protectionist measures have increased, and narrow nationalist demagogues are trying to exploit them, along with anti-immigrant scapegoating.

No international agreement can ward off the specter of fascism and world war, just as it cannot erase the memory of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when massive state intervention into the economy could not renew value production until World War II sowed such vast destruction across the globe. A mainstream economist as rigorous as Simon Kuznets could not escape the conclusion:

"Thus, emergence of the violent Nazi regime in one of the most economically developed countries of the world raises grave questions about the institutional basis of modern economic growth--if it is susceptible to such a barbaric deformation as a result of transient difficulties."

(B) Disarray in thought reflects capitalism's structural crisis

The disarray in bourgeois thought reflects the rulers' desperation. Ever the pragmatist, Obama is determined to try something, despite the gulf between the size of the problem and the proposed solutions. Hence the sigh of relief that the summit reached an agreement, though it did not include his desired Keynesian super-spending. Even a prizefighter for capitalism like bourgeois economist Paul Samuelson found himself quoting Joseph Schumpeter's statement during the depths of world war in 1942: "Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can."

What the clashes on how to address the economic meltdown reflect above all is that there is no fix: capitalism's contradictions cannot be solved as long as we live under capitalism, but capitalism is precisely what the world powers are trying to save.

Even stepping up capitalist globalization through the "Doha Round" of trade talks was included in the summit's communique--but the same globalization was instrumental in the unprecedented speed of the collapse's global spread, and its steep descent. Each forecast is worse than the last, with the 30-nation Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) now warning that world trade is in "free fall," expected to decline by 13.2% in 2009, and reporting, "This contraction of world trade is broad-based, and affects all regions and is the worst since comparable data exist." It projected its member economies would contract 4.3% this year, predicting the first negative global economic growth since World War II, and a sharp rise in unemployment.

Neither trade liberalization, nor fiscal stimulus, nor financial regulation, nor funding the IMF can change the fact that the rate of profit has declined below what capitalists consider necessary to keep investing in expanded production. In fact, much of the trillions being poured out of the central banks and treasuries ended up paying for marketing, underwriting of mergers, patches for balance sheets, lobbyist fees, bonuses and luxury parties and golden parachutes for executives--everywhere but investment in production.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN CAPITALISM

What capitalism has never fully recovered from is the deep structural change manifested in the global economic crisis of the mid-1970s. At the time, few Marxists were ready to agree with Raya Dunayevskaya's analysis of this structural change based on the rate of profit's decline. In retrospect, even bourgeois economists admit that the "booms" since then look more like bubbles now, combined with a restructuring which they prefer not to name plainly: the additional profits squeezed out of the world's working classes through a class war attacking wages, benefits, working and living conditions and unions--a class war of which globalization is an integral part that pits workers of all countries against each other in a race to the bottom.

Some radical economists who rejected Dunayevskaya's analysis then, are now stating that the rate of profit has never recovered, as if they had come up with it all by themselves. But at the time she had to confront Marxist epigones like Ernest Mandel who, dazzled by capitalism's ability so far to avoid another Great Depression, were awed by its "stabilizers" and saw only a recession that was already ending in 1975.[5]

Despite the widespread recognition that the totalitarian Communism--that is, state-capitalism--of Stalin's Russia or Mao's China is neither a solution to crises nor a model for the new society, and despite the calls for a humanist and not statist socialism for the 21st century, the illusion still abounds that capital can be controlled by nationalization and other forms of state planning and intervention, and that statification is the road to "socialism."

WORKERS' REVOLT VS. ALIENATED LABOR

This disarray in thought on the Left as well as among the rulers and their intellectual representatives proves the need for a total uprooting of this society in order to make new beginnings--and, to do so, the need to be rooted in Dunayevskaya's analysis of the crises of state-capitalism. We cannot chart a path to freedom based on state vs. private property. But we must break with the perversity of capitalist relations spelled out as "dead labor dominating living labor," the machine as master of the human being, "which gives rise to the fetishistic appearance of commodities and presents the relations between men as if they were mere exchange of things." It is that basic alienation of labor that must be overthrown, and that cannot be done by the state or from the top down, but must be accomplished through the self-activity of masses in motion.

Nor can we allow thought to be separated from workers' revolt. Proletarian revolution is needed to put an end to capitalism's ongoing destruction of the bases of human civilization, and at the same time, "the totality of the contradictions compels a total philosophic outlook. Today's dialectics is not just philosophy, but dialectics of liberation, of self-emancipation by all forces of revolution--proletariat, Black, women, youth. The beginning and end of all revolves around labor."

Whether or not they acknowledge it, too many "Marxists" today have no confidence in the ability of masses of workers to remake society, whether that is expressed as the need to limit the movement to pragmatic piecemeal goals, to provide a blueprint to the masses, or to form a vanguard party to lead them. But where some on the Left lack confidence, the rulers are worried about what will surge up from below. The worldwide revolt of labor--as well as rulers' often-expressed fear of the revolt--is another index of the crisis.

(C) Two worlds in every country

(1) The challenge from labor in 'developing' and 'developed' lands

From the UN Secretary-General to the head of the IMF to the Prime Minister of Qatar speaking at the Arab League summit, warnings of unrest to come have been pouring out. In Obama's White House, the economic crisis is the subject of a daily secret briefing since global instability (that is, revolt) from the meltdown is considered a bigger strategic threat than al Qaeda. The really fundamental rift is not one between heads of state, but the rift within each country, the struggle between two worlds of the rulers and the ruled.

Revolt, especially by labor, has been heating up worldwide. France and its overseas colonies showed what could be in store. A general strike brought the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe to a standstill from Jan. 20 to March 5, lasting over six weeks. Workers by the thousands held demonstrations, built roadblocks, clashed with police, and surrounded a police station to secure the release of 50 arrested strikers. By March the French government, which rules the island, had granted the top 20 demands of the labor-community coalition LKP (Collective Against Super-Exploitation), including a substantial wage hike for the lowest-paid. Unemployment there was 22.7% as of 2007, with poverty 12.5%, yet prices are higher than in France.

Unrest spread to other islands ruled by France: neighboring Martinique, which also went on general strike; and Réunion, an island east of Africa, where 30,000 protested, listing 62 demands. Ivan Hoareau, a union leader there, said, "We will lean on the victory in the Antilles to satisfy the biggest number of our grievances. If we continue here, it is to help our buddies in the Antilles."[6]

Shortly after Guadeloupe's workers walked, mainland France saw a general strike, with well over one million protesters in the streets of 200 towns on Jan. 29, opposing President Sarkozy's economic policies. A larger number marched March 19 in another general strike. French workers have also pioneered the technique of "bossnapping," penning bosses into their offices until workers' demands are met. Bosses at Sony, 3M, Michelin, Caterpillar and RBS have experienced it, usually finding the demands not so unreasonable after all.[7]

(2) Back to the U.S.: Racism, homelessness, prison, homophobia on the one hand, strikes and discontent on the other

Suffering, and revolt, will certainly continue to build. Far from the world food crisis being a thing of the past, the world's chronically hungry people now exceed one billion, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. And let us not think for one minute that hunger only stalks overseas, as hunger, homelessness, and poverty are making a big comeback in the U.S. Real unemployment (including "discouraged" workers and involuntary part-timers) is almost up to 16%, while another 2.3 million people are behind bars; some of them work, but for only pennies an hour.

Despite the draconian conditions in which prisoners are confined, there is a ferment of discontent and ideas behind the walls and bars. Many are denouncing the nature and function of the prison-industrial complex, which they recognize as an integral part of the mechanism keeping the working class down as well as supplying an ever-growing source of cheap labor to pit against "free" workers on the outside.

While the situation of Black America has worsened with the crisis, depression conditions have existed in the inner cities for many years. As reported in the March 16 Christian Science Monitor, the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University indicates that:

• While the number of men (all races and ethnicities) looking for full-time work has nearly doubled in the last year, employment fell much faster for Black men than for Asians, Latinos, and whites;
• "The employment rate among African-American men aged 20-24 is now just 51%, as opposed to 68% during the late 1990s. For African-American teens, it's just 14%."
• From November 2007 to February 2009, "there was no net job loss among professionals or managers....All the job loss has been among blue-collar jobs--construction, manufacturing, and retail," where Black men have traditionally found employment.

As well as suffering higher imprisonment, unemployment and poverty, Blacks lost homes through foreclosures at a higher rate than other groups--partly due to being targeted for subprime loans, even when eligible for more affordable loans.

The sharp increase in homelessness visible everywhere has sparked new initiatives of homeless people squatting in some of the many homes made vacant by the irrationality of a system in which people exist to serve the production process rather than the other way around. It has also meant new tent cities, such as Seattle's Nickelsville, named after the mayor who is trying to drive the homeless out of Seattle. Formerly homeless activist Anitra Freeman said:

"People have been dying on the street for twenty years. The homeless women's group that I work with stands a vigil, women in black, whenever somebody homeless dies outside or by violence in King County. We started in 2000, and we've stood vigil for 330 people since then. Eleven just this year. This has been going on for a long time, and it is getting worse."[8]

WORKERS, IMMIGRANTS, GAYS STRUGGLE FOR NEW HUMAN RELATIONS

Voices like this express a Reason not likely to heed for long Obama's calls for "patience" for his "recovery and reinvestment" plan to bring relief and even "a secure and lasting prosperity." Nor has labor been quiescent, from a 14-week strike against Vought Aircraft Industries in Nashville, Tenn., to a seven-week strike at Dover Chemical in Ohio, and from a protest by temps against pay cuts at Microsoft to vocal discontent from autoworkers facing Obama's drive to bankrupt GM to force union concessions (see "Workers tossed aside in auto bailout"). In all this, the successful factory occupation by workers at Republic Windows and Doors has not been forgotten, and shows not only a method of struggle but a link to revolts in Latin America and a challenge to the sanctity of private property.

The upcoming May Day demonstrations, reclaiming U.S. labor's revolutionary history and highlighting the struggles of immigrants, will be a test for labor. Let us not forget that Obama could not have won office without the votes of white workers, and though virulent racism is still widespread, it does mean that unity of white, Black and Latino workers is on the agenda, not just to elect someone to manage capitalism but to abolish it and to begin the reconstruction of society on new, human foundations.

At the same time, Obama's election coincided with California's Proposition 8, which aimed at relegating Gays to second-class citizenship by outlawing same-sex marriage. This anti-human drive has continued in many states, and the protests that broke out immediately after the election, by Gay and straight alike, continue, revealing how serious the masses are about "change" being not just political, but a change in human relations. (See "No half-way opposition to DOMA!") Even a legal victory as sweeping as the Iowa Supreme Court's legalization of same-sex marriage will not still these voices.

Among these multiple profound contradictions, it is not only Marx's analysis of capitalist crisis that needs to be recovered. What he developed was a philosophy of revolution that encompassed all the dimensions of human liberation. And today the world faces many crises--economic, political, ecological--that were not even on the G20 agenda, from the war in Afghanistan to the continued threat from nuclear weapons, from genocide in Darfur to ongoing social battles in Latin America.

Part II: Political-military crises from Afghanistan to Sudan

What refuses to be put on the back burner behind the economic crisis is war--or, rather, war grows out of the same soil of a decaying capitalist system that has long since outlived its usefulness to humanity. Obama, formerly the anti-war candidate but today holding the reins of commander-in-chief, now projects keeping troops in Iraq until the end of 2011. Even then their withdrawal is no certainty.

(A) Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan surge, with a possible Taliban deal in the wings

In Afghanistan Obama is adding 21,000 troops, comparable to the size of Bush's "surge" in Iraq. Although these wars were off the G20 agenda, Obama's trip to Europe also took him to NATO's 60th anniversary meetings and a summit with the EU, at both of which he twisted arms just to get 5,000 more non-combat European troops sent to Afghanistan. Near the NATO summit in Strasbourg, France, a peace camp was the base for vigorous protests against the Afghan war and against NATO's imperialist role.

Obama has also stepped up bombings in Pakistan, despite fears it will destabilize the country and strengthen the Islamist insurgency within. One result of the U.S. escalation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is the decision of competing Taliban factions in the two countries to unite to fight the U.S.

That will not stop either the U.S., Afghan or Pakistani government from cutting a deal with the Taliban. To the contrary, the Pakistani government already has discussions under way with the Taliban leadership, and plans to develop them into more formal talks with U.S. support. While the language used is that talks will proceed with the "moderate" Taliban, the reality is they want to negotiate with Muhammad Omar and the murderous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-i-Islami, which was directly involved in some of the most horrendous crimes against women. That includes throwing acid in unveiled women's faces, as well as, according to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), the murder of their founder, Meena. He is also notorious for slaughtering those who are not of his Pashtun ethnic group.

The latest retrograde deal is in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where the Taliban have been murdering intellectuals, secular politicians and women leaders, burning schools and terrorizing the population of 1.3 million, who just a year ago voted overwhelmingly for the secular Awami National Party. Now, the Pakistani government has allowed the imposition of Islamic law in the Swat Valley, suspending the army's drive to crush the Taliban, thereby turning it into a Taliban sanctuary. The nature of that "compromise" can now be seen on the internet in a horrifying video of a 17-year-old girl there, held down by three masked men and flogged brutally in public, reportedly for the "crime" of refusing to marry a Taliban commander.

(B) All sides sell out women

That the U.S. is seriously considering negotiating with such creatures shows that, to the rulers, it's all about fighting al Qaeda. It's not about building democracy and certainly not about women's liberation--in fact all sides from the Pakistani government to the U.S. are willing to sell out women. If any more proof were needed, there is the new law passed in Afghanistan with President Hamid Karzai's support--until international outcry supposedly forced him to reconsider. The law legalizes rape within marriage and forbids women to leave their homes, seek work, get an education, or visit a doctor without their husband's permission.

It isn't only that women's struggle for freedom is a human rights and justice issue. Rather, women's fight for liberation is a crucial dimension of the dialectics of revolution. That was seen most clearly during the Iranian Revolution on International Women's Day, March 8, 1979, when thousands of women took to the streets in protest of Khomeini's order for women to wear the veil. While that was the impetus that brought them into the streets to chant, "At the dawn of freedom, we have no freedom," their marches, which continued for five straight days, criticized the unfinished nature of the revolution and pointed to the counter-revolution within the revolution. It pointed to how the revolution could continue and reveals even today how deep and total revolution must become if it is to uproot the present system.[9]

(C) Extremes of capitalist barbarism: nuclear weapons and genocide

But U.S. actions in the region are not determined by freedom, except insofar as it is seen as a threat to strategic interests. The same is true of other powers trying to intervene, from Iran to Russia. Both are challenging the U.S., which has been weakened by imperial misadventures and economic collapse. Having effectively partitioned Georgia, Russia has used its muscle in Central Asia to pressure tiny Kyrgyzstan into shutting down the U.S. military base there that has been vital to supplying U.S. forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, the CSTO--a military grouping of seven former USSR republics, led by Russia and including all but one of the Central Asian countries north of Afghanistan--announced the activation of its own "rapid reaction force."

Perhaps more crucial is the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country that borders another nuclear-armed country, India, with which it has had three wars. Nothing better shows that the threat of nuclear war did not disappear with the USSR. In addition to the eight nuclear-armed countries, neither Iran nor North Korea shows signs of shifting direction from the nuclear-weapons road--with the possibility of their actually using them or serving as magnets for U.S. or Israeli attacks.

The most telling measure of what is left off the agenda of all Obama's meetings on his European trip is Darfur. The U.S. angles for a direct military presence in Africa via its new military command called Africom aimed at maintaining access to crucial resources like oil and providing a base for geopolitical maneuvers. (See Black/Red View, "Sudan and oil.")

Part III: The needed return to Marx is through the re-creation of his Humanism as Marxist-Humanism

The tragedy of Darfur demonstrates the fatal trap of Obama's mantra of "patience," which allows a million human lives to remain at risk while his new administration "debates" what to do. Another chapter of the crisis began March 4, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague charged Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the slaughter of 300,000 people in Darfur. It was the first time a sitting head of state has been indicted by the tribunal. When Bashir then expelled 13 NGOs (including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and CARE) for "spying for the Court," it left over a million people without adequate food, clean water and healthcare as a meningitis outbreak threatened. Obama's feeble response to the ongoing horrors, offered in a meeting with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, was that it was important to send a strong message "that it is not acceptable to put that many people's lives at risk." At the same time came the shocking report that none less than Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, along with a number of Arab League state leaders, dared to defend Bashir at the Arab League summit in Doha, and call for the indictment instead of President Bush and Israeli leaders, in light of U.S.-Israeli actions in Gaza. As if we have to choose one war criminal or another to support! Meanwhile, the horrors of Darfur continue unabated.

What is clearly needed to respond to such deadly and myriad global crises as those we are facing at this moment is far from a "debate," that is, a war of words, but a battle of ideas to grasp the deep uprooting demanded to get rid of capitalism and all the crises it gives birth to. That battle of ideas involves realizing--that is, making real--that it is not a question only of destroying the old, but also of creating the new.

This is what distinguishes the struggles and discussions ongoing in Latin America. In countries like El Salvador, Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia (see "Latin American Notes," and "Correa betrays labor"), that has meant a move to the left and actual battles over how to reorganize society, while across Latin America it has meant a serious battle and ferment of ideas. In Mexico the Spanish translation of Raya Dunayevskaya's Philosophy and Revolution has just been reprinted, and her Marxism and Freedom is being used in high school classes and activist study groups.

In Venezuela and Bolivia the talk by leaders of a "socialism for the 21st century" reflects the pressure from below. It reflects mass rejection of capitalism and the desire for a humanist socialism that doesn't settle for varieties of state-capitalism trying to pass itself off as socialism, whether social democracy of the welfare state or totalitarian Communism. Yet the actual events raise crucial questions: Can workers' self-management be legislated or imposed from above? Can socialism co-exist with a President who declares war on workers who strike against state-owned enterprises?[10] What constitutes socialism? These battles of ideas are not about abstractions but about real revolution and how to get a direction to a new society.

THE NEEDED RETURN TO MARX, BUT WHAT KIND OF RETURN?

If it has not been clear, ever since Obama was elected on a groundswell for "change," his trip to Europe and the Middle East removed any doubt that his "new" ideas and efforts are all about saving capitalism. At the same time, there have been significant calls to return to Marx not only from the Left but from bourgeois economists as well. There are reports of substantial new sales of Capital in Germany. And bourgeois and academic economists are re-discussing constant and variable capital, value and surplus value, and declining rate of profit. Yet it all ends with a narrowing of Marx to no more than a radical economist. The call for a "revolutionary change" is reduced to an abstraction, when what is needed to confront the questions of pathways to revolution and what happens after revolution, is a return to the fullness of Marx's Marxism, the philosophy he identified as a "new Humanism" to distinguish it from "vulgar communism," in his 1844 Economic Philosophic Manuscripts. Those Manuscripts were, at one and the same time, a profound critique of the Hegelian dialectic and a recovery of the Hegelian "negation of the negation" as the turning point for all forward movement.

These 1844 Manuscripts constituted what the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, identified as "the philosophic moment" in the development of Marx's Marxism. In her presentation dated June 1, 1987,[11] Dunayevskaya clarifies it as the specific point when Marx "articulates the great merit of Hegel in discovering the 'negation of the negation' and the great demerit of this same Hegel in enveloping it in such mysticism by dealing with it as various stages of consciousness, rather than as men and women thinking." It is where, she continued, Marx "declares himself not only against capitalism and 'vulgar communism,' but proclaims his philosophy to be 'a new Humanism.'"

In our age of absolutes--of state-capitalist totalitarianism and humanity's quest for full freedom against it--Dunayevskaya, in attempting to follow through on Marx's roots in Hegel, picked up on where the 1844 Manuscripts were going, in two letters written on May 12 and May 20, 1953, that became the philosophic moment for all that followed in the development of Marxist-Humanism. It was in those 1953 Letters that her own breakthrough on Hegel's "Absolute" succeeded in "demystifying it as either God or the closed ontology," to see it as "the unity of both the movement from practice that is a form of theory and the movement from theory that is itself a form of philosophy and revolution." This philosophic moment is what governed all the concretizations that followed for Marxist-Humanism.

Those concretizations included the founding of a new kind of organization, News and Letters Committees, determined to take responsibility for the idea of Marxism for our age, with a Constitution that was grounded in Marx's concept of the unity of theory and practice; and a journal, News & Letters, established directly in that Constitution, that would make sure the voices from below would be heard unseparated from the articulation of a philosophy of revolution. The philosophic moment governed, as well, the continued development of that philosophy through the three books that constituted a "trilogy of revolution," each incorporated directly into the Constitution as they reached publication: Marxism and Freedom in 1958, Philosophy and Revolution in 1973, and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution in 1983.

The objective moment we are living today--when the continued existence of capitalism is being questioned by theoreticians and workers alike--underscores the urgency of our work on publishing a book collecting some of Dunayevskaya's writings on Marx that have not previously achieved a wide circulation. As part of the process of working that out, News and Letters Committees organized a series of classes in all our Locals this year on "Confronting Today's Crises: The Marxist-Humanist Return to Marx and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism." In this series of discussions, we aimed to catch the methodology of Dunayevskaya's return to Marx and to discover how to uproot the old society by creating the new. We projected Marxist-Humanism as a vital contribution for today's freedom struggles, one that is not only a return to Marx's Humanism but its re-creation for a new age of state-capitalism, an age of counter-revolution coming from within revolution and of its opposite, the reach for total freedom. As a way of working out the book, the classes focused on moments of development of Marxist-Humanism, from the original philosophic moment, through each of the trilogy of revolution, to the work on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy--including how each moment meant also a new view of Marx that was only possible due to the re-creation of his philosophy.

CONFRONTING TODAY'S CRISES THROUGH THE TRILOGY OF REVOLUTION

How Dunayevskaya's 1953 philosophic moment proved to be the determinant for establishing continuity with Marx's 1844 Humanism can be seen in how it was concretized in each of the trilogy, beginning with Marxism and Freedom. In the context of the world stage of state-capitalism ushering in a new stage of production with Automation, and a new stage of cognition, Marxism and Freedom restored the philosophic foundation of Marxism in Humanism and the Hegelian dialectic, and spoke to the way our age with its total crises compels a total outlook. Our classes highlighted the original contribution Dunayevskaya made in making explicit how Marx responded to the dialectic in the movement from practice--including the workers' struggle for the eight-hour day--and in thought, by restructuring Capital and in the process breaking with the old concept of theory. In the context of today's situation, this was also seen in the way Marxism and Freedom takes up Capital, Volume III as it analyzed economic crisis, which Marx refused to separate from the perverse relations of dead labor dominating living labor, or from its opposite: "human power which is its own end."

Responding to the failure of the 1960s movements, and especially of the attempt to "pick up theory en route," Philosophy and Revolution showed the dialectic of the movement from theory and its relationship to the movement from practice. Our classes focused on its central category of Absolute Negativity as New Beginning. Not just a point of departure for studying Marx and Hegel, it is an original contribution to Marxism that is needed for this age to reach freedom.

As Marx's last writings became available, the Women's Liberation Movement arose and crises wracked the globe from the mid-1970s structural economic crisis to the counter-revolution coming from within the Iranian Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution developed the category of post-Marx Marxism as pejorative and, with it, Marx's "new moments," proving why a successful revolution required the whole of Marx, every moment of which spells out the need for revolution in permanence. Our classes asked what is a viable basis for socialism for the 21st century that would not repeat the historical failures of post-Marx Marxism.

TOWARD THE DIALECTICS OF ORGANIZATION AND PHILOSOPHY

In the last years of her life, confronting how the changed world of the 1980s had polluted the thought of the Left, the founder of Marxist-Humanism began an intensive study to work out the question of "Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy" that all of her developments had led her to confront as the "burning question" that remained an "untrodden path" by all except Marx.

The very last presentation she wrote on June 1, 1987, drew urgent attention to one of the last writings of Marx, his Critique of the Gotha Program, wherein, for the first time, "no matter how Marx kept from trying to give any blueprints for the future," he developed "a general view of where we are headed for...the day after we have rid ourselves of the birthmarks of capitalism, when a new generation can finally see all its potentiality put an end once and for all to the division between mental and manual labor."

As Marx had written it in his Critique of the Gotha Program: ". . .after labor, from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual. . .only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banner, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Yet post-Marx Marxists had failed to make that the ground for organization.

Our classes took up some of the many aspects of the work Dunayevskaya did toward Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy, beginning with how the June 1, 1987, presentation made a category of the philosophic moment as determinant, and thus gave a new vantage point for grasping the whole body of ideas of Marxist-Humanism. Inherent in the 1953 philosophic moment was the need for revolutionary organization to be animated by Marx's philosophy of revolution in permanence, to prepare for what happens after revolution in an age when even successful ones got pushed back or turned into opposite.

THE PATH TO THE POSITIVE IN THE NEGATIVE

The collection of writings which we have begun to organize has revealed the complex pathway that it took to reach the leap in cognition that the philosophic moment of 1953 represents. The first significant point on that pathway was the creation of the theory of state- capitalism, without which Dunayevskaya said the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism could not have been developed. It underlines the difference between theory and philosophy, in the way theory can be seen as what addresses the needed uprooting of the old, but philosophy is demanded for the creation of the new. Indeed, finding the positive in the negative--the negation of the negation--was the key task of philosophy to Hegel, to Marx, and to Dunayevskaya, as the turning point to all forward movement.

Another crucial part of the complex pathway to the full development of Marxist-Humanism was what could be called "living the revolution"[12] with the movement from below: the miners' strikes and Black struggles right in the midst of World War II; women as revolutionary Reason throughout history; and, after World War II, her crucial participation in the 1949-50 Coal Miners' General Strike against Automation--all at the same time that she was digging into Marx and his roots in Hegel. Most crucial of all in that activity was the question she heard the miners posing about "what kind of labor" humanity should do? Why should there be a division between mental and manual labor? The significance of that experience was incorporated directly into our Constitution.[13] Because the May 1953 philosophic moment caught what was in the air after Stalin's death, it anticipated the revolts in Eastern Europe, which did not begin until the following month, and which answered affirmatively the question: "Can humanity be free in this age of totalitarianism?"

Grasping the methodology by which Marxist-Humanism was developed as the needed philosophy of revolution for our age, in order to pursue it all the way to the new society, is what has put the development of the book we are undertaking as one of our primary tasks for the year ahead.

Part IV: Marxist-Humanist tasks for 2009-2010

1. Foremost among our tasks this year is our aim to complete a collection of Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on Marx, from the 1940s to the 1980s. It will demonstrate the totality of Marx's Marxism through the lens of Marxist-Humanism's continuity with it, and make explicit a methodology for today's revolutionaries to confront new objective-subjective developments.

2. We also plan to again make available in print the collection of Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on the Middle East, from the 1960s to the 1980s, first published in a pamphlet by News and Letters Committees in 2003. As we pointed out there, they introduced readers to "the limitations of the Nasser model of Arab national revolutions, the origins of Ba'athism, the transformation of Israel into a right-wing imperialist state, the carnage of the Lebanese Civil War, the contradictions of the Iranian revolution, chief among them the repression of a vibrant women's liberation movement by Khomeini and his leftist allies."

"While these texts contain some of Dunayevskya's best political writings," we added, "their content is by no means limited to the political sphere only. Her 1979 essay 'What is Philosophy? What is Revolution?' emphasizes the need to transcend the merely political analysis into a philosophic encounter with the dialectics of revolution." This issue of News & Letters carries part of one of the essays from this pamphlet.

We published them, we wrote, "not to supply answers" about the Iraq war Bush had launched, or the motivations behind it, but to contribute to a re-creation of the idea of social revolution on the part of the activist-theoreticians of a new generation. As we enter the seventh year of Bush's--now Obama's--war, the meaning of Dunayevskaya's writings on the Middle East has grown enormously.

3. Never was a Marxist-Humanist journal like News & Letters more needed, in which the voices from below of workers, women, youth, LGBT people and minorities are heard unseparated from the articulation of a philosophy of liberation. Our determination to continue this unique paper came to the fore this year in confronting two very different challenges. One was an attempt to stop our publication, which was defeated with the help of our readers and supporters. The other is the continuing impact of the internet, which has led to the demise of a number of print publications. We are determined to maintain News & Letters both as a website and as a print publication, the importance of which is attested to by workers like those at Republic Windows and Doors, who took it inside their occupied factory to share with fellow strikers; and by the discussion it arouses at anti-war protests and open forums alike. It is most of all attested to by the many prisoners who, thanks to the generosity of others, are subscribers who share each issue with their fellow inmates. While that alone increases the number of revolutionaries who are "subscribers" in that sense, there is a great need for us to focus special attention this year on increasing our paid subscriptions.

4. From our beginnings we have been sustained by the support we have received from our friends and subscribers as well as by the commitment of our members, who together give life to our Sustaining Fund every year. It is why we see Revolutionary Finances as not about "money"--important as it is to pay the rent, the postage, and the printing bills--but about human relationships.

5. We plan to mark the 2010 centenary of the birth of Raya Dunayevskaya with forums and publications drawing attention to her Marxist-Humanist body of ideas as indispensable for forging the missing link between philosophy and revolution.

6. The most urgent of our tasks this year is the culmination of all our work, in theory and practice, in projection and development of new relationships, as membership growth to help in carrying out our tasks on the pathway to revolution and the establishment of a new, truly human world.

At the forefront of our minds is that:

"Only live human beings can re-create the revolutionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. 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.'"[14]

--The Resident Editorial Board

NOTES

1. BBC News television report by Mark Simpson, April 1.

2."Greeks stage walkout tied to summit," by Anthee Carassave, The New York Times, 4/3/09.

3."'Borderless' Europe faces test of unity," by Tom Hundley, Chicago Tribune, 3/18/09.

4.See "America is from Mars, Europe is from Venus," by Christian Reiermann, Michael Sauga and Thomas Schulz, Der Spiegel, 3/16/09.

5.See Marx's Capital and Today's Global Crises (News and Letters, 1978). Its essay "Today's Epigones Who Try to Truncate Marx's Capital" is to be included in a forthcoming collection of Dunayevskaya's writings on Marx--see Part III of this draft thesis.

6."Paris fails to end island protests, seen spreading," by Estelle Shirbon, Reuters, 2/13/09.

7."Angry French workers turn to 'Bossnapping' to solve their problems," timesonline.co.uk, 4/3/09.

8."A 21st Century Hooverville," Democracy Now, 3/30/09.

9.. See "Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution," by Raya Dunayevskaya, in Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East (News and Letters, 2003).

10.See "The words of President Chavez are a declaration of war against the workers, says Orlando Chirino".

11.Though her death prevented this presentation from being delivered, it stands as the crucial final writing of her full body of Marxist-Humanist ideas. See The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism, pp. 3-12.

12.Adrienne Rich's designation for Dunayevskaya's body of work. Rich, "Living the Revolution," Women's Review of Books (3:12), September 1986.

13.See A 1980s View: The Coal Miners' General Strike of 1949–50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. by Andy Phillips and Raya Dunayevskaya (News and Letters, 1984).

14.Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, p. 195.

Return to top

Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search l RSS

Subscribe to News & Letters

Published by News and Letters Committees